How to (formerly) outrage a Zionist

It used to be that Zionists were outraged by the Palestinian practice of packing bombs with metal objects to cause maximum damage in suicide bombings. They would publish ghastly descriptions and pictures, like:

Front view of a pelvis imbedded with nails and metal fragments.

X-rays taken from victims of suicide bombings reveal pieces of metallic fragments embedded in their skin, muscles, organs and bones, says Dr. Michael Messing, who visited the victims of suicide bombings while at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Suicide bombers pack their bombs with nails and other objects so even survivors of suicide bombings will suffer from the bomb's effects.

"They're trying to maximize the number of people they kill and injure," said Messing of the terrorists.

The accusation became an essential component of the demonization of Palestinians:

Those sadists who dip their hands in the blood of lynched reservists, who gouge out the eyes of two thirteen-year-old boys in a cave, who murder and mutilate an unarmed shepherd, who target a ten-month-old baby girl playing with her father, who fill their suicide bombs with flesh-tearing nails -or who cheer such abominations in the streets of Jenin or Ramallah are indeed egged on by words, and drunk on anti-Zionist venom.

That was the difference between them and civilized people; the Jews didn't do those things:

When have you last seen a Jew detonating bombs with nails blowimg gentiles to smithereens in the name of Moses?

Fast forward to 2009, the year that Argentinian Juan Martín del Potro won the US Tennis Open and South African Richard Goldstone wrote a damning report on the Israeli activities in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. While del Potro was crushing his rivals, Goldstone was busy finding facts. And among other things, he found what follows:

864. On 4 January 2009 the Israeli armed forces struck an ambulance in the Beit Lahia area with a flechette missile as it was attending a number of wounded persons who had been hit in an earlier attack. Those wounded in the first attack had also been hit by a flechette missile. As a result of the attack on the ambulance, one of the first-aid volunteers in the ambulance crew, Arafa Abd al-Dayem, suffered severe injuries. He died later the same afternoon.

865. The following day, as is the custom, the family set up condolence tents where family and friends would pay their respects and comfort the grieving relatives. The family home is in Izbat Beit Hanoun, a built-up area in the north-east corner of the Gaza strip. It is located between Jabaliyah and Beit Hanoun, about 3 kilometres from the border with Israel both to the north and to the east. Although the Israeli armed forces had entered Gaza at the time of the incident, in this area they remained on the Israeli side of the “Green Line” border. Two tents were set up – one for male visitors and one for female visitors. They were positioned at about ten metres from each other. The male tent was outside the house of IK/11. The tents were struck three times in two hours, again with flechette missiles.

866. The Mission spoke to several of the witnesses who had attended and survived the attacks on the condolence tents. The Mission noted the great pride Arafa Abd al-Dayem’s father had in his son and the deep sense of loss he clearly felt.

867. As regards the attacks on the condolence tents, witnesses stated that at around 7.30 a.m. on 5 January, the house of IK/11 was hit by a shell. The shell struck the fourth floor of the fivestorey building causing the roof to collapse.477 Three men at the gathering, including the father of the deceased, were slightly wounded and taken to the Kamal Idwan hospital in Beit Lahia for treatment. They returned to the house at around 8.15 a.m. where a decision was taken by the mourners to end the condolence ceremony for fear of further attacks.

868. The witness stated that at around 8.30 a.m. when the people were leaving the house of IK/11 and moving towards the women’s condolence tent, two flechette missiles struck within a few metres of the tent and less than half a minute apart. Around 20 to 30 persons assembled there were injured. The injured include a 13-year-old boy who received a flechette injury to the right side of his head and a 33-year-old man who sustained injuries to the chest and head, his body punctuated with little holes according to a witness who saw his corpse being prepared for burial. A 22-year-old man was wounded in the abdomen, the chest and the head. A 16-year-old boy sustained injuries to the head and the neck. A 26-year-old man sustained injuries to his chest, head and left leg. These five persons died of their injuries. Another 17 persons present at the scene, including 14 men, two children (aged 17 and 11) and one woman were injured.

869. RA/14, who survived the attack, still has several flechettes embedded in his body, including in his chest, and is unable to move freely without pain.(...)

877. The Mission notes that, during the condolence ceremony, flechette shells were fired in the vicinity of a large group of civilians, killing 5 and injuring more than 20. To consider the attacks indiscriminate would imply that there was a military objective underlying the attacks in the first place. The Mission has no information on which to base such a conclusion and notes the silence of the Israeli authorities on the incident.

Do you know what a flechette shell is? Here's some basic info:

A flechette shell is an antipersonnel weapon that contains ten to fourteen thousand 1 .5-inch steel darts which, as they are released from the canister, spread out in an arc that can reach a maximum width of about ninety-four yards.

Well, this looks dangerously close to a bomb packed with nails, doesn't it? If Israel uses it, it mustn't be illegal, God forbid. Now if this sadistic weapon is allowed by the laws of warfare, the only issue is whether it is used against combatants or not. Mourners at a tent that include a 13-year-old are not, in my book, combatants.

You will find thousands of refutations of the Goldstone report over the Internet, mostly hurling crude ad-hominem attacks at the author and calling into question his ability to investigate because he claimed someone was wearing a shirt when actually it was a T-shirt. When it comes to the war crimes themselves, however, the refuters suddenly go silent and point to the Israeli response, which in this case is

Recently, eight additional criminal investigations by the Military Police were ordered regarding matters more closely connected to "operational activities", including allegations of shooting towards civilians carrying white flags and directing flechette munitions towards civilians or civilian targets. Seven incidents that appear in the Goldstone report are currently under Military Police criminal investigation. In a typical Military Police investigation, evidence is taken from Palestinian and other complainants who may have witnessed the events. In such cases, the investigative office of the Military Police approaches the complainant to assist in contacting potential witnesses. For example, the investigative office of the Military Police has approached human rights NGO's for assistance regarding currently ongoing cases. Additionally, the investigative office of the Military Police has, via Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, approached the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to receive additional information regarding an incident where claims of use of human shields were raised. That incident remains under investigation.

Or, in plain English, "we're thinking out how to spin this, and we're having a hard time. We'll contact you when we come up with something."

In any event, please notice how the outrage at bombs filled with nails is quietly being dropped from Zionist discourse. If that army uses them, they can't be all that bad.

Dershowitz: A liar -- and an illiterate one at that

Not that the world needs me to expose Alan Dershowitz as a liar, but as a matter of fact I have. (More than once.) Now he's again at it on his Jerusalem Post blog, publishing one mendacious hatchet job after another targeting men and women of the Hebrew persuasion who still have a conscience, or, in Zio-parlance, self-hating Jews. Foremost among them, needless to say, is Richard Goldstone, whose report on the Israeli carnage in Gaza pointed to war crimes, with Israel's government failing to appoint an independent commission to investigate the charges.

In a recent piece, claims Dershowitz:

"He cannot possibly believe that Israel used the thousands of rockets that Hamas directed against its children as an excuse, or a cover, for its real goal, namely to kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible."

Of course, it would be outrageous if Goldstone believed that. But, once again, it's a lie. In the report, Goldstone claims that

what occurred in just over three  weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate  attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish  its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an  ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.

Punishing, humiliating and terrorizing are not the same as killing. Dershowitz knows it, but prefers to transform an accusation that is made by Goldstone, but which is not outrageous, into another accusation that is outrageous, but not made by Goldstone. Sorry, Alan, we've caught you with your pants down again.

See also Jerry Haber's minutious destruction of Dershowitz's "response" to Goldstone, on which his blog article is based.

