Tag: Zionism

Is the “News” You Watch Informative or Is It Propaganda?

Signing the first Oslo Accords

This past summer marked the 30th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, the supposed peace agreements that were intended (or were they?) to end the incessant hostilities between Zionist Israel and the Palestinian people living in the Occupied Territories.

Below are two different video news reports ostensibly covering the negotiations and eventual signing of these peace accords.

The first report is from CBN, a supposedly Christian news organization. As such, I expect them to maintain a high level of honesty, even-handedness, and truthfulness.

The second report is from Mondoweiss. (I will also disclose that it is produced and narrated by a friend of mine, Umna Patel.) Mondoweiss is a secular organization claiming to tell both sides of the story when it comes to Israel-Palestine.

While watching these two videos, ask yourself: Which one tells me about the details of the Oslo Accords? Which report best informs me about this piece of Middle East history, the role played by Oslo, and its long-term effects? Which one attempts to explain the specifics of why the Accords did not bring peace?

I’ll give you a hint on what I consider a dead give-away in rating these two clips.

Notice that the CBN report starkly portrays the characters involved as good guys in white hats (Israel) and bad guys in black hats (Palestinians). Period. There is no nuance or explanation. We are only told that Palestinians are inclined to violence and that they hate Israel. (Really, is anything in life that simple?)

In the CBN report, Israel is always the innocent victim of irrational Palestinian hatred. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are always bent on destroying Israel.

Sadly, the supposed “Christian” account is pure propaganda.

It’s the secular Mondoweiss account that informs and explains the real story in a balanced fashion.

The CBN report:

The Mondoweiss report:

Time to Support the One Democratic State Solution for Israel

Even though western pundits continue to promote the old idea of a “Two State Solution” for Israel-Palestine, the facts on the ground (as Israeli politicians like to say) buried this possibility long ago.

In the wake of the disastrous Oslo Accords, with 700,000 or more Jewish settlers entreanched in the many illegal settlements scattered throughout the West Bank (what Israel calls Judea and Samaria), the old idea of a two state solution has become a blind man’s fantasy.

That’s why men (and women) like Jeff Halper are promoting a new vision called the One Democratic State Campaign. A program for Israel’s truly democratic future where all citizens, Jews and Palestinians, throughout the whole of the land — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — would have the same citizenship status with equal rights.

It’s the only “solution” that can bring real justice to Israel-Palestine. And justice is the necessary precursor to lasting, genuine peace.

Take some time to listen to Jeff Halper explain how this could work:

Palestinian Journalist Suspended from Twitter without Explanation

Twitter suspensions have been in the news lately. But I am sure that most people have never heard about the suspension of Said Arikat, a reporter for the Palestinian publication, Al-Quds newspaper.

Journalist Said Arikat

Arikat is a veteran journalist who has covered the US State Department for the past 20-years.

He was suspended without explanation, but his removal is very much in keeping with the anti-Palestinian bias of US mainstream media.

I’d bet my bottom dollar that he is the latest victim of the pro-Zionist, Israel lobby in this country —  a collection of organizations that work hard to hide Israel’s human rights abuses and silence Palestinian voices.

The story is by Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss. It’s titled “Twitter Suspends Palestinian Journalist Arikat, and media response — silence.”

Below is an excerpt:

In yet another demonstration of anti-Palestinianism in the U.S. mainstream, there is no outcry over Twitter’s arbitrary suspension of Said Arikat, longtime D.C. correspondent for Al-Quds newspaper.

It was big news when Elon Musk suspended the Twitter accounts of at least nine tech journalists last week (over alleged dox-ing) and then reinstated them this week after Twitter users demanded as much.

But in yet another demonstration of anti-Palestinianism in the U.S. mainstream, there has been scarcely any attention given to the arbitrary suspension of Said Arikat, a fixture at the State Department briefings as the longtime Washington correspondent for Al-Quds newspaper, a Palestinian publication.

Arikat said he woke up on December 3 to read a notice from Twitter that his account had been “permanently suspended after careful review”. No reason was given; and despite the assurance that he could appeal the suspension if he thought the decision was wrong, Twitter has not responded to numerous letters Arikat has sent the media giant.

The only reason for Arikat’s suspension would seem to be that he is Palestinian and speaks up for Palestinians. His case has elicited no concern in the press. Let alone efforts to discover the pretext for the action.

Al-Quds is clearly being targeted as a Palestinian source. Today there is news that Facebook has shut down the official page of the Al-Quds newspaper.

Read the entire article here.

Telling the Truth About Israel Can Get You Fired. Just Ask Katie Halper.

