Gaza.

IDF Propoganda 101

Apparently, the IDF and Israeli Navy will “act with judgement and accomplish the mission”.

According to the decision made by the Israeli government, the IDF and the Israeli Navy are getting prepared to prevent the flotilla from reaching the shores of Gaza. The flotilla’s passengers will be given the opportunity to turn back at any stage of their trip or to give up the control of their ships.

From the moment of their departure, the ships will receive formal warnings at various stages of their journey, requesting them to stop their trip to Gaza’s shores.

 Should the passengers decide to continue the journey and not take the Israeli Navy’s warning into consideration, they will be arrested, brought to Israel’s shores and transferred to the Ministry of Interior and the immigration authorities so they can be sent back to their country of origin.

The security forces will grab hold of the aid expected to be brought to Gaza by the flotilla, and after a security check of the goods, they will be transferred into the Gaza Strip.

Read more directly from the IDF.  Of course, the IDF fail to mention that boarding unarmed civilian ships in international waters and arresting peaceful activists amounts to piracy and false imprisonment. As usual, the mass media is quiet on this issue.

UPDATE (28 May 2010):

IDF admitting it will commit illegal piracy during briefing?

Hypocrite Wiesel says Jerusalem is “above politics”

The story of Elie Wiesel is both a saddening and inspiring one.  Wiesel survived the Nazi holocaust to become a successful author and Nobel Prize Winner.  But his story makes his recent actions all the more difficult to fathom when he appears to support the oppressive regime of Israel as it is imposed upon the non-Jews of Jerusalem.

Wiesel recently used his wealth to take out advertising space in The International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal on April 16, 2010 and in The New York Times on April 18, 2010.  In that space he wrote an open letter to Barack Obama appealing to him not to politicise Jerusalem by exerting diplomatic pressure upon Israel.  Obama must have been reading as he invited Wiesel to lunch at the white house.

Perhaps Obama did not see the hypocrisy of a person on the one hand who claims that “There is no more moving prayer in Jewish history than the one expressing our yearning to return to Jerusalem” whilst on the other being a millionaire citizen of the United States for whom the cost of moving to Israel and living in Jerusalem would be a mere trifle.  And perhaps Wiesel saw no irony in using his personal wealth and stature to gain him an audience with the President of the United States of America to employ political means to attempt to place Jerusalem “above politics”.  And above scrutiny. 

To its credit, the New York Review of Books published a reply from a group of actual Jerusalemites -  Just Jerusalem -  which explains, amongst other things, that:

Your letter troubles us, not simply because it is replete with factual errors and false representations, but because it upholds an attachment to some other-worldly city which purports to supersede the interests of those who live in the this-worldly one. For every Jew, you say, a visit to Jerusalem is a homecoming, yet it is our commitment that makes your homecoming possible. We prefer the hardship of realizing citizenship in this city to the convenience of merely yearning for it.

Whilst easily rebutting the idealised vision that Wiesel has of Jerusalem, this reply certainly will not be as widely read as Wiesel’s original letter. Nor will it earn the writers an audience with Barack Obama.

Wiesel is a man who retains US citizenship but also whose heart and mind appear to align more with the aims and objectives of Israel - a foreign state to his adopted homeland - and its prescriptions for Jerusalem. Through his wealth and personal status he is single-handedly pursuing the objectives of Israeli foreign policy.  Does this make him what some would call a ‘useful idiot’, or perhaps what others would term a ‘traitor’ to his country of citizenship? (We would have said ‘homeland’, but Wiesel’s ‘homeland’ would probably be up for debate).

UPDATE 17 May 2010: Who Is Elie Wiesel? Apparently irrefutable testimony and Nazi-era documentation the demonstrate that Elie Wiesel is not who he claims to be.

Israeli tourism ad banned for using photo of Occupied Territories

An Israeli tourist office press campaign has been banned by the UK advertising regulator for including pictures of East Jerusalem, part of the Palestinian occupied territories.

