Al Ghazali St. in Jerusalem

A while back Mondoweiss had a post about the evil Israeli occupation forces which are forcing Jewish names on streets in East Jerusalem so as to drive home to the locals who's the boss. (Jerusalem's municipality to sart 'judaizing' street names in East Jerusalem). Mondoweiss lifted this report with nary any questioning from a Palestinian propaganda site called The Voice of Palestine, and this source also knew to tell that the project "was initiated by the occupation's mayor of Jerusalem, the extremist right winger, Nir Barakat".

If you know anything about Israel, and also regularly read Mondoweiss, you get a reasonably good feel for their lack of accuracy and credibility, but this item stood out for its outlandishness. Anway, a while later Twitter told me to read this item, in which you can see a picture of Mayor Nir Barkat participating in a small ceremony at which a street is named after Umm Kulthum, hardly a Zionist name. So I sent off a tweet to the Mondoweiss account wondering if they'd like to comment, but they didn't.

Yesterday I was busying myself sending off greetings to some Muslim (and Palestinian) friends for their Id el-Adha holiday, which starts this evening. One of them is an activist in East Jerusalem, and it occured to me to ask him about the conflicting stories. His response was illuminating:

 - Well, Yaacov, since I was on the committe in our neighborhood which was to choose the names, of course I can tell you about it. We chose names from the Muslim tradition and history, as well as names of important places and so on. I can say that the list was accepted in its entirety, and there was no pressure whatsoever to change anything.

- I'm glad to hear it. Care to tell me what's the name of the street you live on, and the street your business is on? [Since I've been there it would put a name to a place, so to speak].

- My street is named after Ghazali, and the second street is called Medina street, after the city in Saudi Arabia where Mohammed is buried.

As a life-long resident of Jerusalem, I'm proud we've now got a street named after Ghazali; the idea that there's a Medina street in jerusalem tickles me no end.

Mondoweiss: A Vipers' Nest of Antisemites

While not blogging anymore, I still do dabble in some of the old observation of the online pro-and-con Israel scene. Mondoweiss has been of particular interest. Set up about 8 years ago by two American Jews, Philip Wiess and Adam Horowitz, to object to the policies of the Bush Administration, it has transformed over time to one of the main homes of the stridently anti-Israel camp.

By my lights, the Jews have the right (like everyone else) to define themselves and their needs, and they've defined themselves as a nation with the need for a nation-state in Israel. Not all Jews, of course, but a very large majority, and that's enough. Ergo, anyone who rejects the Jews' rights to define themselves and to insist on having a nation-state, is antisemitic (though I'm willing to quibble about the possibility of the Palestinians rejecting Israel without being antisemitic - but only they). Seen that way, Mondoweiss is clearly antisemitic, since its tone and over-arching theme is rejection of Zionism and Israel. The more one looks, however, the worse the picture becomes. Someday, a century or two from now, when someone sits down to write the history of Jew-hatred in the early 21st century, Mondoweiss will be a fine case study, worthy of a full section.

The site offers six or ten posts a day. Weiss writes often, Horowitz rarely (he apparently runs their Twitter account which I don't follow). There's a clutch of other regular writers, and a larger group of people who will appear there occasionally; some of them run their own sites or publish elsewhere and are cross-posted at Mondoweiss. The total number of people who have ever posted there is probably a few hundred. There are many dozens of active commenters. Interestingly, many of those who've offered any information about themselves are retirees; the number of students seems much smaller than you'd expect. There are some Canadians Germans and Aussies, but most commenters seem to be Americans. Ah, and then there are the Israelis: some anarchists and extreme far-left ones, and some mainstream Israelis who try to argue with the locals. The latter tend not to stay too long, since their mission is wholly futile: no-one is in the Mondoweiss community to discuss. Their goal is quite different.

The point of Mondoweiss is to get rid of Israel. The site is of course an avid supporter of BDS. While occasional lip-service is given to the two-state solution as a way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, any regular reader will understand this is not something to strive for, as it won't resolve the basic injustice of Israel's existence. Moreover, the conceit of the blog is that it is actively promoting its goal, by spreading the truth about Israel, and slowly chipping away at the stranglehold the Zionists have on the media and public discourse. Weiss writes regularly with considerable excitement about how the public discourse is changing; he's always on the outlook for new converts to his positions or anything near them, and to read him you'd think there's a sea-change underway so that soon Israel will lose its support in America, and soon thereafter, shorn of its only ally, it will crumble away. The Israelis, aware of the precariousness of their enterprise, are eternally bolstering their control of the discourse, because without it they're lost; but they're losing it anyway because the only decent way to understand the Middle East is to hate Israel and this decency is already proving itself more powerful than the Zionist tricks to keep it at bay.

You recognize the old-fashioned antisemitic trope about the Jews who pull the strings behind the facade which hides reality. Even as I write this Weiss has posted about the 35-year friendship between Mitt Romney and Binyamin Netanyahu; I don't see how his piece can be read except as part of a conspiracy theory. Truly frightening, those Zionists, surrounding a future potential American president with their agents when he was only in his 20s.

Being against the existence of Israel isn't particularly exceptional. One of the interesting things about Mondoweiss is the tremendous amount of work they invest in their animosity. I happen to think the Saudi regime is ghastly, but I'd never spend hours every day digging up dirt on it. The Mondoweiss people do that, first by avidly seeking any remotely negative story about Israel, then by seeking the ones which aren't true, then by damning anyone who casts doubt with terms such as hasbarists, Ziobots (I assume these are part Zionists and part robots), and of course genocidists. In order to collect all that dirt they've got to pass by the occasional positive story too, but these never get linked to or even alluded to unless to demonstrate how yet another journalist has succumbed to the threat of Zionist censorship. The result is a depiction of reality which has at best a glancing relationship with the real world, but these folks aren't interested in the real world. In their world, Zionists are easily the worst group of humans, they purportedly hate all Palestinians, they enforce the most cruel policies possibly on them, they steal from-, degrade and kill Palestinians, on a daily basis. You read Mondoweiss regularly and the force of hatred towards Zionists becomes overpowering: no normal decent person could have anything but the deepest contempt for such a gang of deceitful violent criminals. As a commentor named "American" recently wrote:

The thing about the zionist is they attack even those who help them. They turned on England, calling it “worse than Hitler’ because England tried to uphold the immigration quotas agreed to. They demonize the UN that created their state for them.
Everyone, without exception, who has ever had anything to do them has regretted it….the US will too in the end. They are vipers who need to be decapitated.

