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Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version - Magda Hassan - 30-07-2014
Massive bombing and with the electricity out it is pretty much in actual and technical/electronic blackout. No one can communicate and find out how everyone is. Last known communications were dire. Ban Ki Moon was as close to hysterical as I have ever seen but UN seems impotent. Can't they revoke recognition of the state since they are a) a rogue state not conforming to international laws b) are not operating within the original agreed boundaries for the establishment of the state of Israel.
Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version - Tracy Riddle - 30-07-2014
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB123275572295011847
How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas By Andrew Higgins Updated Jan. 24, 2009 12:01 a.m. ETMoshav Tekuma, Israel
Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor's bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile's trajectory back to an "enormous, stupid mistake" made 30 years ago.
"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.
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Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas. Abid Katib/Getty Images
Last Saturday, after 22 days of war, Israel announced a halt to the offensive. The assault was aimed at stopping Hamas rockets from falling on Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hailed a "determined and successful military operation." More than 1,200 Palestinians had died. Thirteen Israelis were also killed.
Hamas responded the next day by lobbing five rockets towards the Israeli town of Sderot, a few miles down the road from Moshav Tekuma, the farming village where Mr. Cohen lives. Hamas then announced its own cease-fire.
Since then, Hamas leaders have emerged from hiding and reasserted their control over Gaza. Egyptian-mediated talks aimed at a more durable truce are expected to start this weekend. President Barack Obama said this week that lasting calm "requires more than a long cease-fire" and depends on Israel and a future Palestinian state "living side by side in peace and security."
A look at Israel's decades-long dealings with Palestinian radicals -- including some little-known attempts to cooperate with the Islamists -- reveals a catalog of unintended and often perilous consequences. Time and again, Israel's efforts to find a pliant Palestinian partner that is both credible with Palestinians and willing to eschew violence, have backfired. Would-be partners have turned into foes or lost the support of their people.
Israel's experience echoes that of the U.S., which, during the Cold War, looked to Islamists as a useful ally against communism. Anti-Soviet forces backed by America after Moscow's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan later mutated into al Qaeda.
Hamas supporters in Gaza City after the cease-fire. APA /Landov
At stake is the future of what used to be the British Mandate of Palestine, the biblical lands now comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1948, when the state of Israel was established, Israelis and Palestinians have each asserted claims over the same territory.
The Palestinian cause was for decades led by the PLO, which Israel regarded as a terrorist outfit and sought to crush until the 1990s, when the PLO dropped its vow to destroy the Jewish state. The PLO's Palestinian rival, Hamas, led by Islamist militants, refused to recognize Israel and vowed to continue "resistance." Hamas now controls Gaza, a crowded, impoverished sliver of land on the Mediterranean from which Israel pulled out troops and settlers in 2005.
When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and '80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.
"When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake," says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early '90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. "But at the time nobody thought about the possible results."
Israeli officials who served in Gaza disagree on how much their own actions may have contributed to the rise of Hamas. They blame the group's recent ascent on outsiders, primarily Iran. This view is shared by the Israeli government. "Hamas in Gaza was built by Iran as a foundation for power, and is backed through funding, through training and through the provision of advanced weapons," Mr. Olmert said last Saturday. Hamas has denied receiving military assistance from Iran.
Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military's Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner, he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement that was spreading across the Muslim world. He says attempts to stop it are akin to trying to change the internal rhythms of nature: "It is like saying: 'I will kill all the mosquitoes.' But then you get even worse insects that will kill you...You break the balance. You kill Hamas you might get al Qaeda."
When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza's Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel -- particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 -- Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas's appeal to ordinary Palestinians. The group ultimately trounced secular rivals, notably Fatah, in a 2006 election supported by Israel's main ally, the U.S.
Now, one big fear in Israel and elsewhere is that while Hamas has been hammered hard, the war might have boosted the group's popular appeal. Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas administration in Gaza, came out of hiding last Sunday to declare that "God has granted us a great victory."
Most damaged from the war, say many Palestinians, is Fatah, now Israel's principal negotiating partner. "Everyone is praising the resistance and thinks that Fatah is not part of it," says Baker Abu-Baker, a longtime Fatah supporter and author of a book on Hamas.
A Lack of Devotion
Hamas traces its roots back to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group set up in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood believed that the woes of the Arab world spring from a lack of Islamic devotion. Its slogan: "Islam is the solution. The Quran is our constitution." Its philosophy today underpins modern, and often militantly intolerant, political Islam from Algeria to Indonesia.
After the 1948 establishment of Israel, the Brotherhood recruited a few followers in Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and elsewhere, but secular activists came to dominate the Palestinian nationalist movement.
At the time, Gaza was ruled by Egypt. The country's then-president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was a secular nationalist who brutally repressed the Brotherhood. In 1967, Nasser suffered a crushing defeat when Israel triumphed in the six-day war. Israel took control of Gaza and also the West Bank.
"We were all stunned," says Palestinian writer and Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi. He was at school at the time in Kuwait and says he became close to a classmate named Khaled Mashaal, now Hamas's Damascus-based political chief. "The Arab defeat provided the Brotherhood with a big opportunity," says Mr. Tamimi.
In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory's previous Egyptian rulers. Fatah, set up in 1964, was the backbone of the PLO, which was responsible for hijackings, bombings and other violence against Israel. Arab states in 1974 declared the PLO the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people world-wide.
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A poster of the late Sheikh Yassin hangs near a building destroyed by the Israeli assault on Gaza. Heidi Levine/Sipa Press for The Wall Street Journal
The Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin, was free to spread its message openly. In addition to launching various charity projects, Sheikh Yassin collected money to reprint the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian member of the Brotherhood who, before his execution by President Nasser, advocated global jihad. He is now seen as one of the founding ideologues of militant political Islam.
Mr. Cohen, who worked at the time for the Israeli government's religious affairs department in Gaza, says he began to hear disturbing reports in the mid-1970s about Sheikh Yassin from traditional Islamic clerics. He says they warned that the sheikh had no formal Islamic training and was ultimately more interested in politics than faith. "They said, 'Keep away from Yassin. He is a big danger,'" recalls Mr. Cohen.
Instead, Israel's military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the recent war.
Brig. General Yosef Kastel, Gaza's Israeli governor at the time, is too ill to comment, says his wife. But Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who took over as governor in Gaza in late 1979, says he had no illusions about Sheikh Yassin's long-term intentions or the perils of political Islam. As Israel's former military attache in Iran, he'd watched Islamic fervor topple the Shah. However, in Gaza, says Mr. Segev, "our main enemy was Fatah," and the cleric "was still 100% peaceful" towards Israel. Former officials say Israel was also at the time wary of being viewed as an enemy of Islam.
Mr. Segev says he had regular contact with Sheikh Yassin, in part to keep an eye on him. He visited his mosque and met the cleric around a dozen times. It was illegal at the time for Israelis to meet anyone from the PLO. Mr. Segev later arranged for the cleric to be taken to Israel for hospital treatment. "We had no problems with him," he says.
In fact, the cleric and Israel had a shared enemy: secular Palestinian activists. After a failed attempt in Gaza to oust secularists from leadership of the Palestinian Red Crescent, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, Mujama staged a violent demonstration, storming the Red Crescent building. Islamists also attacked shops selling liquor and cinemas. The Israeli military mostly stood on the sidelines.