The Israeli Government Tourist Office (IGTO) press ad stated that a tourist can “travel the entire length of Israel in six hours” and featured a range of photos of destinations in Israel including a picture of Jerusalem.

A complaint was received by the Advertising Standards Authority that the image showed the Western Wall of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, both of which are in East Jerusalem and part of the occupied territories of the West Bank.

The ASA said that readers of the ad were likely to assume that all the places featured in the ad were within the state of Israel.

Read More

Apartheid is all in the Mind

Apartheid is classified as a crime against humanity under international law.  It is “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime”.

It is abundantly clear - and Israel appears to be going to great trouble to hide the objective fact that - Israel is an apartheid state.  Advocates for Israel will continually stress that Israel has equality of rights and legal protection under Israeli law. They also regularly tell us that Arab-Israeli citizens enjoy greater freedoms and rights than Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority.

It is difficult to argue against the latter statement, though not for any reason an unwavering supporter of Israel will publicly concede.  It is not good enough for a country which is demonstrably undemocratic - by even both its’ own standards and those applied by internationally respected organisations   - to point the finger at other governments and complain that the rights enjoyed by citizens of those governments are not up to standard. However, the real issue when discussing the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza Strip is that Israel, as the Occupying Power under the terms of the Forth Geneva Convention is the final and ultimate guardian of those rights.  The Palestinian Authority does not have sovereignty from Israel but in fact acts as an organ of Israeli governance over Palestine.

The 2009 Israeli Democracy Index clearly states that

…Israel’s Arab citizens are mainly Moslems [sic] and members of low-socio-economic groups.  By contrast, Israel’s Jewish citizens are Jewish by religion and belong to socio-economic groups of higher status than those to which Arab citizens belong.

The governmental bodies of Israel are well aware of the disparity (or should that be “cleavage”) between the socio-economic classes of Jewish and Arab citizens, but do very little to close the gap between them.

The IDI democracy report informs us that only approximately half of the Jewish population of Israel think that Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel should have full and equal rights.  The statistics for Jews supporting Arabs joining the government are even worse. Given this, it is saddening and ironic that the apparent general feeling amongst Jews - even those who think Arabs should not have the same rights as Jews, and nor should they be part of the governance of Israel - is that Arabs are not discriminated against.

This article is published in support of the Sixth Annual Israeli Apartheid Week, 2010.

The Fallacy of ‘Democratic’ Israel

Advocates of Israel continually assert that Israel is the only democratic country along the traditional ‘Western’ model in the Middle East.  If we examine this statement objectively, we will find it to be almost the opposite of the truth.

Whilst we understand that Israel recognises that the Palestinian National Authority as having some level of autonomy and authority in the West Bank and Gaza (though not at all in Gaza since Hamas legally won elections and fought off an illegal coup attempt to within Gaza), it is a fact that the State of Israel has de-facto final authority over all matters relating the Palestinian National Authority and therefore can subvert the democratic will of Palestinians at will.  This is not the act of a democratic country.

Setting aside the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, and the status of Israeli settlers - who enjoy Israeli citizenship, rights and votes whilst living on Palestinian land - if we look within the internationally recognised borders of Israel we will see that even according to the metrics of Israeli specialists in democrocy, Isreal is not democratic according to many measures of the traditional ‘Western’ ideal.

The Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) released the 2009 Israeli Democracy Index in August 2009 which examined the state of Israeli democracy and which discovered that there is a ‘cleavage’ of opinion on democracy between Israeli Jewish and ‘Arab’ (presumably non-Jewish) citizens.

Even the methodology applied to the IDI Democracy Report betrays an institutional bias against non-Jewish citizens of Israel.  The report repeatedly sub-divides Jewish citizens into classes such as “Secular”, “Traditional”, “Religious” and “Ultra-Orthodox” in order to  point out the apparently infinite nuances of opinion within these different groupings.  In contrast, the only non-Jewish grouping mentioned is ‘Arab’, as if the ‘Arabs’ are a homogenous mass whose opinion is not as nuanced as the Jewish communities’, or if it is, the fact is not worth the effort of exploration and analysis.