As an aside, I was amused to see that, according to Dershowitz,

Goldstone (...) refused to credit eyewitness reports published by refutable newspapers, and even admissions by Hamas leaders.

Well -- if the newspapers were "refutable," Goldstone was right not to credit their reports, wasn't he? A few hours after the article was published on Dershowitz's blog, a reader spotted the mistake and commented,

24  |   Arnold - Canada, Thursday Feb 04, 2010

Editing error: paragraph 5, line 4: should be "reputable" rather than "refutable".

The misspelling was corrected (but I preserved the cached version with the mistake here).

It's not the first time that Dershowitz struggles with the English language. A few months back he debated arch-Zionist hawk Melanie Philips over whether Obama adequately passes the loyalty (to Israel) test. Philips argued Obama is bent on Israel's destruction. Dershowitz's (correct, in this case) position was that Obama would eventually "see the light" (i.e. understand the power of the Jewish lobby) and back down from pressuring Israel. In that debate, the "civil rights champion" argued:

This is simply not the Barak Obama that I know and voted for. No one who fits this characterture would have gone to Sderot (...) No one who fits that characterture would have appointed Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, Dennis Ross (...) as an advisor on Iran and Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff.

Making charactertures of American presidents is indeed horrible. But I'm a linguist, and in my professionally distorted view, grotesquely misspeling the word caricature is even more horrible.

Dershowitz's trouble getting fairly common words straight may have cost him the book censorship he sought circa 2005. When the University of California Press was about to publish Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah, a neat exposé of Dershowitz's bogus scholarship, Alan tried to stop the book from coming out by writing to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the crucial paragraph, the expert appeals attorney warned:

I know that you will be interested in trying to prevent an impending scandal involving a decision by the University of California Press to publish a viciously anti-Semitic book by an author whose main audience consists of neo-Nazis in Germany and Austria. The book to which this is a sequel was characterized by two imminent historians as a modern-day version of the notorious czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Of course, Gov. Schwarzenegger refused to censor the book. Among other factors, he must have taken into account that Finkelstein was slammed by imminent (i.e., soon-to-be, but not yet so) historians. If they had been eminent historians, who knows, maybe the book would have never seen the light of day.

Some people wonder how it is that Harvard continues to proudly display a professor who openly endorses crimes against humanity, such as torture or collective punishment. I, for my part, would be pleased to see the university fire Dershowitz on far simpler grounds -- his illiteracy.

The missing word in the dictionary

Among contrarian commenters at this and other anti-Zionist blogs I have recently noticed an increased use of the argument, "Judaism is not a race; therefore, Jews can't be racist, and Israel, which is the Jewish State, can't be a racist country." To me, this claim has always sounded similar to the one that Arabs can't be antisemitic because they themselves are semites. I.e., the superficial appearance of a word, its intuitive meaning, are taken to represent the actual concept involved in that word.

Now, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary,

Main Entry: rac·ism

Pronunciation: \ˈrā-ˌsi-zəm also -ˌshi-\

Function: noun

Date: 1933

1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination

It all boils down to the meaning of race. Which is:

Main Entry: ³race

Function: noun

Etymology: Middle French, generation, from Old Italian razza

Date: 1580

1 : a breeding stock of animals
2 a : a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same stock b : a class or kind of people unified by shared interests, habits, or characteristics

As can be seen, there is a broader meaning to the word race than people usually think. We tend to only consider features that can be genetically passed on; but a community with shared interests can also be counted as a race.

Israel apologists tend to point out that Judaism is not a race by the criterion involved in defninition 2a. After all, Ashkenazis tend to be whitish, Sephardis tend to be brownish and the Ethiopian Beta Israel are outright black. True, but Judaism is above all a genetic concept, in that you're Jewish if your mother also is. In response to this, it is frequently claimed that you can join Judaism through conversion, and if you can join it it's not a race. Also true, but converts are asked to become fanatical subscribers to the myriad Jewish superstitions, which is not required of "genetical" Jews. These newcomers (which, anyway, are statistically almost irrelevant) become part of the Jewish race as per definition 2b above.

Some will still be unconvinced that Judaism is a race. But you can belong to a group that is not a race and still be racist. This happens in several layers in Israel. In the first place, Jewish groups hate each other. The Ashkenazim hate the Sephardim, the Sephardim hate the Ashkenazim (to the point of shouting "Hitler was right" at them), they both hate the Ethiopians, etc., with very specialized hates playing a particularly important role among the haredim (the Litvak hate Chabad, etc.). But all these groups are cemented by a common hate of the Arabs (do I have to clarify that this is a statistical statement, that allows for numerous individual  exceptions?). And latent in the latter is a generalized hate of people not Jewish -- which is not explicitly promulgated by most Israelis, but is widely tolerated by the society. This hate can be perceived in the frequent assertions, by the Jewish clergy and West Bank settlers, that Jews are more sacred, more valuable or, simply, more worthy of life than non-Jews. As Shmuel Neumann, who describes himself as a "Ph.D. (...) actively involved in (...) an emigration program for Palestinians," put it recently in the settler organ Arutz Sheva:

One Jew named Chai is worth more than the two million so called Palestinians who inhabit Judea and Samaria. Barak may give the order to evacuate Jews, but the Almighty gave the order thousands of years ago to evacuate the gentiles[.]

The big, the enormous advantage that Zionists have is that there is no word to describe this hate of neighbors who are not Jewish. There is no horrible-sounding counterpart for the term "antisemitism." There exists a specialized word for the hate of Jews, but there's none for the symmetrical hate of non-Jews.

So that, until "antigentilism" or "goyophobia" gain currency, we will have to stick with "racism" to describe the mistreatment and abuse of the non-Jewish citizens of Israel and the occupied territories -- a fact which, itself, is beyond dispute.

Israeli Jewish racism (update 1): Genocidal languages

When German Chacellor Angela Merkel spoke before the Knesset on March 18, 2008, MK Arye Eldad, from the National Union-National Religious Party, left the plenum in disconformity. His objection? Merkel was addressing the Israeli parliament in her mother tongue -- German. As Eldad explained to the media:

"The last words my family heard were in German, and those were the orders to shoot them," Eldad said. "My protest is against the State of Israel and the Knesset, who invited her to make an address inside [the Knesset] when protocol does not require it."

Eldad's account may or may not be accurate (lots of Jews were executed by Ukrainians or Lithuanians), but what does it matter? The important thing is the symbolic significance of his unsourced statement. Very much like Misha DeFonseca or Benjamin Wilkomirski or Herman Rosenblat -- who are we to laugh at their fake Holocaust experiences? I mean, after all they went through, does it really matter it was a fabrication?

Joining in Eldad's protest was Shelly Yacimovich, from Labor:

Yacimovich said that while Merkel was a true friend to Israel, "allowing her to speak in German in the Israeli Knesset is utterly insensitive to Holocaust survivors. Germany is our ally, but in our generation we must respect the wounded psyches of survivors."

At first glance this would seem to be nonsense, and one would be tempted to point out that while survivors deserve respect and a just treatment --such as Germany, though not Israel, grants them--, they should not hold all speakers of a language hostage. Upon deeper analysis, however, one realizes that German's compound words, separable verbs and mixed vowels indeed arouse in the speaker the desire to commit genocide. Particularly guilty is the umlaut sign (¨), not coincidentally also present in Turkish. (Spanish also uses it, but nowhere as frequently; that would explain why the Inquisition killed far less people than the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide.)