Comments at Mondoweiss are moderated, so that one could have been deleted - but wasn't. And why would it be? It merely states what is obvious to the locals. Any attempt to argue with them will either be blocked by the same moderators, or derisively laughed off the screen. If a sane commenter has made a reasonable point which gets past the moderators, the locals will dig up a dozen spurious links to disprove it: the value of links being not their veracity, or the trustworthiness of their sources, but their usefulness to the party line. Links which are not useful - you guessed it: they're written off as hasbara lies.

Interestingly, the Mondoweiss community not only has no interest in the lives of real Israelis, it also has no interest in the lives of real Palestinians. Their point is to hate Israel and damn it, no matter what; the possibility that there are Palestinians who live alongside Israelis, interact with them, and even could imagine living with them in peace, is a thought never contemplated. I have Palestinian staff members, colleagues and friends; none of them could remotely fit into the Mondoweiss world. The methodology also has the odd result that according to Mondoweiss, Israelis and Palestinians are all boring cardboard figures, with none of the complexities, complications, shades of grey, frustrations and successes of real people. The very parts of the human story which make it worth following are all dropped, to be replaced by detestation (towards Israelis) and patronizing pity (towards Palestinians).

I'll complete this very partial list of malicious methodology with two links from the Resources page of the website, the part where the editors have collected the basics about their topic. Obviously, they've got a paragraph about the so-called Dalet Plan, which in the mythology of Israel's enemies was the 1948 plan to expel the Palestinians, and which serious scholarship has long since demonstrated was a limited tactical military move formulated in March 1948 in response to developments in an ongoing war which the Arabs had launched:

Khalidi, Walid, "Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies p14.
Drafted by members of the Haganah under the guidance of David Ben-Gurion, and carried out by Israeli para-military groups during 1947-8, Plan Dalet is a military blueprint for the Palestinian Nakba. The document emphasizes the need to secure territory both inside and outside of the 1947 Partition Plan, and provides detailed instructions for the forcible transfer of the Palestinian population, establishing the conditions for a Jewish national state.

You'd expect a resource section explaining a basic Israeli document to link, you know, to an Israeli document, but if you follow the link behind that explanation you'll reach an Arab website with an English version; I searched in vain for anything at all about the Dalet Plan, dishonest or honest.

Then there's an item on their list of resources called "Creating 'unrecognized' villages and home demolitions":

Planning and Building Law 1965, 5725—1965." Knesset 14 July 1965.
The 1965 Planning and Building Law is a set of codes, including legal restrictions to Palestinians on building permits, and land use. The law allows for the Israeli government to transfer privately owned Palestinian land to the state, and requires any unpermitted building to be demolished at the owners’ expense.   All current home demolitions in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories are carried out under the tenets of this law.

This paragraph actually does have a link to an (English version) of an Israeli law, so it looks convincing. Unless you actually look at the law, as I did. It's 67 pages long, and never remotely says what Mondoweiss says it does. As a matter of fact, the very word Palestinian never appears, nor does the word Arab, nor Minority (terms the sneaky Israeli legislators might have used to hide their true intentions). The word Palestine appears only in the footnotes, citing some British laws from before 1948.

Summary: There may be tens of thousands of loyal Mondoweiss readers - an unimportant demographic, but an interesting sociological and historical group. There is no possibility for discourse between them and us, only invective from their side, and head-shaking from ours. Yet they fit comfortably into ancient traditions of Jew-hatred, and thus their potential significance shouldn't be shrugged off. It's important to keep in mind that the free and pluralistic society of the West also harbors such ugly forms of thought.

Bin Laden Still Popular in Israel's Neighborhood

Yesterday I linked to the story about the Hamas Prime Minster, no less, who condemned America's killing of Bin Laden. Meanwhile he has been joined by others. The Al-Aqsa martyrs Brigades - that's Fatah, if you keep track of such matters, not Hamas; Fatah as in Mahmoud Abbas - published a long statement condemning the killing and calling it a catastrophe. And no, the explanation that it's Fatah's military wing, not its political wing, is not helpful. These people are claiming the right to a sovereign state, for crying out loud; would we brush off a separate foreign policy of the Syrians, say? The Russians? Karl Vick, a journalist not known for Zionist inclinations, wandered around Ramallah yesterday and found some support for Bin Laden even after his death, though of course Vick allows the supporters to explain it's Israel's fault. An imam in El Aksa mosque told Obama he'd soon be hanged for his crime of killing Bin Laden. The Economist, a bit more cool-headed, reports that support for Bin Laden among Palestinians has declined over recent years from 70% in 2003 to a mere third not long before he was killed. How reassuring.

Over in Egypt, the Muslim Brothers have also lined up on the wrong side of the current discussion. Something to keep in mind the next time a clueless media type assures us the Brotherhood is eager to be an Egyptian version of a European Christian Democratic party or some such silliness.