Mr. Segev says the army didn't want to get involved in Palestinian quarrels but did send soldiers to prevent Islamists from burning down the house of the Red Crescent's secular chief, a socialist who supported the PLO.
'An Alternative to the PLO'
Clashes between Islamists and secular nationalists spread to the West Bank and escalated during the early 1980s, convulsing college campuses, particularly Birzeit University, a center of political activism.
As the fighting between rival student factions at Birzeit grew more violent, Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, then a military intelligence officer in Gaza, says he received a call from Israeli soldiers manning a checkpoint on the road out of Gaza. They had stopped a bus carrying Islamic activists who wanted to join the battle against Fatah at Birzeit. "I said: 'If they want to burn each other let them go,'" recalls Mr. Harari.
A leader of Birzeit's Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature elected in 2006. He recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop. He denies any collusion between his own camp and the Israelis, but says "they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO."
A year later, in 1984, the Israeli military received a tip-off from Fatah supporters that Sheikh Yassin's Gaza Islamists were collecting arms, according to Israeli officials in Gaza at the time. Israeli troops raided a mosque and found a cache of weapons. Sheikh Yassin was jailed. He told Israeli interrogators the weapons were for use against rival Palestinians, not Israel, according to Mr. Hacham, the military affairs expert who says he spoke frequently with jailed Islamists. The cleric was released after a year and continued to expand Mujama's reach across Gaza.
Around the time of Sheikh Yassin's arrest, Mr. Cohen, the religious affairs official, sent a report to senior Israeli military and civilian officials in Gaza. Describing the cleric as a "diabolical" figure, he warned that Israel's policy towards the Islamists was allowing Mujama to develop into a dangerous force.
"I believe that by continuing to turn away our eyes, our lenient approach to Mujama will in the future harm us. I therefore suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," Mr. Cohen wrote.
Mr. Harari, the military intelligence officer, says this and other warnings were ignored. But, he says, the reason for this was neglect, not a desire to fortify the Islamists: "Israel never financed Hamas. Israel never armed Hamas."
Roni Shaked, a former officer of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, and author of a book on Hamas, says Sheikh Yassin and his followers had a long-term perspective whose dangers were not understood at the time. "They worked slowly, slowly, step by step according to the Muslim Brotherhood plan."
Declaring Jihad
In 1987, several Palestinians were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli driver, triggering a wave of protests that became known as the first Intifada, Mr. Yassin and six other Mujama Islamists launched Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas's charter, released a year later, is studded with anti-Semitism and declares "jihad its path and death for the cause of Allah its most sublime belief."
Israeli officials, still focused on Fatah and initially unaware of the Hamas charter, continued to maintain contacts with the Gaza Islamists. Mr. Hacham, the military Arab affairs expert, remembers taking one of Hamas's founders, Mahmoud Zahar, to meet Israel's then defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, as part of regular consultations between Israeli officials and Palestinians not linked to the PLO. Mr. Zahar, the only Hamas founder known to be alive today, is now the group's senior political leader in Gaza.
In 1989, Hamas carried out its first attack on Israel, abducting and killing two soldiers. Israel arrested Sheikh Yassin and sentenced him to life. It later rounded up more than 400 suspected Hamas activists, including Mr. Zahar, and deported them to southern Lebanon. There, they hooked up with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed A-Team of anti-Israeli militancy.
Many of the deportees later returned to Gaza. Hamas built up its arsenal and escalated its attacks, while all along maintaining the social network that underpinned its support in Gaza.
Meanwhile, its enemy, the PLO, dropped its commitment to Israel's destruction and started negotiating a two-state settlement. Hamas accused it of treachery. This accusation found increasing resonance as Israel kept developing settlements on occupied Palestinian land, particularly the West Bank. Though the West Bank had passed to the nominal control of a new Palestinian Authority, it was still dotted with Israeli military checkpoints and a growing number of Israeli settlers.
Unable to uproot a now entrenched Islamist network that had suddenly replaced the PLO as its main foe, Israel tried to decapitate it. It started targeting Hamas leaders. This, too, made no dent in Hamas's support, and sometimes even helped the group. In 1997, for example, Israel's Mossad spy agency tried to poison Hamas's exiled political leader Mr. Mashaal, who was then living in Jordan.
The agents got caught and, to get them out of a Jordanian jail, Israel agreed to release Sheikh Yassin. The cleric set off on a tour of the Islamic world to raise support and money. He returned to Gaza to a hero's welcome.
Efraim Halevy, a veteran Mossad officer who negotiated the deal that released Sheikh Yassin, says the cleric's freedom was hard to swallow, but Israel had no choice. After the fiasco in Jordan, Mr. Halevy was named director of Mossad, a position he held until 2002. Two years later, Sheikh Yassin was killed by an Israeli air strike.
Mr. Halevy has in recent years urged Israel to negotiate with Hamas. He says that "Hamas can be crushed," but he believes that "the price of crushing Hamas is a price that Israel would prefer not to pay." When Israel's authoritarian secular neighbor, Syria, launched a campaign to wipe out Muslim Brotherhood militants in the early 1980s it killed more than 20,000 people, many of them civilians.
In its recent war in Gaza, Israel didn't set the destruction of Hamas as its goal. It limited its stated objectives to halting the Islamists' rocket fire and battering their overall military capacity. At the start of the Israeli operation in December, Defense Minister Ehud Barak told parliament that the goal was "to deal Hamas a severe blow, a blow that will cause it to stop its hostile actions from Gaza at Israeli citizens and soldiers."
Walking back to his house from the rubble of his neighbor's home, Mr. Cohen, the former religious affairs official in Gaza, curses Hamas and also what he sees as missteps that allowed Islamists to put down deep roots in Gaza.
He recalls a 1970s meeting with a traditional Islamic cleric who wanted Israel to stop cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood followers of Sheikh Yassin: "He told me: 'You are going to have big regrets in 20 or 30 years.' He was right."
Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version - Lauren Johnson - 30-07-2014
Magda Hassan Wrote:Massive bombing and with the electricity out it is pretty much in actual and technical/electronic blackout. No one can communicate and find out how everyone is. Last known communications were dire. Ban Ki Moon was as close to hysterical as I have ever seen but UN seems impotent. Can't they revoke recognition of the state since they are a) a rogue state not conforming to international laws b) are not operating within the original agreed boundaries for the establishment of the state of Israel.
Yes, they should, but we know why they won't. Just try to start doing it and there will be consequences.
Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version - Lauren Johnson - 30-07-2014
TR @ 22 I have become very suspect of any blowback narrative. Blowback is a feature, not a bug.
I can't prove it buy at times I suspect that Hamas is being run through layers of cutouts. It seems when they are most needed they are there to provide just the perfect foil to unite the nation against terrorism. Just sayin'.
Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version - Peter Lemkin - 30-07-2014
Given his background, what American Jewish leader Rabbi Henry Siegman has to say about Israel's founding in 1948 through the current assault on Gaza may surprise you. From 1978 to 1994, Siegman served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress, long described as one of the nation's "big three" Jewish organizations along with the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Born in Germany three years before the Nazis came to power in 1933, Siegman's family eventually moved to the United States. His father was a leader of the European Zionist movement that pushed for the creation of a Jewish state. In New York, Siegman studied the religion and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Yeshiva Torah Vodaas, later becoming head of the Synagogue Council of America. After his time at the American Jewish Congress, Siegman became a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He now serves as president of the U.S./Middle East Project. In the first of our two-part interview, Siegman discusses the assault on Gaza, the myths surrounding Israel's founding in 1948, and his own background as a German-Jewish refugee who fled Nazi occupation to later become a leading American Jewish voice and now vocal critic of Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories.
"When one thinks that this is what is necessary for Israel to survive, that the Zionist dream is based on the repeated slaughter of innocents on a scale that we're watching these days on television, that is really a profound, profound crisis and should be a profound crisis in the thinking of all of us who were committed to the establishment of the state and to its success," Siegman says. Responding to Israel's U.S.-backed claim that its assault on Gaza is necessary because no country would tolerate the rocket fire from militants in Gaza, Siegman says: "What undermines this principle is that no country and no people would live the way that Gazans have been made to live. … The question of the morality of Israel's action depends, in the first instance, on the question, couldn't Israel be doing something [to prevent] this disaster that is playing out now, in terms of the destruction of human life? Couldn't they have done something that did not require that cost? And the answer is, sure, they could have ended the occupation."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue our coverage of the Israeli offensive in Gaza, we spend the rest of the hour with Henry Siegman, the former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, long described as one of the nation's "big three" Jewish organizations along with the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Henry Siegman was born in 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany. Three years later, the Nazis came to power. After fleeing Nazi troops in Belgium, his family eventually moved to the United States. His father was a leader of the European Zionist movement, pushing for the creation of a Jewish state. In New York, Henry Siegman studied and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Yeshiva Torah Vodaas. He later became head of the Synagogue Council of America. After his time at the American Jewish Congress, Siegman became a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He now serves as president of the U.S./Middle East Project.
AMY GOODMAN: Over the years, Henry Siegman has become a vocal critic of Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories and has urged Isral to engage with Hamas. He has called the Palestinian struggle for a state, quote, "the mirror image of the Zionist movement" that led to the founding of Israel in 1948. He recently wrote a piece for Politico headlined "Israel Provoked This War." Nermeen Shaikh and I sat down with him on Tuesday. I started by asking Henry Siegman if he could characterize the situation in Gaza at the moment.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Yes, it's disastrous. It's disastrous, both in political terms, which is to say the situation cannot conceivably, certainly in the short run, lead to any positive results, to an improvement in the lives of either Israelis or Palestinians, and of course it's disastrous in humanitarian terms, the kind of slaughter that's taking place there. When one thinks that this is what is necessary for Israel to survive, that the Zionist dream is based on the slaughter ofrepeated slaughter of innocents on a scale that we're watching these days on television, that is really a profound, profound crisisand should be a profound crisisin the thinking of all of us who were committed to the establishment of the state and to its success. It leads one virtually to a whole rethinking of this historical phenomenon.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: What do you believeMr. Siegman, what do you believe the objectives of Israel are in this present assault on Gaza?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, they have several objectives, although I'm not sure that each of them is specifically responsible for the carnage we're seeing now. It has what seems on the surface a justifiable objective of ending these attacks, the rockets that come from Gaza and are aimedit's hard to say they're aimed at civilians, because they never seem to land anywhere that causes serious damage, but they could and would have, if not for luck. So, on the face of it, Israel has a right to do what it's doing now, and, of course, it's been affirmed by even president of the United States, repeatedly, that no country would agree to live with that kind of a threat repeatedly hanging over it.
But what he doesn't add, and what perverts this principle, undermines the principle, is that no country and no people would live the way Gazans have been made to live. And consequently, this moral equation which puts Israel on top as the victim that has to act to prevent its situation from continuing that way, and the Palestinians in Gaza, or Hamas, the organization responsible for Gaza, who are the attackers, our media rarely ever points out that these are people who have a right to live a decent, normal life, too. And they, too, must think, "What can we do to put an end to this?"
And this is why in the Politico article that you mentioned, I pointed out the question of the morality of Israel's action depends, in the first instance, on the question: Couldn't Israel be doing something in preventing this disaster that is playing out now, in terms of the destruction of human lives? Couldn't they have done something that didn't require that cost? And the answer is: Sure, that they could have ended the occupation, with resultswhatever the risks are, they certainly aren't greater than the price being paid now for Israel's effort to continue and sustain permanently their relationship to the Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: When you say that Israel could end the violence by ending the occupation, Israel says it does not occupy Gaza, that it left years ago. I wanted to play a clip for you from MSNBC. It was last week, and the host, Joy Reid, was interviewing the Israeli spokesperson, Mark Regev.
MARK REGEV: Listen, if you'll allow me to, I want to take issue with one important word you said. You said Israel is the occupying authority. You're forgetting Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip. We took down all the settlements, and the settlers who didn't want to leave, we forced them to leave. We pulled back to the 1967 international frontier. There is no Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip. We haven't been there for some eight years.
AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, can you respond?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: OK, yeah. That is of course utter nonsense, and for several reasons. First of all, Gaza is controlled completely, like the West Bank, because it is totally surrounded by Israel. Israel could not be imposing the kind of chokehold it has on Gaza if it were not surrounding, if its military were not surrounding Gaza, and not just on the territory, but also on the air, on the sea. No one there can make a move without coming into contact with the Israeli IDF, you know, outside this imprisoned area where Gazans live. So, there's no one I have encountered, who is involved with international law, who's ever suggested to me that in international law Gaza is not considered occupied. So that's sheer nonsense.
But there's another point triggered by your question to me, and this is the propaganda machine, and these official spokespeople will always tell you, "Take a look at what kind of people these are. Here we turned over Gaza to them. And you'd think they would invest their energies in building up the area, making it a model government and model economy. Instead, they're working on rockets." The implication here is that they, in effect, offered Palestinians a mini state, and they didn't take advantage of it, so the issue isn't really Palestinian statehood. That is the purpose of this kind of critique.
And I have always asked myself, and this has a great deal to do with my own changing views about the policies of governments, not about the Jewish state qua Jewish state, but of the policies pursued by Israeli governments and supportedyou know, they say Israel is a model democracy in the Middle East, so you must assumethe public has to assume some responsibility for what the government does, because they put governments in place. So, the question I ask myself: What if the situation were reversed? You know, there is a Talmudic saying in Pirkei Avot, The Ethics of the Fathers: "Al tadin et chavercha ad shetagiah lemekomo," "Don't judge your neighbor until you can imagine yourself in his place." So, my first question when I deal with any issue related to the Israeli-Palestinian issue: What if we were in their place?