Against that backdrop, Israeli Arab student Hanin Muslah committed an even worse crime than Angela Merkel. While on an Israeli bus, she spoke Arabic. Yes, Arabic -- the language in which the Mufti of Jerusalem instructed the Germans to start the Final Solution. Ynet reports:

Muslah, who is originally from the Wadi Ara area and is studying for a degree in engineering at the establishment's architecture and interior design department, said two armed security guards boarded the bus near a checkpoint as it was leaving Ariel. She claimed that the guards questioned her after hearing her speak Arabic and eventually ordered her to get off the bus.

"As I was talking on my cell I noticed they were pointing at me," said Muslah, who takes the same bus home every day. "I started to cry. I have never been so humiliated in my entire life. They took me off the bus in the middle of nowhere. I told them, 'I'm an Israeli, just like you are, so why are you treating me like this? Why take me off the bus in such a degrading manner?'"

Ms. Muslah is wrong. She is Israeli, but the guards are Jewish, i.e., much more Israeli than her. The Israelis' concept of equality is the same as that of the pigs in Animal farm. (Will I ever be able to criticize Zionism without using antisemitic, dehumanizing, and, worst of all, treif imagery?)

The Dhimmi status of Arabs in Israel is further confirmed by the following remarkable statement:

"I don't wear a veil or traditional dresses; I don’t look Arab," said the student, "I was taken off the bus only because I spoke Arabic."

Somewhat pathetically, this young woman is implying that, had she worn a veil, taking her off the bus would have been OK. I did my homework, she seems to complain, to have the "right" looks. Can't I be forgiven if I speak Arabic with my mom on the cell?

Ehm, no, Ms. Muslah, you can't. You're a second-class citizen. You'll be tolerated on buses and even in classrooms, but the moment you get assertive about your Arab identity, the system will make sure that you don't get away with it.

Later on in life you'll discover that however Western the clothes you wear, and however polished the Hebrew you speak, your job application will be dismissed as soon as your prospective Jewish employer reaches the line in your résumé that says, "Name." Welcome to Zionism, Ms. Muslah.

Letters to a Zionist friend (4): From blood libeler to reliable witness

OK, at last your insistence has borne fruit and I've watched that video you wanted me to check out:



This is a phone interview with Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian journo in Gaza, done during operation Cast Lead. In it, Rahma reports that Hamas members have gone undercover and that he hasn't seen any of them on the streets in the past couple of days. You claim this is the definitive proof that Hamas "hid among civilians," which clears Israel of responsibility for any civilian deaths.

A few questions arise, though. Any Jew reporting Israeli atrocities (the Breaking the Silence soldiers, for instance) is a self-hater according to you: can't there be self-haters among Palestinians? Or more likely still: isn't it possible that Rahma is a Fatah supporter aiming to tarnish Hamas? An examination of Rahma's reporting record is in order.

And our readers won't believe what pops up in the Google search. Mr. Rahma is none other than the journalist who first blamed Israel for the murder of the Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Durrah in October 2000. As was reported at the time:

"They were cleaning the area. Of course they saw the father," says Talal Abu-Rama, the camera man who watched the horror unfold. "They were aiming at the boy, and that is what surprised me, yes, because they were shooting at him, not only one time, but many times."

Now it's not like you've never given your opinion on Mr. Rahma. On the contrary, you've described all people who charged Israel with that murder as antisemites who engaged in the centuries-old blood-libel that Jews murder babies. So if that opinion of yours is sincere, quoting Rahma would be akin to quoting David Irving, David Duke or other certified Jew-haters.

The fact that you yourself are, nevertheless, peddling a video that quotes Rahma proves that you don't believe that accusing Israeli soldiers of having murdered al-Durrah on purpose is by itself a blood libel. We actually don't know what exactly happened that day in Gaza, but that an Israeli soldier or group of soldiers took aim at the child and killed him (out of "bad-appleness," not policy) belongs to the realm of the possible, and any analogy between that speculation and an antisemitic medieval myth is simply yet one more instance of Zionist bad faith.

Selectively believing Mahmoud

In an article titled I believe Ahmadinejad, former Israel Air Force top officer Aviam Sela, the architect of the 1981 bombing of Iraq's nuclear facility at Osirik, deploys the umpteenth version of an already familiar Zionist analogy: Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is Hitler; those who appease or try to negotiate with him are Chamberlain; and if Iran is not bombed the result will be another Holocaust. In his own words:

As was the case then, now too the Jewish people and enlightened nations are facing a dictator, this time an Iranian one, who keeps on declaring that the people of Israel have no right to exist. Or simply put, he says that the entity known as the State of Israel has to be eliminated, along with its Jewish citizens of course.

This paragraph contains truths --for instance, that Ahmadinejad is a dictator--, but it also contains a considerable amount of distortion.

Did Mahmoud talk about eliminating Israel? His actual words were "the Zionist regime," which is not quite the same. I recall when on June 1, 2001, the Nepalese royal family were mowed down in unclear circumstances. That certainly annihilated Nepal's monarchical regime, but it didn't obliterate the state of Nepal or the Nepalese people. Zionism, like monarchy, or apartheid, is a political system, not a country or an ethnic group.

But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that my antisemitism prevents me from realizing that when Ahmadinejad says Zionist regime he means Israel. Did he make any reference to its Jewish citizens? No; his speech did not contain the word "Jewish." So why does Sela suggest that he's singling out the Jewish population of Israel for elimination? That can't be inferred from any of the dictator's words.

Sela further muddies the waters by (again, incorrectly) claiming:

Hitler, just like Iran’s Ahmadinejad when he speaks of the State of Israel, presented a clear position whereby those born Jewish have no place on earth.

One would expect a former top officer from the IAF to be more rigorous in his interpretations. Iran's president has never presented a position that Jews have no place on earth. In fact, he has systematically endorsed the right of some 15,000 Jews to have a place on earth in the city of -- Teheran.

But another question worth raising is whether Ahmadinejad ever said that Iran itself will take care of eliminating the Zionist regime, the state of Israel, the world Jewry or whatever Sela chooses to interpret when he wakes up in the morning. It is not the same to say "John Doe needs to be killed" as to assert "I will kill John Doe," especially when people who combine both the will and the ability to murder Mr. Doe are not exactly in large supply. In other words, wishing for something horrible to happen to someone is itself horrible, but until you decide to harm that person yourself your horrible thoughts are basically irrelevant (unless you can have someone else do the task, which is clearly not the case here).

It would help a lot if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had ever clarified if he meant that Iran would work towards the elimination of the Zionist regime or he was just talking rhetorically.

Well, actually he did.

In July 2008, the Presidency of The Islamic Republic of Iran News Service reported:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the Zionist regime is inherently doomed to annihilation and there is no need for Iranians to take action.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of D8 summit in Malaysia, he said the Zionists themselves are well aware of the fact that their time is over.

"They label us as aggressors but this is a big lie because the Iranian nation throughout the history never attacked any nation," he said.

So if Sela's analogy is sound, surely we'll be able to find a Hitler speech in which he clarifies that Nazi Germany won't take action against the Jews, won't we?

Of course, we can revert to the theory that Ahmadinejad is a clown, but then why should we take some of his words seriously and some others not?

But the icing on the cake is Sela's proposed remedy to this impending Holocaust:

In retrospect, we can present today the lessons and conclusions we should have drawn back then, before the Munich Conference and before 1939. Had we had our own state back then, we would have expected its leaders to take the required decision and curb the process undertaken by Adolf Hitler. We would have expected the decision to thwart the threat.

The government of Israel took such decision, according to foreign reports, after it decided to prevent the killers of our 11 athletes in the Munich Olympics from undertaking another such massacre. By doing so, the State of Israel created the right kind of monument for our murdered athletes. The living monument of those who hurt us and are no longer alive is the most important testament to our continuing lives here rather than the embarrassing monument at the outskirts of Munich.

