Saturday, December 8, 2012

Paul Pillar : Zoning Out in the Middle East

Paul Pillar : Zoning Out in the Middle East

My Catbird SeatDecember 8, 20121
Editor' s Note : This week a United Nations resolution, approved by a vote of 174 to six with six abstentions, called on Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) "without further delay" and open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Those voting against were Israel, the U.S., Canada, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau.
A conference sponsored by the United Nations and backed by Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom, on building a nuclear-free Middle East that was set to take place this month in Finland, has been postponed. Postponing the talks was a missed opportunity writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R Pillar

Obama’s missed chance to assert American leadership at the Helsinki Conference on a Nuclear-Free Middle East and possibly bringing both Israel and Iran to the table.


by Paul Pillar

This was supposed to be the month for an international conference to discuss a possible weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the Middle East.
The concept of such a zone has been addressed in past review conferences of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT), sessions of the United Nations General Assembly, and meetings at the International Atomic Energy Agency. The official convenors of the conference would be the United States, United Kingdom and Russia, the depository states for the NPT. The gathering was to have been hosted by Finland, with preparatory work having already been done by Finnish diplomat Jaakko Laajava. But a couple of weeks ago the State Department announced that “the conference cannot be convened because of present conditions in the Middle East and the fact that states in the region have not reached agreement on acceptable conditions for a conference.”

Israel rejects NPT conference for nuclear free Middle East

The principal objector was Israel, which—notwithstanding its vociferous agitation about what it contends is a drive by Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon—has always said that weapons-free zones in its region need to await a regional peace.
Postponing the conference was a missed opportunity. And this matter was not like, say, trying to get the Israelis to stop building settlements in occupied territory, which requires a positive Israeli action to accomplish anything. As one of the convening powers, the United States, along with its British and Russian partners, could have simply gone ahead and convened the conference as scheduled. Israel could decide whether or not it would attend. The conference would be better with Israeli attendance, but could still do some good even without it.
No one believes creation of a nuclear- or WMD-free zone in the region is feasible any time soon. No signs suggest Israel is about to part with its arsenal of nuclear weapons. But the postponed conference was only going to discuss such a zone, not create one. Such discussion can be part of a long-term process beneficial to security in the region.
Nuclear weapons-free zones are a proven and well-established concept. They exist, among other places, in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. The State Department announcement and the usual Israeli objections suggest that other types of conflict resolution must precede international agreements restricting categories of weapons. But beneficial spillover effects can work in the other direction as well—just as during the Cold War strategic arms limitation agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union not only achieved reductions in nuclear arsenals but also became a tool of, and an impetus for, a larger process of detente. Among the existing nuclear weapons-free zones, the one in Latin America is especially instructive in this regard. The treaty establishing it was negotiated before Argentina and Brazil had fully given up their nuclear weapons ambitions. The treaty established a framework for hastening that process and achieving broader reconciliation in South America.

Ambassador to the IAEA says Iran "decided to participate" in the international conference in Finland on creating nuclear-free zone. Photo: Herwig Prammer/Reuters

Discussion of such a zone in the Middle East would help to move away from double standards and the hypocrisy that goes with it. The Iranians have a legitimate gripe in being subject to enormous pressures over the mere suspicion that they might someday use their current nuclear program to make a nuclear weapon, while their principal accuser and antagonist in the region has had a sizable nuclear weapons arsenal for decades. Any Israelis legitimately concerned about the direction Iran might take on nuclear matters ought to realize that ending the double standard would be the best possible way to take away whatever wind is in Iranian sails. In any event, it is in the interests of the United States not to be involved in such hypocrisy.
Discussion of such a zone would be a step toward a long-term security regime that would be in every regional state's interests, including Israel's. With its overwhelming conventional superiority over its neighbors, Israel would be no less secure in a region in which no one, including itself, has nuclear or other unconventional weapons. A thoughtful case can be made that Israel's nuclear arsenal has not bought it any additional security in the past either.
A related matter concerns Israel's refusal to acknowledge that arsenal, a refusal that precludes useful examination of Israel's security needs even in private conversations with its benefactor, the United States. Israel maintains the public position that it will “not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East”—an outright lie, unless “introduce” refers to some strange and meaningless formality. (“Region, I'd like you to meet my nuclear weapons.”) At least the Syrians, in responding to the recent outside concern about possible use of their chemical weapons, avoid a direct lie by using conditional phrasing and saying “if such weapons exist in Syria, we will not…” The leading historian of Israel's nuclear weapons program, Avner Cohen, argues it would be in Israel's interest to stop the silly opacity and acknowledge the existence of its arsenal.
Meanwhile, refusal to talk about any of these matters does not make the issue go away. A reminder of this came earlier this week when the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling on Israel to join the NPT without delay and to open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the IAEA. The vote—174 to 6, with 6 abstentions—was even more overwhelming than the vote on Palestinian statehood. This time the only "no" votes that Israel got besides itself and the United States were Canada and those Pacific powerhouses, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau.
Source : The National Interest
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. )
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Why I am no longer a Zionist

Wayne Myers

Wednesday 28 November 2012

Why I am no longer a Zionist


In this highly personal guest contribution, a British and Jewish blogger reflects on his youth membership of Zionist movements, the recent conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas, and how his relationship with faith changes as he gets older



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I'm a nice Jewish boy from North West London. I was brought up in a family that was never particularly religious – we belonged to a Reform synagogue, not an Orthodox one - but where my Jewish identity was considered extremely important, and where support for Israel was an absolute given. Not blanket, unquestioning support, but support nonetheless.
As a teenager I was heavily involved in RSY-Netzer, the Zionist Jewish youth movement affiliated with the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain. In 1987, at the age of 16, I spent a summer in Israel with RSY, and two years later took a gap-year there. Half that year was spent on Kibbutz Lotan, one of the two Reform Synagogue affiliated kibbutzim, and the other half was spent on a course known colloquially as 'Machon', at the Institute For Youth Leaders From Abroad in Jerusalem, run by an arm of the Israeli state known as the Jewish Agency.