What if the situation were reversed, and the Jewish population were locked into, were told, "Here, you have less than 2 percent of Palestine, so now behave. No more resistance. And let us deal with the rest"? Is there any Jew who would have said this is a reasonable proposition, that we cease our resistance, we cease our effort to establish a Jewish state, at least on one-half of Palestine, which is authorized by the U.N.? Nobody would agree to that. They would say this is absurd. So the expectations that Palestiniansand I'm speaking now about the resistance as a concept; I'm not talking about rockets, whether they were justified or not. They're not. I think that sending rockets that are going to kill civilians is a crime. But for Palestinians to try, in any way they can, to end this state of affairand to expect of them to end their struggle and just focus on less than 2 percent to build a country is absurd. That is part ofthat's propaganda, but it's not a discussion of either politics or morality.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: One of the things that's repeated most often is, the problem with the Palestinian unity government is, of course, that Hamas is now part of it, and Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and also by the United States. I'd just like to read you a short quote from an article that you wrote in 2009 in the London Review of Books. You said, "Hamas is no more a 'terror organisation' ... than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland. In the late 1930s and 1940s, parties within the Zionist movement resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons." Could you elaborate on that and what you see as the parallels between the two?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, I'm glad I said that. In fact, I repeated it in a letter to The New York Times the other day, a week or two ago. The fact is that Israel had, pre-statein its pre-state stage, several terrorist groups that did exactly what Hamas does today. I don't mean they sent rockets, but they killed innocent people. And they did that in an even more targeted way than these rockets do. Benny Morris published a book that is considered the Bible on that particular period, the war of
AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli historian.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Sorry?
AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli historian, Benny Morris.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: The Israeli historian, right, then in the book Righteous Victims, in which he saidI recall, when I read it, I was shockedin which heparticularly in his most recently updated book, which was based on some new information that the Israel's Defensethe IDF finally had to open up and publish, that Israeli generals received direct instructions from Ben-Gurion during the War of Independence to kill civilians, or line them up against the wall and shoot them, in order to help to encourage the exodus, that in fact resulted, of 700,000 Palestinians, who were driven out of theirleft their homes, and their towns and villages were destroyed. This was terror, even within not just the terrorist groups, the pre-state terrorists, but this is within the military, the Israeli military, that fought the War of Independence. And in this recent book, that has received so much public attention by Ariyou know, My Promised Land.
AMY GOODMAN: Shavit.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Ari Shavit. He describes several such incidents, too. And incidentally, one of the people whoaccording to Benny Morris, one of the people who received these ordersand they were oral orders, but he, in his book, describes why he believes that these orders were given, were given to none other than Rabin, who was not a general then, but heand that he executed these orders.
AMY GOODMAN: Meaning?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Meaning?
AMY GOODMAN: What did it mean that he executed these orders, Rabin?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: That he executed civilians. And the rationale given for this when Shavit, some years ago, had an interview with Benny Morris and said to him, "My God, you are saying that there was deliberate ethnic cleansing here?" And Morris said, "Yes, there was." And he says, "And you justify it?" And he said, "Yes, because otherwise there would not have been a state." And Shavit did not follow up. And that was one of my turning points myself, when I saw that. He would not follow up and say, "Well, if that is a justification, the struggle for statehood, why can't Palestinians do that? What's wrong with Hamas? Why are they demonized if they do what we did?"
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the Israeli prime minister earlier this month, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowing to punish those responsible for the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian teen who was burned alive following the murders of three Israeli teens. But in doing so, Netanyahu drew a distinction between Israel and its neighbors in how it deals with, quote, "murderers."
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I know that in our society, the society of Israel, there is no place for such murderers. And that's the difference between us and our neighbors. They consider murderers to be heroes. They name public squares after them. We don't. We condemn them, and we put them on trial, and we'll put them in prison.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talking about the difference. Henry Siegman, can you respond?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, the only difference I can think of is that in Israel they made the heads of the two major pre-state terrorist groups prime ministers. So this distinction he's drawing is simply false; it's not true. The heads of the two terrorist groups, which incidentally, again, going back to Benny Morris, in his book, Righteous Victims, he writes, in this pre-state account, that the targeting of civilians was started by the Jewish terrorist groups, and the Araband the Arab groups followed.
AMY GOODMAN: You're talking about Irgun and the Stern Gang.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Yes, yes. And as you know, both the head of the Irgun and both the head of the Stern GangI'm talking about Begin and Shamirbecame prime ministers of the state of Israel. And contrary to Netanyahu, public highways and streets are named after them.
AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress. We'll continue our conversation with him in a minute.[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we continue our conversation with Rabbi Henry Siegman, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, former head of the American Jewish Congress. I interviewed him Tuesday with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I'd like to turn, Henry Siegman, to Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, who was speaking to Charlie Rose of PBS. He said Hamas was willing to coexist with Jews but said it would not live, quote, "with a state of occupiers."
KHALED MESHAAL: [translated] I am ready to coexist with the Jews, with the Christians, and with the Arabs and non-Arabs, and with those who agree with my ideas and also disagree with them; however, I do not coexist with the occupiers, with the settlers and those who put a siege on us.
CHARLIE ROSE: It's one thing to say you want to coexist with the Jews. It's another thing you want to coexist with the state of Israel. Do you want to coexist with the state of Israel? Do you want to representdo you want to recognize Israel as a Jewish state?
KHALED MESHAAL: [translated] No. I said I do not want to live with a state of occupiers.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, speaking to Charlie Rose. Henry Siegman, could you respond to that, and specifically the claim made by Israelis repeatedly that they can't negotiate with a political organization that refuses the state of Israel's right to exist in its present form?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Yes. It so happens that in both international custom and international law, political parties, like Hamas, are not required or even ever asked to recognize states, whether they recognize a state or not. The question is whether the government of which they are a part and that makes policy and executes policy, whether that government is prepared to recognize other states. And this is true in the case of Israel, as well, the government of Israel, any government. I, incidentally, discussed this with Meshaal, not once, but several times, face to face, and asked him whether he would be part of a government that recognizes the state of Israel, and he saysand he said, "Yes, provided"they had a provisohe said, "provided that the Palestinian public approves that policy." And he repeated to me the fact thathe said, "You're absolutely right." He says, "People ask us will we recognize the state of Israel, and will we affirm that it's legitimately a Jewish state." He said, "No, we won't do that. But we have never said that we will not serve in a government that has public support for that position, that we will not serve in such a government."
But a more important point to be made hereand this is why these distinctions are so dishonestthe state of Israel does not recognize a Palestinian state, which is to say there are parties in Netanyahu's governmentvery important parties, not marginal partiesincluding his own, the Likud, that to this day has an official platform that does not recognize the right of Palestinians to have a state anywhere in Palestine. And, of course, you have Naftali Bennett's party, the HaBayit HaYehudi, which says this openly, that there will never be a state, a Palestinian state, anywhere in Palestine. Why hasn't our government or anyone said, "Like Hamas, if you have parties like that in your government, you are not a peace partner, and you are a terrorist group, if in fact you use violence to implement your policy, as Hamas does"? So the hypocrisy in the discussion that is taking place publicly is just mind-boggling.
AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, you're the head, the former head, of one of the leading Jewish organizations, the American Jewish Congress.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Two of them, also of the Synagogue Council of America.
