Antony Loewenstein's Blog, page 219

Need some heroin or a bazooka online?

This article in Gizmodo may help:

The Bushmaster M4 is a 3-foot rifle capable of firing thirty 5.56×45mm NATO rounds, and used by spec ops forces throughout Afghanistan. It’s a serious weapon. But in the Internet’s darkest black market, it’s all yours. Who needs a background check? Nobody.

The Armory began as an offshoot of The Silk Road, notable as the Internet’s foremost open drug bazaar, where anything from heroin and meth to Vicodin and pot can be picked out and purchased like a criminal Amazon.com. It’s virtually impossible to trace, and entirely anonymous. But apparently guns were a little too hot for The Silk Road’s admins, who broke the site off from the main narcotics carnival. Now guns, ammo, explosives, and more have their own shadowy home online, far from the piles of Dutch coke and American meth. But the same rules apply: with nothing more than money and a little online savoir faire, you can buy extremely powerful, deadly weapons—Glocks, Berettas, PPKs, AK-47s, Bushmaster rifles, even a grenade—in secret, shipped anywhere in the world.

 

America’s gift to Afghanistan: “Auschwitz-like” conditions at US-funded hospital

Who exactly are the Free Syrian Army?

My friend Yaara Bou-Melham’s remarkable SBS Dateline report from Syria and Turkey:

ABCTV News24′s The Drum on Israel/Palestine and uranium sales to UAE

I appeared last night on ABCTV’s The Drum (video here) alongside the Sydney Morning Herald’s Judith Whelan and  former NSW Liberal leader Kerri Chikarovski.

Aside from arguing against Australia selling uranium to UAE – seriously, do we need to provide a brutal dictatorship with a toxic and deadly resource? – and challenging the corporate media to not always call for economic “reform” that means privatisation and deregulation, I focused on Israel/Palestine.

In the context of Mitt Romney’s recent visit to Israel, which was all about raising money from rich Jews and telling Israel and Republican voters that he loved Zionism and occupation like a son, I said that both Romney and Obama are in effect killing the two-state solution by indulging Israel’s love of colonisation. The result? A ever-deepening ghetto mindset. It’s therefore vital to seriously consider, as is explained in my new book, After Zionism, that a one-state equation is the only just and democratic outcome.

What Gazan women are facing

It ain’t pretty. Years of isolation, the Israeli siege, Hamas and growing Islamic fundamentalism. The Guardian reports:

It is five years since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and Israel tightened its siege of the territory. Many men became jobless overnight and it is women who have ended up bearing the brunt of their husbands’ frustration. Besides sticking to their traditional role of raising children, the blockade has compelled large numbers of women to become the breadwinners, while standing by their husbands, many of whom have depression.

Violence against women has reached alarming levels. A December 2011 study by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, PCBS, revealed that 51% of all married women in Gaza had experienced violence from their husbands in the previous 12 months.

Two thirds (65%) of women surveyed by the PCBS said they preferred to keep silent about violence in the home. Less than 1% said they would seek help. Mona, my 22-year-old interpreter, is astonished when I later ask what support there is for women such as Eman. “If her husband, or in fact anyone in the family, knew she had talked about this, she’d be beaten or killed. As for places for a woman to run to safety, I don’t know of any.”

At first glance, Eman has little in common with Mona apart from their age. The latter is fresh out of university, fluent in English and wears a canary-yellow silk blouse and tight jeans with a large designer handbag. Until a few years ago, women such as Mona were the norm in Gaza and few would question their dress sense and independence.

Nowadays, with the blockade cutting off 1.6 million Palestinians from the rest of the world, conservatism dominates much of daily life.

It has also led to spiralling rates of unemployment among men – more than 45% of working-age people are without a job, one of the highest rates in the world. “The challenges of unemployment, fear of violence and restriction on movement can often mean that women and children are at the receiving end of men’s frustration,” says Ghada al-Najar from Oxfam Gaza. “There are many reasons why domestic violence is on the increase, including psychological trauma, the feeling of being trapped, and rampant poverty.”

