Israeli spy drones are easily spotted in the Lebanese skies, carrying out ‘routine surveillance circuits.’  The Lebanese know all too well about

If you feel you have to hide it, you probably shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.  Consider the latest on British drones, from Chris Cole of Drone Wars UK:

Romancing the drone…

By Chris Cole

Anyone with even a passing interest in the military soon discovers the peculiar phenomenon of ‘military speak’, in which a spade can never quite be called a spade. 

Bombs and bullets are called ’ordnance consumables’, a missile strike or bombing raid is known as a ‘kinetic event’, and despite its offensive purpose, the industry and its business must always be described as ‘defence’.  Military speak is essentially about maintaining a psychological distance between the day-to-day sanitized business of planning, preparing (and profiting) from armed conflicts and the awful brutal reality of warfare.   

The same coyness over language applies of course to drones.  Over the past few years I‘ve lost count of the number of times I been told not to call drones ‘drones’.  The current preferred term in the military is ‘Remotely Piloted Air System’ (RPAS) after they rejected ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’ (UAV) as being ‘off message’ (“such a generic term can be unhelpful, particularly when working with an uninformed audience” said the MoD last year). 

The term ‘drone’, though widely used and understood by the public and media alike, is snubbed both by the military and those wanting to get a civil drone industry of the ground.  Not only is it seen as too dull a name for such a ‘sophisticated piece of kit’ but its association with death and destruction is of course problematic.

This week the Guardian revealed that the Unmanned Aerial Systems Association, a UK lobby group, is planning a public relations offensive to counter the negative image of drones.  The website (Drone Wars UK) was cited by the lobby group as part of the problem to be overcome.   They recommend  that drones deployed in the UK “be decorated with humanitarian-related advertisements, and be painted bright colours to distance them from those used in warzones”  As the Guardian reports:

“John Moreland, the general secretary of UAVSA, said the industry was uncomfortable with the word “drones” and wanted to find new terminology. “If they’re brightly coloured, and people know why they’re there, it makes them a lot more comfortable,” he said.

The idea that the public could be persuaded to accept drones by painting them bright colours has rightly been mocked across the blogosphere.

A more serious strategy in the attempt to rebrand drones is for advocates to play up their potential to be used by green or human rights groups. Last week the New York Times carried a think piece arguing that drones should be used to monitor human rights abuses. Like many drones themselves however, the idea has come crashing down to earth after being comprehensively rubbished by human rights advocates (see the excellent post from Laurenist and also from Mark Kersten).  Even one noted supporter of drones, @drunkenpredator,  ridiculed the idea on twitter.

Drones do not have a negative image because of the work of Drones Wars UK, but because of the awful impact that they have in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, and because of the serious concern that remote warfare will mean more warfare. 

The public will not be reassured by any renaming or rebranding exercise.  What is needed is for the legitimate concerns about drones in warfare and their impact on civil liberties to be taken seriously.

By Chris Cole, 05 February 2012. This article was originally published on Drone Wars UK here and is reprinted with permission. He can be contacted at chris@figtree.org.uk.

Zionist tactics attempt to stifle Norman Finkelstein

The Israeli Occupation Archive newsletter today highlighted a disturbing item: “Norman Finkelstein’s lecture at Henley College (UK) is threatened by a ‘disinvitation’ prompted by a letter from the Zionist Federation to the college.”   I read the article in the Henley Standard, which provides details of the letter.  Those of us who are active in the campaign to bring peaceful, respectful relations to the region have often encountered these tactics from the Zionist camp.

By sheer coincidence, the quote of the day on Dictionary.com today is from US historian Joyce Appleby:

“Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.”   

The apartheid nature of the Israeli government is highly contentious.  Given the obvious fact that it grievously impacts the lives of so many, though, it is our right and our responsibility to study the issue.  This means we must have public discourse on the matter.  Not biased, filtered or censored—but comprehensive discourse.  We must listen to all perspectives of the issue.  How can we evaluate any issue unless we are privy to all the available information? 

Henley College, a sixth form college for Oxfordshire, has also scheduled Michael Brodsky, The Director of Public Affairs at the Embassy of Israel, to give a lecture at the school next month.  So it would seem that the school is committed to offering a full spectrum of discussion.  No doubt the Zionist Federation was aware of this fact when it contacted the school in protest of Finkelstein’s appearance.  It would seem, then, that the Federation is reluctant to let the students listen to any opposition and make a balanced decision for themselves. 

Finkelstein is also scheduled to appear at three prestigious British universities this month.  No doubt the Zionist Federation has lodged similar protests with them.  With its participation in such events as last year’s BICOM conference, which gave lessons on how to quash any opposition to Israeli conduct, it is clear that the statement it made to Henley College—“The federation supports freedom of speech and accepts the right of people to criticise Israel based on an objective review of all the facts”—is simply untrue. 

There is a fundamental difference between such efforts to censor anything viewed as anti-Israel and the BDS campaign, which calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the apartheid nature of the Israeli government until there is compliance with international laws.  The Zionist attempts to censor open dialogue blatantly oppose the expression of opinion contrary to their own.  The BDS campaign, on the other hand, opposes the impunity with which a state continuously violates international law. 

Are we nurturing the democratic society we profess to value or are we sliding further into becoming ourselves the oppressive societies that we profess to condemn? 

Unless the Zionist lobby has its way, Norman Finkelstein will be lecturing in Glasgow 8^th February, London 9^th February, and Exeter 10^th February.  Further details here.

Science v. Lies: Imagining a “Clean Break” with Israel Over Iran

by Gary Leupp

A recent column by the always insightful Ray McGovern succinctly demonstrates the problem.

The world of science acknowledges matter-of-factly that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. There is simply no evidence for one. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, staffed by specialists on nuclear power and maintaining a tight watch on Iran’s civilian facilities, finds no evidence of a military program. Two successive reports (National Intelligence Estimates) produced (in 2007 and 2010) by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have declared with confidence that there is no operative weapons program. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and (even) Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both recently stated (or let it slip) that Iran is not currently attempting to build nuclear weapons.

But then there is the political world of systematic disinformation. The world of big, bold lies which, as they are constantly repeated, acquire a certain life of their own. Thus the mainstream press and the entire political class in this country refer routinely to “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” as though there obviously were one. As though any questioning of the charge were thoroughly naive.

(By the way: try doing an advanced Google search for the exact phrase “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” and you will call up 4,640,000 results. Try “Israel’s nuclear weapons program”—which we know exists—and you’ll get 533,000. What does this tell you?)

The proponents of the lie rest assured that it will resonate, since it pertains to a Muslim country, and people here are largely conditioned to believe the worst about Muslims and see them as all complicit in some sort of anti-U.S. movement. In a poll taken as late as 2007, 41% of U.S. citizens stated their belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks!

Similarly, misguided by well-funded and well-placed propagandists, people will believe anything about Iran.

Never mind that Iran has never in modern times attacked another country. Never mind that it had nothing to do with the 9/11 episode, and that thousands of Iranians rallied in solidarity with the people of the U.S. after the attacks. Never mind that the majority of its people and their leaders are Shiites, like the people of Iraq, and that they’re sworn enemies of the Salafists in al-Qaeda as well as the Taliban. To the masters of disinformation they’re purveyors of terror, holding the world hostage to the threat of nuclear attack and Israel to total annihilation.

This view is so patently idiotic than many bright people might just roll their eyes in bewilderment and, lacking McGovern’s capacity for moral indignation, simply give up trying to challenge the mendacity. It’s tiresome, year after year, to refute the ever-expanding web of lies. But this is serious, dangerous idiocy broadcast from the citadels of power. It has become integral to U.S. political culture.

One should—again and again—cite this telling little anecdote. In 2002, as the campaign of lies about Iraq began to pick up steam, an advisor of George W. Bush told New York Times columnist and Pulitzer prize winner Ron Suskind that “guys like” him were in (what the advisor disparaged as) the “the reality-based community.”  That is, people “who believe that solutions emerge from [the] judicious study of discernible reality.”

But no, this top operative (Karl Rove, perhaps?) insisted. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Part of “creating new realities” is lying through your teeth, and spreading fear to obtain your political ends. The mission in 2002 was to persuade the people of this country that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that it threatened us with weapons of mass destruction. No matter that Iraq had been subject to the most intrusive arms inspections regimen in history, was bleeding from sanctions, and wasn’t regarded by any of its neighbors (including Kuwait and Iran, which it had invaded) as a threat. Through coordinated statements (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”) and leaks of (mis)information to complicit journalists, the Bush administration built a case for a truly criminal war (frankly pronounced “illegal” by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to the outrage of some U.S. diplomats).

If the Bush administration officials weren’t consciously taking their cue from the Nazis, they surely embraced a Nazi-like logic. As Hermann Goering stated before his suicide in 1946, “Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along… This is easy.  All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger.  It works the same in every country.”

And so we were told to fear an Iraqi nuclear attack on New York City. It worked beautifully. Most of the people were indeed dragged along. Neo-conservatives hell-bent on transforming the “Greater Middle East” to advantage Israel concocted their case through the secretive “Office of Special Plans” and scared a large section of the public into rallying for war. And when no weapons of mass destruction were found, and no evidence for Iraqi-al Qaeda links were found, they slinked offstage quietly (Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle) with no apology, embarrassment or explanation (to say nothing of prosecution).

Who is most responsible for this utter lack of responsibility? Barack Obama! He came to power through the support of antiwar voters. His own opposition to the Iraq war was timid and partial; it was, he thought a “strategic blunder” rather than a crime. (You simply cannot be a politician in the USA and speak honestly about the vicious criminality of its wars.)

The would-be harbinger of Hope and Change was all smiles when he met the outgoing president, and made it clear that there would be no embarrassing Justice Department investigations or prosecutions of Bush-era officials for war crimes. He wasn’t outraged that the highest officials in the land had approved a campaign to hoodwink the people into endorsing a horrific assault on a country that did not threaten us. He just wanted to put that all behind us, be reconciliatory, “unite the country” and move on…

Part of “moving on” meant embracing the neocons’ lies about Iran. In his very first press conference after the 2008 election, Obama signaled his intentions. He was asked about his response to Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s friendly letter congratulating him on his election. He sidestepped the question but used the occasion to grimly declare that the U.S. would not tolerate Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. It was a shameless sop to the Israel Lobby. And just as George W. Bush ignored the 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program, Obama ignores the 2010 NIE and presses on with a policy of vilification and confrontation.

There is some distance between Israel and Washington on the Iranian nuclear question. The Likud Party would happily involve the U.S. in another war (like the Iraq war based on lies) serving Israeli interests. But Obama apparently doesn’t want another war, and worries that an attack on Iran would jeopardize the U.S. project in Iraq. That Vatican-sized embassy compound could come under attack by pro-Iranian Shiite militias; its seizure would make the Iranian “hostage crisis” of 1979-81 appear a minor historical episode.

Obama can’t say what he must surely know: that the Israeli officials’ repeated references to Iran’s nuclear program as an “existential threat” to their state, echoed by neocons and the Lobby in the U.S., is sensationalistic fear-mongering of the sort Goering spoke of. The neocons have been bellowing “Bomb Iran!” for years hoping that the Christian Zionists and bought legislators will override “the judicious study of discernable reality.”

Dennis Ross, the leading Iran hawk in the Obama administration, may have left his National Security Council post last November out of chagrin at the fact that Obama had failed to carry out the attack Ross had advocated from at least 2008. (Described by Aaron David Miller, whom he’d served with as a diplomat during the Camp David negotiations of 1999-2000, as “Israel’s lawyer,” Ross had responded to the 2007 NIE by co-authoring a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece declaring that Iran was striving to become “a nuclear state” and that leaders needed to “mobilize the power of a united American public in opposition” and send aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf. He has long advocated crippling economic sanctions on Iran, precisely to provoke actions that might be used to justify a U.S.-Israeli attack.)

Still, Obama has acceded to the fundamental demand of the anti-Iran war-mongers: he has refused to respect the judgment of his own intelligence apparatus and relentlessly stepped up sanctions against Iran, arm-twisting allies to join in taking actions that many western legal scholars agree constitute acts of war. He does so ostensibly to derail a nuclear weapons program, but that is not the real reason. Nor is it because he believes that Iran truly constitutes an “existential threat” to Israel, which has its own 300 nukes. If he’s done his homework, he knows that the Iranian regime is not even an “existential threat” to Iranian Jews.