AMY GOODMAN: So, these are major establishment Jewish organizations. You said you went to see Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas, not once, but several times to meet with him. The U.S. government calls Hamas a terrorist organization. They will not communicate with them. They communicate with them through other parties, through other countries, to talk to them. Talk about your decision to meet with Khaled Meshaal, where you met with him, and the significance of your conversations.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, first of all, it should be noted that the U.S. has no such policy of not meeting with terrorist organizations. It has a policy of not meeting with Hamas. That's quite different. We're very happy to meet with the Taliban and to negotiate with them. And they cut off hands and heads of people, and they kill girls who go to school. And that didn't prevent the United States from having negotiations with the Taliban, so that's nonsense that we don't talk to terrorist organizations. We talk to enemies if we want to cease the slaughter, and we're happy to do so and to try to reach an agreement that puts an end to it. And why Hamas should be the exception, again, I find dishonest. And the only reason that we do that is in response to the pressures from AIPAC and, of course, Israel's position. The largest caucus, parliamentary caucus, in Israel's Knesset is called the caucus of Eretz Yisrael HaShlema, which the Likud leads.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain that in English, "the land of Israel."
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: An "eretz," in Englishin English, it means the whole land of Israel. This is a parliamentary caucus, the largest caucus in the Knesset, which is totally dedicated to not permit any government to establish a Palestinian state anywhere in the land of Israel, headed by Likud, senior Likud members of Knesset, and headeda party that is headed by the prime minister of Israel. And what boggles the imagination is that no one talks about this, no one points this out, and no one says, "How can you take these positions via Hamas if this is exactly what is going on within your own government that you are heading?"
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Henry Siegman, as you are far more familiar than most, the argument made by Israel and supporters of Israel is that what might be construed as a disproportionate response by Israel to Hamas has to do with the historical experience of the persecution of the Jews and, of course, the Holocaust. So how do you respond to those kinds of claims?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, I don't accept that at all, because the lesson from the persecutions would seem to meand certainly if you follow Jewish tradition, the lesson of those persecutions, we have always said, until the state of Israel came into being, is that you do not treat people in that kind of an inhumane and cruel way. And the hope always was that Israel would be a model democracy, but not just a democracy, but a state that would practice Jewish values, in terms of its humanitarian approach to these issues, its pursuit of justice and so on.
I have always felt that, for me, the Holocaust experience, which was important to me, since I lived two years under Nazi occupation, most of it running from place to place and in hidingI always thought that the important lesson of the Holocaust is not that there is evil, that there are evil people in this world who could do the most unimaginable, unimaginably cruel things. That was not the great lesson of the Holocaust. The great lesson of the Holocaust is that decent, cultured people, people we would otherwise consider good people, can allow such evil to prevail, that the German publicthese were not monsters, but it was OK with them that the Nazi machine did what it did. Now I draw no comparisons between the Nazi machine and Israeli policy. And what I resent most deeply is when people say, "How dare you invoke the Nazi experience?" The point isn't, you know, what exactly they did, but the point is the evidence that they gave that decent people can watch evil and do nothing about it. That is the most important lesson of the Holocaust, not the Hitlers and not the SS, but the public that allowed this to happen. And my deep disappointment is that the Israeli public, precisely because Israel is a democracy and cannot say, "We're not responsible what our leaders do," that the public puts these people back into office again and again.
AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned your experience as a Holocaust survivor. Could you just go into it a little more deeply? You were born in 1930 in Germany. And talk about the rise of the Nazis and how your family escaped.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, I don't consider myself a Holocaust survivor, in the sense that I was not in a concentration camp. But I lived under Nazi occupation. I was born in 1930, but the Nazis came to power inI think in 1933. And shortly thereafter, we lived in Germany at the time. My parents lived in Germany, in Frankfurt. And they left. My father decided to give up a very successful business and to move to Belgium then, and on the assumption that Belgium was safe, that we would be escaping the Nazis. But in 1940, the Germans invaded Belgium, and they invaded France. That was in early 1940, I believe. And so, it's a long story, but for the nextfrom that point on until February 1942, when we arrived, finally arrived in the United States.
And how my father pulled that off is a miracle; to this day, I don't fully understand, because there were six children that he had to bring with him, and my mother, of course. We ran from place to place. First we were at Dunkirk, where the classic evacuation, memorable evacuation took place, and the French and the British soldiers withdrew to across the channel. We happened to find ourselves there at the time. And then we were sent back by thewhen the Nazi troops finally caught up with us in Dunkirk, they sent us back to Antwerp. And then my father had connections with the police chief, because of his business interests in Antwerp before the Nazis came. He was tipped off the morning that we were supposed to bethe Gestapo was supposed to come to our house to take all of us away. And so we just picked up, and we managed to get to Paris. And from Paris, we crossedwe were smuggled across the border into occupied Vichy France, and we were there for about a year, again without proper papers and in hiding. Then we tried to cross into Spain. And we did, but when we arrived at the Spanish border, they finally closed the border and sent us back into France.
So, then we managed to get a boat to take us from Marseille to North Africa, where we were interned briefly in a camp in North Africa. And then thewhat I believe was the last ship, a Portuguese, a neutral ship, taking refugees to the United States stopped in North Africa. We boarded that ship. And we were on the high seas for two months, because the Nazi subs were already busy sinking the ships that they encountered. So we had to go all the way around to avoid various Nazi submarine-infested areas.
So after two months on the high seas, we arrived in New York, where we were sent to Ellis Island, which was full of Bundists, who had been German Bundists, who were arrested and were being sent back to Germany. But as we walked into Ellis Island into that hallway, something I will never forget, "We're in America at last!" And those Bundists were greeting each other in the hallway, "Heil Hitler!" So the "Heil Hitlers" that we were trying to escape in Europe was the first thing we encountered as we landed on Ellis Island.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did you end up becoming head of one of the country'sor, as you said, country's two major Jewish organizations? And what was your position on Zionism after World War II?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, my father was one of the leaders of European Zionism. He was the head of the Mizrachi in the religious Zionist movement, not just in Belgium, but in Western Europe. And the leaders, the heads, the founders of the Mizrachimayor of Berlin himself, Gold, many otherswere guests in our house in Antwerp. And they used to take me on their knees and teach me Hebrew songs from Israel. So, I hadI was raised on mother's milk, and I was an ardentas a kid even, an ardent Zionist. I recall on the ship coming over, we were coming to America, and I was writing poetry and songsI was 10 years old, 11 years oldabout the blue sky of Palestine. In those days we referred to it as Palestina, Palestine.
And so, into adulthood, not until well after the '67 War, when I came acrossand I got to know Rabin and others, and I came across a discussion in which I was told by Israelis, by the Israeli people who I was talking to, government, senior government people, that they had an initiative from Sadat about peace and withdrawal and so on. And Rabin said, "But clearly, the Israeli public is not prepared for that now." And that hit me like a hammer. I always had this notion drilled into me that if only the Arabs were to reach out and be willing to live in peace with Israel, that would be the time of the Messiah. And the Messiah came, and the Israeli leadership said, "No, public opinion is not ready for that." And I wrote a piece then in Moment magazineif you recall, it was published by Leonard Feinand he made it a cover story, and the title was, "For the Sake of Zion, I Will Not Remain Silent." And that triggered my re-examination of things I had been told and what was going on on the ground.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Prior to that, your sense had always been that if the Arabs reached out, there would be two states: Palestine and Israel.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: I had no doubt about that. I mean, that was, you know, just a given, that we are sharing. The resolution said, you know, two states. The resolution, which Israelthe partition resolution, which Israel invoked in its Declaration of Independence, planted, rooted its legitimacy in thatit cited the Palestinianthe partition plan. But when someone these days says, "But there's a partition plan that said that the rest of it, that was not assigned to Israel, is the legitimate patrimony of the Palestinian people," the answer given is, "Ah, yeah, but they voted they would not accept it, and the partition plan was never officially adopted." Well, why are you quoting it then in your Declaration of Independence, if you consider it to be null and void and notanyway.