'Hasbarah'

On Machon, along with dozens of other young Jews of my own age from a range of different Zionist youth movements, I received training in youth leadership skills, Jewish history, and what is known in Hebrew as 'hasbarah'. Hasbarah literally means 'explaining', but it has another meaning, which is essentially 'propaganda'.
RSY-Netzer was at that point one of the three most left-wing Zionist youth movements - the other two are the explicitly socialist Habonim-Dror and HaShomer HaTzair. We were encouraged – and at the age of 18 or 19 we needed no encouragement – to spend much time discussing and arguing the fine points of Zionist ideology and Israeli politics both among ourselves and with members of the other movements.
The left-wingers among us were highly critical of many of Israel's actions from the War in Lebanon to the whole of the Occupation, and we all argued strenuously that it was a fundamental necessity for Israel to behave ethically at all times; moreover we left-wingers argued that it was of prime importance that we as Zionists stood up and criticised Israel when it did not do so.
However, none of that criticism was ever allowed to cross the red line of rejecting the idea of the Jewish State itself. We did not go so far as to accept the idea that Zionism was racism or that Israel ought not exist – indeed we had special sessions on Machon where we were explicitly taught strategies for arguing against these ideas. The concept of a democratic secular one-state solution for all inhabitants of the Holy Land, under which Jews and Palestinians would be equal citizens in the eyes of the law, was not at any point on the table.
Unlike most of my colleagues on the Machon course, I made a particular point of learning Hebrew, and while in Jerusalem I met and fell in love with Ayelet, an Israeli girl my own age. She was not long out of basic Army training and had taken up a post as a remedial Hebrew teacher at an Israeli Army school. We spoke only in Hebrew and were for a while very much in love, though she thought I was a complete lunatic not just for being a Zionist – among Israelis the word 'Zionist' means something somewhat different to its meaning in the wider Jewish community – but also for being on the Machon course at all and for seriously considering moving to Israel permanently: her ambition at the time was to move to New York.

Sexual Zionism

I remember joking then that the most potent form of Zionism was not Religious Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, Political Zionism, or Cultural Zionism, all of which we had been taught about in class at Machon, but was rather Sexual Zionism, which we had not been taught about even once. Looking back, I now understand why hardly anyone, Ayelet included, found my joke funny.
As a Jew, despite being born in London, I had and still have the right at any time to move to Israel and immediately take up Israeli citizenship under the Israeli Law of Return. The only reason that I did not do so straight away was that I had a place at Oxford for which, as a state-school applicant, I had worked very hard, and on which I had no intention of missing out. My plan at the time was to get my degree from Oxford and move to Israel afterwards.
Once back in the UK, my obsession with Zionism continued. At Oxford I changed my degree from Maths and Philosophy to Oriental Studies (Hebrew), a course comprising Hebrew literature and Jewish history; on the history side I made a special study of Zionism up to 1948. It astonished me at the time that my parents were implacably against the idea of me becoming an Israeli, but I was 19 and – like all 19 year olds – knew deeply that I was as right about everything as my parents were wrong about everything.
Life at university was something of a shock for two reasons. The first was that as a state-schooler at Oxford, surrounded by the products of public and private school educations, the trappings of extreme privilege to which most of my contemporaries were so effortlessly accustomed seemed enormously strange and discomforting to me. Despite this I largely fit in well at my college, Balliol, which had a reputation for being very left-wing. The second shock was that for the first time in my life I was meeting both Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Zionists.
All my Hasbarah training came out.
I became involved with both the Oxford Jewish Society and the Oxford Israel Society, and ended up spending a lot of time arguing with people about Israel on all sides. With those on my right, I was arguing that Israel was not and had not for some time been behaving ethically, and that it was the absolute duty of anyone who called themselves a Zionist or a supporter of Israel to stand up and call Israel out on these ethical transgressions. With those on my left I was arguing that while Israel might indeed be as ethically dubious a state as any other state on the planet, nothing that it did in any way impinged on its right to exist as a Jewish State.
Many of my left-wing friends at Balliol were utterly shocked to find that I was a Zionist, but I continued to argue passionately for a position on the extreme left of Zionism; I was critical of Israel's moral transgressions, critical of the Occupation, supportive of the putative Palestinian state, supportive of the idea that Jerusalem should be again partitioned de jure (as it already is de facto) so it could be both the capital of that Palestinian state as well as the capital of Israel, but at no point did I dare to cross the red line that questioned the legitimacy of the Jewish State itself.