Doesn’t Iran have the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel, a community tracing its history back two and a half millennia? And isn’t that community of maybe 35,000 protected by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa of 1979 and by representation in the Majlis far exceeding its numbers? (Jews are fewer than half of one percent of Iran’s population, but their one constitutionally mandated seat in the Majlis is over three percent of the total.)

Don’t synagogues operate legally (as they did, by the way, in Baathist Iraq)? And aren’t Hebrew schools funded by the Ministry of Education? Doesn’t Article 13 of the Iranian Constitution specifically allow Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians to “perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education”? Didn’t a judge last year determine that Christians drinking wine during Communion were innocent of violating the law banning alcohol citing that article?

(When you hear the wild charge that Ahmadinejad, who has very limited power in Iran’s complex political system, is another Hitler, ask yourself how Nazi policy compared to all this? Iran is a very oppressive place, without question. But it is not the same as fascist Germany, as the hysterical Norman Podhoretz suggested in his ridiculous 2007 column, “The Case for Bombing Iran.”)

Obama and his team want to topple the regime in power in Tehran. But not primarily because it oppresses its people; this is the norm in the Middle East (and most places), and Washington (and Israel) have been comfortable enough with dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and now in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain… Nor because it has allegedly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” (That was a deliberate mistranslation of Ahmadinejad’s comment to a conference in 2005, indirectly quoting Khomeini, that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” He alluded in the same breath to the vanishing of the USSR and the regime of the Shah. He made no reference to Iran using force to make this happen.)

The real reason Washington wants regime change in Iran is that, in the most mass-based, genuine revolutionary upheaval in the modern history of the Muslim world, the Iranian people overthrew the brutal U.S.-imposed regime of the Shah in 1979. This deprived the U.S. of the services of the “Gendarme of the Gulf” serving U.S. oil interests, and intervening in Yemen (to support royalists against republicans) and Oman (to suppress a secessionist movement). It was a huge blow to Washington’s geopolitical interests, and the U.S. wants to reestablish its lost hegemony.

While there have been moments when the U.S. flirted with the mullahs who replaced the Shah (the Iran-Contra episode under Reagan, Colin Powell’s brief consideration of rapprochement in 2001-2) the neocon advocates of “regime change” have always won out.

Iran under the Shah was a virtual ally of Israel, maintaining diplomatic and military relations and supplying it with oil. Since the Islamic Revolution Iran has maintained close ties with Palestinian resistance groups (notably Hamas) and the Lebanese Shiite-based Hizbullah.  These are probably the two most popular political parties in Palestine and Lebanon respectively, but since they challenge the legitimacy of the Israeli settler-state, they are regarded by the U.S. and most of its allies as “terrorists.” Hence Iran is a “supporter of international terrorism” and its government (like those of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, etc.) should be destroyed—with no option left off the table.

The fact that there’s no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program is an inconvenient truth. And it would surely be inconvenient for the U.S. administration to state frankly that it’s trying to topple the Iranian regime—to either please the lying Likudists and enhance Israel’s power in the region, or to re-establish Anglo-American control of Iran’s oil production. Hence the ongoing campaign against discernible reality on behalf of another Big Lie.

A lot of people alarmed by the situation have been predicting an attack on Iran since 2002, the year of George W. Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” speech and the year when the neocons huddling around Dick Cheney came to dominate foreign policy. For a couple years I was convinced a strike was imminent, only to learn that during Bush’s second term he had rejected Cheney’s advice to bomb. But the neocons remain a powerful force in policy making; they have helped insure that Obama consistently condemns a program which the experts deny exists, and ratchets up pressure on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment through economic warfare.

The signals are so contradictory. The Bomb Iran advocates, including the Israel leaders, dearly hope that increasingly crippling sanctions (along with the—apparently—Israeli-sponsored program of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and sponsoring terrorism in the country) will provoke Iran into moves which will force a reluctant Obama administration to attack the nuclear facilities.

But as Jim Lobe of Inter-Press News observes, many “liberal hawks” who supported the Iraq War, including former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, Princeton professor Anne- Marie Slaughter, New York Times columnist Bill Keller, former Pentagon Middle East policy chief Colin Kahl, and former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden have recently warned of dire consequences should either the U.S. or Israel attack.  There is opposition within the foreign policy elite. But there was during the lead-up to the attack on Iraq as well.

On the other side are the Congressional leaders urging the stiffest, most provocative sanctions and even (in HR 1905) prohibiting any contact between U.S. diplomats and Iranian representatives without Congressional approval fifteen days in advance.  Presumably such contacts might derail the drive to war.

On the one hand, you have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visiting Israel this month to meet his Israeli counterpart, in a mission former Maj.-Gen. Gideon Shefer described as one to stop Israel from attacking Iran. On the other hand you have the Pentagon requesting funding from Congress for a more powerful, bunker-busting bomb.  (Having spent $ 330 million constructing 20 “Massive Ordnance Penetrators” they need another $ 82 million to make them more destructive.)

Perhaps the best outcome of the unpredictable course of events would be a serious falling out between Israel and the U.S., such as occurred during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. In the first, Israel, Britain and France tried to seize control of the newly nationalized Suez Canal. President Eisenhower, fearing an Arab  joined with the Soviets to demand an end to this tripartite aggression. In 1981, Ronald Reagan ordered his UN ambassador to vote with the rest of the world in condemning the utterly illegal “preventative strike.”

Since then the power of the Israel Lobby in league with politicized Christian fundamentalism and the neocon cabal have so sharply tilted U.S. policy towards Israel that a president cannot even press for a freeze on illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank without encountering a ferocious political backlash. One can’t be too hopeful about any “clean break” but it’s surely pleasant to imagine one.

Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history.  He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu. Read other articles by Gary.  This article appeared on Dissident Voice here and is reprinted with permission.

30 January 2012

Democratic Elections in the Middle East: Why the Islamists Win – An Analysis

by Lawrence Davidson
　

Part I – Two Democratic Elections
There have now been two democratic elections in the Middle East as a consequence of the Arab Spring. One was in Tunisia in October 2011, and the recent staggered elections of December 2011-January 2012 for a lower house of parliament in Egypt.
　
In both cases Islamist parties did the best. In Tunisia it was the Islamist al-Nahda (Renaissance) party that got 41% of the votes. In Egypt it was Hizb al-hurriya wa al-adala (Freedom and Justice Party), affiliated with country’s Muslim Brotherhood, that got 47% of the votes, while the hard-line Salafi group, the al-Nour (the Light) party got 29%.  In Tunisia the liberal parties came in a collective second with 34% of the votes, but in Egypt they did poorly. The liberal Egyptian Bloc Coalition only managed 8.9% of the vote.
　
Actually, the biggest surprise was the good showing of the liberals in Tunisia, and not the fact that relatively fair elections put the Islamists in positions of power. No one should be surprised at this result. Why? It has to do with history. While what I describe below is simplified for the sake of brevity, it gives a basically accurate picture of how the past has given us the present we now witness.
　
Part II – A Very Brief History Lesson
The Middle East has been the home of an evolving Islamic civilization since the 7^th century. Civilization means more than just religion and religious practice–it means values, outlooks, mannerisms, habits of thought and behavior. The dynamic nature of this way of life was such that up to, roughly, the 16^th century every outside invader that pushed its way into the Middle East ended up being “Islamized.” That is, whether they were Turks, Mongols, Crusaders, etc. most ended up adopting an Islamic way of life. But this changed sometime in the late 1500s.

It was about then that the military and economic balance of power between the Islamic world and Christian Europe shifted. From that point on European power allowed incursions into the Middle East by Western invaders who saw Islam and its civilization as inferior. These invaders proved not to be susceptible to “Islamization.”
　
In fact it was at this point that Western ways began to draw at least a certain class of Middle Easterners away from their traditional lifestyle. Those who became Westernized were largely the people who politically, economically, militarily and educationally interacted with the increasingly powerful Europeans. Many of them became secular in their outlook and some developed principled positions supporting liberal, open societies. Some sought to meld Western technology and educational techniques with Islamic tradition. Others, however, obtained leadership positions in which they behaved (and still behave) in corrupt and dictatorial ways.
　
It is a mistake to think that this process penetrated deeply within Middle Eastern society. One way to think of the result is in terms of a volcanic landscape. Here you have a thin crust of surface material beneath which is a deep pool of magna under building pressure. When the pressure gets high enough the magna breaks through. The thin crust represents Westernized elites, the magna is the great mass of Middle Easterners who have always identified with Islamic civilization and increasingly resent the penetration of Western culture into their lands. Historically, the resulting occasional volcanic eruptions, if you will, have occurred in the form of revolution–a modern example of which is Iran in 1979.
　
Of course Tunisia and Egypt had their own brief revolutions which led to democratic elections. You can think of these elections as controlled breakthroughs of the Islamic magna. Given the state of society in the Middle East, the results were predictable.
　
Part III – The Price of Historical Ignorance
On 22 January 2012 Juan Cole wrote a revealing piece on his blog Informed Comment. It was entitled “South Carolina & Gingrich, Egypt & the Muslim Brotherhood.” What Cole notes is that you can get a large number of religious fundamentalists swaying the primary election in South Carolina and the media hardly considers it an event to be looked into. But let religious fundamentalists do well in elections in the Middle East and it automatically generates stereotyping and shallow, inaccurate analyses. Thus, Cole notes:
　
1. “…it is implicitly deemed illegitimate for Egyptians to be religious or vote for a religious party. But it is legitimate for South Carolinians to be religious, to vote on a religious basis, to seek to impose their religious laws on all Americans.”
　
2. What if Egyptians voted for religious parties for reasons other than just religion? Given the shallowness of U.S. media coverage how would we ever know? Yet, polls in Egypt indicate that many Egyptian voters chose the Freedom and Justice Party because the Muslim Brotherhood has a reputation for honesty and a commitment to social justice.
　
3. And finally, “almost no Egyptians think that the revolution against [the military dictatorship of] Mubarak was made to establish a religious state.”
　
None of this makes much difference to U.S. politicians who usually know little or no relevant history and are therefore oblivious to reality in the Middle East. They are, however, deeply committed to ideologically driven stereotypes and conventions. And there are plenty of special interests out there pushing an Islamophobic message.
　
How can one ever create reasonable and workable foreign policy under these conditions? The answer is, you can’t. You end up thrashing around this way and that, running scared and talking yourself into war-like scenarios. This is utterly crazy and utterly typical.

Let’s end with a quote from a religious leader who does have a penetrating sense of history, the current Dalai Lama: “Where ignorance is our master there is no possibility of real peace.” Alas, that is reality!
　

Written by:

Lawrence Davidson
Department of History
West Chester University
West Chester, Pennsylvania, USA 19383

29 January 2012

ldavidson@wcupa.edu
www.tothepointanalyses.com
www.twitter.com/pointanalyses

West Bank Diary

by Graham Peebles

In July 2009 I went to the Middle East to run a series of creative education workshops, with Palestinian children in the West Bank, and informal, discussion-based training sessions with local staff. There were various aims of the work with the children: To build self-confidence and self-belief and to provide a means of expression – to give the children a voice, inherent in all the work was the objective of encouraging independent creative thinking and cultivating an atmosphere of tolerance and understanding amongst all the beneficiaries, children and adults alike.

Arrival

From Ben-Gurion airport I took the Sheruk minibus to Jerusalem, where, at the Jerusalem Hotel, I met Henry, an Englishman working for Sharek Youth Forum, the local Palestinian NGO I would be collaborating with. After a much needed breakfast, we took a bus to Ramallah. There are two bus stations in Jerusalem, one filled with white and blue buses – Israeli buses – the other, in East Jerusalem, five minutes walk away, with white and green Palestinian buses, these are not allowed to pass into West Jerusalem.

Ramallah is a mere 15 km from Jerusalem via the notorious Qalandia checkpoint. Qalandia is one of the largest Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank. Located between Ramallah, Qalandia refugee camp, and the Palestinian town of Ar-Ram, it separates Ramallah residents from southern Palestinian towns and the Palestinian neighbourhoods of (East) Jerusalem, home to around 200,000 Palestinians. Israeli soldiers check identity cards and passports when moving from the West Bank side in Ramallah. Travelling into Ramallah from Jerusalem no checks are made.