Of course, the Europeans weren't all unanimously overjoyed by the killing either, though not because they liked Bin Laden; rather, it seems there's a significant constituency in Europe for the idea that extra-judicial killings are always wrong, no matter what the circumstances. This is not at all the same as Muslim support for Bin Laden, but it does help explain why too many Europeans can't get their heads around the facts of Islamism. There are other facts they can't comprehend, either, because they don't fit the paradigm of how the world ought to be, which makes explaining Israel's positions largely impossible to such people. Personally, I think the sentiment that there's an international system of law which overrides anything else and must dictate everyone's behavior, is quaint at best on the day after the world's most powerful nation has just demonstrated it doesn't accept the idea: if not the US, and certainly not many others, what might be the source of authority for such talk except wistful thinking?

But I digress.

Too many Palestinians and others in Israel's neighborhood are firmly on the wrong side in the war between the Islamists and humanity. They are the enemy. This has to be clear, and the myriad attempts to obfuscate it must be countered. At the same time, the fact that too many Palestinians support humanity's enemies is not a justification for building more settlements on the West Bank, nor must it inevitably dictate that Israel needs to assist the Palestinians in their war against us by sitting on them and granting them perpetual propaganda victories for their victimhood. It doesn't even mean that the Palestinians can't have a state, such as everybody else has.

Thinking adults in a democracy can be - must be - expected to be capable of holding contradictory thoughts simultaneously.

(Short addendum: the strange people who inhabit the Mondoweiss universe are deeply troubled by the killing of Bin Laden. The reason this is significant is that it demonstrates how far from any type of American normality these folks are; this probably means their extreme aversion to Israel is just as far removed, and just as unlikely ever to have a politically significant public).

Contextualizing Olive Trees

An anonymous reader wonders if I'd care to contextualize a story that appeared yesterday on Mondoweiss. I'm not particularly impressed by snide anonymous comments, but in this case it may be possible to create what President Obama might call a Teachable Moment. So here goes.

The cast:

Taayush. This is a Jewish-Arab organization, created in 2000 just when the Palestinians were launching their war against the Israelis who had just offered them a sovereign state. They are so deeply invested in the Israel-is-always-wrong-and-the-Palestinians-are-always-right narrative, that so far as I know even the NIF refuses to fund them, and that's saying something. I haven't spent much time following them, but my impression is that they're against Zionsim, meaning they'd prefer the Jews not to have a nation state. Also, from what I know of them, they're not interested in facts unless they serve their agenda. This is true of many folks, of course, but is never praiseworthy and always casts a shadow over any statement they make.

IDF troops: The film shows some IDF troops enforcing the law in the hills south of Hebron. There are about 8-10 enlisted men, a major and a lieutenant colonel. I assume the two officers are the CO of an armoured battalion and his deputy, but I could be wrong about this. The video was filmed last Saturday, October 30th; normally, on weekends either the CO or his deputy will be at home with his family; since both of them were on duty that day, the battalion seems to have known there was trouble coming, and both officers decided to stay with the unit.

An order declaring a closed security zone: Israel is the occupying power in this area (the hills south of Hebron), for better and for worse. International law decrees that this entails keeping order. One tool the military government has is to declare certain areas as temporary security zones, which allows them to limit activities which are normally not the government's business, such as freedom of movement. These decrees are used for all sorts of purposes, including keeping Israelis out of certain areas. In the film before us, such a decree has been signed and is introduced in the first scene; it relates to a clearly defined geographic area, and forbids people from walking off the roads; normally such orders last hours or a day or two.

Olive trees: the story in the film is that the IDF troops prevent some Palestinian farmers from harvesting olives, while some Jews from Taayush do their best to obstruct the army and two of them are eventually arrested. The insinuation is that the trees belong to the farmers, but this is actually never clearly said. Which is puzzling, because if it was clearly the case the makers of the film would have said so, either to the IDF troops, or to the viewers of the film, or both. They never do. Moreover, if you look at the trees, they're clearly young. Olive trees can live for many centuries; these trees look to be no older than a decade or two. Which means, they weren't there when Israel occupied the area in 1967. This doesn't prove anything about the ownership, but it does raise the question: who owns the trees, and who owns the land on which they're planted, and is it conceivable that these matters are disputed? Might it be that there are conflicting claims, and the farmers are not innocently harvesting their olives but rather participating in a dispute over ownership? Indeed, is it conceivable that Taayush, Mondoweiss, and the farmers are all trying to prejudice a legal dispute by casting it as a cruel anti-Palestinian policy of the evil Israelis?

I don't know this to be the case - but there's no indication in the film that it's wrong, and as I've said, given their record, there's no other explanation for the lack of a declaration of ownership from the Taayush people. There are two additional circumstantial pieces of evidence. The first is that there is no Israeli policy of preventing Palestinian farmers from harvesting their crops. On the contrary. The present Israeli government has taken a series of active steps to encourage Palestinian economic activity since it came to power. The second is that in previous years there indeed have been cases where extreme settlers did their best to prevent Palestinian farmers from harvesting their crops, and specifically olives; this year the IDF has made a significant effort to defend the Palestinian farmers. IDF troops have been guarding Palestinian farmers from Israeli settlers. If that's the policy, why is the policy in this particular case so different? Might it be because the farmers don't, actually, own the trees or the land they're on?

The plot:


The film opens with the deputy battalion commander, a major, explaining calmly that a specific area, defined on the map he shows, has been declared a sealed military zone. This means, he explains, that road travel is unhampered, but anyone walking off the roads will be arrested. In the next scene (after a shot of ants, which must have some poetic meaning), the Palestinians and Taayush Israelis are harvesting olives. The troops arrive, but contrary to what they said they'd do, no-one is arrested. The lieutenant colonel tells the farmers to stop working, and his deputy signs a specific order pertaining to that orchard: it's 12:07 pm, and he then announces that anyone harvesting after that time will be arrested.

A few minutes later two soldiers and the major are slowly escorting a Palestinian woman out of the orchard. No-one touches her at any point. Eliyahu Nawi, a well-known Israeli supporter of Palestinian farmers, intervenes; after some discussion the officer loses his patience with Nawi, who is arrested. The rest of the Taayush team has all along been taunting the soldiers, insulting them, and obstructing their operation. Eventually a second Taayush Israeli activist is also arrested. No Palestinians are arrested, and there is no violence throughout.