Katie Halper is an independent journalist and political commentator. Until last week, Ms. Halper was a visiting host on the news program The Hill.

That is, she WAS a regular guest on the show until she was summarily fired for reading her editorial spot explaining the details of Israeli apartheid.

Yes, Israel IS an apartheid state. It has always been an apartheid state, since day one. There is NO non-apartheid phase in Israel’s history because Israel was founded as a Jewish supremacist state.

If this is new information to you, then I encourage you to read my new book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021).

But the pro-Israel, pro-Zionist public relations machine works very hard to hide this fact from the rest of the world.

They have been working particularly hard in recent years since Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have all published their own reports extensively cataloguing the ins-and-outs of Israel’s comprehensive, systemic, apartheid regime.

I will let Ms. Halper explain it all for you:

Lessons from “One of the Most Brutal Military Tyrannies in the World” — Israel

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy critiques the work of Israel’s spy agency, Shin Bet in the most recent edition of the Jerusalem daily, Haaretz. The article is

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

titled “Israel’s Stasi Preaches Morality.”

Below is an excerpt explaining why Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza will forever resist Israeli oppression:

. . . It is difficult to assess the real balance – how many terror attacks the Shin Bet thwarts and how many attacks it motivates with its unchecked activities. But when Bar boasts of 2,000 recent arrests, it’s clear there are more than a few innocent people among them, and people who will be radicalized by their very detention.

In a reality in which every night, soldiers accompanied by dogs terrorize people sleeping in their homes and snatch citizens from their beds at the behest of the Shin Bet, without any legal supervision of course, and in a reality where hundreds of people are detained without trial for months and years, also by order of the Shin Bet, it is clear that the damage is enormous. The most serious consequence is turning Israeli democracy into one of the most brutal military tyrannies in the world, even if only in its own backyard.

The Shin Bet barely operates in sovereign Israel. But what it is doing in the occupied territories, which are an inseparable part of Israel, apparently forever, makes it impossible to define Israel as a democracy anymore, certainly not when it is clear that this is not a temporary situation. There is no evil with which the Israeli Stasi – in the territories the Shin Bet is the Stasi in every way, with more advanced technology than the infamous East German organization had – is unfamiliar.

Just this week I met, at the Al-Arroub refugee camp, an 11-year-old boy who lost an eye to an IDF bullet. Now he has also been defined as a security risk, who is barred from entering Israel for treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center on the order of the Shin Bet. Last week, two cancer patients in the Gaza Strip died; they were unable to receive treatments in Israel in time because the Shin Bet denied them entry for two months.

Click here to read the entire article.

Listen to Sensible Voices Address the Israel-Palestine Bloodshed

I just finished participating in another political action campaign with Jewish Voice for Peace focused on the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza.

Below is a collection of reasonable testimonies from both Jewish and Palestinian young people addressing this tragedy of non-stop violence.

Please check it out:

 

 

The Colonizer and the Colonized

Albert Memmi, born in Tunis in 1920, was a Tunisian intellectual who grew

FRANCE – JULY 02: Albert Memmi, author, at home in Paris, France on July 02, 2004. (Photo by Marc GANTIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

up in his native land under French colonialism. He would eventually become a philosophy professor in Paris and write a best-selling autobiographical novel, The Pillar of Salt.

In 1956, he wrote a fascinating book titled The Colonizer and the Colonized, in which he insightfully describes the lasting effects of colonization on both those who conquer a foreign land, as well as those who are conquered.

The folks who study the history of colonization sometimes say that colonization is not an event but a structure. In other words, the people with the power build a social system intended to protect their power.

That colonial system does not come down until everyone, both the colonizers and the colonized together, decide that the old power structure must end.

Both Israel and the United States are colonial powers. Memmi’s analysis offers a penetrating description of both societies.

Memmi describes modern Israeli society to a T.

I believe he also sheds light on the inner resources of those Americans who embrace the ideologies of White Supremacy, American Exceptionalism and Nationalism, particularly Christian Nationalism.

And what about the American urge to control foreign governments and their economies around the world?

Below is a short excerpt for your consideration:

Accepting the reality of being a colonizer means agreeing to be a nonlegitimate privileged person, that is, a usurper. To be sure, a usurper claims his place and, if need be, will defend it by every means at his disposal. This amounts to saying that at the very time of his triumph, he admits that what triumphs in him is an image which he condemns…to possess victory completely he needs to absolve himself of it and the conditions under which it was attained…He endeavors to falsify history, he rewrites laws, he would extinguish memories – anything to succeed in transforming his usurpation into legitimacy.