A Wall of Separation

As we drove through the checkpoint and I had my first sight of the Wall – known variously as the Apartheid Wall, Separation Wall, Security Wall or simply the ‘fence’- no matter the name, it is an abomination in any language. The ‘wall’ is being constructed mainly on Israeli occupied territories inside the West bank and substantially deviates from the 1949 Armistice or ‘Green Line’, which demarcates the West Bank. A concrete structure eight metres tall (the Berlin wall was 3.5 metres high) makes up around 5% of the total barrier’s length. In many places three fences of barbed wire, act as the dividing barrier.

The Wall has in places become a kind of ‘notice board’, a place for Palestinians to vent frustration and shout a message. On the West Bank side around Qalandia it is covered in graffiti – From slogans and cries of anger to an image made by Banksy, the well known British graffiti artist, of two children dressed in swimming trunks, holding buckets and spades and sitting below a coloured photograph of a tropical island beach – an idealised image of escape. 

Ramallah

There seems to be construction work taking place everywhere in Ramallah, new apartment buildings, hotels and office space. Many buildings are left semi-built where funds have run low. Al-Manara, is a typical city centre area, noisy and hectic, full of shops, cafes and stallholders. Cars, lorries and minibuses crowd the busy roads, honking their horns as they hurry around the city. It is the picture of a bustling, vibrant, commercial city, an expensive city – the cost of living in Ramallah is the highest in the West Bank.

On the surface life here, certainly in Ramallah, where I am staying, looks fine. Nobody is homeless, children are well dressed, clean, healthy and in school, shops are filled with produce, café’s are busy, everyone seems to have a mobile phone. Life ‘appears’ much as it does throughout the developed world. The appearance is deceptive of course, it is estimated that 50% of Palestinians – 2 million people, live in poverty. The average income in the West bank is around $11,000 per annum, this compared to their Israeli neighbours’ $21,000 a year. Much of the Palestinian economy is remittance based, with Palestinians living abroad supporting hundreds of families.

It is late July and the wedding season is in full swing, this is a rather noisy affair with convoys of wedding cars driving through the streets sounding their horns and waving to passers by. Fireworks often accompany the marriage celebrations, my first night in Ramallah was spent listening to explosions overhead, I was somewhat relieved to discover they were nothing more than firework rockets and ‘bangers’.

Halhul

It’s the first day of a Creative education programme we are running in Halhul. A district of Hebron, Halhul is roughly 30 km south of Ramallah beyond Bethlehem.  A volunteer from Sharek, Dahlia a student from the USA, will be assisting me.

The short journey by mini bus from Ramallah should take no more than 40 minutes. The direct route would mean passing through Jerusalem, taking three buses and having to pass through Albania checkpoint where there are often long delays.

Our journey avoids Jerusalem and rather than being direct is more like a huge semi-circle, taking us around Jerusalem. The journey takes one hour and 25 minutes. By 10.30, when we arrive at the community centre in Halhul, the temperature is already 30 degrees we are met at the bus stop by Fahed, the co-ordinator of the centre. A large group of children await us, and with numerous local volunteers we run a short introductory workshop, outlining the underlying ideas to the volunteers: to stimulate self-awareness in all involved and break down conditioning, thereby freeing the mind to think in a more creative, independent manner.

After the introductory workshop lunch and a delicious falafel sandwich, the first of many, Dahlia and I take the mini bus back to Ramallah. A few miles outside Halhul we spot an Israeli military lorry and jeep. They are parked in a ‘lay-by’ at the side of the road, where a young Palestinian has set up a simple stall selling fruit and vegetables. Israeli soldiers are breaking up the stall, pulling the makeshift tarpaulin roof down and kicking in the sides. Continuing along the road, we see a further eight stalls destroyed and abandoned. A common practice, I later discover and one that is illegal under Israeli law. According to the Israeli military these stallholders are trading without the required paperwork. These permits (issued by Israeli authorities) according to Palestinians are difficult to obtain yet are required by the Israelis to trade inside the West Bank, supposedly Palestinian land.

Thanks to further checkpoints and searches, our return journey takes almost two hours.

Nablus

I visit Nablus where we will be delivering a programme, to meet the Sharek team who are running a summer camp for children and youths in the city. There are a large percentage of young people in Nablus, approximately half the population are under 20 years of age – a representative demographic throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Around 45 km north of Ramallah, with a population of 134,000, Nablus is the most populated city in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

It is chaos when we arrive at the community centre. There are over 60 children whom we divide into two smaller groups and spend an hour outlining the programme. Local volunteers, somewhat heavy-handedly help to organise the groups. 

Later I wander around Nablus with Yasmin, the 20 something daughter of the centre’s manager and my translator. Over tea and halweh (a sickly sweet pastry), we talk about male/female relationships for Palestinian Muslims. She has had one ‘boyfriend’, who she’d only physically met on a few occasions. The relationship was maintained via mobile telephone conversations and text messages. This partitioned, inhibited relationship continued for some months until they could stand it no longer and separated, with much sadness on both sides. Yasmin’s mother, she says, is very open-minded, but her father is more conservative.

The settlements

The road to Nablus is dotted with Israeli settlements built strategically on hilltops. Initially, armed military ‘outposts’ are established using trailers as accommodation. Concrete houses soon follow, shops and the usual social amenities are built and a village/town is created. As these individual hilltop settlements grow, they merge to form one large town.

The settlements are a world within a world, often gated with Israeli flags flying, always guarded. The Israelis settlers live altogether more comfortable, privileged lives than their Palestinian neighbours, stories abound of settlers attacking Palestinian farmers, beating them, burning or cutting down their trees and crops and generally making life intolerable. The settlers have access to Israeli-only roads and tunnels, use settler only buses, and have ample, disproportionate supplies of water and good electricity services. Settlers live in subsidised housing, often leaving a small city apartment for a large family home in a sanitised settlement.

‘De-development’

Friday is a weekend day, a day of rest. Government offices are closed, as are public buildings, shops and many café’s and restaurants. Fortunately my local supermarket is open. Whilst buying pitta bread, humous and water, I meet Taleb Abu Remeis a local resident and we begin to discuss life in the OPT. Taleb had spent three years in an Israeli prison when in 1968, as a student, he was arrested for peacefully demonstrating against the occupation.

Now working for Coca Cola in Ramallah he described how a regular business journey that once took 30 minutes now takes up to three hours, due to the establishment of new checkpoints and the ‘wall of separation’ on Palestinian land. A land-grab has taken place as the Israelis have redefined boundaries and demarcated territory through the construction of the wall, branding land that had been in the West Bank and therefore Palestinian, as part of Israel. This has caused many problems, both sociological and economic, the supply of water being a major issue.

De-development is a term often applied to Palestine. Taleb gave me an example from Coca Cola of the impediments to healthy, normal business practice. All goods being imported into Palestine come through Israel; import permits have to be obtained from the Israeli authorities. Coca Cola applied for a permit to import a material needed for the packaging of the soft drink. Permission to import this harmless material was refused, justified under the umbrella term ‘security’.

A small example of the daily inconvenience and controls placed upon Palestinians by the occupying Israeli forces: I met a man working in a pharmacy in Ramallah, from a village outside Nablus. For three years He had been denied access to the city, where he had work and family, due to what the Israeli military described as ‘problems with his ID’. He would repeatedly queue at the checkpoint for hours, only to be turned away. Offers by the man to have his ID renewed were dismissed by the soldiers. Disempowerment and loss of dignity are strategies of control employed to smother hope, creating despair and immense frustration.   

House demolitions

Later in the day I meet up with Henry, the co-ordinator for the project. He has been in Ramallah for six months and heard many stories of Palestinian suffering at the hands of the occupying force. House demolition is a particular horror for many families. Demolitions are usually done without prior warning and often during the night. The inhabitants are given little time to evacuate – anything from a few minutes to half an hour. Once a demolition order has been passed (by the Israeli authorities), it may be executed anytime – immediately, or after 10 years, 20 years or more. A family known to Henry have been living under the ‘imminent’ threat of demolition for 37 years, causing them untold stress and anxiety.

Once an order has been passed, the family has a choice. They are free to move before the house is levelled, demolish it themselves, or stay in the knowledge that at any moment their home may be knocked down. If the Israeli authorities carry out the demolition, the family may be presented with a bill for the work, up to $20,000 – lose your home and pay for the privilege!

I have been in the West Bank for just one week. It’s an unsettling, disorienting place, a ‘Truman Show’ reality, where subtle and not so subtle modes of manipulation build insufferable obstacles to harmonious, easeful living. On the face of it life appears normal. Children are in school, shops are busy, the buses run, and no one is starving. So what’s the problem? If one speak to the Palestinians, look beyond the surface of ‘normality’, travel around as the locals do, very quickly a picture forms. It is an insidious image of fear and control. There is a kind of pervasive suffocation taking place, it may be likened to dropping a frog into a bucket of warm water and slowly, almost imperceptibly, increasing the heat.  The hand of repression looms large and day-by-day the feeling of entrapment grows.

The Israeli Committee against House Demolition (ICADH)

I am Travelling to Jerusalem by bus, my first journey into the ‘City of Peace’ from Ramallah. I have arranged a meeting with Angela Godfrey Goldstein, a Director of ICADH, The Israeli Committee against House Demolition (www.icahd.org).

ICAHD is an Israeli NGO, comprised of members of many Israeli peace and human rights organizations. It is a non-violent, direct-action group, originally established to oppose and resist Israeli demolitions of Palestinian houses in the OPT. Angela an artist, is British, has been living in Israel for some 30 years and has a great deal of knowledge and experience of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

Checking out Qalandia

I leave from Ramallah bus station, a bleak concrete building housed in a multi-storey car park in the centre of the city. To enter Jerusalem we must go through Qalandia checkpoint.  I had been warned that passing through Qalandia was a pretty ghastly ordeal and could take some time.

The bus parks up on a mini-roundabout at the entrance to the checkpoint. Having been issued with a second bus ticket, the passengers disembark and walk through a full body turnstile into the checkpoint. Inside the part-covered area there are what I can only describe as three caged corridors, 10 metres or so long, with at the end of each, another full body turnstile, a cctv camera and a red and green light. Once inside there is no way back, there is no choice but to stand in the queue and wait.

Each ‘corridor’ has roughly the same number queuing; I join a line of around 12 people.  It is 2pm and very hot – the temperature must have been over 30 degrees. People are pushed up against the turnstile, which is not moving in any of the corridors. After 15 minutes or so a loud siren blares out, the green light shines and one, two or perhaps three people push through the turnstile, then nothing for another 10 minutes.

I am standing with a young Israeli woman, a university student. It is her first time at Qalandia too. I ask what she thinks of the checkpoint and the occupation in general. She becomes quiet, then in hushed tones whispers: ‘It is not safe to talk of such things, they have spies everywhere.’

The atmosphere in the queue was calm and quiet to begin with, but after 30 minutes in very hot, claustrophobic conditions with little movement, the anxiety level began to rise, there was some jostling for position in the line and shouting through the turnstiles to the unseen guards on the other side. After 45 minutes or so the turnstiles were released and two by two we passed through to the security check. Much like checks made at airports, all bags, wallets and metal objects pass through an ex-ray scanner and ID papers, passports and permits, are checked by security personnel.

After presenting my passport to a young female officer, I walk out to a car park where a number of buses are waiting.  With my previously issued ticket I board my original bus and after a wait for the remaining passengers we leave Qalandia. The whole process takes over an hour, it is an unsettling experience, which many people face daily, designed to inconvenience, frustrate and to chip away at the dignity of the Palestinians.

Touring East Jerusalem

I finally arrive at Angela’s apartment in a residential area of Jerusalem; she has arranged a guided tour of east Jerusalem, for two French journalists and myself. Our taxi drives up the Mount of Olives, upon whose slopes sits the world’s oldest continually used cemetery, some 150,000 Jews are buried here. At the top of this historic hill is the beautiful Russian Chapel of the Ascension, with its three golden onions rising to the heavens, behind the church runs a newly constructed concrete section of the wall, which divides this part of the city. I’m struck by how completely unsightly the structure is, and how in a place of such historical and religious importance, something symbolising, indeed fuelling, hatred and division has been built. Checkpoints have been set up and what were busy local city streets are now closed, making simple journeys impossible.