The Mondoweiss blurb that accompanies the film tells that "every detail of Palestinian life requires a permit which is unattainable." This is of course nonsense, as Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minster of the West Bank will readily tell; indeed, his entire policy these past two years is predicated on the reality that this isn't the case and that the Palestinians can build a state of their own under Israeli occupation. Also, Palestinian farmers don't need permits to farm their own lands, unless there are specific over-riding reasons. Farming doesn't require permits.

I've said in the past, and I'll say it again: by the standards of military occupations of the modern era, these IDF troops are gentle, kid-gloved and harmless. If this is brutal, what word in the English language remains for the real thing? 

Some critics of Israel like to complain when Israelis compare themselves favorably to Arab states in matters of law, human rights and so on. My question here is if it's conceivable that citizens of a Western democracy would be allowed to verbally assault their own soldiers and obstruct them as they do their jobs within a war zone. Thankfully, there are no war zones within the borders of Western democracies; but there are Western soldiers active in war zones: can anyone imagine some anti-war protesters ranting at American, British or German troops in, say, Afghanistan, or Kossovo, or Iraq?

Mondoweiss is the Enemy

If you ever thought Mondoweiss' rejection of Israel starts from pacifism and an aversion to militarism and wars, think again. Philip Weiss has just published a paean to a Palestinian sniper who shot 11 Israelis in 2002. It's quite simple: Weiss is an enemy of Israel. Not a critic, not allergic to Israel, an enemy at time of war.

Balloons in Poisoned Wells

Michael Totten told me yesterday that Mondoweiss has posted the accusation that Israel is using poisoned balloons against civilians in southern Lebanon. That sounded far-fetched even for the feverish minds of Mondoweiss, but no: they've really said it, along with various other outlandish allegations. But the one about the poisoned balloons tops them all. It's 2010, but it could still be 1348, can you believe it?

Pre-emptive Slander of Alvaro Uribe

Although most people probably won't recognize his name, Alvaro Uribe has been the president of Columbia since August 2002, and is stepping down next week at the end of his two terms. I'm not a big expert on Columbia, but the magnitude of his success as president has been so great that even non-experts couldn't have missed it: he inherited a basket case, one of the most violent and ungovernable places in the world, and hands over to his successor a mostly normal country. This wasn't done by smiling at people, and there were murky aspects to the story all along. The Economist recently summed it up:

NOTHING in the way he has led his country for the past eight years suggested that Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s outgoing president, was going to fade discreetly into the background. And so it is proving. Mr Uribe inherited a failing state in 2002. With single-minded determination and the backing of the United States, he reduced the FARC guerrillas from a mortal threat to Colombian democracy to a scattered irritant and persuaded over 20,000 of their brutal opponents, the right-wing paramilitaries, to disarm. The fall in murders and kidnaps restored morale, investment and economic growth. Colombians are grateful: Mr Uribe, whose attempt to run for a third term was ruled unconstitutional, departs early next month with an approval rating of around 70%. The voters endorsed his call for the continuation of his “democratic security” policy by voting overwhelmingly for the candidate who most closely personified it: his former defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos.

Yet there has always been a darker side to Mr Uribe. Several of his officials and allies have been accused of complicity with the paramilitaries and his army murdered many civilians. The president has seemed to want to subvert the independence of the judiciary. In foreign affairs he was sometimes naive and erratic. Colombia has been unjustly isolated abroad.

Not a paragon of virtue, but still the savior of his country - and, given the murder rate in Columbia back in 2002 - a man who has saved the lives of tens of thousands on all sides of the conflict. Now compare that story to this description, posted at Mondoweiss in response to Uribe's appointment to the UN committee to investigate the flotilla case:

It’s difficult to catalogue and summarize the various political scandals that have plagued Uribe’s 8-year presidency. Three days before the announcement of Uribe’s appointment to the U.N. committee, the Colombian press reported the outgoing president’s verbal attack against Colombian Supreme Court Magistrate Yesid Ramirez, after Ramirez asked the nation’s prosecutor general to open an investigation into allegations that the president’s son, Tomás Uribe, bribed congressmen to ensure his father's re-election in 2006. The recent scandal is only the latest in one of many of Uribe’s public displays of contempt for the Colombian judiciary, the most famous of which was his outrage at the Court’s nixing of a referendum that would have allowed Uribe to run for a third presidential term.

More significant than political tumult or charges of corruption is Uribe’s contempt for international law, demonstrated by his government’s illegal use of the International Red Cross emblem in a hostage rescue mission in July 2008. Uribe admitted using the Red Cross emblem in the mission - which successfully duped the guerrilla into releasing several high profile hostages, including three Americans and one former Colombian presidential candidate – but dismissed the violation as a “mistake” committed by a soldier in a “state of angst”. Immediately following the mission, the Red Cross released a statement urging all sides to respect the ICRC emblem, but did not pursue the issue further. The Geneva Conventions prohibit improper use of the Red Cross logo.

You can win one of the world's worst civil wars; you can defeat one of the world's most murderous terrorist armies; you can enjoy the support of 70% of your nation's voters. None of this will gain you the support of the International Purist Human Rights Brigades, and if you get anywhere near a body which Israel has joined, you're toast.

My apologies to readers for having dedicated rather too much attention to the hate-filled sick people of Mondoweiss these past few days. I understand it's not a pleasant subject. On the other hand, there are some pathologies in the world we need to be aware of, and this is one of them.

PC vs Truth: Journalism Loses

It's actually not that common to have such a clear cut case: Israeli soldiers operating on Israeli territory in an area which all sides agree on, near a border which is clearly marked by barrels, are attacked with no sort of provocation by enemy troops, even while UN forces who have been notified in advance stand by and observe. Within hours the UN spokesmen confirm the Israeli version of events. An Israeli officer is killed, another severely wounded; the three or four subsequent Lebanese casualties all died because Israel was provoked; one of them was a journalist who just happened to be there, if you believe such things.