 

What freedom of speech really means in today’s US

A fine program, Alyona Minkovski on RT, has now finished and this is from her last episode:

Lessons in how not to be a serious journalist in Syria

Back in 2011, an article by Joan Juliet Buck in Vogue appeared that profiled the Assads in Syria. I covered it back then. It was a puff piece, sycophancy due to access. The piece was shunned, wiped from the Vogue website but never forgotten.

Now the writer is back, explaining herself in a strange piece in Newsweek. It’s written in terrible Orientalist style, all about the allegedly dangerous Arab. She clearly has no clue, then or now. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, for us all, but seriously, writing that Syria sounds like syringe or hiss? Though it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for her, nobody could have expected the exact events in Syria today:

Late in the afternoon of Dec. 1, 2010, I got a call from a features editor at Vogue. She asked if I wanted to go to Syria to interview the first lady, Asma al-Assad.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “I don’t want to meet the Assads, and they don’t want to meet a Jew.”

The editor explained that the first lady was young, good-looking, and had never given an interview. Vogue had been trying to get to her for two years. Now she’d hired a PR firm, and they must have pushed her to agree.

“Send a political journalist,” I said.

“We don’t want any politics, none at all,” said the editor, “and she only wants to talk about culture, antiquities, and museums. You like museums. You like culture. She wants to talk to you. You’d leave in a week.”

A week: clearly my name was last on a list of writers that the first lady had rejected because they knew nothing about Mesopotamia. I didn’t consider the possibility that the other writers had rejected the first lady.

“Let me think about it,” I said. I had written four cover stories that year, three about young actresses and one about a supermodel who had just become a mother. This assignment was more exciting, and when else would I get to see the ruins of Palmyra?

I looked up Asma al-Assad. Born Asma Akhras in London in 1975 to a Syrian cardiologist, Fawaz Akhras, and his diplomat wife, Sahar Otri. Straightforward trajectory. School: Queen’s College. University: King’s College. Husband: president of Syria.

Syria. The name itself sounded sinister, like syringe, or hiss. My notions about the country were formed by the British Museum: the head of Gudea, king of Lagash, treasures from Ur, Mesopotamia, Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon—all of which had occupied what is now Syria. Both Aleppo and Damascus had been continuously inhabited for more than five millennia. This was where civilization was born, 6,000 years ago.

…

Both Assads were in jeans and sweaters. Bashar turned out to have a neck so long that he looked like something you might glimpse breaking the water in a Scottish loch. He spoke with a slight lisp. He showed me his cameras, described the wide variety of lenses now available, and showed me framed photos he’d taken on family holidays in Qatar. He didn’t strike me as much of a monster.

And he wanted to talk. I thrust the recorder at him and asked the most innocuous question I could think of.

Why had he wanted to become an eye doctor?

“Because it’s never an emergency,” he said. “It’s very precise, and there is very little blood.”

Never an emergency. Very little blood.

He wanted to talk about computers. “When we met, I was Mac and she was PC!” he said.

Their daughter, Zein, a 7-year-old with curly hair, watched Alice in Wonderland on her father’s iMac. Asma’s iMac faced a side window.

The entire back half of the apartment was glass, rising from the lower level through the main reception floor above, and perhaps even farther up. Other residential buildings with hundreds of windows had an unobstructed view of the Assads’ doings. The apartment was like a custom-built habitat in which a rich first family could go about its domestic life in front of a large audience.

I wondered how this meshed with the secrecy Asma seemed to prize. I wondered who lived behind all those windows out there, and who they worked for.

Nosy neighbors, Asma said, had commented on their orange seating area.“This curiosity is good,” said the president. “Even if you want to be secure, you have to choose between being secure and being … psychotic.”

The kitchen, at the opposite end from the windows, was the only place that wasn’t exposed to public view.

Israeli export: lessons in isolation

The Jerusalem Post reports on the latest lessons the Zionist state are giving the world. What inspiration:

A growing number of countries are flocking to Israel to study border security as the Defense Ministry works to complete the construction of a physical and technological barrier along the Egyptian border.

In August, a delegation from India will arrive to study the various technologies used by the IDF to secure the borders with the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Egypt, and which could be implemented as part of India’s own fence with Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The interest in Israeli border security has spiked since Israel began constructing a barrier along its border with Egypt to stem terrorism and infiltrations by illegal migrants. The Defense Ministry and IDF have so far completed about 150 km, of the fence; plans are to complete the remainder by the end of the year.