Charming

While I was at Balliol, Ariel Sharon was invited to speak at the Oxford Union; this resulted in an extremely busy time for me. I was involved in organising the pro-Zionist counter-demonstration to the anti-Zionist demonstration outside the Union; as a Zionist critical of Israel, I was also involved in ensuring that strong criticisms of Israel in general and Sharon in particular were made during the debate. Later that evening, as a guest of the L'Chaim Society, an alternative Jewish student organisation then run by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, I ended up having dinner with Sharon, along with thirty or forty other people, and was astonished at how charming he seemed in person, for all that I strongly disagreed with all aspects of his politics.
I was also pleasantly shocked by Sharon's stories of how his closest friends were not other Israelis at all but were rather Palestinians living in the West Bank for whom – he explained - hospitality and personal relationships trumped any notion of tribal hostility.
By 1993, when I left Oxford, things in my personal life had changed. Ayelet, quite reasonably unwilling to spend three years of her early twenties in a long-distance relationship with a complete lunatic, had left me, and I was now romantically involved with Abigail, a rather posh Jewish girl from one of the old established Anglo-Jewish families from before the wave of immigration from Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century that had brought my own great-grandparents to London. Abigail was about as likely to move to Israel as she was to grow feathers and a beak, and I found myself strongly reconsidering my decision to move there myself.
My political position, however, did not change. As a Zionist I felt passionately that it was of prime importance that Israel's moral transgressions – especially those in the Lebanon war of 1982 and the ongoing indefensible occupation of the West Bank and Gaza - be censured. I felt that the Occupation had to end, and end now, and that the Two State Solution was the only way forward. Since the idea of the right of national self-determination was at the core of my support for Zionism, I found it hard to understand how any Zionist could be against the two state solution.
If the Jews should have self-determination in Israel, I argued, surely it is only logical that the Palestinians should also have self-determination in Palestine. I simply could not understand how those Zionists to my right – which was basically all of them – could not see this.
On Jerusalem, I also could not understand the mainstream Zionist position. Having lived there for some time, and being well aware that the city was effectively divided into Jewish West Jerusalem, where you could safely go, and Palestinian East Jerusalem, which was dangerous and to be avoided at all costs, I simply could not grasp any of the stuff about the 'unification' of Jerusalem that I had been taught.
It might have been unified legally as far as a Zionist was concerned but it certainly wasn't unified in any way in practice, and it seemed to me only right that a repartitioned East Jerusalem should be the capital of the forthcoming Palestinian state just as much as West Jerusalem should remain the capital of the Israeli state. I was sure that Palestinians felt just as passionately about Jerusalem as I did myself, and repartition seemed to me to be the just and reasonable answer to this question.

Drink

In 1994/5 I spent a further year in Jerusalem on the One Year Graduate Program at the Hebrew University. This was supposed to be my year to 'check out' whether or not I really wanted to go and live in Israel, before I made a final decision. Jerusalem is and was a miserable and tedious place for a young secular man in his early twenties; it soon became clear to me that I did not wish to live there after all, and I began drinking heavily.
Mostly this went on at a bar called 'Mike's Place' run by a burned out Canadian ex-photo-journalist called Mike, and populated almost exclusively by Israeli leftists and members of the international press corps who were old friends of Mike's. Abigail came to visit, and hated it all even more than I did. I began to make arrangements to go home early.
Before I left, however, I was befriended at Mike's Place by a member of the press corps, an American called Stefan Ellis, who considered his time in Jerusalem to be basically R&R away from the really hideous places in the world he had worked before, like Cambodia. Stefan was horrified by my youthful ideological support of Israel. Life as a photo-journalist specialising in war-zones had inoculated him against all forms of ideology. As far as he was concerned, all sides committing atrocities, everywhere, were all as bad as each other.
It was his job as a journalist to get close to those atrocities in order to document them so that the rest of the world could see. Of course they wouldn't – he was all too aware of this - but it was his job nonetheless.
I did not, at the time, remotely understand him.
Fast-forward to 2008.
I'd long split up with Abigail. I was still in London. I'd had two failed careers, first as a freelance journalist, and then as a computer programmer. Both had gone wrong as I'd also been trying to pursue music in a serious way; there are only so many hours in a day and as a result of pursuing multiple career goals I'd made myself seriously ill twice and (just) survived a complete nervous breakdown. I was at last pursuing music full-time and, as part of this, had finally received my London Underground busking licence. I'd finally recorded and released an album of original music, not that anyone had noticed. At least, I felt, I was now on the right path.
My position on Israel had not changed.
I had by this time met Daphna Baram, an Israeli journalist and Guardian contributor effectively in exile in London for her anti-Zionist views. Despite our differences of opinion over Israel we had become close friends, and spent many nights staying up late arguing in a mixture of English and Hebrew over the fine points of whether or not Achad Ha-am, the founder of Cultural Zionism, would have supported the actions of the current Israeli state, or whether the 1947 position of the Zionist youth movement Hashomer HaTzair, that British Mandate Palestine should be formed into a bi-national state for both Jews and Palestinians, had any relevance today.
Daphna was the first to put to me directly the astonishing proposition that the best solution for the Israel-Palestine problem was a single genuinely democratic state in which all citizens were treated equally regardless of ethnic origin. Currently, that is not the case. While the state of Israel makes just as reasonable a claim to be a democracy as, say, Belarus or Russia, the fact is that Jewish and non-Jewish citizens are not treated equally.