By now almost everyone, and certainly Mr. Sela, is aware that in its campaign to avenge the deaths of the 11 athletes, Israel "collateraly" murdered completely innocent civilian Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter and the brother of Gipsy Kings musician Chico Bouchiki, whom they mistook for the Black September terrorist Ali Hassan Salameh at the Norwegian resort of Lillehammer.

So what Sela is advocating is more Israeli actions outside of the rule of law, with no regard for possible non-Jewish collateral deaths, in line with Rabbi Yaacov Perrin's ruling that one million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.

Indeed there are guys around making scary threats, but we should first be concerned with those whose threats are credible, of whom Mr. Sela provides an excellent example.

Sderot residents: "We want the Qassams back"

You would think Israel cares a lot for Sderot. After all, its soldiers sacrificed life and limb, or at least a few thousand white phosphorus shells, to make the place safe from Palestinian rockets in operation Cast Lead. They didn't want to, but in the end there was no other option than to wipe out 1,400 terrorists, between men, men dressed up as women, women who allowed men to dress up like them, and children who might have grown up to kill Jews. You would think it was all done for Sderot's sake.

Think again. In a story titled Sderot plagued with welfare crisis, Ynet reports that, now that the rockets are over, the true face of Sderot as an impoverished and neglected community of mostly Mizrachi resdidents has emerged. Director of social services in the Sderot Municipality Yigal Levy is very candid about the origins of the city's current troubles:

Over 4000 families are currently being treated by social services in Sderot. Out of all applications this year, 40% were new applications and some 20% of those were related to bank debts and foreclosure threats. The municipality finds itself unable to attend to all of the new problems as a result of a drop in grant funds.

"The number of applications has risen, but our ability to address them has dropped by 50%," Levy complained. "The government saved people from the Qassams, but now no one really cares."

An indebted resident feels virtually helpless:

"Suddenly when it's calm and there are no more Qassams, they've threatened to take away my house. During the operation everyone was considerate. (...)

As long as the operation lasted no one approached me and I could live in peace, at least in that respect. My debt isn't that high, I'm trying to pay it off and still they threatened to evict me…I always felt that we were abandoned here, but now I feel it even more," he said.

But most striking is his actual longing for the days when the rockets poured down on the town, "bringing unspeakable pain to the population and leaving them mentally scarred forever":

Sometimes I think, to hell with it - bring on the Qassams. It'll solve my problems with the bank and I'll get to keep the roof over my head[.]

Yes, firing those rockets against a civilian population center was a crime against humanity on Hamas' part, which can't be overlooked or forgiven. But no matter what the intentions were, the actual harm inflicted can't be disregarded either. Any equivalence between the low-level damage suffered by Sderot and the carnage visited on Gaza is immoral and should be denounced by intellectuals as a monstrously dishonest debating device.

If this fails, we can try yellow badges

I recall that as a young child I enjoyed singing Argentina's national song, Aurora (Dawn). We gathered at the schoolyard early in the morning, whether it was hot or cold or a shining spring day, and, as the flag was raised, we chorused the hymn with patriotic fervor. I particularly liked the tune:



However, I did have a small issue with the lyrics:

High in the sky
a warrior eagle
corageously rises
in triumphant flight;
a wing blue,
the color of the sky;
a wing blue,
the color of the sea...
It is the flag of my homeland,
born from the sun, given to me by God;
it is the flag of my homeland,
born from the sun, given to me by God.

I was nine years old, and I already knew I was an atheist. The other children in my class didn't have the same problem. The overwhelming majority were Catholic; a boy and a girl, who were cousins, were Jewish; and another boy was Protestant: they all had a God to pray to. I didn't, and I particularly regretted that, as a proud son of the city were the Argentinian flag was created, I had to mention God in the song devoted to it. It was my first taste of religious coercion.

But at least I wasn't forced to sing that I belonged to any particular faith.

How difficult it must be for Israeli Arabs, who have to sing a national anthem in which they must say they're Jewish -- and that is only the tip of the iceberg of religious coercion in Israel. Of course, no one is implying that it approaches the level of enforcement of totalitarian Muslim states like Saudi Arabia. But it steers clear from Western standards.

In some places, modesty patrols make sure that women don't go around immodestly dressed. Cars are stoned if they travel on certain roads on Saturday. Women are harassed if they sit next to men on buses that serve ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. Christian monks, nuns and priests are spat on on a regular basis.

The usual Zionist defense is that these abuses are not officially sanctioned by the State. That would be a good defense save for the fact that Israel is a country of many states within the State, which more or less do as they please without the forces of order interfering much. One example are the settlers, who build illegally like crazy essentially unstopped by the police and the army. Another example are criminal mobs, which operate with remarkable freedom, engaging in extortion, drive-by shootings and other typical underworld activities. The religious establishment is yet another example.

Religion controls all personal and family affairs in Israel, from marriage to inheritance to burial. Interfaith marriage, thus, doesn't exist. Israel apologists are quick to point out that if a Jew and a Muslim want to marry, they can always travel to Cyprus and have a civil marriage there, which is accepted by the State. But is the trip paid for by the State? Circumventing religion, while not impossible, makes life much harder.

Zionists counter that, while coercion may have a symbolic place, it does not practically affect the daily affairs of people. Well, that's simply not true. If you own a restaurant, you've got to display a kashrut certificate that states that you comply with Jewish dietary laws. The rabbis can grant it or revoke it -- and use this power to enforce behaviors completely unrelated to food rituals.

For instance, see what can happen to you if you put up a Christmas tree, or Christmas decorations in your restaurant (h/t Didi Remez):

While hotels, restaurants and clubs put up fir trees, Santa Claus dolls and red hats for the Christmas celebration and New Year parties that will take place in the next two weeks, the chief rabbinate  recommends not displaying symbols of the Christian holidays. Moreover, the rabbinical “Lobby for Jewish Values” recently began to take action against restaurants and hotels that intend to put up Christian symbols. “We are considering making public those business establishments that put up Christian symbols for the Christian holidays and will call to boycott them,” said the lobby’s chairman, Ofer Cohen.

Every year, the Jerusalem Rabbinate also acts to ensure that fir trees not adorn places of entertainment. A source in the Kashrut Department said that this is done every year in consent, and that businesses that don’t comply can find their kashrut certificate revoked.

Jude signs on shops anyone?

Haaretz further reports on the loon Lobby behind this persecution:

According to the Israeli media, the fliers distributed by the Lobby for Jewish Values contain the following call to arms:

"The people of Israel have given their soul over the years in order to maintain the values of the Torah of Israel and the Jewish identity. You should also continue to follow this path of the Jewish people's tradition and not give in to the clownish atmosphere of the end of the civil year. And certainly not help those businesses that sell or put up the foolish symbols of Christianity."

Of course, you always have the option of opening a restaurant in Cyprus.

So if I get this straight, "the Jewish right to self-determination" means the right to impose on non-Jews, or even on liberal Jews, absurd restrictions based on the superstitions of the Jewish religion, and to publicly insult the Christian religion in a variety of ways. If this trend continues, I see a future for yellow-badge makers in Israel.

Zionism's changing discourse

Norman Geras' blog has a review of Yaacov Lozowick's Right to Exist, a book devoted to justify Israel's warmongering. Here's an excerpt:

The massacres of civilians at Deir Yasin in 1948, Kibiya in 1953 and Kfar Kassem in 1956, for instance, really were just that, massacres. But such events were atypical and were met with horror in the wider community, while great efforts were subsequently made to prevent their recurrence. Indeed, the IDF has shown a consistent commitment to fight its battles justly, as dramatically demonstrated by Operation Defensive Shield in Jenin in 2002. Instead of bombing from the safety of the air, Israel lost 23 soldiers in hand-to-hand combat 'so that the Palestinian terrorists would be defeated with as few [Palestinian civilian] deaths as possible' (p. 255).