Within East Jerusalem, with a total population of around 430,000, there are estimated to be 190,000 Israeli citizens living in settlements – almost half of the population. It is difficult to see how a two-state solution would deal with this social problem. It is akin to mixing water and orange juice then attempting to remove the water.

Angela points out a large residential building near the Mount of Olives, which in September 2005 was demolished. It is the largest single building to be destroyed under the house demolition programme. The apartment building was to be home to 28 Palestinian families: it now lies in ruins, covered in graffiti.

Water monopoly

We drive out of Jerusalem passing Maale Adumim, with 30,000 residents it is one of the largest Israeli settlements in the OPT. In an arid area bordering the Jordan desert, the settlement is adorned by palm trees and gardens bursting with colour, creating a theme park image of artificial beauty upon a battle ground of injustice and hate.

 The supply of water in the region – on average 1100mm annually in the North, but only 100mm in the far south – is a major issue. The ‘wall’ has played a major strategic part in allowing Israel to confiscate sources of water.  Springs and ground wells, which were once on Palestinian land, are now, thanks to the wall, inside Israel.

Israel steals the water, provides ample supply to settlements inside the West Bank, enough for tree-lined avenues and landscaped gardens, and effectively rations water flow to Palestinian communities. The apartment I stayed in for example, received mains water only once a week, water tanks and jerry cans are filled to provide water until the following week.

Palestinians have no legal control over their own water resources. The Israelis determine the water supply, which is far below that of Israel’s, and well below that of World Health Organisation (WHO) standards. The inadequate water supply is also a key factor affecting the Palestinian economy and is having a de-development effect. Try buying fruit, which is produced inside the West Bank and you’ll find it very limited.  I would estimate that 80% of all available fruit and vegetables are ‘imported’ from Israel.

Perched on a hilltop on the outskirts of East Jerusalem and overlooking the city, we pass a newly built, and I understand, state-of-the-art Israeli police station.  Constructed at great expense – $1 billion was one figure mentioned – it is an intimidating statement of intent by a country purporting to be working for peace.

The Bedouins’ plight

Our tour ends with a visit to a Bedouin camp, situated at the side of a busy main road in the Jordan desert. This semi-nomadic community lives sandwiched between Israeli settlements, in wooden shacks with no mains water or electricity supply. Barely tolerated by the Israeli authorities, they are constantly being moved on by the military and subjected to attacks and intimidation by settlers. The community have built a school on the site, made out of reclaimed car tyres covered with mud. The building has two classrooms and will serve as a nursery/primary school and community centre. At the time of our visit they were waiting for funding from the Palestinian Authority to cover salaries for two qualified teachers. 

I take a shared taxi back to Ramallah with two Palestinian construction workers, returning to Ramallah from working on an Israeli construction project inside the West Bank. Avoiding Qalandia checkpoint, the return journey takes 30 minutes and is straightforward.

Friendship in Halhul

Friendship is the theme of our work with the children; what it means to be a friend, what draws individuals together, what are the qualities we look for in a friend and need to demonstrate ourselves. Workshops are structured to encourage group responsibility, tolerance and understanding of others.

It’s the first day in Halhul of this part of the project, our journey from Ramallah is slow. At a checkpoint in the hills outside Jerusalem, previously unmanned, soldiers are stopping and checking all vehicles. There are long queues in both directions. When we finally reach the barrier a young Israeli soldier, around 20 years of age, leans into the minibus, his arm intimidatingly resting on the driver’s open window, automatic rifle in hand. He asks the nervous Palestinian driver a series of questions, the driver replies and we are waved on. It takes us one and a half hours to cover the 30 km journey today.

The session begins with the usual two minutes or so of silence. Usually this is conducted in a circle, eyes closed, with boys and girls mixed up and holding hands; here, however, the children are loath to stand with a member of the opposite sex, let alone take their hand. We discuss friendship with the group and they are encouraged to share examples of friendship based on their own experiences. They are then asked if they could be friends with someone who has completely different interests to themselves. This question causes a major rift in the group, with roughly 50% saying they could, the other half adamant they could not.  A highly animated debate followed, with both sides marshalling their arguments and presenting their case through an elected spokesperson – it was a fiery, articulate 12-year-old girl who definitely could not be friends unless one shared her interests and led the argument.

After 45 minutes or so of debate, the balance had shifted: there were now 75% in agreement that ‘yes’ friends could have different interests. A quarter however refused to see how this was possible, this group even maintained that had a friendship been established prior to realising a difference in interest, the friendship could not then continue. It had been a good session with lots of the children contributing to the discussion and debate. A closing period of silence as always concluded the workshop.

Blessed Bethlehem

For the return journey to Ramallah we decided to go through Jerusalem instead of the circuitous journey around it. We first took a bus to Bethlehem, no longer a ‘little town’, but at first glance at least much like any other bustling commercial Middle Eastern city. At Bethlehem we change buses, leaving the hot and crowded Palestinian minibus, and board a white and blue air-conditioned Israeli coach.

Bethlehem is in the West Bank, in order to enter (West) Jerusalem it is necessary to pass through an Israeli military checkpoint. The checkpoint looks much like a European motorway toll station, a new structure, with booths where the Israeli soldiers sit.

Our coach is stopped the passengers are ‘asked’ to disembark and queue at the side of the coach to have IDs checked. With the exception of three women from the USA and myself, all the passengers are Israeli.

The soldiers, two men and a woman in their early twenties, collect all the Israeli IDs, the passports and strangely the bags from the American women, to be scanned and searched. The whole process takes around 45 minutes. We continue into central Jerusalem through heavy traffic, as it is now rush hour.  At the Palestinian bus station in East Jerusalem, five minutes walk from the Israeli bus station, we board a green and white Palestinian bus to Ramallah.

Although there are no checks passing from Jerusalem into Ramallah the heavy build up of traffic coming into Jerusalem is causing congestion all around the Qalandia checkpoint. Finally after some imaginative manoeuvres from our bus driver, involving driving over a roundabout and onto the opposite side of the road, we arrive in Ramallah. It is at 6.30pm, 2 hours 40 minutes after leaving Halhul.

Children’s workshop in Nablus

I am en-route to Nablus by minibus, to conduct a creative education session. The Palestinian drivers all seem to be frustrated Formula One drivers; today’s driver is no exception. We hurtle through the green valley from Ramallah to Nablus and arrive, somewhat relieved, in one piece and in record time.

It is the turn of the children in Nablus to discuss friendship. They were asked could they be friends with children/people from different countries. Certain countries, yes, but not if the child came from Israel, USA (‘because they arm Israel’) – understandable perhaps, it was less clear with Denmark and Canada? Would it be possible to be friends with people holding different religious beliefs?  Very difficult, probably impossible in fact was their response, as we simply would not understand one another.

A powerful way to break or dislodge conditioned patterns of thinking is through the use of abstraction. With this aim in mind workshops are designed which, encourage abstract thought. Working in pairs within small groups, the children were asked to make drawings using geometric shapes to depict qualities of friendship. These sketches were then used as a template for body sculptures expressing the same quality.

A difficult exercise perhaps, the group were able to associate qualities of friendship with forms when shown to them, but were not able to invent forms themselves. The tendency was to create a recognisable familiar image. One boy for example draws a circle, with arms and smaller circles; this drawing morphs into an army jeep and a soldier with a gun.

Final thoughts

Living in Ramallah, even for a short time as I have, creates the feeling of being imprisoned. It is a most extraordinarily unsettling experience. There is a creeping claustrophobia in the city, a helplessness, which grows in strength the longer one is there.

The logistics of working in the OPT place a strain on all involved and affect the success of any endeavour.  However, simply to bear witness to the plight of the Palestinian people made my time in the West Bank worthwhile. Trust is a major factor when working with people who have been victimized in any way, the building of this jewel sometimes takes time, particularly where there has been so much betrayal, false promises and duplicity. The young throughout the World are crying out for justice and freedom, loud and clear their voices united are bringing changes to many dark corners. Working with the children within the West Bank was a privilege and a joy. The future is theirs and it is safe in their hands.

In order for reconciliation, forgiveness and healing to begin, the Israeli occupation must end the illegal building of settlements must cease and the 1967 borders must be recognized by Israel. These are the essential foundations upon which any movement towards lasting harmony must be built.

It is abundantly clear that the Palestinians and Israelis need to share equitably this tiny piece of land and begin to live in harmony, to reach out to one another as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters and to unite in peaceful living. Tolerance of differences and understanding of a shared humanity are essential and will help move toward the co-operation needed to bring about right relationship in this divided land.

Graham Peebles is the Director of The Create Trust.  He can be reached at info@thecreatetrust.org.

Tour d’horizon: An Iranian optic on the Middle East and its prospects

By Seyed Mohammad Marandi

Almost a year ago, in a well-remembered Friday prayer sermon delivered on February 4, 2011, Ayatollah Khamenei spoke at length, in Arabic, about the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. At the time, the Egyptian people were on the streets attempting to topple the Western-backed dictator, Hosni Mubarak. In his sermon, after praising the Tunisian people, Ayatollah Khamenei spoke of how Mubarak had humiliated Egypt by becoming an American pawn and an ally of Israel. He also recalled the sharp pain that Egyptians felt when Mubarak helped implement the Western-imposed, inhuman siege of Gaza and when his regime worked in partnership with Israel and the United States during the 22-day onslaught against women, men, and children there in late 2008.

Ayatollah Khamenei went on to speak about the history and intellectual traditions that have given Egypt its unparalleled importance in the Arab world. In this context, he described the movement unfolding in Egypt as both Islamic and freedom-seeking, with its potential for significant impact on the Middle East. Noting that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt had parallels to Iran’s revolution more than three decades ago, he also underscored that the situations are not all identical; each is unique, in accordance with different geographical, historical, political, and cultural conditions. Claims that Iran is seeking to export its ideology or model of government to Egypt, he said, were dishonest attempts to keep the peoples of the region divided. He went on to warn that the United States has recognized it cannot keep its pawns in power, so it will attempt to “move its pawns around” to preserve its hegemony and should not be trusted. [1]

Sharp criticisms were leveled at Ayatollah Khamenei’s sermon in the West and by parts of the Arab media. Commentators attacked the idea that these movements constituted an “Islamic Awakening”, claiming they had nothing to do with religion. It was an “Arab Spring”, they intoned; the revolutionaries were looking to establish secular liberal democracies, not embrace “theocratic” rule. However, as time went by, it became clear that the Western political establishment, the Western media, and most Western “experts”—who had not anticipated the coming revolutions in the first place—were once again incapable of correctly understanding the situation in Egypt or correctly interpreting the broader region’s realities.

Hence, their dismay with the results from the first round of the parliamentary elections in Egypt, in which the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice coalition and the Salafist Noor coalition together received over two thirds of the votes, despite the fact that voting mostly took place in areas not normally considered to be religious strongholds. [2]  It is already apparent how the parliament that will emerge from these elections is likely to steer the process of drafting a new constitution for Egypt—if it is allowed to do so by the country’s U.S.-backed military.

The Western (or Western-affiliated) Middle East “experts”, who were previously so adamant that these revolutions were secular in nature, now wonder how to read unfolding events. Some are putting on a brave face, expressing hope that, after a few years, Islamic parties will fail and people will vote for Western-oriented liberal parties—as if people in the region do not remember who backed and continues to back Arab dictatorships. They do not seem to recognize that the social and economic crisis currently taking place throughout Europe and the United States has already raised serious questions about the nature and future of liberal capitalism, especially in the Middle East and other non-Western parts of the world.

Western elites’ difficulties in understanding the Middle East are exacerbated because their sources of information in the region are basically local secular elites—wealthy, Western-educated, and even Western-oriented Muslim intellectuals. Westerners collectively fail to recognize that such people are simply not representative of their societies. As in Iran, the large majority of Egyptians are religious. If past experience in Iran is something to go by, the Muslim Brotherhood will probably at some point split into two or more separate parties, which will then provide competing interpretations of how society should be run. Hence, religious parties will probably be the dominant forces in Egyptian politics for many years to come—not just for one or two electoral cycles.