Israeli from left to right all know this version of the case, as summarized here in Haaretz, normally Israel's most skeptical media outlet.

It took the Associated Press (AP) about 18 hours to confirm the the Israeli version, citing the UN. Even then their reporter assumes the Lebanese must have been confused by the discrepancy between fence and border - the barrels don't make it into the AP report. You can see how a tourist might not be aware of the situation, or a clueless journalist; how the local military might be confused about its own border, however, is not explained. By now, a day later, CNN seems to have accepted the UN version of the story, the one aligned with Israel's version. Of course, CNN's very existence is predicated on moving quickly with its stories.

As I write, however, respectable international news outlets are still not reporting the facts. They scrupulously cite both sides: the Israelis say this, the Lebanese say that, we report you decide. Here are the New York Times, Washington Post, The BBC, The Guardian. The BBC report contains an embedded TV report in which the reporter says that the UN's version confirms Israel's but, he adds, the Lebanese disagree. The Washington Post one is even funnier. They begin by telling that:

What happened along the Israel-Lebanon border remained somewhat murky late Tuesday. The Israeli army said it defended itself from Lebanese forces who fired at Israeli soldiers carrying out routine bush-clearing maintenance along the border. Lebanese media, by contrast, cited the Lebanese army as reporting that Lebanese soldiers fired warning shots at an Israeli patrol trying to cut down a tree and that the Israeli soldiers responded with gunfire.

The rest of the report, however, essentially confirms the UN-Israeli version, leaving us to scratch our head and wonder where the murkiness lies.

This is all mildly comic, except for the deadly serious part of it. As I never tire of saying but unfortunately must repeat over and over and over, the reality Israelis know they live in is decidedly different from the mishmash of lies, mistakes, inaccuracies and wishful thinking just about everyone else is spoon-fed. Since reality is stronger than media reports, the discrepancy leads eventually to real-world actions, in which, for example, well-meaning but wrongly informed American Jews grow ever more exasperated with Israel for not understanding what any regular reader of the NYT can see; or when newly elected American presidents need 12-18 months of daily briefings before they begin to understand what's really going on (Bush II needed 12 months, Obama seems to have needed the 18).

Finally, there are Israel's enemies, who can't be brought to see reality no matter what. Phil Weiss and the Mondogang had a field day yesterday with a picture that showed something else than what they thought, and no amount of corrections, even by citing the UN, could bring them to accept they'd been misled.

Imagining the One-State Solution

There's an interesting article by Ahmed Moor at Mondoweiss, in which he asks himself what the Right of Return to a bi-national state might really mean. Moor is the grandson of Palestinian refugees, who probably lives in the US (I'm not enough of a regular at Mondoweiss to know all the details). For whatever reason, he seems to think that BDS is steadily making the One-State resolution of of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict very likely, so he takes a stab at the practicalities.

On the one hand, it's startling how very little animosity he generates towards the Israelis. He seems truly to think that once Zionism is made to disappear, Jews and Arabs will mostly live happily ever after in their bi-national country. It's an article of faith with him that the Zionists alone created and maintained the conflict and the Palestinians are simply the hapless victims, with no gray zones at all, but since he's envisioning a post-Zionist era, he's willing to put that in the past and assumes everyone will. On the other hand, even as he assumes Jews will continue to live in the new state, he doesn't show the faintest hint of understanding of who the Jews are, what it means to be one, why they might feel their national expression to have any importance, why they might have come to the land in the first place - nothing. The Zionists escaped the Nazis, they brutally imposed themselves on the poor Palestinians, but once they're willing to move over and share, there will be a matter of material restitution and then everything will be fine.

I doubt such a description fits Palestinian nationalism or any other form of yearning for communal expression, but who am I to say; it has nothing to do with 3,000 years of Jewish identity.

The funniest part of his article is at the single moment when he passes in the general area of Jewish identity: he takes a swipe at Peter Beinart, of all folks, for engaging in chauvinistic jingoism (my terminology).

It's an exercise in other-worldliness; a weird combination of total rejection of Jewish identity and self determination (and probably Palestinian ones, too) with a benign, almost wistful hope for a future when everyone simply gets along with their private matters, irrespective of any higher identity.

On another matter - which may well be the same matter: Gallup has a set of data about how Americans see Israel and the Palestinians. The support for Israel is near an all-time high. This in spite of the very different picture in many other parts of the world. It may be that most Americans have a higher opinion of national expression and identity than the folks at Mondoweiss.

The Hatreds of Greenwald and Weiss

Benjamin Kerstein analyzes Glenn Greenwald; Ron Kampeas looks closely at Philip Weiss. All four are Jews, of course, which makes the entire story faintly weird. The more you follow these things, the stronger the impression that absent the Jewish anti-Zionist brigades, in Israel and beyond, the potency of the anti-Israeli legions would be markedly weaker, at least in Europe and North America.

Kerstein makes the plausible comment that Greenwald's methods are the same used by the Holocaust deniers: if the Jews make a claim it has to be false and discounted. Automatically, since their entire narrative is an evil hoax, and everything they say is part of the evil. Kampeas says the hatred shoveled out by Weiss and his ilk is endangering the lives of journalists in the Muslim world. The first allegation is clearly true; the second I'm not in a position to judge.

From Jerusalem to Mondoweiss

Various readers have asked me about my position on the Silwan story, while others have taken me to task for the position they think I've taken.

I haven't taken a position. I have criticized Bernard Avishai's blogpost on the matter for his treatment of history, not its particular politics on Silwan, and I've pointed out that the City of David is a very important place in Judaism and has been for abut 3,000 years. Beyond that, I'll try to present a fuller picture once I've finished looking into some of the relevant facts.