AMY GOODMAN: And the response ofor the slogan, the idea that was put forward so much in the founding of the state of Israel: Palestine is a land without people for a people without land?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, that was the common understanding and referred to repeatedly in Ari Shavit's book and others, that the Zionist movement, at its very birth, was founded on an untruth, on a myth, that Palestine was a country without a people. And as he says, obviouslyand he recognizes in his book that it was a lie. And therefore, from the very beginning, Zionism didn't confront this profound moral dilemma that lay at its very heart. How do you deal with that reality? And as a consequence of that, one of the ways in which they dealt with it was to see to the expulsion of 700,000 people from their cities, from their towns and villages, and the destruction of all of them, which, to his credit, Ari Shavit writes about very painfully and honestly.
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our coverage of the Israeli offensive on Gaza, we turn to part two of our conversation with Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America. What he says about the future of Israel and the ongoing assault on Gaza may surprise you. Siegman was born in 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany. His family fled Germany as the Nazis came to power. He eventually arrived in the United States in 1942. His father was a leader of European Zionism, pushing for the creation of a Jewish state. In New York, Henry Siegman studied and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Yeshiva Torah Vodaas. He now serves as president of the U.S./Middle East Project. He recently wrote a piece for Politico headlined "Israel Provoked This War: It's Up to President Obama to Stop It."
Democracy Now!'s Nermeen Shaikh and I sat down with Henry Siegman on Tuesday. I asked him about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claim that Israel is just responding to the thousands of rockets that Hamas and other groups are firing from Gaza.AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our coverage of the Israeli offensive on Gaza, we turn to part two of our conversation with Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America. What he says about the future of Israel and the ongoing assault on Gaza may surprise you. Siegman was born in 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany. His family fled Germany as the Nazis came to power. He eventually arrived in the United States in 1942. His father was a leader of European Zionism, pushing for the creation of a Jewish state. In New York, Henry Siegman studied and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Yeshiva Torah Vodaas. He now serves as president of the U.S./Middle East Project. He recently wrote a piece for Politico headlined "Israel Provoked This War: It's Up to President Obama to Stop It."
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: My response is that they wouldn't be firing those rockets if you weren't outif you didn't have an occupation in place. And one of the reasons you say you do not have an occupation in place is because you really don't have a united partner, Palestinian partner, to make peace with, and when Palestinians seek to establish that kind of a government, which they just recently did, bringing Hamas into the governmental structure, Palestinian governmental structure, that is headed by Abbas, you seek to destroy that. You won't recognize it. And this is why I say there are several reasons for the Israeli action. A primary one is to prevent this new government from actually succeeding. It's an attempt to break up the new unity government set up by the Palestinians.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Why would they do that? Why would they want to do that?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: They want to do that, for the first timefor years, I have been suggesting and arguing that they want to do that because they are intent on preventing the development of a Palestinian state. To put it bluntly, they want all of it. They want all of Palestine.
Now, this is something that Netanyahu said openly and without any reservations when he was not in government. He wrote about it, published a book about it, his opposition to a Palestinian state, that Israel couldn't allow that. The difference between the time that heand he, incidentally, opposed not just Palestinian statehood. He opposed peace agreements with Egypt. He opposed peace agreements with Jordan. Any positive step towards a stabilization and a more peaceful region, Netanyahu has been on record as opposing.
And when he came into office as prime minister, he understood that it is not a smart thing to say that Israel's policy is to maintain the occupation permanently. So, the only difference between his positions in the past and the position now is that he pretends that he really would like to see a two-state solution, which, as you know, is the affirmation he made in his so-called Bar-Ilan speech several years ago. And some naive people said, "Ah, you know, redemption is at hand," when, to his own people, he winked and made clear, and as I just read recentlyI didn't know thatthat it's on record that his father said, "Of course he didn't mean it. He will attach conditions that will make it impossible." But that was his tactic. His tactic was to say, "We are all in favor of it, but if only we had a Palestinian partner."
Now, in fact, they've had a Palestinian partner that's been willing and ablethey set up institutions that the World Bank has said are more effective than most states that are members of the U.N. today. And that, of course, made no difference, and continued to say we do not have a partner, because you have nearly two million Palestinians in Gaza who are not represented. So the unity government became a threat to that tactic of pretending to be in support of a Palestinian state.
AMY GOODMAN: In a response to the piece that you wrote for Politico that was headlined "Israel Provoked This War," the Anti-Defamation League writes, quote, "Hamas has a charter which they live up to every day calling for Israel's destruction. Hamas has used the last two years of relative quiet to build up an arsenal of rockets whose sole purpose is to attack Israel. Hamas has built a huge network of tunnels leading into Israel with the purpose of murdering large numbers of Israelis and seizing hostages." Henry Siegman, can you respond?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: What I would point out to my former friend Abe Foxman of the ADL is that, too, is Israel's charter, or at least the policy of this government and of many previous governments, which is to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state. And they have built up their army and their armaments to implement that policy. And the difference between Hamas and the state of Israel is that the state of Israel is actually doing it. They're actually implementing it, and they're actually preventing a Palestinian state, which doesn't exist. And millions of Palestinians live in this subservient position without rights and without security, without hope and without a future. That's not the state ofthe state of Israel is a very successful state, and happily Jews live there with a thriving economy and with an army whose main purpose is preventing that Palestinian state from coming into being. That's their mandate.
But sadly and shockingly, they can stand by, even though international law says if you're occupying people from outside of your country, you have a responsibility to protect them. I mean, the responsibility to protect is the people you are occupying. The soldiers who are there, ostensibly to implement that mandate, will watch settler violence when it occurs when they attack Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and they won't do a thing to prevent it. They won't intervene to protect the people they are supposed to protect, and they will tell you, "That's not our job. Our job is to protect the Jews."
NERMEEN SHAIKH: On the question of the support, the successive U.S. administrations supporting Israel, I'd like to again quote from something you said in a 2002 New York Times interview with Chris Hedges. You said, "The support for Israel," in the United States, "fills a spiritual vacuum. If you do not support the government of Israel then your Jewishness, not your political judgment, is in question." So could you explain what you mean by that and what the implications of that have been, in terms of U.S. governments supporting Israeli government policy?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, what I meant by that, and that was an interview quite a while ago
NERMEEN SHAIKH: 2002, yes.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: I see, OK, which is not all that long ago, for me anyway. I meant by that something quite simple, that for many American Jewsand, I suspect, for most American JewsIsrael has become the content of their Jewish religious identification. It has very little other content. I rarely have been at a Shabbat service where a rabbi gives a sermon where Israel isn't a subject of the sermon. And typically, they arethe sermons are not in the spirit of an Isaiah, you know, who says, "My god, is this what God wants from you? Your hands are bloody; they're filled with blood. But he doesn't want your fast. He doesn't wanthe despises the sacrifices and your prayers. What he wants is to feed, to feed the hungry, to pursue justice and so on." But that's not what you hear from rabbis in the synagogues in this country. So, what I meant by that is that there's much more to Judaism and to the meaning that you give to your Jewish identity than support for the likes of Netanyahu.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And Henry Siegman, what do you think the Obama administration has done since his first administration? And what do you think he ought to be doing differently, on the question of Israel-Palestine and, in particular, his response to this most recent military assault on Gaza?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Look, I have written about this for years now. It's not all that complicated. It is quite clear that, left to its own devices, if Israelif the United States says to the Palestinians, "Hey, you guys have got to talk not to us; you've got to talk to the Palestiniansto the Israelis, and you have to come to an understanding that's how peace is made, but we can't interfere. You know, we cannot tell Israel what to do"left to their own devices, there will never be a Palestinian state. And the question isI have very serious doubts that we have not gone beyond the point where a Palestinian state is possible. The purpose of the settlement movement was to make it impossible. And I believe they have succeeded: That project has achieved its goal.