Indeed, if the Muslim Brotherhood does not meet popular expectations in the coming months and years, it is the Salafists who are likely to capitalize on this to expand their own influence over Egypt, not Western-style, secular liberals. The Salafists’ strong electoral performance and substantial external funding positions them to declare, in the not-so-distant future, that it is time for “true Islam” to save the country. This is something that Western countries should be deeply concerned about, as the ideologies of these Salafist groups have a great deal in common with those of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Of course, Americans and Europeans cannot complain about the Salafists’ religious intolerance or their externally backed rise to power, because they are heavily financed by the West’s closest regional allies. For reasons largely linked to self-preservation, Saudi Arabia and other Arab dictatorships in the Persian Gulf region are financing such extremist groups all over the Arab World and beyond. Over the past three decades they have radically affected societies in significant parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, creating a culture of intolerance and radically altering the local culture.

In sum—and notwithstanding the scorn directed at Ayatollah Khamenei’s observations a year ago—this is looking very much like the manifestation of an Islamic Awakening. Many factors such as injustice, social inequality, despotism, and western domination contributed to the recent events, but they do not at all contradict the idea of an awakening. For those who kept their eyes open, there were clear signs of this from the prevalence of Islamic slogans as well as the role of mosques and Friday prayers. Significantly, the term “Islamic Awakening” has been used by Ayatollah Khamenei in his public statements as leader nearly two hundred times over the past two decades. [3]  He has repeatedly stated that Islamic movements are on the rise and that the region is heading for major changes that are, for the most part, in sharp conflict with Western interests.

Unlike in the West, the Iranian leadership, along with others in the region, has expected these events for many years and is thus much better prepared than Europe and the United States to deal with this reality. [4] The Islamic Republic is rapidly expanding relations with rising political entities throughout the region. It recently held the First International Islamic Awakening Conference, with over seven hundred participants from a host of key regional movements. In the Conference’s Inaugural speech, Ayatollah Khamenei told attendees what he believed to be the principles and slogans of the revolutions: independence, freedom, the demand for justice, opposing despotism and colonialism, the rejection of ethnic, racial, or religious discrimination, and the explicit rejection of Zionism. All of these, he said, are Islamic values, based on the Qur’an. [5]

In the eyes of many Iranians, these extraordinary changes in the Middle East and North Africa—alongside America’s forced withdrawal from Iraq, its inevitable defeat in Afghanistan, the sharp social and economic decline in the West, and the rise of new international players such as China, India, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa—will ultimately lead to a rapid decrease of American and European influence, regionally and globally.

From an Iranian perspective, this provides at least a partial explanation why the United States and the EU are now so explicit in their (so far unsuccessful) attempts to inflict severe pain on ordinary Iranians through “crippling” sanctions. [6] While, in the past, it was clear that the objective of sanctions was to make average Iranians suffer—as the Wikileaks cables confirm [7]—there was at least a hypocritical attempt to portray these actions as humane and directed at the government.

Now, the incessant and shrill calls to assassinate and murder Iranian scientists, military officials, and politicians and to launch military strikes on the country reveals the existence of a disturbed mentality among many of the political elite in the West and in the United States in particular. The recent flurry of absurd accusations made against Iran by the US, such as the so-called plot against the Saudi Ambassador to Washington, [8] the rehashed IAEA report presented by a deeply biased director general, [9] cyber attacks, and the attempts to impose sanctions on the Iranian central bank which politicians like Ron Paul consider to be an act of war, [10] is also leading many in Iran to conclude that the United States is currently too irrational for any form of meaningful dialogue.

The Russian Foreign Ministry noted that the IAEA report “had a set goal to deliver a guilty verdict”, [11] despite the fact that, as Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister elsewhere pointed out, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to show that Iran’s nuclear program is anything but peaceful.[12] That is why, contrary to the dominant narrative in the Western media, the majority of the “international community”, [13] such as the 120 Non-Aligned Movement states, have consistently backed the Islamic Republic’s position on its nuclear program. [14]

Iranians well remember the American government’s duplicity when President Lula attempted to find a diplomatic solution to the refueling of the Tehran Research Reactor. The reactor, which each year produces medical isotopes for hundreds of thousands of dying cancer patients, was running out of nuclear fuel. Western governments were preventing it from being refueled in order to put pressure on Iran, effectively playing with innocent lives. [15] In April 2010, Obama sent official letters to the Brazilian president and the Turkish Prime Minister stating the conditions that would have to be met for the United States to accept an agreement. When the conditions were met and Lula, Ahmadinejad, and Erdogan signed the Tehran Declaration, Obama shocked the three leaders by immediately rejecting it and pushing for a new UN Security Council resolution to increase sanctions against Iran. Not only did Obama lie to the Brazilian and Turkish leaders and publicly humiliate them, but it later became clear that his letters to them had been intentionally written to mislead both Brazil and Turkey. [16]

It did not take long for history to repeat itself. In July 2001 the Russians put forth a new “step by step” proposal to resolve the nuclear issue. Senior Russian officials informed their Iranians counterparts that the proposal has the support of the United States and subsequently, despite reservations, the Iranians agreed in principle with the plan. [17] It later became clear to the Iranians that the Americans had misled the Russians too and that they did not actually accept the Russian proposal. [18] American actions make it reasonable for Iranians to conclude that the actual US objective is for the nuclear issue not to be resolved and that the real problem for the United States is Iran’s opposition to and resistance against American hegemony. Contrary to claims made in the west, Obama has never seriously attempted to engage with the Iranians on the basis of mutual respect. [19]

The irony is not lost upon Iranians that they have had to experience four rounds of sanctions, even though they have never produced Weapons of Mass Destruction. Yet the countries that have actually pushed for the sanctions—meaning the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany— actually helped provide Saddam Hussain with WMDs to use against Iranian civilians and combatants, as well as against the Iraqi people. In other words, these countries were deeply implicated in crimes against humanity; they compounded their complicity by preventing the UN Security Council from even declaring that Iraq had used such weapons, much less condemning it. Iran on the other hand, despite its capability, refused to produce or use such weapons. In fact, the Islamic Republic has, to this day, never produced chemical weapons, because it considers them inhumane. As war veterans and civilian casualties in Iran continue to die because of the WMDs provided to the former Iraqi regime by the West, it is an understatement to say that Iranians are angered by these governments’ continued attempt to strangle the Iranian economy.

More recently, the extraordinary capture of the unmanned American stealth plane by the Iranian armed forces, not only reveals the extent of Iranian military competence; it also exposes the extent of US hostility towards Iran as well as its sheer disregard of international law, including Afghan sovereignty. [20] What is the point of talking with the United States, Iranians ask themselves, when it has carried out such provocative acts of hostility with such total unaccountability and impunity?

Many in Iran feel that, to a large extent, the Syrian public has also been made the target of sanctions and foreign intervention because of the West’s extraordinary hatred towards the Islamic Republic. In other words, Syrians must cease to earn a living, because their government, alongside Iran, stands in opposition to the Israeli regime’s apartheid policies. From almost the start of the troubles in Syria, Iranians were aware that external forces were involved, notwithstanding repeated denials by Arab regimes in the Persian Gulf, Turkey, and Western countries. As time passed, this has become even clearer, despite unending media propaganda [21] claiming that it is simply a struggle between unarmed street protestors and the Syrian army and intelligence services. [22]  Indeed, the dictatorships of the Arab League are even having problems forcing their own monitors in Syria to tow the official line and now even a poll funded by Qatar, whose results have clearly been spun and completely ignored by the western media, reveals that the majority of Syrians actually support President Bashar Assad. [23]

There is no doubt that the foreign anti-Syrian alliance is responsible for arming groups, for the devastating car and suicide bombings, and, thus, for the many deaths—including the large number of sectarian murders, largely ignored in the Western media—that have occurred as a result. When American officials and the western media speak of Syrian brutality and constantly repeat unsubstantiated casualty figures presented by western funded Syrian NGOs [24], it would be good for them to recall how many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Iraq were killed during the insurgency against US occupation. The regular killing of civilians in Afghanistan and the regular drone attacks in Pakistan among other countries are, of course, ongoing tragedies.

Iran believed that the Syrian president should have been given a chance to carry out the reforms which were promised, but that from the start, Western governments and Arab dictatorships were adamant that reforms should not succeed under President Bashar Assad. Hence, they attempted to overrun the legitimate internal opposition with an external one that backs Western military intervention. [25]

While the Islamic Republic was critical of the treatment of peaceful protestors with legitimate grievances by Syrian security forces, Iranians knew that, unlike other Arab regimes, President Assad had and continues to have significant popular support. His stance against the Israeli regime, his support for resistance groups, and the fact that unlike other Arab leaders he lives a relatively normal lifestyle, gives him much more street credibility that Saudi, Jordanian, Bahraini, Yemeni, or Egyptian rulers. [26] On multiple occasions in recent months, enormous crowds have taken to the streets in simultaneous pro-Assad demonstrations in major Syrian cities; in contrast, none of the Arab dictators—including his current antagonists—have ever been able to muster such public support for themselves. Indeed, Iran believes that this is the main reason why cruel sanctions have been imposed on Syria: they are meant to do nothing but hurt the general public and cause discontent among the population. President Assad’s foreign adversaries recognize that he has significant popular support; hence, the Syrian people must be punished until this support is diminished.

As in Gaza and Iran, the goal is to punish people for backing political forces critical of the West. In the 1980s the United States had success with such a policy, as they removed the Sandinistas from power in Nicaragua by making life unbearable for ordinary people through sanctions and a bloody insurgency. While Iranians recognize that international law has been unfairly constructed to favor   western powers, the increasing Western, Turkish, Saudi, and Qatari disregard for Syrian sovereignty—and even for their own UN Security Council resolution on Libya—is creating a strong sense of lawlessness and chaos. Add to this, of course, the regular and arrogant violation of Iranian sovereignty through drones and “crippling” sanctions as well as active support for anti-Iranian terrorist organizations.

In an extraordinary Wall Street Journal interview, the pro-Western Syrian National Council’s spokesman, Burhan Ghalioun, revealed clearly where things stand. He effectively said that if the Syrian state is overthrown, the new regime would relinquish the Resistance against Israel and would move politically towards the “principal Arab powers”, meaning the current Arab dictatorships. [27] Therefore, while there is no doubt that the Syrian government has major deficiencies and that excessive force has been used by army soldiers and security service members, leading to the deaths of innocent people, Iranians do not believe that the US, EU, Qatari and Saudi led attempts for regime change in Damascus are being carried out for the sake of freedom or democracy. If only for self-preservation, these absolute monarchies will, with the aid of their Western backers, try to deter any meaningful move towards democracy near their borders, at all costs. Hence, the continued US support for the Jordanian king, the Egyptian military, [28] the Yemeni regime, the Saudi occupation of Bahrain, and the Al-Khalifa dictatorship. [29] The United States has a policy of deterring democracy in the region, so why should anyone believe they have a sincere interest in freedom for Syrians?

There is evidence indicating the United States has been viewing sectarianism as a potential tool for weakening its adversaries for quite some time now. [30] This fits well with the current situation in Syria. The fact that Turkey, which seems to be showing Neo-Ottoman tendencies, has allowed Abdulhakim Belhadj (who was close to both the al-Qaeda leadership and the Taliban) to meet with leaders of the so called “Free Syrian Army” in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey is mind boggling. [31] In addition, Salafi clerics close to the insurgency repeatedly incite religious, racial, and sectarian violence, such as the well-known Saudi cleric Saleh Al-Luhaidan, who said a third of the Syrian population should be killed so that the rest could live. [32] The foreign-backed extremists even murdered the son of the Syria’s Grand Sunni Mufti, [33] just as their allies killed many Sunni clerics and sheikhs in the Anbar province in Iraq.

Whether the Syrian regime survives in its current form, reforms itself, or falls is not really the central issue—though in Tehran it is widely believed that President Assad will survive this crisis and most probably remain in power. What is striking is how the Americans and Europeans simply do not learn from history. One would imagine that, after the September 11 attacks, they would have learned a thing or two about blowback. If extremist ideologies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, funded by the Saudis and other oil-rich Arab regimes, can create such immense difficulties for Western countries, imagine the problem when their sphere of influence reaches North Africa, India, Nigeria, Central Asia, and Turkey.