How? How can usurpation try to pass for legitimacy? One attempt can be made by demonstrating the usurper’s eminent merits, so eminent that they deserve such compensation. Another is to harp on the usurped’s demerits, so deep that they cannot help leading to misfortune. His disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurpers to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time…

With all his power he must disown the colonized while their existence is indispensable to his own. Having chosen to maintain the colonial system, he must contribute more vigor to its defense than would have been needed to dissolve it completely. Having become aware of the unjust relationship which ties him to the colonized, he must continually attempt to absolve himself. He never forgets to make a public show of his own virtues, and will argue with vehemence to appear heroic and great…

He cannot help but approve discrimination and the codification of injustice, he will be delighted at police tortures, if the necessity arises, will become convinced of the necessity of massacres…The mechanism is practically constant. The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized…

Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom.

What is fascism, if not a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few?…The human relationships have arisen from the severest exploitation, founded on inequality and contempt, guaranteed by police authoritarianism. There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism…

It is no more surprising that colonial fascism is not easily limited to the colony. Cancer wants only to spread. The colonialist can only support oppressive and reactionary or, at least, conservative governments. He tends towards that which will maintain the current status of his homeland, or rather that which will more positively assure the framework of oppression.

Israel Mows Gaza’s Grass, Again

The Jerusalem Post reported in 2014 on the Israeli military policy of “mowing the grass” in Gaza.

Of course, no one living in Gaza has an actual lawn. Instead, this is Israel’s not-so-clever euphemism for its periodic military attacks against the human beings living in Gaza.

Yes, the Israeli military actually thinks it’s clever to describe the way they periodically mow down innocent Palestinian civilians as a public service in lawn care.

Ha ha…

Mowing Gaza’s grass accomplishes several goals for Israel.

First, as I explain in my book Like Birds in a Cage, regular Israeli airstrikes and bombings, causing mayhem, death, and destruction is intended to remind the Palestinian people of who their Master is.

Thus, mowing the grass gives Israel yet another opportunity to sear the Palestinian conscience, to quote the military’s own description of this policy goal.

Like random electrical shocks administered to a caged dog, the Palestinians are supposed to surrender their will, abandon all resistance, and lapse into a state of learned helplessness.

Fortunately, however, the Palestinian people are refusing to learn Israel’s intended lesson.

Here is the sequence of events for the most recent exercise in Israel’s deadly conscience searing:

It began on August 1st when Israeli commandos captured a leader of the rebel organization called Islamic Jihad (IJ) who was living in the West Bank.

Several days later Israel followed up on that raid by launching an airstrike on Gaza in order to assassinate another IJ leader in his home. He was killed with several others.

Then Israel announced that it was launching a “preemptive strike” against Gaza in response to intelligence reports detailing IJ’s plans to use heavy artillery against Israel. Of course, as usual, Israel never provided any details about this supposed intelligence. The world is expected to simply take Israel’s word at face value.

What followed was another merciless blood-letting.

At last count, as best I can discover, hundreds of Gazans have been injured, approximately 65 people were killed, 15 of them being children. The total damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure has yet to be determined.

The IJ forces launched almost 1,000 rockets against Israel. Yet, Israel did not suffer a single casualty. Some of these rockets did not even make it outside of Gaza, landing short and killing Palestinians instead.

These statistics tell us everything we need to know about the grotesque asymmetry characteristic of this “conflict.” A nuclear power is using state-of-the-art weaponry to mow down people living under military occupation whose weapons are like children’s toys in comparison.

I can’t help but wonder what happened to the (imaginary) heavy artillery that IJ was supposedly preparing to fire against Israel. Such rockets never made an appearance among the 1,000-or-so homemade IJ missiles that traced their wobbly, white streaks erratically across the Gazan sky this past week.

So, there you have it. The entire Israel-Palestine situation in a nut shell.

Israel continues its military occupation and blockade of Gaza and the West Bank, and they continue to get away with it.

Israel mows down hundreds of innocent men, women, and children, and gets away with it. Again, Israel will not suffer a single negative consequence from the outside world.

Palestinians make a feeble attempt to defend themselves against Israeli aggression, and they are vilified by Israel and its allies.

Which all raises a vital question: Whose conscience is being seared by this perpetual savagery?

 

Israel’s Settler Colonialism Continues at a Steady Pace

(I will write a post about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza later today.)

Israel is a settler-colonial state, much like the USA, Australia, Canada, and South Africa.

One of the defining goals of every settler-colonial state is the elimination of the native. Israel has created a massive state apparatus that works to accomplish this goal, whether through annexing Palestinian territory, building separation walls, home demolitions, zoning restrictions, or travel restrictions, to name only a few.