AMY GOODMAN: The Jewish settlements.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: The Jewish settlers have achieved the irreversibility of the settlement movement, in terms of the vast infrastructure that has been put in place. So, even if there were a leftist government, so-called leftist government, that came to power, it would not be able to do it, because of the upheaval that would be necessary to create such a state.
There is only one thingas far as I'm concerned, there are only two things that could happen that could still, perhaps, produce a Palestinian state. The first one is for thebecause the United States remains absolutely essential in terms of Israel's security, to its continued success and survival. If at some point the United States were to say, "You have now reached a pointwe have been your biggest supporters. We have been with you through thick and thin. And we have basedwe have treated you"you know, a lot of people say, criticizing the U.S. and the international community, that we have double standards, that we expect things of Israel that we don't expect of the rest of the world. We do have double standards, but it works the other way around: We grant Israel privileges and tolerate behavior that we would not in other allies. We may say there's nothing we can do to change that, but we don't give them billions of dollars. And we don't go to the U.N., at the Security Council, to veto when the internationalefforts by the United Nations to prevent that bad behavior. So we have double standards, but it works the other way. But if the United States were to say to Israel, "It's our common values that underlie this very special relationship we have with you and these privileges that we have extended to you, but this can't go on. We can't do that when those values are being undermined. The valueswhat you are doing today contradicts American values. We are a democratic country, and we cannot be seen as aiding and abetting this oppression and permanent disenfranchisement of an entire people. So, you're on your own." The issue is not America sending planes and missiles to bomb Tel Aviv as punishment; the issue is America removing itself from being a collaborator in the policies and a facilitator, making it easy and providing the tools for Israel to do that. So, if at some point the United States were to say what is said in Hebrew, ad kan, you know, "So far, but no further. We can'tthis is not what we can do. You want to do it? You're on your own," that would changethat could still change the situation, because the one thing Israelis do not want to do is have the country live in a world where America is not there to have their back.
And the other possibility, which I have also written about, is for Palestinians to say, "OK, you won. You didn't want us to have a state. We see that you've won. You have all of it." So our struggle is no longer to push the border toto maintain a '67 border, where nobody is going to come to their help, because borderlinesinternational opinion doesn't mobilize around those issues. But this is a struggle against what looks and smells like apartheidwe want citizenship, we want full rights in all of Palestineand make that the struggle. If Palestinians were to undertake that kind of a struggle in a credible way, where the Israeli public would see that they really mean it and they are going to fight for that in a nonviolent way, not by sending rockets, for citizenship, I am convincedand I've seen no polls that contradict that beliefthat they would say to their government, "Wait a minute, that is unacceptable, in fact, for us, and we cannot allow that. We don't want a majority Arab population here." I've talked to Palestinian leadership and urged them to move in that direction. There is now a growing movement among younger Palestinians in that direction. And that, I hope, may yet happen. Now, it has to be a serious movement. It can't just be a trick to get another state, but only if it is serious, where they are ready to accept citizenship and fight for it in a single state of all of Palestine, is it possible for the Israeli public to say, "This we cannot want, too, and we have to have a government that will accept the two states."
AMY GOODMAN: Why would Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has said he supports a two-state solution, create a situation that makes it virtually impossible, since it leads to this second possibility, which is a one-state solution, to the possibility that he does not want, which would be a majority Arab country?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: He obviously believes that a one-statewell, I said earlier in our conversation that he never meantwhen he said in his Bar-Ilan speech that he embraces a two-state, that was totally contrived. It was dishonest. Or, in simple English, he lied. And I appreciated the fact that several weeks ago, two weeks ago, he had a press conference in which he saidhe didn't say, "I lied," but he said, "There will never be a truly sovereign Palestinian state anywhere in Palestine." So, it's quite clear now, and one of his friends, the former editor of The Jerusalem Post, who now edits The Times of Israel, had this big headline: "Finally, Now We Know It." We know he never meant it. He didn't say this critically; he said this positively. "Finally, he's back in the fold, and we know he will never allow a sovereign Palestinian state." Now, what will he do with a majority Arab population? He will do what the head of HaBayit HaYehudi, Bennett, has been advocating and proposed.
AMY GOODMAN: That means Jewish Home party in Israel.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: That means the Jewish Home, and the Jewish Home meaning everywhere. And what he has said is that we'll solve this problem of a potential apartheid in Israel in the following way: We will allow certain enclaves where there are heavy populationheavily populated by Palestinians, in certain parts of the West Bank, and those enclaves will be surrounded by our military. In other words, a bunch of Gazas; there will be several Gazas. Gaza, of course, will be shed or will become one of those enclaves, so they're not part of the population of Israel. All the rest of Israelthe Jordan Valley, Area C, all of Area C, which is over 60 percent of the West Bankwill be annexed unilaterally by Israel. So, we will have shed two million Palestinians from Gaza. We will have shed another million and a half that live in the cities and in the more populated urban areas, in those enclavesin those, essentially, bantustans. And the rest, that there arewhat did he say? There are 50,000 Palestinians who live in Area C. We will make them citizens, and voila, apartheid is solved. That isI believed that for the longest time, but that is the plan of Bibi Netanyahu. He may have to settle for less than 60 percent of the West Bank, but essentially he thinks he can solve this problem, this demographic bomb, as it's been described, in this manner.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: You've also expressed in an interview in 2012 with The Jewish Daily Forward a concern that if Israel continues on its present path, its path in 2012, which I think it's safe to say it continues today, that Israel will not be able to exist even for another 50 years. Could you explain what you mean by that? Why couldn't it exist in the form that you've just described, for instance?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: In which form?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: What you were saying earlier about the way in which the
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: You mean in Bennett's form?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Well, it certainly would not be existing as a Jewish state, and neither as a democratic state or a Jewish state.
AMY GOODMAN: Because?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Because a country that createsfor the same reason that South Africa could not claim it is a democratic state, because it has a bunch of bantustans.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you see Israel as an apartheid state?
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: If they were to implement Bennett's plan, absolutely. I don't know if technically this is apartheid, but it certainly would not be a democratic state. It would lose its right to call itself a democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: Henry Siegman, I wanted to ask you about media coverage of the conflict right now in Gaza. In a comment to close the CBS show Face the Nation on Sunday, the host, Bob Schieffer, suggested Hamas forces Israel to kill Palestinian children.