Second-class

It is true that there are Israeli Arab Knesset members and that Israeli Arabs can vote, but it is also true that there are huge differences in the way that Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews are treated by the state, ranging from whether or not they are required to join the army at the age of 18 to whether or not their home town or village gets a reasonable annual budget to cover municipal requirements. It is painfully obvious from available statistics that Israeli Arab areas get substantially less support from the Israeli state than equivalent size Jewish settlements, and that in general, while Israeli Arabs may not offically be second-class citizens of Israel, that is certainly what they are in practice.
Then, in late 2008, Operation Cast Lead began. Having previously largely withdrawn from Gaza in 2005 (though still keeping it surrounded and effectively cut off from the West Bank), Israel began in December 2008 to bombard it indiscriminately, in the name of ending rocket fire into Israel from within the Strip. For the life of me, I could not see how this was supposed to work. I could not see any way of defending this action. As the number of Palestinian casualties grew – far out of proportion to the number of casualties on the Israeli side - it just got worse and worse.
For the first time in my adult life I began wondering whether the Jewish State was actually worth defending at all on any level if this was the price. I was watching a blatant and brutal massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, utterly disproportionate to the attacks that had provoked it, which had in turn been provoked by earlier Israeli incursions, in an endless back-and-forth cycle, in order to defend what?
An Israeli State that would allow me – born in London – to become a citizen at a moment's notice, while Palestinian friends of friends actually born in the Holy Land itself could never become citizens of anything anywhere? Exactly what convoluted justification would stand that up?
I couldn't do it any more. On Machon, I'd had training in how to argue against the proposition that Zionism was racism, but no training in how to argue in defence of the indiscriminate massacre of civilian children. That one hadn't come up.
I began to consider the possibility that I'd been misled.
It looked terribly plausible. It was horribly embarrassing and deeply painful, but it began to seem to me an awful lot as if Achad Ha-am, founder of Cultural Zionism, and a somewhat flawed but deeply ethical character, would have himself been implacably against anything calling itself a Jewish State that behaved like this.
Around the same time, I took up the saxophone, as part of an effort to give up smoking, and had a one-off lesson with the best local saxophonist I could find, who happened to be another Israeli exile by the name of Gilad Atzmon. This was an incredible stroke of luck, as without exaggeration I can promise you that Gilad is one of the best saxophonists alive anywhere in the world; he is also a lovely guy in person and a fantastic music teacher. Additionally, he is highly politically active as an anti-Zionist, and is considered so extreme that most other anti-Zionists consider him totally beyond the pale; he is widely accused by both anti-Zionists and Zionists alike of actual anti-semitism.
This is of course utter rubbish. It was clear to Gilad from the second he met me that I was Jewish – we even discussed the fact during my first pre-lesson meeting - and had he been a real anti-semite he would never have agreed to teach a Jew to play the saxophone.
His views are, nonetheless, extreme; for example he is against the concept of secular Jewish anti-Zionist organisations, and believes them all, along with any concept of secular Jewish identity, to be a stalking horse for Zionism itself. This stems from his deeply philosophical approach to the whole Israel-Palestine question, and his view that any secular expression of Jewish identity is inherently somehow supremacist; this has led him – as I understand it - to hold that any kind of Jewish identity itself is deeply flawed outside of the religious context.

Secular and positive

I do not agree with Gilad on that. I do believe that it is possible to be a secular Jew with a positive Jewish identity that does not in any way believe in Jewish supremacy. I do not even agree with his view that Zionism is inherently racist. For example, the pre-1948 position of the Zionist youth movement Hashomer HaTzair, which argued, as Zionists, for a secular binational state to be shared equally between Jews and Palestinians, puts paid to that.
In the 1920s Martin Buber, a humanist philosopher who had absolutely no truck with racism, developed a branch of Zionism centered politically around the concept of a binational state, and sadly, like Hashomer HaTzair, got nowhere. Today it is clear that the racist branches of Zionism have prevailed. But it does not take much more than a cursory view of the history to see that those were not the only branches.
Nevertheless, post 1948, it is very hard to argue that Zionism has not behaved, since Independence, in a de facto racist way. On that at least, Gilad, Daphna and I can all agree. Right now in 2012 we are watching aghast at yet another massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Yet again this comes just before the Israeli elections; this time we are hearing Israeli ministers such as Eli Yishai assert that “the goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.”
Not only can I no longer defend any of this, I can no longer defend Zionism at all, not even in an abstract philosophical sense outside of any context involving the actions of the Israeli state. The Law of Return, under which I - an occasional tourist who just happens to be Jewish – can claim Israeli citizenship at a moment's notice, while a Palestinian actually born in, say, Haifa, but subsequently exiled cannot – that is a racist law. The notion of a Jewish state? That is – as far as it has been put into practice since 1948 - a racist notion.
Is Zionism racism? It didn't have to be. There were historical strands within Zionism that were not racist. Martin Buber – Zionist founder, in 1925, of the Brit Shalom organisation advocating a binational state, was not a racist, and nor were the pre-1948 Hashomer Hatzair.
But right now?
It's really very hard indeed to argue otherwise.
And it's such a blessed relief to feel that I am no longer obligated to attempt to do so.
That relief does not, however, in any way reduce the anger I feel at the current massacre of civilians in Gaza.
This article originally appeared at conniptions.org
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It is sanction time for Israel

It is sanction time for Israel

My Catbird SeatDecember 8, 20120
Israel fell into a carefully laid trap today by refusing to allow inspections of its weapons of mass destruction facilities. This has opened the door for the only possible response. It is sanction time for the Israelis. Let them reap what they have sown. And let us do what we must do.