The fence is 5 meters in height and layered with barbed wire. It is supported by dozens of radars that are deployed along the border to issue alerts about possible crossings while the potential infiltrators are still kilometers away.

Israel’s primary concern is with the growing number of terror attacks along the border. Last week, shots were fired at a bus carrying IDF soldiers. While there was damage to the bus, no one was wounded. On June 18, terrorists crossed into Israel from Sinai and killed an Israeli contractor working on the border fence, while last August eight Israelis were killed in a cross-border attack.

India is interested in beefing up its border security to prevent future incidents like the Mumbai attacks in 2008.

How to move from two-state paradigm to one-state democracy

The following (first) review of my new book, After Zionism, has just been published in the Palestine News Network:

Journalists Antony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moore have succeeded in putting together an impressive collection of essays in their new book After Zionism. The essays all focus on the shift that is now taking place in many people’s thinking about the Israel-Palestine conflict: from the two-state paradigm to the emerging one-state mode thinking. The essays cover a lot of ground both historically and politically and comprise a mixed bag of views, sometimes divergent, that are sure to spark much needed debate about the future of the conflict. With the fallout from the PA’s UN Statehood bid fading and shifting dynamics across the region this book couldn’t have come at a more important time!

The content covers a lot of ground. For instance, Ilan Pappe contributes a chapter to the Nakba and its legacy as it haunts the conflict today. There are essays here on American Jewish identity (Philip Weiss), the Oslo process (Dianna Buttu), joint struggles in the West Bank (Joseph Dana) and two attempts at outlining how a one-state solution could work (Jeff Halper and Ghada Karmi). As well as chapters on the development of Zionist thought as well as an analysis of Israel’s discriminatory land laws.

The quality of the essays varies and given the depth and breadth of the book and so reviewing all of them is beyond the scope of just one review. In order to be brief I will only address a portion of the book’s chapters that concern themselves with advocacy. The chapters that are historical and literary in nature, which are dynamic and well worth reading, I will leave aside.

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The two-state solution is dead, announce the books contributors, and it is time to start approaching alternatives. The alternative, the editors write in the book’s foreword, is the one-state solution. The feeling amongst many is that the basic conditions that need to be addressed in order to bring a just peace to Israel/Palestine – the return of refugees, full and equal citizenship for Palestinians within Israel’s borders, the end of the occupation – cannot be fulfilled by the two-state solution.

Editor Ahmed Moore, a young Palestinian-American journalist who’s writing on the Middle East has appeared across outlets throughout the world and who consistently brings fresh insights into often-stale debates, pens the first chapter of the book. He recounts his earliest experiences of College life and the struggle to express a Palestinian identity. He writes eloquently about the Zionist narrative in American politics and its capacity to distort history and marginalise Palestinians, citing the latest string of slurs by Republican candidates claiming Palestinians don’t exist. Reflecting on his return to Palestine and finding his old neighbourhood Al-Ram partially depopulated by the annexation wall he declares that he has borne witness to the death of the two-state solution. This narrative is a familiar one for many young Palestinians who have lived abroad and then returned to their home to find it deracinated by the occupation.

This thinking is heading in the right direction and is broadly representative of a growing number of young Palestinians and Israelis.

The shift from the idea of a two-state solution to the one-state solution is not as easy to make as many of the contributors to this anthology assume. The usual thinking is that there are so many settlements that we should by-pass the idea of a Palestinian state and head straight for one state.

However, people need not see two states as a be all and end all. One can view a two-state settlement (note: not solution) as an intermediary stage toward a one-state solution. So the establishment of a Palestinian state need not be the end of the struggle. In fact this may be a necessary step toward a bi-national solution, which seems more feasible given the nationalisms that are by now firmly ingrained in both Palestinian and Israeli societies. Moore inadvertently touches upon this point perhaps without fully grasping it. He writes at the end of the chapter:

“It is very likely that before the one-state solution is fully developed, the Bantustan option will be established in the West Bank. But the Palestinian struggle will continue despite that.”

The logical follow up to this question is if a two-state settlement isn’t the end of the struggle then why not factor that in to advocacy? Why not see a real (not a bantustan option) two-state settlement as only an end to the occupation and to the fighting before proceeding to push toward a one-state solution after that?