Why does the IDI report make no specific mention of any Christian or even atheist population within Israel?  Is it that these groupings do not exist? Or, is it more likely to be the case that they do exist but their opinions are not considered equal, or even at all important when conducting a survey about the state of democracy within the self-proclaimed Jewish State of Israel?

When it comes to freedom of the press as enjoyed by the vast majority of ‘Western’ democracies, the IDI found that, by contrast, Israel has only a ‘partly free’ press. The IDI itself buttresses this fact with the statement that “Most of the [Israeli] public support freedom of expression, but are not prepared to accept criticism of Israel”.  Is this a classic chicken and egg paradigm?  Which came first, censorship (even if it is self-censorship) of the media, or public refusal to accept criticism of the State of Israel?

It is not only by internal measures of democracy that Israel is found wanting. The Democracy Index as compiled by The Economist sandwiches Israel between Botswana and Estonia and concludes that Israel is a ‘Flawed Democracy’, this is outside the parameters of the ‘Full Democracy’ status enjoyed by the ‘Western’ democracies that Israel claims to be in the company of.

If we select our own measure of democracy, such as equality of representation in the Knesset, we see that although ‘Arabs’ (in this context, ‘Arabs’ are defined as ‘non-Jews’) make up just over 23% of the population of Israel, they account for just under 11% of the Knesset. This is a quite dramatic under-representation of ‘Arab’ views within the Government of Israel.  Coupled to this under-representation of non-Jewish perspectives within the government of Israel, it is an easy research project to undertake if one wishes to prove that no ‘Arab’ member of the Knesset has ever held any position that could be considered to of critical importance to the governance of Isreal.  Has there ever been an Arab Prime Minister, or an Arab Minister of  Finance, Health, Justice, Education, Foreign Affairs, or Defence?  Considering that Arabs make up over 20% of the population of Israel, is it not fair to assume that such a large demographic of people could, at some point in the 61 years since Israel declared independence, have placed a non-Jew into a government position with some critical importance?  Or should we simply brush this fact away as another ‘cleavage’ in an apparently democratic Israeli society?

The consistent election of ex-Military officers with a history of a ‘hard-line’ stance against Palestinians in particular and/or membership of ‘elite’ or ‘special forces’ fighting units is a recurring and peculiar feature of Israeli democracy.  The IDI can perhaps partially explain as it tells us that Israeli support for that statement that “A few strong leaders can be more useful to the country than all the discussions and the laws” is currently running at 61%, the IDI report itself shows that traditional ‘Western’ democracies support for such a statement , for instance in Britain, the US and France, runs much closer to 30% than 60%.  This is a large gap which cannot be easily explained away.

If we look at the attitude of some of the ruling elite in the Knesset, we see that it is perfectly acceptable to be openly hostile against democratically elected Arabs (that is to say, non-Jews).  Avigdor Lebermann, currently Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, said to the Arab Members of the Knesset  “a new administration will be established and then we will take care of you.”  What are ordinary Israeli-Arabs to think if such a statement can be made by a high-ranking politician against their elected representatives in the very building representative of Israeli democracy?

A feature of ‘Western’ democracy is the separation of the state from religion. A commitment to secular state apparatus is a non-negotiable aspect of any true democracy.  Israel wishes to present itself as democratic along the model of a secular democracy, but at the same time claims also to be a Jewish state and offers only Jews the right to unquestionably migrate migrate to Israel on the basis of religion and to achieve Israeli citizenship through the legal instrument of the Law of Return, enacted in 1950.

That Israel is gradually approaching the status of a true democracy cannot be denied, but the claim that Israel currently is now a democracy - at least by the current accepted measures and even brief observation of the machinations of the Israeli political system - is not supported by the objective facts, nor by Israel’s own institutional research.

This article is published in support of the Sixth Annual Israeli Apartheid Week, 2010.