By Jim W. Dean


Netanyahu played his role as expected. Straight out of the Talmud, his coalition does not accept demands from the non-Jewish sub-humans. He will bet the farm on the Jewish Lobbies in the main Western countries, that they can bully their host country legislatures to do their bidding. They have a long track record.
If the shoe were on the other foot, the Zios would be screaming to have the facilities bombed, but we won’t do that. The WMD contamination would be a disaster. Even conventional weapons landing just on their nuclear waste sites would create a catastrophe for anyone down wind. It’s the cheap way of making a conventional warhead go nuclear, using the target’s own waste material
In America this is a bipartisan campaign. The Senate Democrats and Republicans passed the new Iran sanctions bill, drafted by Israeli intelligence operatives as usual.
Canada, which is the Mossad’s western hemisphere base, will rubber stamp anything coming out of Tel Aviv. She has slid a long way down the humanity scale since WWII, when their great PM Mackenzie King refused to sign onto a post war plan to ‘depopulate Germany.’
The other Allied leaders wanted to kill off 20 million men, women and children through starvation. Their goal was removing Germany’s need to be an export competitor to earn the needed foreign exchange to buy the food for its population.
When the plan was leaked to a shocked world, the villains pretended it had only been a working paper, when it had actually been a signed mass murder document. Where are the Mackenzie Kings of our day when we need them? Was the Palestinian UN vote a hint that some are coming out of incubation?
This post-war planned crime against humanity, against a defenseless people, was of course never prosecuted. To add to this shame the victor’s court historians have ignored it all these years. Real historians like David Irving were attacked for printing the forbidden truth and made examples of to cower the rest of the sheep. And yes, Jewish lobbies had their fingerprints all over the dirty deed.
But the Israelis have huge amounts of blackmail material collected over decades on most Western leaders and legislators. They certainly will not hesitate to use this to stop any sanctions effort. There will have to be a grass roots effort to clean house. All those who have aided and abetted in Israel’s crimes will need to be sanctioned, also.
There is no point to taking out a repressive leader and leaving the repressive infrastructure in place.
A new leader will be found in a day to carry on the former work. But we do have a template to use on Israel from WWII, the Japanese one.
Israel must not only be de-nuclearized but de-militarized just like Japan was, and for similar reasons. Both wanted growing space, and used their military power to get it. Japan’s target was Asia. For Israel it is every country on the planet.
To militant Israelis we non-Jews are just two-legged farm animals. As their chief rabbi publicly declared, the rest of us are here to serve Jews. The Likud party people really like that part and they are big fans of the rabbi.
Israel has mounted offensive espionage operations across the entire world. The Palestinian UN vote showed that not even the tiny Micronesia countries, including the make-believe ones under water, escaped their targeting for control and dependable UN voting.
Can Israelis actually do this with just their resources in Israel? Of course not. Israeli 5th columns operate everywhere. They are used as a human shield of sorts to deflect any mention of disloyalty as based on anti-Semitism only.
It is an open secret in the Intel community that no Western country will prosecute any Israeli espionage. This is a breach of all of their leadership oaths to defend their country. Of course those countries that reject domination, and do defend their people from the Zios, are considered threats.
So we have the incredible irony of those who sat in judgment at Nuremberg, and hanged people for ‘waging an aggressive war,’ are now breaching their own precedent and demanding immunity out of the barrel of a gun. They dishonor the deaths of all those who lost their live in that conflict. They stain Western civilization and jurisprudence by betraying it.
The Israeli regime also provides us a tried and true sanctions template. Once Israel is ‘officially’ deemed a security threat to all the rest of us… we just build a wall… around the entire country. The difference this time the Army Corp of Engineers will not build it like they did around Gaza, and the American taxpayers pay for it. We will give that honor to Israel’s victims.
The pro-Israeli Diaspora and their friends like the Christian Zionists can pay for it. The latter can use the money they have donated to the WMD Regime to clean it up like a nuclear waste site, which in many respects I believe we will find when the inspectors get in there.
David Ben Gurion Airport will get to see what it is like with no planes coming in or leaving. Yes people, I mean that kind of wall, just like Gaza. If they protest just tell them that Jim Dean said if it was good enough to dish out to the Gazans deemed a threat with no WMD, then it is certainly fair for one Israel that has.
The US will have multiple exposures here, not only for the black projects and billons pumped into Israel while Americans are being third-worlded to pay for it all back at home. We also waved India past the IAEA inspection process, which assured that Pakistan would keep investing in its own nuclear deterrent, which it can ill afford.
Why has America done this? The only feasible reason I can see is a desperate attempt by those behind the military industrial complex to replace the Soviet Cold War with the Neo-China one. The bogeyman drum was being beaten for China, another country endeavoring to build up its defensive capabilities.
Why do more Americans not connect the two dots that making an enemy threat out of anyone wanting to defend themselves is very undemocratic? It is not a difficult hoax to see through.
How many military bases does China have in Canada and Mexico? And how about those Chinese S400 type ground-to-air missiles lining up on our southern border and the ten warhead medium-range missiles being installed ‘to protect Chinese and Mexican interests?
How would Americans react to this? But here is the big question. Why would they act the same way… when it is not happening? Who really is our enemy in such a twisted scenario?
The rank and file Americans are victims in all this. The war costs have been just a tool to transfer wealth to the super rich, and I mean the cash. The troops and factory workers get IOU’s and paper stock certificates. The average Israelis are getting robbed themselves. Even their ‘Holocaust’ funds get looted. At last count a third of Israel’s ‘survivors’ were eating in soup kitchens.
The American version of this looting hustle was taking place on Capitol Hill today with an expert testifying on Iran as a threat to the Caucus region. He was of course surprise – surprise – an Israeli expert, Ariel Cohen.
I took a look at Cohen’s bio at the Heritage Foundation and he has the grooming profile of the classic Israeli asset. Israel has tons of them working out of numerous think tanks here and in Canada. Many have become Mossad hostels of a sort.
His expert testimony was shocking to say the least. I will try not to make you sick by just showing a few points from his conclusions.
“Expand anti-terrorism and drug trafficking cooperation between the US and the three South Caucus states, neutralizing Iranian subversion activities in the region.”
My response: Mr. Cohen, how can you not know that all the drugs coming out of Afghanistan are being shipped out by American and Israeli ‘contractors’ with the three countries you mention getting their cut of the pie? And why did you not address this subversive activity as threat to the region when everyone in the military and intelligence business knows that it is true, including you?
“Uphold the interests of the small Southern Caucasian countries when attempting to construct an effective Iran policy which leads to the elimination of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.”
Mr. Cohen, you must know the IAEA, Israeli and American Intel have all stated that the Iranians do not have a nuclear weapons program. Why would Iran want to prelude having a nuclear deterrent at some point in the future when they are in range of Israeli nuclear missiles with constant threats of launching a preemptive strike?
Your testimony Mr. Cohen is exactly what I would expect an Israeli agent to deliver at exactly this point in time to justify the Senate sanction vote as addressing a threat, when you are just doing some ‘pre-staging’ work for Israel. It’s an old game what you did today.
But thank you just the same. You have validated all the reasons why Israel also deserves to be sanctioned as a rogue state. You were doing double duty today just like Netanyahu was with his ‘bugger off’ on the WMD inspections.
We now have a long Israeli list to work with, multi-decades of extensive WMD programs, drug trafficking, terrorist operations, destabilizing countries, money laundering, blood diamonds, human trafficking, waging offensive wars, and crimes against humanity. And yes, we know Israeli special operations people were killing US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s in the classified reports.
What would you say sir about you and I working together to write up a joint statement to deliver to the Congressional committee on this threat? I would even be willing to do most of the work. It would be a good change of pace for you.
JD/HSN/IS/ PRESS TV
Jim W Dean is managing editor at Veterans Today. He has been writing, speaking and doing public relations, television, consulting and now multimedia work for a variety of American heritage, historical, military, veterans and Intel orgs. He has appeared on PBS most recently on the Looking for Lincoln documentary with Prof. Henry Lewis Gates and lectured at the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Gordon. His current writing focus is on national security, intelligence, black and psy ops, military/Intel history including personal video archives, and the current wars
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International Law Legal Intifada by Palestinians Against Israel (Must Read)