In the meantime, however, Elder of Zion has some interesting facts and photos about the village of Silwan and its serial ethnic cleansing of Jews over the past century. If you're already over at Elder's place, you might be interested in Adam Levick's guest post about Mondoweiss the Jewish Jew-hater.

Perhaps Not Easing the Blockade of Gaza

Israel decided yesterday to ease the blockade of Gaza. Or not. It depends which media outlets you imbibe.

Haaretz tells that the easing is dramatic, and adds gloatingly that the Turks did it.

The New York Times says Israel bowed to pressure following the Mavi Marmara incident, and the American administration is pleased.

The Washington Post reports that Israel is switching from a short list of permitted items to a list of forbidden ones, and speculates that this may be a good thing - the administration thinks so - or may not. We'll have to see, is the tone.

The London Times starts with Tony Blair, and continues with him: their evaluation of the decision is whatever he says, i.e. it's dramatic, it could of course have been even better but it's still good, and of course the Israelis must implement it as decided.

The BBC has a long report, mostly devoid of snark: they tell what changes Israel is making, cite American approval, underline that Tony Blair was instrumental in the decision, and end with a quote from unidentified Palestinians who say the whole thing is a sham. Ah, and they mistakenly tell that the blockade began in 2005 (which is when Israel left Gaza), when in reality it began only in 2006, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections.

The Guardian is greatly impressed by how the pressure on Israel worked, after its "deadly interception" of the flotilla. They explain what Israel proposes to do, but also explain that it's not clear what this really means, and then give space for various critics of Israel to explain why it's either not significant or not really going to happen. Unnamed "aid agencies", a top Hamas fellow, an Israeli radical NGO, those sort of people. Still, they add, the White House is pleased. Of course, the main reason must have been to foil the arrival of additional ships.

UNRWA says nothing less than Israel fully throwing open its border is acceptable, so this move isn't.

Juan Cole, whom I rarely read these days, starts with an article from the LA Times about how the Israeli decision is only marginally significant, and may well not really change anything. Cole then goes on to poke fun at Israel's security agencies, who don't understand the Arab world and are ridiculous.

Richard Silverstein manages not to notice the matter at all, so I don't have to link to him and you don't need to check - which is good, because he's inordinately sensitive to his page hits. Mondoweiss also hasn't noticed: odd, that. Those folks never miss a report about how ghastly Israel is, but this one seems to have escaped their attention. At least Andrew Sullivan noticed. He agrees with other bloggers that it's a scandal that Israel may wriggle out of an international investigation of the flotilla incident in return for easing the blockade, but admits the easing itself is a good thing.

The IDF announced it is expanding supplies into Gaza by 30% immediately, with more to come.

Meanwhile, watch the market: prices in Gaza are tumbling since yesterday. Not because shortages will now disappear, but because goods brought in from Israel are of higher quality than those smuggled in through the Rafah tunnels, and are also cheaper.

We're not talking about learned scholars disagreeing about an event from, say, 500 years ago. This all happened last night.

Some of My Best Friends Are Antisemites

Have I ever mentioned that Phil Weiss of Mondoweiss is a narcissist? Well anyway, even if he is, this demonstration of the fact is pretty funny.

Oddly revealing tho.

Being Antisemitic is Hard Work

Jessica Montell, boss of B'tselem, has written Mondoweis to say that she's not certain there was an explicit Israeli intention to harm the populace of Gaza, but that an independent investigation would tell us more than we presently know. And of course, intention or not, Israel did all sorts of awful things in Gaza.

The readers of Mondoweiss don't like this line of reasoning, ultimately saying that no Israeli investigation will ever tell the truth, and Montell herself is too Israeli for their taste, and too squeamish (I'm paraphrasing).

I've got my issues with Montell and her small corner of Israeli society. Yet they are rational, facts matter to them, and they wish Israel would do better according to their lights. While the result of their actions is too often to supply false fodder to Israel's enemies, that's not their putative goal.

This means there are fundamental differences between them and the Mondoweiss part of humanity. The Mondoweiss gang imbibes a diet of untruths, outright lies, warped interpretations and malice. It's not possible to argue with them, because their assumptions, methods and frames of references are constructed so as to strengthen their opinions, irrespective of reality. They're so far out that a radical Israeli such as Montell is ultimately unacceptable to them, since she does care about facts, and does think that Israel can be saved from itself. The Mondoweiss gang don't think Israel can be saved from anything because in their minds, Israel is the problem. The root cause of Israel's evil is that Israel is evil.

The Mondoweiss community puts daily efforts into maintaining their edifice of malice. They've got a detailed narrative of Israeli evil, and they're constantly tinkering with it, bolstering it, adding new layers, incorporating events as they happen (or rather, incorporating a false version as reality does something else). They work hard at it. For these people, hating the Jewish state isn't a passing interest or an idle whim. It's a passion; it's a collective effort; it's a cult.

See Only What You Intend to See

Phil Weiss is back home from a very quick trip to Israel. Israel is "the world's worst country", he says (twice).

During his trip he managed to see only the things he intended to see: Palestinians who hate Israel's occupation, but none who hate Jews. Israelis who demonstrate against the occupation, but none who see complexity. Masses of Israelis (he seems not to have talked with any of them beyond a passing grunt) who are blind to reality and can't see the Truth, but none with a feeling of history. He saw cardboard figures galore, as he and his readership always do, but no real people. He is fully bereft of compassion for real people, but full of derision for the caricatures he imagines them to be. And he came away greatly heartened, because a handful of Jews, some Israeli and some American, see the world as he does, and this vindicated his conviction that the Zionist project is ending. He's a contemporary of the greatest moment in millennia of Jewish existence, and all he can generate is spite.

Somewhere deep down I feel for him. A bit. It can't be pleasant to be Phil Weiss.