BOB SCHIEFFER: In the Middle East, the Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist group that is embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed in order to build sympathy for its causea strategy that might actually be working, at least in some quarters. Last week I found a quote of many years ago by Golda Meir, one of Israel's early leaders, which might have been said yesterday: "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children," she said, "but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."
AMY GOODMAN: That was the host, the journalist Bob Schieffer, on Face the Nation. You knew Prime Minister Golda Meir.
RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: Yes, I did. I wasn't a friend of hers, but I knew her, and I heard her when she made that statement. And I thought then, and think now, that it is an embarrassingly hypocritical statement. This statement was made by a woman who also said "Palestinians? There are no Palestinians! I am a Palestinian." If you don't want to kill Palestinians, if that's what pains you so much, you don't have to kill them. You can give them their rights, and you can end the occupation. And to put the blame for the occupation and for the killing of innocents that we are seeing in Gaza now on the Palestinianswhy? Because they want a state of their own? They want what Jews wanted and achieved? I find that, to put it mildly, less than admirable. There is something deeply hypocritical about that original statement and about repeating it on the air over here as a great moral insight.
Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version - Tracy Riddle - 31-07-2014
Lauren Johnson Wrote:TR @ 22 I have become very suspect of any blowback narrative. Blowback is a feature, not a bug.
I can't prove it buy at times I suspect that Hamas is being run through layers of cutouts. It seems when they are most needed they are there to provide just the perfect foil to unite the nation against terrorism. Just sayin'.
I agree, Lauren. I think Hamas is a Mossad-controlled terror group that can be turned on and off depending on the needs of the Israeli government. It gives them a great excuse to keep taking Palestinian land.
Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version - Magda Hassan - 31-07-2014
The show must go on....
Quote:As atrocities mount in Gaza, US approves Israeli request for more bombs
Submitted by Rania Khalek on Thu, 07/31/2014 - 05:04
290714_ash_00_21.jpg
Smoke from the explosion of an Israeli strike rise over Gaza City on 29 July. (Ashraf Amra / APA images)
Hours after Israel shelled yet another UN school sheltering internally displaced families and a marketplace in Gaza, killing dozens of people, an unnamed defense department official revealed to CNN that the US had approved an Israeli request to tap into the one billion dollar weapons stockpile the US keeps in Israel.
The last time Israel dipped into the special stockpile was in 2006, during its assault on Lebanon.
Pentagon press secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby confirmed to the The Electronic Intifada over email that the US Department of Defense authorized a transfer of munitions to Israel on 23 July in response to a request from the Israeli defense ministry for "a normal Foreign Military Sales delivery of ammunition."
Two of the munitions Israel demanded120mm mortar rounds and 40mm grenadeshappened to be available in the stockpile, so the US delivered them to the Israeli army from there.
"Issuing munitions from the War Reserve Stockpile Ammunition-Israel (WRSA-I) was strictly a sourcing decision," explained Kirby.
Arming Israel to stop violence?
Israel's call for more arms was fullfilled on the sixteenth day of Israel's assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. By then Israel had already killed at least 661 Palestinians, including 132 children.
Asked whether the defense department the Pentagon is concerned that its weapons might be used to harm innocent Palestinians given that the overwhelmingly majority of those killed in Gaza have been civilians, Kirby replied that the US is troubled by civilian casualties and is actively pushing for a ceasefire.
"We have consistently voiced our concerns over the rising number of civilian casualties in this conflict. We need to bring the violence and civilian casualties to an end, which is why the US government is focused on instituting an immediate, unconditional humanitarian ceasefire that ends hostilities now and leads to a permanent cessation of hostilities based on the November 2012 ceasefire agreement," said Kirby, adding, "We are also concerned that continued fighting could further destabilize the West Bank."
The spokesman also issued an unprompted reaffirmation of support for "Israel's right to defend itself," and praised the Israeli army's supposed moral superiority, saying "Unlike Hamas, which is firing rockets from populated areas and indiscriminately targeting civilians in Israel, the IDF [Israeli army] takes measures to limit civilian casualties."
Kirby continued: "But the fact is, despite Israel's efforts, the Palestinian civilian suffering in Gaza including the deaths and injuries of children is great and growing every day."
"The high civilian death toll makes clear that Israel can and must do more to meet its own high standards for protecting civilians from being killed. This underscores the urgency of getting an unconditional, immediate humanitarian cease-fire."
"High standards"
Today Israel has killed over 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza since 7 July, including more than 300 children. Almost 80 percent of those killed have been civilians.
In stark contrast, actions by armed Palestinian resistance groups, mainly Hamas, killed 56 soldiers and three Israeli civilians, one of whom was a West Bank settler killed while voluntarily delivering treats to Israeli soldiers stationed at the Gaza border prior to the ground invasion.
Hamas rockets, which do little damage, lack precision guidance systems and are therefore indiscriminate by default, although Hamas has said on occasion that rockets it has fired were intended for military targets.
Conversely, Israel, with a high-powered US-financed precision-guided arsenal at its disposal, has deliberately bombed civilian targets including private homes, hospitals and mosques, as well as schools, UN shelters, playgrounds, ambulances, media buildings, water treatment facilities and Gaza's only power plant.
Based on the evidence, it seems Israel's "high standards for protecting civilians" are no match for the ethical calculations of the side being demonized as "terrorists."
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/atrocities-mount-gaza-us-approves-israeli-request-more-bombs
Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version - Peter Lemkin - 31-07-2014
A young girl in Gaza had had her tweets go viral on conditions in Gaza and what she saw out her window - but she is now silenced by the power outage [projected time to repair power station, about one YEAR!].
Sadly, Israel and the USA [and some of the friends] are all well on their way to neo-fascist governments, run by military and propaganda - devoid of democracy and their peoples not informed enough to make rational decisions.
I can hardly bare to watch the carnage and pain seen on Al Jazeera and RT; but it is almost absent on American TV - which usually has Israeli talking heads explaining how they are the 'victims' - rather than the truth of their being the problem and the naked aggressor.
Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version - Magda Hassan - 31-07-2014
Peter Lemkin Wrote:A young girl in Gaza had had her tweets go viral on conditions in Gaza and what she saw out her window - but she is now silenced by the power outage [projected time to repair power station, about one YEAR!].
Sadly, Israel and the USA [and some of the friends] are all well on their way to neo-fascist governments, run by military and propaganda - devoid of democracy and their peoples not informed enough to make rational decisions.
I can hardly bare to watch the carnage and pain seen on Al Jazeera and RT; but it is almost absent on American TV - which usually has Israeli talking heads explaining how they are the 'victims' - rather than the truth of their being the problem and the naked aggressor.
Al Jazeera and RT are some of the only reasonable coverage of Gaza part from some good bloggers. Jon Snow, who just returned from there did a good interview calling the Israeli ambassador out on the usual tripe. But other wise precious little in the MSM worth watching. On this or any other issue.
Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version - Magda Hassan - 01-08-2014
Well, looks like the ceasefire is over already. Was supposed to be for 72 hours. To bury the dead, get some food. Israel did a mass bombing in the few hours before the ceasefire took effect. It seems only to have been quiet for an hour or so and now Israel is back to bombing. They claim Hamas shot a rocket but no evidence. 34 dead they say.