In any case, despite American attempts to preserve the old order, the region is rapidly changing. This has enormous implications for the Islamic Republic, the United States, and Israel. There is no doubt that future political orders in Egypt and Tunisia will, to say the least, be highly critical of Zionism. It is even possible to imagine the rise of radically different political orders in the future in countries like Jordan.

Iran will no longer be an isolated voice in its opposition to Israeli apartheid. This alone will be a major breakthrough for the Islamic Republic, since it will significantly decrease Western pressure on the country. Ongoing events in Yemen also have the potential to help bring about major change in the Persian Gulf region, especially after the role that the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others have played to preserve the current regime. In the midst of all this, oil-rich countries to the north of the Islamic Republic are also beginning to show signs of instability.

It is important to note that, contrary to Western propaganda, no Iranian leader has at any point advocated the dismantling of Israel through military annihilation. Despite the often willful distortion of the Iranian president’s words in the Western media, the Islamic Republic’s position has consistently been that Israel, like apartheid South Africa, is a colonial entity entitling a particular group of “chosen people” exceptional rights while denying those rights to the majority of the native population, thereby leaving the regime without any legitimacy. Iran’s stance against Israel is based on what it sees to be an important moral principle. [34] The Islamic Republic followed the same principle in its opposition to apartheid South Africa, at a time when Western countries backed the regime. From the Iranian perspective, the only way for the Palestinian issue to be resolved is for the Zionist ideology to be relinquished, so that Muslims, Christians, and Jews can live as equals in the land of Palestine. If the Palestinian people as a whole, including refugees, come to an agreement with Israel, the Islamic Republic would respect the Palestinian decision and refrain from interference. Nevertheless, on moral grounds it will not recognize the Israeli regime as legitimate. Of course, the extremist ideologies promoted by wealthy Arab dictatorships have a very different view of religious diversity and coexistence.

The claim that the Islamic Republic is somehow a military threat is not only dishonest, but the reverse of reality. The United States and Israel, along with other Western countries have repeatedly made military threats against the Iranian people, while the Iranians have never made threats of their own. Of course, Iranians believe that an attack on Iran is unlikely, because even senior American leaders admit that the consequences would be highly detrimental to the United States and its interests. [35] However, the mere threats themselves are seen as inhuman and irrational; because of such American behavior, Iran has prepared itself for any potential American miscalculation.

Ayatollah Khamenei recently stated that, while Iran will never carry out aggression, from now on the Islamic Republic will respond to threats with threats. [36] Iranians firmly believe that stability or instability from the Mediterranean to the borders of India is inextricably linked to peace and stability in the Persian Gulf region. A look at a map makes clear that Iran has the ability to respond to threats throughout the region and beyond. If there is no security for Iranians or for Iranian oil exports, then, in Iranian eyes, there will be no security for Iran’s antagonists in the region. [37] Under such conditions, the United States and its allies should not expect oil or gas to flow out of the Persian Gulf, northern Iraq, or Central Asia. It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the Islamic Republic’s military power and resolve as well as the region’s popular response to yet another western act of aggression in a very unstable region.

Hence, it is in the interest of the declining Western powers to take a more rational approach towards regional issues and a more reasonable approach towards the Islamic Republic. Any attempt to hurt or humiliate Iranians will simply harden Iran’s stance and have an opposite effect, whereas reason and respect can lead to a solution acceptable to all sides. As things stand; however, the Islamic Republic has no option but to make conditions more difficult for the United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf region.

It is also in the interest of those so-called “Iran experts” in Western countries who consistently distort reality inside Iran to behave more responsibly. [38] Their constant caricature of Iranian society as well as their unfounded claims of fraud in the 2009 presidential elections, [ 39] have largely served the interests of unwise advocates of confrontation within the United States who need to “delegitimize” the Islamic Republic in the eyes of the American public. Iranians know quite well that a country engaged in perpetual war—where even establishment figures such as Helen Thomas, Rick Sanchez, and Octavia Nasr are silenced, where academics are denied tenure for their political views, [40], where people are imprisoned for making television channels like Al-Manar available to the public, [41] and where innocent citizens are regularly harassed by the FBI and IRS or arrested on trumped-up charges, simply because they are antiwar, anti-Wall Street or because of their sympathy for Palestinians, Lebanon, or Iran [42]—has little right to speak about Iran. Those who do so anyway should at least have the decency to wait until the last Iranian gas victim dies.

Seyed Mohamed Marandi is an Associate Professor at the University of Tehran and is currently spending a sabbatical year in Beirut.  He can be reached at mmarandi@ut.ac.ir.

[1] http://farsi.khamenei.ir/speech-content?id=10955

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/world/middleeast/voting-in-egypt-shows-mandate-for-islamists.html

[3] http://farsi.khamenei.ir/speech-topic

[4] http://www.raceforiran.com/the-islamic-republic-of-iran-the-united-states-and-the-balance-of-power-in-the-middle-east

[5] http://farsi.khamenei.ir/speech-content?id=17269

[6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/22/iran-sanctions-economy-government  and

http://djavad.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/the-fall-of-the-iranian-rial-too-much-of-a-good-thing/

[7] http://www.wikileaks.de/cable/2009/01/09LONDON50.html

[8] http://www.presstv.com/detail/204299.html

[9] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/julian-borger-global-security-blog/2010/nov/30/iaea-wikileaks

[10] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/29/news/la-pn-ron-paul-sanctions-act-of-war20111229

[11] http://rt.com/news/russia-iran-watchdog-nuclear-953/

[12] http://en.rian.ru/world/20111209/169515956.html

[13] http://www.zarcommedia.com/index.php/research-documents/6691.html

[14] http://irna.ir/ENNewsShow.aspx?NID=30669329

[15] http://www.raceforiran.com/is-the-u-s-%E2%80%98offer%E2%80%99-to-iran-on-medical-isotopes-a-pretext-for-more-coerciveaction

[16] http://www.raceforiran.com/why-should-iran-trust-president-obama

[17] http://rt.com/politics/iran-approves-russian-nuclear/

[18] http://irannuc.ir/fa/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id= -در-ار-هیسور-حرط-امابوا-یلم-تینما-رواشم: 1721

درک &catid= برغ-یمسر-عضاوم-هعومجم: 105 &Itemid=512

[19] http://www.raceforiran.com/giving-%E2%80%9Cengagement%E2%80%9D-a-bad-name-obama%E2%80%99s-iran-policy-at-oneyear

[20] http://www.news24.com/World/News/US-spy-operations-will-continue-20111214

[21] http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NA05Ak03.html  and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharmine-narwani/stratforchallenges-narra_b_1158710.html

[22] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/04/syria-iran-great-game

[23] http://www.presstv.ir/detail/218712.html and http://www.gulftimes.

com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=478192&version=1&template_id=36&parent_id=16

[24] http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NA05Ak03.html and http://rt.com/news/syrian-ngo-western-support-755/

[25] http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/time-rethink-syria

[26] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/8857883/Syrias-President-Assad-I-live-a-normal-life-its-why-Impopular.html

[27] http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/revolution-against-resistance

[28] http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2011/11/21/tahrir-square-unnerves-us-turkey/

[29] http://www.raceforiran.com/american-misreading-of-iran-and-the-changing-reality-of-the-middle-east

[30] http://www.salon.com/writer/sharmine_narwani/

[31] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8919057/Leading-Libyan-Islamist-met-Free-Syrian-Army-opposition-group.html

[32] http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MG15Ak02.html

[33] http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90777/90854/7609900.html

[34] http://conflictsforum.org/2011/ayatollah-khamenei-and-a-principled-foreign-policy/

[35] http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4937

[36] http://farsi.khamenei.ir/speech-content?id=17868

[37] http://www.tabnak.ir/fa/news/ ھشدار-ایران-بھاي-نفت-را-افزایش-داد/ 214501

[38] http://www.raceforiran.com/american-misreading-of-iran-and-the-changing-reality-of-the-middle-east

[39] http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/9757  and

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=33663  and

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/652.php

[40] http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/the-chronicle-of-higher-ed-a-reliable-source/

[41] http://middleeast.about.com/b/2009/04/25/absurd-prison-sentence-for-new-yorker-over-hezbollah-tv.htm

[42] http://www.freeseyedmousavi.com/

Intelligence services agree: Iran is not trying to develop a nuclear weapon

By David Morrison 

Asked about Iran’s nuclear programme on Face the Nation on CBS on 8 January 2012, US Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, replied:

“Are they [the Iranians] trying to develop a nuclear weapon?  No.” [1]

Viewers whose opinions on Iran’s nuclear activities have been formed by mainstream media in the West must have been amazed by this statement.  There, the impression is constantly given Iran definitely has an active programme to develop nuclear weapons, which will yield results in a year or two.  And that has been the impression for the last six or eight years.

One would never guess that it has been the considered view of the US intelligence services since November 2007 that Iran hasn’t got an active nuclear weapons programme.  This assessment was contained in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) entitled Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, key judgments of which were made public.  These stated, inter alia:

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program … We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007 …” [2]

An IAEA statement on 4 December 2007 in response to the NIE said:

“IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei received with great interest the new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear program which concludes that there has been no on-going nuclear weapons program in Iran since the fall of 2003. He notes in particular that the Estimate tallies with the Agency’s consistent statements over the last few years that, although Iran still needs to clarify some important aspects of its past and present nuclear activities, the Agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran.” [3]

The NIE’s conclusions were a disappointment rather than a relief to President George W Bush, who complained in his memoir, Decision Points, that the news “tied my hands on the military side”, saying:

“But after the NIE, how could I possible explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?”

(Quoted in Urging Obama to Stop Rush to Iran War by ex-CIA analysts Ray McGovern and Elizabeth Murray, published by Consortiumnews.com on 30 December 2011 [4])

Subsequent annual threat assessments of the US intelligence community given to the US Congress were not materially different from the conclusions of the NIE.  For example, the February 2011 assessment to the House of Representatives intelligence committee by the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper stated:

“We continue to assess [that] Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.” [5]

So, when he expressed the opinion on 8 January 2012 that Iran hadn’t got a nuclear weapons programme, Defense Secretary Panetta was merely repeating the considered view of the US intelligence services for the past four or five years.

Do the Israeli intelligence services disagree with this assessment?  Not significantly, judging by quotations from key Israeli intelligence service personnel published in the Israeli media.

“Israel: Iran still mulling whether to build nuclear bomb” was the headline on an article by Amos Harel in Haaretz on 18 January 2012, just before a recent visit to Israel by the head of the US military.  The article said:

“Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb, according to the intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon – or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.” [6]

This concurs with the view expressed in January 2011 by the head of Israeli military intelligence, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, just after his appointment to the post.

According to an Agence France Presse report, he told the Knesset foreign affairs and defence committee on 25 January 2011 that “Iran is not currently working on producing a nuclear weapon but could make one within ‘a year or two’ of taking such a decision” [7].  He added that Iran “would then need more time to develop an effective missile delivery system for it”.

He also said “it was unlikely that Iran which currently enriches uranium to 20 percent, would start enriching to the 90 percent level needed for a bomb, because it would be in open breach of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty exposing it to harsher sanctions or even a US or Israeli military strike”, adding that “at the moment, it’s not in Iran’s interest to move their programme ahead”.

Earlier in January 2011, Meir Dagan, who had just retired as head of Mossad, told the same Committee that he did not believe that Iran would be able to produce a nuclear weapon until 2015 (see Haaretz, 7 January 2011, [8]).  According to Haaretz, he said that “Iran was a long way from being able to produce nuclear weapons, following a series of failures that had set its program back by several years”.

So, whereas Israeli political leaders often assert that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is imminent, Israel’s intelligence services question whether Iran has made a decision to develop nuclear weapons.  In that, they appear to be at one with the US intelligence services.

References:

[1]  www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57354647/face-the-nation-transcript-january-8-2012/

[2]  www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf

[3]  www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/PressReleases/2007/prn200722.html

[4]  http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/30/urging-obama-to-stop-rush-to-iran-war/

[5]  www.dni.gov/testimonies/20110210_testimony_clapper.pdf

[6]  www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israel-iran-still-mulling-whether-to-build-nuclear-bomb-1.407866

[7]  www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gShKfmWcoQ1ABBQ_DodMUUh61ckA

[8]  www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/outgoing-mossad-chief-iran-won-t-have-nuclear-capability-before-2015-1.335656

By David Morrison, board member of Sadaka, January 2012.  He can be reached at david@sadaka.ie.