Israel's behavior during its assault on Jenin has often been hailed  as a model of morality. Here are other examples:

I am proud that we were there, that we fought, and I also am proud of the morality of the battle. The camp was not bombed from the air in order to prevent innocent civilian casualties, and artillery was not used even though we knew about specific
areas in the [refugee] camp where terrorists were holing up.
--Dr. David Zangen, Seven Lies About Jenin, Ma'ariv, 8.11.2002

In Jenin, Israel's government decided to pursue a course that placed much greater risks on Israel's soldiers but that greatly reduced the dangers to Palestinian civilians. We announced over loudspeakers our intention to clear out the terrorist infrastructure in the camp and warned everyone to leave. Then, instead of bombing from the air or using tanks or heavy artillery, our soldiers were sent on a harrowing mis­sion. They painstakingly went from house to house, moving through a hornet's nest of booby traps, bombs, and armed terrorists. After thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed during one mission, we still refused to use our air force or heavy artillery.
--Natan Sharansky, Jenin: Anniversary of a Battle

Not only was Jenin not a massacre or an unparalleled catastrophe but it is regarded by many as a model of how to conduct urban warfare against terrorists hiding among civilians. (...) Instead of bombing the terrorists' camp from the air, as the United States did in Afghanistan and as Russia did in Chechnya, with little risk to their own soldiers but much to civilians, Israeli infantrymen entered the camp, going house to house in search of terrorists and bomb-making equipment, which they found. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers and fifty-two Palestinians, many of whom were combatants, were killed.
--Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, 2003, p. 144

In Jenin there was a battle - a battle in which many of our soldiers fell. The army fought from house to house, not by bombing from the air, in order to prevent, to the extent possible, civilian casualties.
--High Court of Justice of Israel

All of these pieces, as well as the hundreds of similar ones you will find on the Internet,  argue that the Jenin operation was particularly moral because Israel did not bomb from the air but did house-to-house searches, thus minimizing civilian casualties.

But in December 2008-January 2009, Israel behaved quite differently during operation Cast Lead. In this war, Israel didn't risk a single soldier in hand-to-hand combat, but instead bombed all houses where terrorists were holed up, in addition to a large number of buildings that contained none. Jenin had been called not a massacre because the 500 casualties initially reported were later found to be just 52; but in Gaza, 1300 people died, including, by Israel's most ardent apologists' own estimate, at least 300 civilians.

You would think that would lead Zionists to lament the IDF's diminished moral standards. After all, in Jenin they declared that the IDF's virtue had been not to bomb from the air, and the Gaza op was completely carried out from the air. They should have observed that, while the IDF is and will always be the most moral army in the world, unfortunately it's not as moral as it used to be.

But somehow they haven't made that observation. The discourse has changed, and now an operation is moral not if the attacking army refrains from leveling buildings with its air force; it's moral if, in addition to the bombs, the warplanes drop leaflets calling on civilians to evacuate the area.

The Zionist threshold for truth

We Israel/Palestine bloggers like to think that our writings make a difference; that someone will be convinced by our posts to join our camp and not our opponents'. In the case of Zionist bloggers, they try to achieve this end in a two-pronged movement. There exists a layer of bloggers that make the most outrageous assertions and engage in "deny-it-all" tactics. If that fails, a second, intellectual segment makes elaborate arguments that may persuade more sophisticated readers.

The first group interests us here. It's the group that makes claims like:

• The territories are disputed, not occupied.
• The settlements are not illegal under international law.
• Israeli soldiers are required by their Code of Ethics to risk their own lives in order not to harm civilians.
• Torture is illegal in Israel.
• All of Palestine, from the river to the sea, was given to the Jews by the League of Nations and this has not been repealed.
• The difference between Palestinian terrorism nowadays and Jewish terrorism in the 1930s-40s is that the latter never targetted civilians.

Keep in mind that these "unsophisticated" bloggers achieve their objective not when they win a debate with an anti-Zionist, but when they succeed in having a neutral reader repeat the bullshit above in other blogs.

Elder of Ziyon belongs in this group. He will endlessly exploit the West's willingness to believe anything nasty about the Arabs (and anything good about the Jews) to discredit the whole ethnic group, with little attention to truth or fact.

In a recent post, Elder reminded us that, as is already known, the Arabs are liars. Under the heading Today's lying PalArab "eyewitnesses," Elder starts off by quoting the Palestinian news agency Ma'an:

Fifteen Israeli settlers from the Yitzhar settlement near Nablus attempted to set fire to a home in the village of Burin, Palestinian sources said Saturday.

Wearing white prayer shirts marking the Jewish Sabbath the group stormed the home of Ayman Attalla Safwan carrying flame excellents but were confronted by several villagers who tried to prevent their entry into the home, eyewitnesses described.

EoZ goes on to analyze:

Not sure what "flame excellents" are but not only would religious Jews not carry implements to create a fire - they wouldn't carry anything at all on the Sabbath, outside of what is necessary for saving lives.

Just another example of the lies that Palestinian Arab "witnesses" routinely engage in.

Because Einstein was Jewish, the gullible West will actually believe that religious Israeli Jews love the commandments of their religion more than they hate the Arabs. A recent Jerusalem Post story, however, proves otherwise:

Hebron rabbi permits gentile Shabbat construction in settlements

Rabbi Dov Lior, the rabbi of Hebron-Kiryat Arba, issued a halachic ruling last week that it was permitted to employ non-Jews on Shabbat to build in Judea and Samaria during the present construction freeze. (...)

Although there is no prohibition against a non-Jew working on Shabbat, there is a rabbinic prohibition for a Jew to tell a non-Jew to do work for him. It is considered more severe to tell a non-Jew to perform a biblical prohibition such as building than to perform a rabbinical prohibition. Nevertheless, to facilitate the settling of the land of Israel it is permitted.

At the time of the post's publication, however, I wasn't aware of this fatwa, but I did know that destroying fruit-bearing trees is illegal under Jewish religious law, and that settlers have been proven to burn and uproot olive trees. I told EoZ so. His response:

HB, the unfortunate truth is that even religious Jews sometimes pick and choose which laws they emphasize. for example, haredi Jews throwing stones on Shabbos at people violates a number of laws.

Creating a fire on the Sabbath is a law that would not be violated by any Jew who pretends to be religious. It is as unthinkable as eating a BLT in public. I stand by my analysis - the event did not happen as described.

(BTW, Palestinian Arabs have a long history of destroying olive trees - of Jews. And most of the olive tree accusations against Jews are lies as well.)

There exist bogus accusations of olive-tree destruction against the settlers, just like there exist bogus Holocaust survivors who collect huge sums writing books about their "stories" before being exposed. This doesn't mean that Elie Wiesel is a liar, or that Ma'an's story is false. So that I told EoZ:

You say "most" but you cited ONE case. I don't mean to offend you, but you look like the Holocaust deniers who say "the Jewish soap story is a lie; therefore, there was no Holocaust."

To prove your point, you must cite ALL accusations and prove that at least 51% of them are lies.

To which he retorted:

If there is a pattern of lies where Arabs cut down their own olive trees, then the accusations become automatically suspect.

How many does it take to establish a pattern?

The one I linked was October, 2008.