International Law Legal Intifada by Palestinians Against Israel (Must Read)

By on 12/04/2012
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Why the US Threatened to Cut Off Aid to the Palestinians if They Pursued and Were Granted Observer Status at the UN

An Interview With Professor

By Dennis Bernstein
International Law Legal Intifada by Palestinians Against Israel (Must Read)
Francis A. Boyle meeting with Palestinian President at the Presidential Compound in in December 1997, in order to celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of the First Palestinian that started in and led directly to the 1988 Palestinian , for which he served as Legal Advisor.
On November 29, the U.N. overwhelmingly approved a resolution to upgrade the Palestinian Authority’s observer status to a non-member state. According to various sources, the U.N. voted to recognize as a sovereign state, despite threats by the and that the Palestinian Authority would be punished by withholding much needed funds for the West Bank government. AFP reported that Britain threatened to abstain from the vote for enhanced Palestinian status at the UN, unless the Palestinians agreed not to take the Israelis to various international courts.
As the vote was in progress, I spoke with Dr. Francis A. Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, and the author of “The Palestinian Right of Return Under ,” in order to find out why the US was making such dire threats of economic retaliation against the Palestinians, if they continued to pursue recognition by the UN. Professor Boyle is somebody who knows a great deal about the Palestinians and their rights under international law. He was advisor to the Palestinian Organization and its chairman, Yassar Arafat, on the Palestinian declaration of independence of November 15, 1988.
Boyle said today, “This can be the start of a legal intifada by Palestinians against Israel.” He joins us from Chicago. Professor Boyle — welcome back to Flashpoints.
***
Francis Boyle: Thank you Dennis for having me on and my best to your listening audience.
Dennis Bernstein: Well, it is good to have you with us, and it’s always an educational experience, particularly when we’re talking about Palestine. Maybe we could begin with your understanding of why the U.S. would threaten to cut off Palestine, and why the Brits are so upset.
FB: Well, you know, Dennis, the point is this, no member state of the United Nations organization has ever been destroyed or eliminated. Some of them have broken off into constituent units but they have never been extinguished. And you see, Israel would like all of Palestine, the West Bank, East — without the Palestinians. And so it’s important, as they see it, not to have a recognition of Palestinian statehood by the United Nations organization. It’s that simple.
I’ve been working with the Palestinians now, their peace initiatives since 1987, and was legal advisor with the Palestinian delegation to the middle east peace negotiations. They never demonstrated even one iota of good faith when it came to negotiating a two-state solution with the Palestinians. And the reason is the have always wanted all of Palestine going back to the Ball Conference of 1897. So nothing has changed. That is still their agenda, and that is why they are vigorously fighting against recognition of Palestine by the U.N. And last year, they fought against our admission as a member state to the United Nations. So this is a real existential battle here that has been going on now for a 115 years. And it’s not about to end tomorrow.
DB: All right. Well, let’s see if we can talk a little bit about the real implications here, in terms of international law, because we know, anybody who has really followed this knows that Israel — supported by the U.S. and many countries in western Europe — has violated international law, and that there really is an illegal, ongoing . It’s been brutal. We’ve seen two years in the last…two wars in the last…no, not wars — two slaughters in the last four years, where Israel went after this Gaza strip where people couldn’t even run. They didn’t even have the possibility of becoming refugees again. And there’s a lot at stake, in terms of the possibilities that lie before the Palestinians if they are recognized by the international community. And you lay out at least six possible legal remedies that the Palestinians could take if, in fact, this becomes a reality. Could you go through those for us?
FB: Well, obviously Palestinians, you know, could barely defend themselves because the United States, the most powerful military power in the world, has given Israel over and over again every type of high-tech weapon system possibly imaginable. So their strong suit is international law. And I’ve just come up with a short list of things — steps — that I have already recommended to them, over in Ramallah, that they consider implementing. These steps are what I call a “legal intifada.”
First, of course, becoming a party to the Rome Statute for the . After Operation One, I advised President Abbas to accept the jurisdiction of the under Article 12, paragraph 3, which he did do. And then we filed a big complaint with the ICC prosecutor over Operation Cast Lead One.
Now, what happened…the ICC prosecutor, Moreno Ocampo announced that he was going to be investigating two issues. One, did Palestine have the capacity to accept the jurisdiction of the ICC under Article 12, paragraph 3? And, Two, did Israel create war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinians during Cast Lead? That second question was answered in the affirmative by the Report; that Israel had inflicted war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinians.
As for the first point, just before he left office, Ocampo announced that he did not believe Palestine had the capacity to accept the jurisdiction of the ICC under Article 12, paragraph 3. And, in any event, it was not for him to determine whether Palestine was a state. This, despite the fact that Palestine was admitted as a full-fledged member state of UNESCO, which is a U.N. specialized agency.