This I think is a weak point of the Palestine solidarity movement as it stands today. The one-state/two-state debate is conducted entirely upon the dichotomous view that resolving the conflict must occur in one swoop and could not possibly move through phases.

Saree Makdisi is similarly guilty of this logic in his contribution. His chapter waxes lyrical about the power of symbols, the imagination and the realm of ideas to bring about a one-state solution without bothering to assess the harder problems of the conflict – those of nationalism, ingrained identity, time frames and public opinion. Instead he dismisses critics such as Mouin Rabbani as simply not being imaginative enough.

Countless arguments can be in made in favour of the moral superiority of the one-state solution and the moral poverty of its two-state counterpart. That these arguments show the moral superiority of the one-state solution is beyond doubt. However, what is more difficult, as Ghada Karmi writes in her essay, is marking out a strategy from how to get from the current dismal state of affairs to the end-goal of a single state. Karmi briefly runs through the various formulations of both the two-state solution and the one-state solution and argues that each one on the table is inadequate and then proceeds to present her path forward.

Her solution? Voluntarily annex the Occupied Territories to Israel and force it to accept full responsibility for the Palestinian population thus clearing the decks for a civil-rights style struggle effectively ending Zionism which, upon its victory will create a single secular democratic state in historic Palestine.

In her own words:

“Key to this new strategy is the idea of a voluntary annexation of the Occupied Territories to Israel, thus transforming the struggle against occupation into one for equal civil rights within an expanded Israeli state”

And that:

“Faced with such a situation, it is difficult to see what Israel could do. At one stroke, the Palestinians would call Israel’s bluff over the peace process and its unrelenting colonization, which has benefited so well from the protracted and futile peace talks to date”

This approach calls for giving Israel the keys, so to speak. But there is a very serious problem with it. Namely, that Israel doesn’t want the keys and sees no reason to take them. The Palestinian Authority also won’t dissolve itself. Quite the opposite actually since the PA has recently shown itself willing to use armed violence in order to put down any challenge to its control. After all it is a collaborationist clique and has a job to do. So the strategy is a non-starter.

Jeff Halper is heading in the right direction. He offers a refreshing approach to the problem in his chapter. Seeing the insurmountable task of convincing an Israeli and International public to run with the one-state solution straight out, Halper advocates a two-stage strategy for meeting the requirements of a just peace, which he argues include the return of refugees and economic and environmental sustainability amongst others. The first step is to end the conflict along the lines of a two-state settlement (note: not solution) which would ‘meet “the Palestinians’ requirements for national sovereignty, political identity and membership in the international community”. The second stage is for the international community to broker a “regional confederation among Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon”. This would ensure the economic and environmental sustainability of both Israel and Palestine.

But what about the refugees? Halper argues that since “They could choose to return home to what is today Israel, but they would do so as Palestinian citizens or citizens of another member state”. This would nominally mean that both Israeli and Palestinian nationalism would survive.

There is a lot to be said about the argument since it sensibly recognizes that the solution to a conflict that has now been roaring for more than a century will actually have to come in stages, even if it is only two stages, since there is no instant solution currently proposed that is both moral and practical.

Having said that the idea of a regional confederation is quite convoluted and relies upon other nation states, such as Syria, Lebanon and Jordan all agreeing to it and consistently enacting policies that push the development of the confederation forward. As Halper himself notes, Israel sees itself as a kind of Singapore, a wealthy and cultured nation amongst a sea of antitheses. For this reason many Israelis would not accept being part of a confederation with Arab states. Convincing them might not be an insurmountable task though and would certainly be more achievable than coercing them into abandoning zionism.

That said, a confederation need not encompass all of the countries in the region, rather it could be between the two nations Israel and Palestine, which would lay the groundwork for integrating to two and eventually dissolving the already artificial borders.

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The best elements of the book are the breadth of vision and creativity that Halper and others present, as well as the razor sharp analysis of Saray Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza, who uses her chapter to trace the changing dynamics in the region.

The low points of the book are when it is derivative and clichéd.