The On-Going War Against Truth – An Analysis

by Lawrence Davidson
　

Part I – The Spanish Front
　
Among the numerous wars that are perennially being waged worldwide is the one between truth-tellers and those who would suppress the truth. I have alluded to this war in prior analyses that took up the plight of such truth-tellers as Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. Their crime is not, as is sometimes suggested, the speaking of truth to Power. As Noam Chomsky once suggested, Power already knows the truth, and doesn’t care about it. No, their crime is the speaking truth to the rest of us. Disenchanting the public of official lies is what really rattles those in power. Of course, it is quite possible that most of the public, in the U.S. and elsewhere, doesn’t care about the truth either. However, Power is not taking any chances in this regard.
　
Recently, a new front in this continuing war has opened up. On 17 January 2012 Al Jazeera reported that Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon had “gone on trial in the country’s supreme court on [three separate] charges of abusing judicial powers.”
　
Garzon is a very important truth-teller. He has conducted a number of investigations into violations of international law against torture. Using the principle of universal jurisdiction Garzon went after Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet back in 1998, and in March of 2009 he stated that Spain could bring charges against six Bush Jr. administration officials for clearing the way for the use of torture during the Iraq war. At least four men who are Spanish citizens, and also former prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison, have accused the U.S. military of torturing them. It was at this point that the U.S. government appears to have placed Garzon in a category that would also include Manning and Assange: the category of the dangerous truth-teller.
　
The U.S. Ambassador to Spain in 2009, Eduardo Aguirre describes his actions (in a diplomatic cable made public by Wikileaks in 2010) in relation to the Garzon investigation as follows, “…behind the scenes we have fought tooth and nail to make the charges disappear.” The significant word here is “disappear” for there are two approaches to suppressing an unwanted truth. The first is to create a counter-story that makes the truth appear untrue. The second is to simply suppress all evidence, all references, all interest so that the particular truth just “disappears.”
　
Aguirre managed to get the cooperation of Spain’s Chief Prosecutor Javier Zaragoza who is quoted in another U.S. diplomatic cable (also made public by Wikileaks) to the effect that he had a plan to “embarrass” Garzon into dropping his case against the Bush officials by misrepresenting Garzon’s actions in previous cases. This sounds like a bit of blackmail.
　
Garzon did not relent and now he is on trial for “abusing judicial powers” in this and other cases.
Garzon and his supporters, which include almost every human rights group on the planet, claim that the charges are politically motivated and, to be sure, the entire affair appears similar to the questionable rape charge facing Assange in Sweden. In the case of Garzon, the Spanish Public Prosecutor (different than the Chief Prosecutor) has recommended acquittal on all three charges and yet there is still serious doubt that this will happen. If he is found guilty on any of the charges Garzon “could be banned from serving as a judge for 20 years, in what would be a career-ending blow to the 55-year-old.” This is precisely the outcome the U.S. government would like to see.
　
The good news is that this battle to silence Garzon, has not yet intimidated all other Spanish judges. On 20 January 2012 another Spanish judge , Pablo Rafael Gutierrez, took up the case of the former Spanish citizens who allege torture at Guantanamo Bay. This judge, again used the principle of universal jurisdiction, and noted that the United States government has consistently refused to investigate the Spanish citizen’s charges.
　
James Goldston, the executive director of Open Society Justice Initiative, described the situation this way, “These crimes [such as torture] are universal crimes and it is very clear that until the United States holds to account those responsible for these crimes, other judicial actors in other countries are going to press for accountability.” The most powerful and influential government in the world, the one with its capital in Washington, D.C., is going to fight to halt these foreign efforts. And so, we have a war that seeks to replace the truth with either lies or historical black holes.
　
Part II – Big Truths and Little Truths
　
One of the major themes of George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984, is the controls of information. In book 1, chapter 3 of the novel we find this proposition – if government can control all media and all public records it can either impose a lie as truth or simply make selected past events disappear from society’s collective memory. “Who controls the past…controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Is this not what the United States government is trying to do in the case of its policy of torture: manipulate and hide the truth so people will ignore it and then forget it? And is this not what almost every country tries to do relative to their present crimes or those embedded in their pasts?
　
It is really amazing just how common this sort of manipulation is. And, the reason it is relatively easy for governments to get away with it is because the average man and woman cares mainly about little truths and not big ones.

Little truths are local truths. Don’t be misled to think that little means unimportant because that is not the case. Little truths are the truths that make possible successful daily interactions and that, of course, makes them very important indeed. Thus, one major reason life can go on relatively smoothly is that, most of the time, you can take as true what others tell you. That this is so means we can rely on friends, have stable relationships with spouses and children, and maintain successfully operating offices, business arrangements, etc. When the little truths start to become lies, these relationships break down.
　
Alleged big truths are the ones governments and the major media outlets tell the masses. When the U.S. government tells its citizens that unregulated capitalism will make the nation strong and prosperous, or that there must be a war to prevent Iraq from using weapons of mass destruction; when the major American media outlets tell their viewers and readers that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons or Israel is “just like us,” they are shaping perceptions that are not just local but regional and national. The problem is that, historically, most alleged big truths turn out to be big lies. But by the time the citizenry realizes this it is too late. Then it turns out that the citizens’ historical memories are short and they forget past big lies which allows them to swallow new ones a generation later. And, finally, as long as the little truths work, most people either don’t notice or don’t care about the big lies.
　
Yet truth-tellers, like Manning, Assange and Garzon have good historical memories and they do notice and do care. They realize that when big truths turn out to be big lies people suffer–they suffer in the millions, bombs rain down from the skies, economies falter and the public sphere of life becomes like a poisoned well. That is why accountability for the crimes hidden behind big lies is so important. That is why no government, no politician, no media organization should be allowed to manipulate the truth about the past or the present. On this the future depends.
 

Written by:

Lawrence Davidson
Department of History
West Chester University
West Chester, Pennsylvania, USA 19383

22 January 2012

ldavidson@wcupa.edu
www.tothepointanalyses.com
www.twitter.com/pointanalyses

Unsettled, unlawful, unresolved:    

Israeli settlers in a foreign land

By Graham Peebles

Violence, abuse, non-accountability, hate—such is communal living today within the occupied West Bank, where some 518,974 colonisers[1] sit within “200”[2] illegal settlements. Noam Chomsky: “The settlements cover over 42% of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), not counting the Jordon valley, which they are taking over”[3] Estimates of colonisation vary from the 42% reported by Chomsky and BT Salem to that of Human Rights Watch who at 60% set the figure even higher.

Around half a million ‘settlers’, more accurately, colonisers, now squat upon Palestinian soil, huddled within walled encampments upon stolen land, branded blue and white. Noisily perching upon hilltops, rooms with a view, or flourishing in verdant valleys, these settlements creep shamefully throughout the West Bank and the sacred city Jerusalem, East, West North South; The City of Peace.

Jimmy Carter: “The occupation & confiscation of Palestinian land that doesn’t belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonisation of that land, and the connecting up of those isolated but multiple settlements, (there are some 200), with each other by high-ways on which Palestinians can’t travel and where quite often cannot even cross. The persecution of the Palestinians under the occupation [by the Israelis] is one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation.”

Inside the West Bank Outside the Law

The building of one single settlement is illegal. This is a fact, a fact well known, a fact Israel signs up to and a fact in International Law. Article 49 of The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, to which Israel is a signatory (1949) and has ratified (1951) and Mother-ship USA is a High Contracting Party, “aims at protecting the civilian persons in enemy hands, notably those residing in occupied territories”[4] and “explicitly prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory”. [Emphasis mine]  Foundation For Middle East Peace (FMEP),

The Geneva conventions agreed and adopted after the Second World War are “one of the major sources of international humanitarian law and are binding [emphasis mine] upon [the] 189 signatory states” (FMEP), meaning you can’t simply ignore them. As a party to the Geneva Conventions, the United States is obligated “to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.”[5] [Emphasis mine] Israel and the USA, two of those bound, some feel gagged and bound would serve well, by the conventions, failed to attend a conference in December 2001 in Geneva, concerning the application of international humanitarian law in the occupied Palestinian territories. A scandalous absence by the two key ‘players’ or ‘builders’ – not of peace, but builders of conflict, separation walls and Israeli housing condos.

“Notwithstanding this ban, almost half-a-million Jewish Israelis with Israeli government support have moved into settlements it has constructed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and formally annexed occupied territory in East Jerusalem, a move not recognized by any other government in the world.”[6]

The settlers are living illegally, often violently, supported by all manner of subsidies from the Knesset, “which entitles them to a number of benefits: in housing, by enabling settlers to purchase quality, inexpensive apartments, with an automatic grant of a subsidized mortgage; wide-ranging benefits in education, such as free education from age three, extended school days, free transportation to schools, and higher teachers’ salaries; for industry and agriculture, by grants and subsidies, and indemnification for the taxes imposed on their produce by the European Union; in taxation, by imposing taxes significantly lower than in communities inside the Green Line, and by providing larger balancing grants to the settlements, to aid in covering deficits.”[7]

These subsidies are little more than bribes, all thanks to Mother Goose USA. Chomsky: “We’re [USA] paying for it [settlement building, subsidies, security], stop paying for it, stop supporting it, stop subsidising. Stop allowing the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to remain in the territories. The setters are subsidized to stay there [the OPT], if the subsidies are withdrawn, they [settlers] will have to face the fact that they are not the ‘Lords of the Land’ they will then go back to Israel”

Israel however disregards, with impunity the many and various, binding agreements, such is the arrogance of the aggressor. Tzipi Livni, when serving as Israel’s foreign minister: “I’m a lawyer and I’m against the law, international law in particular”. Norman Finkelstein commenting: “She had good reason for saying that because under international law “Israel loses, on Jerusalem, on the West Bank and Gaza, on settlements and right of return for refugees”[8] There is a rising light of freedom and unity throughout the World Miss Livni, it glints from the cleansing sword of justice, law, International, National, ignore it at your peril, Israel.

Israel is supported, sustained and supplied, in words, arms and deed by the US. During 2011, the U.S. provided Israel with at least $8.2 million per day in military aid”[9] alone. The One who rides shotgun above any treatise, convention and or nation, Big American Brother, allows [Israel] to dissent encourages violation of international law and leads by example. One has only to recall the International Court of Justice judgement against them (USA) in 1984, when the ICJ found in favour of Nicaragua. As Noam Chomsky puts it, “America was condemned by the World Court for, what they called unlawful use of force for political ends, another word for International terrorism. Tens of thousands of people [were] killed [and] the country ruined perhaps beyond recovery. The ICJ ordered the US to terminate their crimes and pay substantial reparations”.[10]  The US ignored the court and continued unabated, in fact escalating the terror.  It seems international laws apply to some but not to others, ‘Do unto others as ye would have others do unto you’. Good idea unless it’s Israel or their Godfather in and of arms, America.

In February 2011 the USA vetoed a proposed United Nations Security Council Resolution calling upon Israel ‘to end illegal policies that promote settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem’ (HRW)[11]. In so doing they undermined international law and gave the green, or should we say the blue and white light, to their Middle East proxy, to continue committing criminal acts, by expanding the settlement building, the colonisation, within and of the West Bank, to include East Jerusalem.

In the UN report (UNSCIIPA)[12], the concerns of the General Assembly are made plain. ‘Despite the repeated calls from the international community and the illegality of settlements, the State of Israel is continuing to expand settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, in violation of its international legal obligations [emphasis mine]. The report continues, ‘Israel is in violation of international humanitarian law, relevant United Nations resolutions, agreements reached between the parties and obligations under the Quartet road map’.

The Clash

Clashes between settlers living illegally upon the West Bank, a line drawn in the 1967 sand –walled and fenced, and Palestinians in their homes, upon their land, inside their schools and mosques, is growing, intensifying and escalating. The UN report makes clear how serious the problem is: “Many of these incidents have been overtly violent acts targeting Palestinian individuals and communities with live ammunition, destruction and denial of access to property, physical assault and the throwing of stones. Some incidents have led to the killing and injury of Palestinians”.