Imagery from Hebron

Michael Ratner, I've learned from Google, is an important person. He's a law professor, who taught among other places at Columbia; he's the kind of lawyer who argues significant cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. Where Glenn Greenwald blogs endlessly about matters he cares about, Ratner acts. He's a significant figure in the important American discussion about how the country should behave while at war. You can disagree with him, but it seems you can't brush him off as a clown or a sophomoric lightweight.

All the more disturbing, then, his snippet from Hebron, in which he juxtaposes a picture with one from Nazi Germany. Has he thought through what he's implying? Might he wish to spell it out?

I'd call him out on this, if I thought he'd ever respond, but of course he won't. Even though I think I know considerably more both about Hebron and abut Nazism than he does.

10,000 Detained Palestinians Every Month

Alice Rothchild at Mondoweiss has a report which is so totally dishonest I wouldn't know where to start disproving it. Or rather, I could imagine how to do it but lack the time and the inclination; it's not as if anything I might say could change her mind.

There is however one little nugget that's worth recording, because it's part of a new trope we're going to be hearing a lot of.

Ala Joradat, the program manager of Adameer, a Palestinian human rights organization that focuses primarily on prisoners, legal aid, and monitoring, meets with our delegation and tries to unravel the complex civil and human rights issues that face Palestinians, particularly those who choose to protest the conditions of the Israeli occupation. He explains that the prisoners are both a product of the conflict and a cause for the conflict. Since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians have experienced detention, representing more than 53% of the population over 18. Because mostly Palestinian males are targeted for arrest, 60-70% of adult males have been to prison.

This is an interesting number, because back in September 2009, when the Goldstone Report trotted out the number of detained Palestinians, it was 750,000. I wrote about this in my analysis of the Goldstone Report, and explained why it was wrong. What we're now being requested to believe is that since late summer 2009, Israel has arrested an additional 50,000 Palestinians, or 10,000 each month, that's 333 daily, every day with no respite.

This is a flat lie. It's also so blatant as to be ridiculous, childish, even. What does it tell you about educated and seemingly intelligent adults who believe in and disseminate extravagant lies about Jews? Isn't there a name for them?

Just in case you wish to see some real numbers, B'Tselem has them. And note: the numbers are not cumulative. Most of the incarcerated are the same people, in for long periods. They include murderers, car thieves, and anything in between.

The Egyptians? Why?

Yesterday there was a bloody clash on the Egyptian-Gaza border. An Egyptian policeman was killed, and there were a number of injured people on both sides- it's not clear how many. These are straightforward facts, as far as they are.

How should they be explained? What's going on? That's harder to know, first, because much of the data isn't accessible. So far as I can tell, no one - that means, NO ONE - has any access to the decision making process of the relevant Egyptians and Palestinians, nor can they even say who made any decision. A man was killed when both sides were using real firearms, and no-one has anything whatsoever to say about who gave which orders, what they thought they were doing, how they understood their situation, or any other part of the story. These things are of course crucial, and no explanation can even begin to approach accuracy without them, but hey, we've not got them, it would be too much of a bother to try, and anyway we've all got pre-existing templates with which to explain such matters so why worry?

Mondoweiss simply disregards the matter. They're interested in Gaza only in two scenarios: when Israel can be blamed, or even better, when Israel can be blamed but they're saving the situation. This case fits neither template, so it didn't happen. Better to blame Israel for that Jordanian-al-Quaida chap who killed seven CIA men. And yes, I understand that Mondoweiss, being a mere blog, doesn't need to cover everything - I certainly don't, either. Yet they're a blog with a large number of contributors, and their editorial choices are instructive.

The BBC doesn't offer any explanation, though its report does contain this odd sentence:

Egypt and Israel impose a strict blockade on the Gaza Strip, which Israel says is aimed at weakening Hamas.

People are being shot as the Egyptians impose a blockade, and the only context offered is why Israel does it.

The Guardian does the same slight-of-hand:

Ehab Ghussein, a Hamas spokesman, said frustration about Egypt's new underground wall was fuelling the protests. "There was anger, and that's because of what happened, especially about the wall and [Egypt preventing entry of] the people who are coming to stand with us," he said. Israel's strict blockade of Gaza, which has been in place for more than two years, prevents all exports and limits imports to a few humanitarian items. Egypt has also kept its one border crossing with Gaza, at Rafah, largely closed.

So it's Israel's blockade, with the Egyptians merely tagging along. Why? The Guardian explains:

Under pressure from the US and Israel, Egypt has started building a vast steel wall along its side of the Gaza border to prevent smuggling. Hundreds of smuggling tunnels dug by Palestinians reach into northern Egypt and supply Gaza with a wide range of products from food and clothing to animals and cars. Israel and the US have said they are concerned about weapons smuggling.

They Egyptians are puppets of the Israelis and Americans. Why a nation of 80 million debases itself in such a manner is unexplained, though there's the implication that the puppeteers have awesome powers; at least with the Americans this has a rational grounding. The Israelis, however? Do they control the world? And if so, haven't we seen that theme somewhere before?

The New York Times offers no explanation at all. There's this context:

The demonstration, organized by Hamas, protested Egypt’s refusal to allow international aid and solidarity missions into Gaza as well as Egypt’s construction of an underground barrier to obstruct smuggler tunnels. Those tunnels supply both goods and arms to Hamas and Gaza.

But no explanation why Egypt might be doing what it does.

Then there's Haaretz. Like everyone else, Zvi Barel has no specific information, he can only tell about the larger picture. Still, in spite of being on the left side of Haaretz, as I've documented in the past, he's first and foremost an expert.

Egypt's stance does not arise from its desire to help the Israeli siege on Gaza or to respond to the United States' demand to prevent smuggling. It is intended to show both Hamas and Syria that just as it has the power to open the border crossings at will and relieve the siege, so it can twist Hamas' arm.