Omar Barghouti, who is fast becoming the most recognizable face in Palestinian solidarity today, attempts a philosophical treatise as his contribution to the book. It reads like a pretentious attempt at literary theory and sticks out like a sore thumb between the magnificent Zionist myth-debunking chapter by Antony Loewenstein and the honest but misguided one-state strategy of Ghada Karmi mentioned above. The crux of Barghouti’s essay is that through assessing the power relations between various theoretical constructs such as ethnic identity and zionisation we come to the conclusion that a secular, unitary, democratic state of Palestine is the morally superior way to end the conflict.

The worst aspect of Barghouti’s chapter is its tendency toward armchair philosophy. By ignoring the obstacles that exist in reaching a one-state solution he conjures up the sort of thinking suitable of any coffee shop revolutionary. One particular instance of this is his careless dismissal of bi-nationalism on the grounds that it doesn’t gel with UN Resolution 194. He doesn’t explain why. Instead he just asserts the point and leaves his reader guessing. He also leaves many of his own questions unanswered but they aren’t worth pursuing here.

By addressing the question of ethnic and national identity at a level of abstraction his philosophizing is entirely ignorant to the long history of violence that has resulted from forcing different ethnic and religious groups to assimilate into one another within state borders. For somebody who has claimed that there is nobody as violent as ‘the white race’ Barghouti seems to have forgotten that Europe was for several hundred years the most violent place on earth due in no small part to the concerted attempts to forced different ethnic, religious and national groups into the narrow confines of the nation state (usually for the benefits of capital).

A second drawback to the book is that certain clichés of the current political discourse are never properly examined. The term Bantustan, which is used at the core of Dianna Buttu’s essay and appears frequently in the chapters of the other contributors, is all too common amongst activists and commentators of this conflict.

The reason this concept becomes problematic in Palestine is because the intention of the Israelis is different from the intention of the Afrikaners. The intention of the Bantustans was the maintain segeregation and a flow fo cheap back labour. This was because black South Africans made up the overwhelming majority of the workforce and so they couldn’t bare to part with them. However, the intention of the Israeli occupation is, as Moshe Dayan said when the occupation first began in 1967, to make the Palestinians live like dogs and if they want they can leave (the crucial word being leave). The goal is to drive the Palestinians off the land – ethnic cleansing. The goal is not to keep them on the land and use them as cheap labor like the Afrikaners did.

It is not that there aren’t glaring similarities between the two situations. Of course there are. But terminology has a point to it and if it is misleading, distracting or both then it won’t advance one’s argument anywhere and in fact bogs it down in moslty pointless debates about historical similarities and dissimilarities.

There is one crucial similarity to South Africa that isn’t often mentioned but that is instructive nonetheless. And that is the role that the US played in propping up the Apartheid regime even after it was a pariah state. The is happening with Israel.

The lack of attention paid to US Imperialism and the role that has in shaping America’s policies of hegemony throughout the region is a definite shortcoming in all of the chapters. For this reason it would have been worth, in my opinion, including a chapter on American anti-imperialism as it relates to the Middle East since this is a crucial determinant in whether the conflict will even end at all let alone end in one-state of two.

The omission of any analysis of this relationship also gives the uninformed reader the impression that Israel is a lone ranger of sorts and in control of its own of its own foreign policy.

It is not.

Israel’s policy must fall in line with US policy since Israeli is wholly dependent on the US for survival.

This incorrect framing has damaging consequences for advocacy since it distracts people’s attention away from US support for Israeli crimes, without which such crimes could not occur.

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These criticisms aside there is a lot here that will breath new life into a stale debate. All in all this is an ambitious book that captures at the right time the paradigm shift that is happening within debates about Israel-Palestine. Its contributors consist an all-star lineup of commentators and scholars who have played a prominent role in shaping public debate and the chapters mostly reflect this. The breadth of the book is ambitious and, the criticisms that I’ve raised aside, it is quite comprehensive. The editors state in the introduction that naturally they do not agree with everything in the book’s diverse chapters and so the book itself is really a debate.

Where will the debate lead? How will the Palestinian national project respond? Only time will tell. But this collection is bound to have an impact one way or the other.

A one-state solution is only way forward for Israel and Palestine

My following article appears today in The Conversation:

How should the world react when a supposedly democratic state can’t acknowledge a 40-year-old occupation?