Continuing efforts to erase both the history and the contemporary existence of the Palestinian people appears, again, in the videos below.

I could post multiple videos like these every week, but I choose to limit them in order to cover a wider range of topics. However, the historical erasure of any group of human beings is always a story deserving of our attention.

Gideon Levy: “Hey, Israel. Let’s Become a Normal Country”

As Israeli citizens are suffering voting burn-out due to their fractious, unstable parliamentary system of government, the journalist Gideon Levy urges his nation to become “a normal country.”

In light of Russia’s recent threats to evict the Jewish Agency from Russian society, many are wondering, “What’s so bad about the Jewish Agency? Is this more antisemitism from Putin?”

Good questions. Why is Putin doing this? And what would it mean for Israel to become “normal”?

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy

Check out Levy’s editorial below. It may surprise you (all emphasis is mine):

To be a normal country – that, too, is an option. We could start, for example, with a normal immigration policy, as is customary in any normal country. Railing against Russian President Vladimir Putin over his intention to put a stop to Israel’s subversive activities against his country – intentions that are immeasurably justified – demonstrate that the path toward normality is still long and arduous. As long as Israel continues to hold the mentality that “we are allowed to do anything” and that “we’re not like other countries,” the path toward normality will be endlessly longer.

And here’s more proof that there’s no difference between one Israeli government and the next: An issue that is untouchable no matter what government is in power is the sanctity of Israel’s immigration policy. And if the Law of Return [a law granting all Jews everywhere in the world automatic citizenship] is accorded primacy among laws, immigration policy is the last of the issues that would be debated.

In seeking to shut down the operations of the Jewish Agency for Israel in his country, Putin has sought to put an end to a foreign country’s intervention in Russia’s domestic affairs. It’s not difficult to guess what would have happened if Warsaw had openly attempted to have emissaries from the Polish establishment stationed in Israel to encourage former Polish Jews and their descendants to return to Poland. But when it comes to Israel’s efforts, it’s all right.

Putin will clearly have to back down on his demand, because the Jewish establishment is stronger, but we don’t need Putin to ask not only by what right but for what purpose Israel is pursuing its activities there. Why does Israel have to meddle in other countries in an attempt to recruit, to coax, bribe or convince Jews, half-Jews or quarter-Jews to immigrate here?

What is the purpose of this entire bloated network of emissaries around the world? What’s the purpose of all those ridiculous Birthright and Masa programs when it’s clear that there’s no more room here?

Israel is a country bursting at the seams, but it still wants more and more immigrants. Its passion for aliyah is insatiable – in a country that already has a population of 9.5 million living on an extremely narrow strip of land. The Jews of the world should therefore have been told: Come here only if you have no alternative. It’s crowded here, even in the sea, and there’s not a parking spot to be had.

Jews are secure and prospering almost everywhere in the world. Israel is less secure than anywhere else, but Jews are being called upon to come and save themselves here of all places, in this crowded and troubled land. And the problem isn’t only that it’s out of space, since Israel can always conquer additional land. The problem is also in the justification for its immigration policy.
It is necessarily based on a racist outlook. It was right in its time. One could understand and even admire the unceasing efforts to bring large numbers of Jews here to build a country here – and to rescue them from the horrors in their countries of origin. But both of these efforts have long been completed.

The country was established and has become a world power and at the present, Jews aren’t facing horrors anywhere in the world. The flags should have been folded up and the second phase of Zionism – which never happened – should have been initiated. And that involves making Israel a normal country.

A normal country has an immigration policy based on its needs and principles. Israel’s immigration policy needs to take the needs and rights of all of its citizens into account. For example, saving relatives in distress – in Ethiopia and Ukraine, as well as in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria.

Consider the name Birthright. Israel is encouraging young Americans to visit the country on a propaganda trip, in the company of armed guards to demonstrate the dangers, to coax them to immigrate here solely based on their origin. And sometimes they’ve even been required to undergo DNA testing to verify that they’re Jewish.

But what about the natives of the country who have no birthright? Why wasn’t an elderly Palestinian woman from Haifa living in exile in Syria not permitted to return to the city of her birth in her old age when a civil war was raging in Syria? Find one convincing reason. And why doesn’t her brother, an Israeli citizen, have the standing to save her? Jeremy from New York and Leonid from Kyiv can come here to live but not Sa’adia from Yarmouk.

It’s a Jewish state. So be it, but why entirely Jewish? Why only Jewish? And why Jewish by force? How is it Jewish if half of its subjects, those under Israel’s authority, aren’t Jewish? And what would happen if we would dismantle all the moldy and fossilized aliyah institutions?

Israel would begin turning into a normal country. That’s all.