December 2006:
http://imra.org.il/story.php3?id=31859
January 2006 (video of Arabs cutting trees down): http://joesettler.blogspot.com/2...live- trees.html

November 2003: http://www.israelnationalnews.co...News.aspx/ 52528

Given this pattern, we need more than Arab and leftist "eyewitnesses" to establish that the accusations have a basis in fact.

How many swallows does it take to make a summer? Not 4, in this case, given the huge amount of olive-tree accusations. To further clarify things, I wrote:

Here is a list of olive tree claims compiled by Yesh Din. Can Elder prove that most of these claims are false?

If he can't, this is yet another instance of this blog providing non-credible information.

EoZ:

It is very funny that your evidence shows that most of the reported incidents could not be shown to have been done by Jews.

Even so, I was going to change my wording to "as far as I understand, most of the..." - but I couldn't correct the post, as it was in the comments.

This is a lot of effort to prove that I was wrong in something I didn't even post. And you still haven't.

Me:

But they (the reported incidents) could not be shown to be lies, either. If you have proof that they are, please show it. It will be of great interest to the State of Israel as it will clarify once and for all what really happened. (...)

I don't have to prove anything. The burden of proof falls on the one making an assertion.

Which finally led to a remarkable statement by EoZ:

Thanks for your opinion of what I must do. I feel I must ignore it. (...) I still believe my original claim is accurate, but I admit I have no hard proof, as you have no proof otherwise. My belief is based on the combination of multiple staged fake olive tree damage by Pals and anti_Israel activists, and the dual incentive of doing the faking - making settlers look bad, and getting compensation from Israel for such accusations. Given that, settler denials have at least as much credibility as the original accusations.

This is what it all boils down to. The Zionist threshold for truth is one's belief as backed by one's manipulation of selective information. He believes the settlers more than he does the Palestinians, but he passes off this belief as fact. In pure Holocaust-denier fashion, he compiles a short list of faked incidents and draws conclusions about the much longer list of reported incidents. And, unfortunately (and this is what we're up against), the West believes his belief.

Because, you know, Jews have 250 Nobel prizes and gave warnings before their terror attacks, while Arabs are hook-nosed, thick-eyebrowed and have shining black eyes and a knife in their teeth.

The Israeli Jewish racism thread

One should not be afraid to call a spade a spade. Israeli Jews hate Arabs. But it's not a normal hate. It's a hate of cosmic dimensions. It's the hate of someone who can't even imagine the possibility of having anything to do with the Other.

Of course the statement above must be qualified. Not all Israeli Jews hate Arabs -- only an overwhelming majority that is fully supported by the State. And it's not a violent hate (except for the settlers and a few other groups), the reason it's not violent being that the State provides Jews with all the legal means to exclude Arabs from their communities.

There have been many recent examples of Israeli Jewish racism --from the statements of the housing minister that Jews and Arabs should not live together to the soccer player who apologized for suggesting that his team might hire an Arab--, so that I thought I might as well start a thread to gather information on the subject, which will be periodically updated with fresh racist outbursts from the Jews of Israel.

Just to start the database, allow me to report the case of Aadel Suad, an Israeli Arab who a few years ago had the weird idea of wanting to build a house in a plot of land he owned in a Jewish town. As usual, what followed is Kafkaesque:

Aadel Suad first came to the planning and construction committee of the Misgav Local Council in 1997. Suad, an educator, was seeking a construction permit to build a home on a plot of land he owns in the community of Mitzpeh Kamon. The reply he got, from a senior official on the committee, was a memorable one.

"Don't waste your time," he reportedly told Suad. "We'll keep you waiting for 30 years."

For Suad it's now been 12 years of fighting the committee's red tape to build a home on his own land. The reason, as far as he and his family are concerned, is singular: The local council doesn't want Arabs(...)

The Misgav Local Council rejected the accusations. The council said Suad's plot is located far from the other homes of the community and has no roads, sidewalks, lighting, water or sewer. All these would need to be connected through other plots, some of which are privately owned, the council said.

The council also said Suad's construction permit was conditioned on coming up with a plan to connect the plot to infrastructure, which he failed to produce in sufficient detail, or to accompany it with permits.

I.e., seeing that Suad's plot was far from the other homes, the Council imposed an ad hoc condition that wouldn't be required of a Jew and that would be next to impossible to meet precisely because of the plot's isolation. Read the whole story here. Be careful to notice the numerous measures taken by the Israel Land Administration to ensure that this particular Arab could not build a house on his own land.

They haven't gotten a thing

Yesterday a mosque was partially burned in Yasuf, the West Bank, in an arson attack that destroyed carpets and religious books. Rightwing Jewish settlers are widely believed to be behind the attack.

The damaged mosque in Yasuf

In fact, as Haaretz reported,

Investigation into the incident points to the likelihood that settlers from nearby Tapuah are behind the attack, police said, but the vandals have not yet been caught.

Although an attack on a house of prayer is a particularly outrageous act of terrorism, it's not the only one in the present wave of violence. Last week the Israeli police was reported to believe that settlers were also responsible for the torching of a house and two vehicles, belonging to private Palestinian citizens, in the West Bank village of Ain Abous.

The Israelis are "investigating" both incidents. Good luck -- both to them and to those who are confident that someone will be jailed as a result.

The attacks are presumably part of the "price tag" policy currently being implemented by the settlers. The Times described it thus:

On a hilltop, blankets, pots and broken chairs are strewn where the Israeli army tried to demolish an illegal Jewish settlement outpost. In the fields opposite, 70 olive trees are scorched and blackened after the settlers took revenge — not on the army, but on the local Palestinians.

It is a new and effective settler tactic known as the “price tag”: if the Government sends police or soldiers to dismantle an outpost that is being built, the settlers make the Palestinian population pay the price.

And why are they stepping up their "price tagging" right now? Very simple: the Israeli government has declared a 10-month freeze on settlement construction in legal settlements -- as opposed to their previous sporadic crackdowns on illegal outposts only. This has been too much for the Jewish fanatics in the West Bank and they have declared war on the Palestinians.

Stupid settlers; they haven't gotten a thing.

Whenever a landmark High Court ruling, painful concession, breakthrough, or watershed is announced by Israel, the first thing you must look for is the caveat. And in this case the caveats are multiple:

• Construction in East Jerusalem won't be frozen.
• Construction already under way (i.e. the foundations of which have already been laid) won't be frozen. This includes more than 3,000 apartments currently being built.
  
• Construction of schools, synagogues and other public buildings won't be frozen.
• Exceptions may be granted under special conditions.

The idea is that construction will continue unabated. No new permits will be granted, but there's no clause in the freeze stating that the construction rate in the buildings already under way can't be stepped up. Meanwhile, Netanyahu will invite Palestinians to negotiate under outrageous conditions: 1) that they recognize the state religion of Israel (never in history has this been demanded of a party to a negotiation); 2) that they accept a state without an army; 3) that they accept Israeli control of all their borders, including that with Jordan; 4) that they accept wedges of settlements cutting deep into the West Bank, etc.

On month ten plus one day, Netanyahu will declare, in faux exasperation, that he made a painful concession and got nothing from the Palestinians, and the Ziosphere will be a festival of quotes from Golda Meir as to how they hate more than they love and they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. On that precise day, thousands of new permits will be asked for -- and granted.