When US Presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel during a visit this weekend, he was playing into this mass delusion, and mouthing the official position of the American Zionist lobby.

It is a fallacy that runs right through Israel, self-described as the Middle East’s only democracy, where a recent government-backed report by retired Supreme Court judge Edmond Levy found that its decades-long occupation of Palestinian land wasn’t an occupation at all. The report granted quasi-legal justification for illegally moving Jews into the West Bank. There are now at least 600,000 Jewish colonists squatting on Palestinian land in direct contravention of international law.

But for the Zionist state, the occupation is merely a God-given right to populate land. The lie was proved when Israeli officials, leaders and dutiful Zionist lobbyists in the West spent decades claiming the occupation was temporary and arguing that Palestinian land and natural resources for Israeli use were solely motivated by security concerns.

The occupation can apparently be ignored forever. Soon enough, a person like Levy will be found to create a legal fiction and legitimise what the whole world knows to be illegal. The US issues muted criticism, while Australia doesn’t have an independent foreign policy when it comes to Israel, meekly following American and Israeli dictates, and colonisation continues apace.

What remains fascinating about the Levy findings – American Zionist organisations still can’t bring themselves to speak clearly and honestly about Jewish housing in the West Bank – is what it implies for Palestinian rights under occupation. If there is no occupation, then there should be no problem granting full voting and civil rights to all citizens of the West Bank and Gaza. If that happened today, Jews would soon find themselves a minority. It’s called democracy and it’s something Zionist leadership fears.

Mitt Romney compounded these lies with his comments about Jerusalem. But peace isn’t served when politicians don’t have their own views on the Middle East issue.

What all this means for the much discussed two-state solution is a death knell. It’s beyond time to declare partition of the land both unworkable and unethical. Despite 20 years of this fiction, two decades of dreamers, cynics, Israel lobbyists, politicians, journalists, officials, liberal Zionists and pundits pronouncing the two-state solution the only game in town, it’s over. Finished. Israel killed it by pursuing its natural Zionist, expansionist tendencies.

The result is that Israel has succeeded in conquering the West Bank but ended its chances of remaining a Jewish state. This is something we should celebrate if we believe in the concept of democracy and a rejection of Jewish privilege in a modern age.

The only viable alternative, and one gaining increasing traction, is the one-state solution. Sometimes support appears from the most unlikely of places. British conservative MP, Bob Stewart, who spent 28 years in the UK military, visited the West Bank recently and said he was “deeply upset by what I saw.” His response? “Unless the settlements stop, there can be no chance whatever of a two-state solution, and the only alternative … is a one-state solution. One state where Jews and Palestinians recognise one another as equals. Surely that is not totally utopian”.

In a new book I’ve edited with Ahmed Moor, After Zionism, we explain both the justice and sense of imagining a one-state future. One chapter, by Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook, highlights the case of Ahmed and Fatina Zbeidat, a Palestinian couple who face systematic discrimination simply because they’re not Jews. It is one story but the message is universal.

Another chapter, by long-time one-state proponent, Palestinian Ghada Karmi, outlines the challenges of achieving true equality in Israel and Palestine, not least the determination of Israel and its supporters to talk peace but entrench Jewish exclusivity over land and rights and the Palestinian Authority who have become financially enriched by being Israel’s occupation manager. Such obstacles once faced the two-state solution until it became corporatised and a convenient ruse to mask colonisation.

The exact outline of a one-state solution is not set. Israelis, Palestinians and interested parties, must decide it. After Zionism features Palestinians, academics, journalists, Orthodox Jews, Arabs and intellectuals, many of whom live, work and breathe with Israelis and Palestinians, and know that Israel must be de-Zionised before it can begin to right historical wrongs of continued ethnic cleansing.

A one-state equation isn’t about dismissing or ignoring Jewish history, but recognising the land is shared between two peoples and a soon-to-be minority Jewish population has no legal or ethical right to control a majority Arab people.

On its current path, despite some mainstream Israeli politicians advocating the illegal annexation of the West Bank to create an indefinite apartheid state, Israel will become increasingly ghettoised and militarised, convincing once-proud diaspora supporters to decide between their morality and Zionist loyalties.

The time for a one-state solution has surely come.