And also this:

Egypt is interested in Palestinian reconciliation and wishes to set up a Palestinian unity government. Egypt has assured Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas of its support if such a government is formed, mainly because it does not want to be responsible for the Gaza Strip. But Cairo is fed up with Hamas' foot-dragging and Tehran's meddling. In this Egypt is assisted by Saudi Arabia, which gave Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal an ultimatum to decide whether he is running an Arab organization or is under the "patronage of a foreign power," i.e. Iran.

Read the whole thing, as Glenn says. You begin to see why Israelis' understanding of the world is dramatically different from that of everyone else.

The Mind of the Antisemites

Zionist Juice yesterday called my attention to this line in Michael Ratner's questionable reportage from Maale Edumim:

We saw field after field of olive tree stumps, 100 year old trees that once belonged to the Bedouins that had been cut down by the Israelis—insuring that Bedouins could not stay in or near East Jerusalem.

Set aside the minor complication that the Bedouins in the Judean Desert don't plant olive trees, and certainly didn't a century ago. I know the field (not plural) he's talking about. Or put it like this: there are no such fields on the road from Jerusalem to Maale Edumim. A few miles further on down the same road, however, where Ratner may well also have been, there is one field that theoretically could be what he saw. I wrote about it late in 2007, here; at the time a Guardian reporter had written about the blackened olive trees, and it just so happened I had just taken the same road:

Most significantly, however, in both directions I looked at the two only fields that could possibly fit Borger's description of blackened olive trees. I stared at them, because they are indeed rather puzzling. Back in the 1970s, so far as I can remember, they weren't there at all: merely a parched and dusty hillside. Then in the 80s, as Jewish settlements were built nearby, someone planted them with some kind of desert crop - acacia, perhaps? I sort of thought it must have been the initiative of the new settlers, but maybe I was wrong. I didn't give it much thought - two fields out in the desert, nothing all that noteworthy. And then yesterday, I was struck by the fact that all the stumps look dead.

There was never an olive tree there, the stumps aren't blackened stumps of them, and anyway, what's the connection between Maaleh Edumim, some miles up the road, and those two fields? Maybe the acacia's all died of something? Maybe the owner, whoever he or she might be, stopped watering them and they died? Indeed, I don't know - but I do know that Borger's version is hogwash.

Since writing that post I've learned more about how these peoples' minds work.

More than 99.8% of the settlers have never had anything to do with Palestinian olive trees, nor committed any kind of violence against their Palestinian neighbors. Along the fringe, however, there are cases of destroying olive trees (and worse). The two communities living alongside one another, however, are never reported in the media, just as there aren't many media reports of people elsewhere living near other people. What gets reported are the unusual cases; in the case of the settlers, reports that fit the template of cruel-settlers-ruining-the-lives- of-neighboring-Palestinians will always be given attention.

Eventually this consistent distortion of reality takes on a life of its own: Settlers have a policy of destroying Palestinian olive groves. So people who come to the West Bank to observe the things they've heard of so often are eager to see for themselves, perhaps as a way of inserting themselves in the story and inflating their own importance: I'm part of history! Alas, there are many Palestinian olive groves on the West Bank, but most of them are simple groves of olive trees. Not destroyed at all. If you didn't know exactly where to look, you could criss-cross the West Bank and never see a destroyed grove. Yet the purpose of the trip is to see - so the travelers invent.

Michael Ratner certainly did. He saw some Bedouins and told they're about to be evicted. He saw a road which has been constructed by the Israelis to assist Palestinian travel from Rammalah to Bethlehem and cast it as Apartheid. He saw some rotten stumps and knew they were century-old Palestinian olive trees destroyed by the Israelis.

Humbug.

Censorship at Mondoweiss

CIfWatch routinely documents how the Guardian staff censors opinions it disagrees with. This morning I tried to post a comment at Mondoweiss. First I had to register (why?). Then I had to re-register twice until the system let me in. I then posted a comment, which has yet to appear, even though in the ensuing hours Phil Weiss has put up a post of his own, so apparently he has been online. Will he eventually authorize my comment? I don't know. May he be waiting until the post it's appended to, sinks so far from the top that no-one will read it? I also don't know. So for the sake of documentation, I'm putting it up here. Perhaps Fake-Ibrahim, who seems to have no problem posting comments at Mondoweiss, will link to this post in a comment. Though I wouldn't count on it.
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To the Mondoweiss community,

This will be my one and only comment on this website.

As a regular reader of Mondoweiss, I have long since resigned myself to the spite and the malice which are its main fare. Indeed, one reason I regularly visit is to keep updated on the themes and argumentation of the enemies of my nation. Perhaps someday we will manage to make peace with our Palestinian neighbors: I certainly hope so, having lost far too many of my friends in wars with them, and wishing them better than what they've got.

We will never be able to make peace with the sort of people who write at Mondoweiss and frequent its comment sections, however, since the source of your enmity is irrational, it's resistant to facts, and there's no common ground from which to begin a discussion. Ask yourselves a simple question: is there a theoretical interpretation of the facts as they seem, which might lead you to a different understanding of the reality; is there any explanation of Israel's actions which might weaken the template always used here at Mondoweiss? Not: Do we agree with that interpretation, simply: could it exist?

One of the oddest things a regular reading of Mondoweiss demonstrates is that the Mondoweiss community has not the slightest interest in the Israelis as human beings. There is never any honest attempt to understand who they are, how they see their world, and how this understanding informs their actions. Yet odder, however, the exact same thing holds also for the Palestinians. The Mondoweiss community loves the Palestinians, automatically sees them as beautiful people and wonderful, but never sees them as human beings. There is no slightest interest in who they are, how they see their world, and how this understanding informs their actions.

The Israelis are cardboard figures of evil, devoid of any real life. The Palestinians are cardboard figures of virtue, devoid of any real life. It's weird.

Dr. Yaacov Lozowick, Jerusalem