So that settlers have nothing to worry about. They can focus on building more quickly the apartments that are already going up, or on building more in East Jerusalem. But I understand them; they want to build in their own settlements. In that case, there are still a few options available:

1. Build boarding schools. Each student's bedroom will be quite large and equipped with a kitchen, a lounge, and one or two "auxiliary rooms" -- i.e., very similar to an apartment.
2. Hire Palestinians to start building new apartments on Saturday, when the freeze enforcers won't drop by. The next time the inspectors show up, the foundations for the buildings will already have been laid, and much to its regret Israel will have to grant them permits. (Don't congratulate me on this idea; I borrowed it from a rabbi.)
3. Declare a settlement part of Jerusalem and sue the State. While the case reaches the High Court, start construction of new buildings, which won't be stopped by the State, since it's not clear that the settlement is not part of Jerusalem. When the High Court decides it's not, the foundations will already have been laid.

I'm sure the creative settlers will find other ways around the freeze. So what are they warring about?

I have a conspiracy theory. The freeze was a deal between the government and the settlers. The settlers accepted the symbolic measure in exchange for being allowed to make a lot of trouble so as to give the impression of painfulness (even if the actual pain is being felt by the Palestinians). This might explain the construction spree that preceded the freeze, which would indicate that settlers had prior knowledge of the measure.

Be that as it may, it's clear that the building rate will not diminish during the freeze, and will probably reach unprecedented levels in ten months' time.

The "illegal settlements myth" myth

Commentary has an article by David M. Phillips, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law, under the title "The Illegal-Settlements Myth." Sound familiar? "Settlements may be unwise, but they're not illegal" and "the territories are disputed, not occupied" are two Hasbara clichés that Zionists repeat tirelessly, failing to convince the saner part of the world, but further convincing themselves and their followers.

Zionists seem to believe that legality is something that is decided by article writers or by pundits on their blogs. Not so. Legality under international law is decided by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the bodies that most countries, including Israel, accept as the authority in matters of international disputes.

The UN's Security Council has repeatedly denounced Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal. For instance, in UNSC Resolution 446 of 22 March 1979, it stated:

The Security Council,(...)

1. Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East[.]

The issue arose again when the ICJ was asked to give an advisory opinion about Israel's Apartheid Wall/Security Fence. On 9 July 2004, the ICJ issued its opinion that the Wall was illegal "recalling in particular"

relevant United Nations resolutions affirming that Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, are illegal[.]

Invoking UNSCR No. 446, the ruling included the following unequivocal statement:

The Court concludes that the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including East Jerusalem) have been established in breach of international law.

The opinion was passed by a 14-1 vote. Even the sole dissenting judge, Thomas Buergenthal of the United States, was very careful to note that:

9. Paragraph 6 of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention also does not admit for exceptions on grounds of military or security exigencies. It provides that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”. I agree that this provision applies to the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and that their existence violates Article 49, paragraph 6.

But this is nothing new. The same conclusion had been reached in 1967 by the Israelis themselves. In early September of that year, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol asked the legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron (currently a judge at the Appeals Chambers for the Rwanda Genocide trials), whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked "Top Secret," Mr. Meron wrote unequivocally,

My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

But with so many scholars and international bodies agreeing that the settlements are illegal, what does Phillips build his case on? Basically, he takes the time-tested approach of muddying the waters by making weird interpretations and wild extrapolations. First off, he tackles the argument that settlements were built on private Palestinian land. The land, he clarifies for us, was not stolen; it was requisitioned, and then for military security reasons. It's true, he admits, that the settlements built on it were not military, creating a legal contradiction; but eventually, when the Palestinians protested, the case got to the High Court and the benevolent Israelis ruled in favor of the Palestinians:

In a 1979 case, Ayyub v. Minister of Defense, the Israeli Supreme Court considered whether military authorities could requisition private property for a civilian settlement, Beth El, on proof of military necessity. The theoretical and, in that specific case, actual answers were affirmative. But in another seminal decision the same year, Dwaikat v. Israel, known as the Elon Moreh case, the court more deeply explored the definition of military necessity and rejected the tendered evidence in that case because the military had only later acquiesced in the establishment of the Elon Moreh settlement by its inhabitants. The court’s decision effectively precluded further requisitioning of Palestinian privately held land for civilian settlements.

Mr. Phillips is in urgent need of updating. In 2005, then-defense minister of Israel Shaul Mofaz commissioned a report on the settlements from Baruch Spiegel, a general with the IDF. The secret document was eventually leaked to Haaretz, where its main findings were published. Among these:

An analysis of the data reveals that, in the vast majority of the settlements - about 75 percent - construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued. The database also shows that, in more than 30 settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure (roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations) has been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents.

Lest anyone think that these settlements comprise only those erected before the 1979 ruling, Haaretz goes on to specify:

Among them are veteran ideological settlements like Alon Shvut (established in 1970 and currently home to 3,291 residents, including Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun); Ofra (established in 1975, home to 2,708 residents, including former Yesha Council spokesman Yehoshua Mor Yosef and media personalities Uri Elitzur and Hagai Segal); and Beit El (established in 1977, population 5,308, including Hagai Ben-Artzi, brother of Sara Netanyahu). Also included are large settlements founded primarily for economic motives, such as the city of Modi'in Illit (established in 1990 and now home to 36,282 people), or Givat Ze'ev outside Jerusalem (founded in 1983, population 11,139), and smaller settlements such as Nokdim near Herodion (established in 1982, population 851, including MK Avigdor Lieberman).

So that extensive land theft took place regardless of the High Court ruling.

Phillips moves then on to his star argument: the Geneva Convention does not say what most of the world believes it says:

Settlement opponents more frequently cite the Fourth Geneva Convention these days for their legal arguments. They specifically charge that the settlements violate Article 49(6), which states: “The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into territories it occupies.”

Frequently, this sentence is cited as if its meaning is transparent and its application to the establishment of Israeli settlements beyond dispute. Neither is the case.

To settlement opponents, the word “transfer” in Article 49(6) connotes that any transfer of the occupying power’s civilian population, voluntary or involuntary, is prohibited. However, the first paragraph of Article 49 complicates that case. It reads: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” Unquestionably, any forcible transfer of populations is illegal. But what about voluntary movements with the antecedent permission or subsequent acquiescence by the occupant? (...)

To the extent that a violation of Article 49(6) depends upon the distinction between the voluntary and involuntary movement of people, the inclusion of “forcible” in Article 49(1) but not in 49(6) makes a different interpretation not only plausible but more credible. It’s a matter of simple grammar that when similar language is used in several different paragraphs of the same provision, modifying language is omitted in later paragraphs because the modifier is understood.

I'm a linguist and I'm not aware of any such grammatical rule as highlighted in boldface above in Spanish. I'm not an expert in English, but I suspect Phillips is making this up.

More to the point, paragraph 49(1) has nothing to do with 49(6). The former refers to the population living in the occupied territory; the latter, to the population living in the occupying country. (If both articles refered to both sets of people, 49(6) would be needless!) In 49(1), it's necessary to clarify that forcible transfers are forbidden because there may exist occupied people who want to be transfered. Moving out of one's country is an inalienable right. In 49(6), however, it's not necessary to clarify anything because the occupying power may not move its own inhabitants into the occupied territory even if they want to.

Ah, but Phillips has his legal experts, too.

To Julius Stone, an international-law scholar, “the word ‘transfer’ [in 49(6)] in itself implies that the movement is not voluntary on the part of the persons concerned, but a magisterial act of the state concerned.”

You will find Stone often mentioned by settlement apologists; not because he's a particularly outstanding jurist, but because he's one of the few authorities propounding this interpretation. However, his further analysis is telling:

We would have to say that the effect of Article 49(6) is to impose an obligation on the State of Israel to ensure (by force if necessary) that these areas, despite their millennial association with Jewish life, shall be forever judenrein. Irony would thus be pushed to the absurdity of claiming that Article 49(6), designed to prevent repetition of Nazi-type genocidal policies of rendering Nazi metropolitan territories judenrein, has now come to mean that . . . the West Bank . . . must be made judenrein and must be so maintained, if necessary by the use of force by the government of Israel against its own inhabitants. Common sense as well as correct historical and functional context exclude so tyrannical a reading of Article 49(6).