So basically Moreno Ocampo copped out. And indeed, if he hadn’t done that, there’s a good chance Israel would not have repeated what I call Cast Lead Light, that just occurred for the last eight days here in November. In any event, in his press conference, Ocampo said, “But of course, Palestine could ratify the Rome statute and then proceed as a member state and that would solve the jurisdictional problem.”
So, all Palestine has to do once it becomes a U.N. member state is accede to the terms of the Rome statute, and file that with the U.N. Secretary General which is the depository for the Rome statute. The Secretary General will be obligated to accept that instrument of accession and then Palestine can simply reactivate the complaint that’s already there, and add in Cast Lead Light for November 2012. And, if they want to, also add all the settlements policy that is going on. The ruled in its advisory opinion on the wall, that all these settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem violate the Fourth of 1949.
Well, of course, such violations are a war crime and when they are widespread or systematic, they become a crime against humanity. And, in the case of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the settlement policy is certainly widespread and systematic.
DB: And, just to add, it’s quite a revelation that you’ve got the British foreign secretary saying they’re not going to get the support –the Palestinians are not going to get their support — unless they agree to pledge not to sue Israel for war crimes. I mean, there it is.
FB: Right. Well, he doesn’t understand that we already did that so, you know, these are obviously highly technical matters that basically their international law staff follow. But we already did file that complaint, and all we have to do is reactivate the complaint we already filed. And the reason being, then this would put us in the driver’s seat and the settlement policy in the dock. And that is what…remember Britain created this problem in the first place with the . They’ve always been against us. So, you know, it doesn’t surprise me that the Brits are still taking this position. And they were behind the partition resolution 65 years ago.
You know, it’s not just Palestine…you know, the Brits did the same to my country, Ireland. They partitioned us. The Brits partitioned the Indian subcontinent to India and Pakistan, creating a monumental human rights tragedy, that’s still going on. Britain also partitioned the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina that still goes on today. So, you know, this is a joke that, you know, that the British are there, they are saying they are for peace, this, that and the other thing. They’ve created so many of these problems that we confront today. India, Pakistan, Palestine, Ireland, Bosnia…that’s just for starters. The Falklands, Malvinas, I guess I could go on from there.
DB: All right, let’s talk a little bit about the possibilities under the International Court of Justice, what could happen in terms of Gaza and the illegal siege of Gaza.
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FB: Right. Once it becomes a U.N. observer state, Palestine can then accede to the terms of the statute of the international court of justice which is the world court of the United Nations system. And here, Palestine will — across the board on all these issues — be following the precedent of , which did not join the United Nations organization until what…maybe five years ago? But during that period of time it had U.N. observer state status. And in that capacity had, you know, pretty much all the rights it needed to do whatever it wanted to do.
So Switzerland became a party to the ICJ statute. Palestine, I’m sure, will too. Just by taking the Swiss instrument and filing it with the world court, then it would be able to sue Israel at the International Court of Justice. And I’ve offered to President Abbas and the PLO executive committee to file this lawsuit, and try to break the genocidal siege of Gaza that is still going on today, as we speak. President Morsi of , despite all the rhetoric, still hasn’t done anything about it. So it is still there, it’s still on and it needs to be broken. So it’s on a list of things that, you know, the Palestinians can do once the dust settles.
Third, Palestine, could then join the Law of the Sea Convention and then get legal access and a legal right to these enormous gas supplies right off the coast of Gaza, which Israel has access to. , Cypress, …they all have their claims in. But Palestine has a claim too. Indeed, a pretty substantial claim. And if Palestine gets access to that gas, it can become economically self sufficient. So this is a very important issue.
They can become a party to the International Civil Aviation Organization and get legal, sovereign control over their own air space. By becoming a member of the International Tele-communications Union, they will get control of their air waves, phone lines, band widths for internet, satellite access and things of this nature.
So, those are just some of the immediate consequences…oh, and finally, of course, also become a high contracting party to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. Back in 1989, I recommended this step to President Arafat as a purely humanitarian measure. The United States government applied massive pressure to the Swiss government not to accept our instrument of accession. So what the Swiss did, again — they copped out back in 1989 — they said, “Well, we’re not in a position to determine whether or not Palestine is a state, but we will treat their declaration as binding.” … And they still carry us as a footnote.
So all this will do then is upgrade us to a high contracting party like all the 193 states in the world, with a demand — the right to demand — that they all act to protect us as a fellow high-contracting party under common Article 1 to the four Geneva Conventions where they have an obligation, not only to respect the conventions themselves but to ensure respect by Israel.