According to Defence for Children International (DCI) ‘there has been a sharp increase in settler violence incidents against children. As of May 2011, DCI documented 19 cases of violence against children involving settlers, two of them fatal’.[13]  Two cases of murder, murder of two innocent children at the hands of the colonisers.

We find in the UN report (UNSCIIPA) the following. “From September 2010 to May 2011, 5 deaths (including three children) and more than 270 cases of injury of Palestinians by Israeli settlers were recorded, lack of accountability for Israeli settlers persists. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) not only failed to protect Palestinians, there are documented instances of their direct involvement in violence perpetrated against Palestinians”.  Noam Chomsky says, “We [USA] now have in the OPT a neo-colonial army, the IDF, to control the population.” [14]

The following shocking examples of settler violence as monitored by the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) are given in the UN report, they are illustrative of the violence that Palestinians suffer at the hands of Israeli settlers, and are simply some of the loudest in a crowd of screaming atrocities committed by Israeli colonists against Palestinian men women and children, their places of worship and of education. So here they are, to the shame of the ‘settlers’.

 “On 7 March 2011, a group of at least 12 settlers from the “outpost” of Esh Kodesh in the northern West Bank attacked Palestinians from the adjacent village of Qusra. Three of the settlers were armed with a handgun and two rifles while the rest were carrying baseball bats and metal bars. One of the settlers had a dog. The settlers hurled stones at the Palestinians and fired guns in the air, before physically assaulting the Palestinians. Israel Defence Forces soldiers reached the scene 30 to 45 minutes later, but the Israel Defence Forces personnel acted only in support of the settlers. One of the Palestinians was shot in his left wrist by a settler. An Israel Defence Forces soldier shot another victim in the leg from a distance of some 30 metres. Once on the ground the same Israel Defence Forces soldier shot him again from close range in the other leg. While trying to flee, the victim was hit in the leg and kicked in the face by a settler with a wooden stick, in the presence of the Israel Defence Forces soldier who had just shot him. An Israel Defence Forces soldier hit another Palestinian in the head with the butt of his rifle. Once the victim fell on the ground, a settler and the Israel Defence Forces soldier started kicking him”.

“On 27 January 2011, an 18-year-old Palestinian grazing his goats on his land was shot dead at point blank range by a settler on Palestinian land south of the village of Iraq Burin. Footage of the killing captured by a security camera appeared in various media. On 15 February 2011, an 18-year-old Palestinian from the village of Jalud south of Nablus, which is surrounded by six Israeli settlements and “outposts”, was shot in his stomach”[15]

 “Settler violence [According to the UN]  is not random criminal activity; in most cases, it is ideology-driven, organized violence, the goal of which is to assert settler dominance over an area.”

The Israeli methodology of suppression, control and terror, is organised and systematic, ‘policies and practices’, as the UN calls them, the settlement building, land theft (UN diplomatically, calls it ‘confiscation’), ‘zoning’ – a term invoking images of social, ethnic and racial manipulation, or cleansing. Add to this Eviction, from their own land, and the barbaric practice of house or home demolitions and you have a witches’ brew of control, victimisation and criminality, which has cast a toxic cloak over the lives of Palestinians and a shadow over history.

In their Sites

Sites for settlements, like everything else the occupying Israeli force undertakes, are chosen with care, on hilltops overlooking valleys, Palestinians, and Bedouins. A demographic dot to dot, one colony merges with another, the dots connected, a line is formed. The line a triangle, the triangle a star, six armed and driven hard into the freshly watered Palestinian earth, to flutter in full intimidation, as the settlers sit high above the valley and the law, eagle eyeing the Palestinians, upon their homeland. And from that height settlers establishing new lows “dump raw sewage down the hillside, contaminating the well[s] and making it unusable for agriculture and drinking’. (IMEMC)[16]

Dual Lives

Two parallel ways of life exist within the West Bank, a controlled, unjust, frightening existence for Palestinians living behind walls of servitude upon their homeland. And a comfortable, flourishing life within their tree lined encampments for the settlers. Palm trees and gardens bursting with colour create a theme park image of artificial beauty upon a battleground of injustice and hate.  Defence for Children International states “Over 90% of settler violence incidents that are investigated by Israeli authorities are closed without any charges being filed. There is a dual system of law operating in the West Bank. The settlers are subject to Israeli civil law, with all the rights of a democratic state guaranteed to them. Palestinians, on the other hand are governed by a series of military orders within a military system, which deprives them of the rights guaranteed to their Israeli settler neighbours. This dual system of law discriminates against Palestinians’.[17]

A ‘dual system’ indeed, “Human Rights Watch recently documented Israel’s two-tier system for the Palestinian and Israeli Jewish populations in the 60 % of West Bank area that Israel controls and in East Jerusalem. Israeli policies deliberately withhold basic services from Palestinians, causing tremendous hardships by preventing and punishing the construction of homes and infrastructure for their communities, while providing generous financial benefits and infrastructure for Jewish settlements. Such differential treatment lacks any security rationale, but is meted out on the prohibited basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin[18]”

A two tier system of injustice, cruelty and control, If they could they would bottle sunlight and ration its use. They have turned day to night, and in the darkness of division, violence and hate they march, out of step with the men and women of goodwill that would bring peace and harmony to the land, out of pace with the winds of change that are sweeping humanity towards peace and unity, out of sync with the destiny of the nations to live safely side by side as enshrined in International Law.

 A ‘dual system’, where a settler, shoots and kills, with impunity an innocent Palestinian, as in the case of the “18-year-old Palestinian grazing his goats on his land was shot dead at point blank range by a settler on Palestinian land south of the village of Iraq Burin”[19] A system which allows a six year old child on his way to the neighbourhood shop for his grandfather to be ‘detained’ by the Israeli army, “they kept the child in detention for four hours at a nearby police station (to Al-Esawiyya town), and interrogated him in an attempt to intimidate him in to giving them names of youth who hurled stones at the soldiers” said. Mohammad Ali Dirbas, after the ‘kidnapping’: ‘“The Police tried to terrify me, but they can’t scare me, they must leave our land.” (IMEMC).

The UN concludes its detailed excellent report (UNSCIIPA) with six clearly articulated recommendations. All recommendations should be applied forthwith. The two most prescient measures are:

1. The Government of Israel should bring its policies and practices into compliance with its international legal obligations and its commitments in the Road Map, as well as the repeated calls of the international community to immediately cease the transfer of its civilian population into occupied territory and to completely freeze all settlement activities in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, and to immediately dismantle all “outposts”.
2. The Government of Israel should take all necessary measures to prevent attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians and their property in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Enough, enough of the injustice, violence and fear, let International Law be done and let the Palestinian people live in peace in their country. Mohammed Ali Dirbas, you speak for all decent men and women everywhere, here here and God bless that child and all those upon the land that is rightly their home.

Graham Peebles is the Director of  The Create Trust.  He can be reached at info@thecreatetrust.org.

London 2012

BICOM alert: now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of Israel

By Richard Kuper

Disagreement about how political issues are framed is normal.  Different actors have different visions, issues of concern on which they wish to focus. It’s all part of the natural cut and thrust of politics and one can generally recognize the point of view of others, even where one’s own concerns are different.

The line between legitimately partisan presentation of an issue and propaganda is hard to draw and the aim of any successful propaganda campaign is to blur this line. Israeli hasbara (propaganda) provides many good examples of the conscious attempt by its practitioners to blur the line.

The Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre (Bicom) has recently produced a Toolkit, intended, in Bicom’s words “to give pro-Israel campaigners the essential information and advice needed to campaign for Israel both all-year-round and in the event of a crisis when Israel hits the headlines.” Strangely, you can’t find it on the Bicom website but, thanks to the net, it is available.*

The reason for the concern is obvious: the Israeli narrative is not playing well among the wider public in the face of a series of own goals scored by Israel in recent years. These range from its war on Gaza three years ago now, to the massacre on the Mavi Marmara; from the almost daily reports of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to the increased hostility towards and discrimination against the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the erosion of Israeli democracy even for its dissident Jewish citizens. The advertising campaign in the US last autumn to persuade Israeli Jews to ‘come home’ America is no place for a Jew: that’s official was disastrous and had to be hastily stopped. And in recent weeks we have had the obscenity of the ultra-orthodox presenting themselves as ‘holocaust’ victims and spitting on an 8-year old girl on her way to school because of her immodest dress.

For Bicom the war on the Palestinians, the continued land grab in the West Bank, the casual violence of the occupation or the drift towards right-wing authoritarianism and fundamentalism in Israel are all secondary. The task is to divert attention from these developments by stressing other things, cases where Israel can be shown up in a good light and its enemies (i.e. its critics) in a bad one.

What is to be done? Turn the Jewish community in Britain into an organised advocate for Israel. “Although the Jewish community in the UK has over 2,000 national organisations,” says Bicom, “it lacks a grassroots network advocating for Israel.” Anyone who ‘confuses’ what Israel as ‘the Jewish state’ does with what Jews elsewhere think is often accused of making illegitimate or even antisemitic elisions. But it’s fine if Jews in the diaspora (or anyone else for that matter) wish to support Israel. And Bicom has stepped in with a hasbara (propaganda) guide: who to lobby, how to lobby and to communicate, how to organise locally, in political parties, unions, on campus and much more besides.

The truth is that, once you accept the premises, it’s not stupid. Much of what the Toolkit outlines is what anyone engaged in political argument and communication needs to know and while some of the arguments deployed may make you seethe with rage it is important to read and learn from them. It is, essentially a handbook of how to divert attention from what people are talking about (human rights, illegal settlement, occupation, humiliation, segregation) by talking about other things – Israel as a democracy, Hamas (terrorist), Judge Goldstone (he retracted), the holocaust (Palestinian leaders were Nazi supporters), Israel’s long commitment to ‘the two-state solution’ and its ‘long legacy of accepting territorial compromise as the way to solve its disputes in the region’. And so on.

Of course this Bicom publication is only one is a long list of similar interventions. In recent years the Israeli government has recognized that it is losing the battle for public opinion. (see the report in July 2010 Israeli propaganda not working so well in the US and New Israeli embassy propaganda project in which Barak Ravid reported in Ha’aretz (31 May 2010) that “The Foreign Ministry is planning to use front groups to transmit hasbara (public relations ) messages in order to influence senior politicians, opinion shapers and journalists in Europe, ministry sources said.”) A year earlier The Israel Project in the US produced its fancifully named Global Language Directory. It is a massive 116-page hasbara project, clearly marked “Property of The Israel Project. Not for distribution or publication. 2009”.

Fortunately again, there is the net. The document was leaked to Newsweek online and while it can no longer be found on that site, it is available elsewhere, currently at the location given above. In 2009 Richard Silverstein, who runs the Tikun Olam blogsite, published an article about it under the title The Israel Project’s Secret Hasbara Handbook Exposed. In it he claimed that “The first thing to say is that the entire document is a pathetic piece of propaganda.” It isn’t, unfortunately. Propaganda, maybe, but Silverstein ignores how and why propaganda works. The presentations given are generally quite sophisticated, the communication techniques they teach quite effective. You have to know in order to be able to refute their arguments. Silverstein knows; but he ignores how many don’t and for whom the selective presentation of partial aspects of the reality on the ground is either convincing, or sufficiently confusing to raise doubts and uncertainties.

Of course, you can view the organised Zionist movement as one big hasbara campaign. There is nothing particularly new about Bicom or the Israel Project campaigns. A particularly interesting earlier example is the The Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus published in 2002 by the World Union of Jewish Students and sponsored by the Education Department of the Jewish Agency for Israel and the US charity the Joint Distribution Committee. With its “neutralizing negativity” and “pushing positivity” approach it tries to teach its audience how to set the agenda, “how to score points while avoiding debate” and much else besides. It’s all good, cynical stuff taking its lead from marketing strategies and experience where cynical manipulation has been developed to a fine art, particularly in the US.

Written by Richard Kuper, 9 January 2012, for Jews for Justice for Palestinians.  This article originally appeared here and is reprinted with permission.

* Note that the ‘Toolkit’ is available at http://www.webelieveinisrael.org/index.html, the website for Bicom’s May 2011 conference.  –editor