Just off the top of my head, this morning in drawing up that press release that was six steps I could come up with in very short order and in terms of priority that Palestine could get to work on, I guess, tomorrow.
DB: In terms of the Law of the Sea Convention and the offshore gas fields, is that extensive, are those fields enough to perhaps help bring Palestinians out of poverty? How big is that battle? Because we don’t hear much about the battle around resources, this is always like a religious war.
FB: Dennis, this isn’t a religious war…you know I’ve spent a lot of time over there. I’ve dealt with Palestinians, , Muslims and . No, this is a war over land and resources and water. That’s what is really going on here.
And Israel believes it is in its best interest to present this as almost a religious war. But it simply is not. Those gas supplies under the Mediterranean are enormous. There have been stories on this in the financial literature, if you read The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, which I read every day, you will find extensive discussion of how much there is there. And certainly it would be enough to make Palestine economically self-sufficient, along with the capacity of its people, who are highly educated and highly motivated.
So…and of course, Israel would be entitled to its share as well. If you read the debates over the gas fields, of course, no one mentions the Palestinians, and their legitimate claim to the gas fields. So Palestine, and Israel and Lebanon and Cypress and Turkey would have to sit down among themselves within the framework of the Law of the Sea Treaty and negotiate some type of equitable sharing of these gas supplies — fields — which in turn would be based upon the delimitation of their continental shelves.
So that is, sort of where it stands. Then, if this could not be resolved by negotiations, you would have access to the U.N.’s Law of the Sea tribunal, down there in Jamaica. So we’re talking about, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of gas there.
DB: So…
FB: But we really don’t know precisely how much there is, but it’s enormous, and it would help the Israeli people too. I mean right now, there is some being pumped out of there but given the disputed status of the title it is not much. So if you’re talking about massive exploitation of this gas, certainly Israel has a very long coastline there on the Mediterranean. But Gaza does too, and the Palestinians are entitled to their cut.
DB: So you are saying when the Israelis fire at the Gaza strip from the water offshore in Gaza, they are firing, they are sort of floating over these very extensive resources. When these Israeli war ships intercept boats coming from Turkey and other places trying to break the siege on Gaza, they are being attacked. And the Israelis are killing international activists over the waters where these resources are existing. So it is a rather obvious attempt to defend the resources that they want to steal.
FB: That’s correct, Dennis. And what I’m suggesting is, you know, in theory it could be possible for, you know, everyone to sit down…the stakeholders which I would identify primarily as Israel, Palestine, Lebanon….to a lesser extent Cypress and Turkey, so that there would have to be an equitable but lawful sharing of these gas supplies. But right now, you know, Israel doesn’t want to share it with anyone. And yet, you know, Cypress and Turkey seem to be enforcing what they believe are their claims. And Lebanon is doing the same, which means then that all these conflicting claims to these resources, at this point in time, makes it difficult for there to be a viable exploitation of those resources, right.
This isn’t just what’s going on there in Gaza. Israel is in fact staking a de facto claim, as it were, to these tremendous gas resources which, by the way, I don’t know exactly how it would pan out in diving it up here, but it would probably make Israel energy interdependent as well. As you know, they really have no domestic sources of energy supplies there at all.
Estimates I’ve read is maybe for the next hundred years, but of course, that’ s cutting the Palestinians out of the picture. Right now they get their, you know, they get oil and gas from Egypt but that’s been disrupted, and then they have to scramble around to get it anywhere else. So this is a very important factor in the equation, you know, together with the water. Most of the water — the aquifers — are on the West Bank. This is Palestinian water and the settlers are stealing it.
I was over there once where I saw a Palestinian village literally thirsting to death because it had no water. And I followed the pipeline upstream to Aerial, a settlement there on the West Bank, where I could see the water being diverted from the village so that the settlers could have an Olympic-sized swimming pool. And since I’ve been there, I’ve now read that they have two Olympic-sized swimming pools in Aerial. But, you know, this is outrageous — unacceptable. Clearly it’s plunder of Palestinian water resources.
And if you note in today’s resolution submitted by the Palestinians at the U.N. they have made it quite clear that any final settlement is going to have to involve water because it is their water that is being stolen by Israel. So, you know, we see Israel stealing, plundering natural resources, certainly water on the West Bank, and now they’re going after all these gas fields in the Mediterranean. Now I am prepared to admit that, yes, they do have a valid claim, but it’s not all their own. They are going to have to sit down with Lebanon and Palestine and, to a lesser extent, Cypress and Turkey, that had laid claims to some of these gas fields.
Dennis Bernstein is an American producer and co-host of the radio news program, Flashpoints Radio on Pacifica Radio.
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