Judge Stone's incendiary language, using loaded terms like "judenrein," is indicative that he was driven by emotion rather than by rational analysis, which makes his opinion on this issue basically worthless. Of course, no one is excluding Jews from the West Bank, especially now that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has declared that they will be welcome to stay there under a future Palestinian state.

Finally, Phillips doesn't spare us from a Tibet analogy:

The settlements are also a far cry from policies implemented by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s to alter the ethnic makeup of the Baltic states by initially deporting hundreds of thousands of people and encouraging Russian immigration.

Nor can they be compared to the efforts by China to alter the ethnic makeup of Tibet by forcibly scattering its native population and moving Chinese into Tibetan territory. Israel’s settlement policies are also not comparable to the campaign by Morocco to alter the ethnic makeup of the Western Sahara by transferring Moroccan Arabs to displace the native Saharans, who now huddle in refugee camps in Algeria, or to the variety of population displacements that occurred in the various parts of the former Yugoslavia.

All these would seem to fit the offense described in Article 49(6) precisely. Yet finding references to the application of Article 49(6) to nations other than Israel is like looking for a needle in a haystack. What distinguishes a system of “law” from arbitrary systems of control is that similar situations are handled alike.

Is it possible that this man is actually teaching law at Northeastern? Someone ignorant of the basic distinction between occupation and annexation? Of course, Phillips has all the right in the world to be outraged by "the efforts by China to alter the ethnic makeup of Tibet by forcibly scattering its native population" (while remaining strikingly silent about similar Israeli efforts to "thin out" the Arab population in the Negev and in the Galilee), but the Tibetans are Chinese citizens and enjoy exactly the same rights as the majority Han population. In a dictatorship like China these may not seem to amount to much, but they include the right to use the same roads as the Han, as well as the highest railroad in the world that was built by China for the region. By contrast, Palestinians in the West Bank not only can't choose the authorities that will build roads on their expropriated lands; they also can't drive on those roads.

Thus, by invoking bogus linguistics and "authorities" that write in a remarkably unscholarly language, as well as by making cheap analogies based on amazing ignorance, Phillips manages to put together yet another unimpressive attempt at defending the indefensible.

Am I a Jew?

The short answer is no.

However, on several Zionist blogs where I've been busting Hasbara I've been "accused" of being Jewish -- and self-hating, needless to say. At first I thought it was some isolated deranged commenter, but as the claim keeps cropping up (see here for the latest instance) I must conclude it's part of a strategy. I know, this sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory, but the blogs where they've alleged I'm Jewish now include Engage, Harry's Place, Z-Word, Desde Sefarad, Judeo-Arab Conspiracy and now Elder of Ziyon.

The curious thing is that if I claimed to be a Jew, they would call me an Asajew, i.e. someone who uses their Jewishness as a shield to fend off accusations of antisemitism. If they, for the reasons that be, think I actually have some Jewish ancestry, they should congratulate me for not bringing it up, which is the right thing for a Jewish critic of Israel to do according to their other set of standards.

In short, damned if you do, damned if you don't. The blogosphere is a weird place, just like the Middle East.

The Gaza greenhouse effect

Every now and then the subject of the greenhouses left behind by Israeli settlers eradicated from Gaza is brought up by Israel apologists as proof of several things. It is claimed that Gazans don't suffer from malnutrition: if they did, they wouldn't have destroyed the greenhouses when the Israelis left. Therefore, there's nothing wrong with Israel's blockade of Gaza, because it doesn't actually harm them. It is also claimed that the destruction of the greenhouses proves how hateful Gazans are: they prioritized wiping out every vestige of Jewish presence over keeping a valuable source of nutrients and income. Finally, it is asserted that a people that got the result of heavy investment and destroyed it can't be trusted ro run anything, much less a state.

Much of this is bullshit, and the part that isn't is highly distorted.

When Israel decided its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the settlers expected to be paid handosmely for the productive infrastructure they had created. Of course this was a display of chutzpah, because it had been heavy state subsidizing that had allowed them to create that infrastructure in the first place. As Haaretz noted:

The Gaza settlers had been inundated by perks from all directions. They received subsidized lands, subsidized water, assured wages from the public sector, "risk bonuses" and lower tax on their higher wages, subsidized daycare, cheap Arab labor, what didn't they get. The benefits they received touched on every area of their lives and they became accustomed to higher standards they can't forgo even now.

As the date of the withdrawal approached with no deal in sight, however, the settlers began to destroy the greenhouses. The New York Times reported:

About half the greenhouses in the Israeli settlements in Gaza have already been dismantled by their owners, who have given up waiting to see if the government was going to come up with extra payment as an inducement to leave them behind, say senior officials working on the coordination of this summer's Israeli pullout from Gaza.(...)

Of the roughly 1,000 acres of agricultural land that were under greenhouses in the 21 Israeli settlements in Gaza, only 500 acres remain - creating significant doubts that the greenhouses could be handed over to the Palestinians as "a living business," the goal cited by the Israeli coordinator of the pullout, Eival Giladi.

Finally, a last-minute effort by American Jewish philantropists raised $14 million and the remainder of the greenhouses was bought and turned over to the Palestinians.

However, since there had been no coordination with the Palestinians, there was no security plan to protect the greenhouses from looters. AP reported:

Palestinians looted dozens of greenhouses on Tuesday, walking off with irrigation hoses, water pumps and plastic sheeting in a blow to fledgling efforts to reconstruct the Gaza Strip.(...)

Palestinian police stood by helplessly Tuesday as looters carted off materials from greenhouses in several settlements, and commanders complained they did not have enough manpower to protect the prized assets. In some instances, there was no security and in others, police even joined the looters, witnesses said.

“We need at least another 70 soldiers. This is just a joke,” said Taysir Haddad, one of 22 security guards assigned to Neve Dekalim, formerly the largest Jewish settlement in Gaza. “We’ve tried to stop as many people as we can, but they’re like locusts.”

As can be seen, the theft was carried out by individuals, and in no way was it encouraged by the Palestinian Authority. Quite on the contrary, there was a conscious PA effort to prevent the lootings, which was however hindered by lack of resources.

Two reflections arise from the stories above.

On the one hand, it's true that some of the greenhouses were destroyed by Palestinian individuals. There's nothing remarkable about that. Beggars can't be choosers, as the saying goes, and looting is what normally happens when two conditions are met: 1) an impoverished populace; and 2) a situation of lack of control by an established authority. Gazans stole the hardware and materials contained in the greenhouses not in a drive to erase the Jews' memory from the territory, but to satisfy their personal needs. There was a rationale to their theft.

The destruction of part of the greenhouses by the settlers, however, can only be explained by animosity. They spent time, effort and probably even money to dismantle the facilities so that the Palestinians wouldn't be able to use them. There's a big difference between he who damages property in order to derive a benefit and he who damages it only to harm another person.

Many other related points could be made. For instance, that even in the Zionists' twisted logic the looting of the facilities would justify the ban on vegetable imports into Gaza, but not that on livestock (cows can't be raised in greenhouses). Or that the 350 Arab villages that disappeared from Israel's map were not looted by vandals; they were razed by the State in a clear drive to eliminate any trace of Arabness from their respective landscapes. But without getting into those intricacies, and just focusing on the destruction of the greenhouses by both Jews and Palestinians, it's clear who was moved by necessity and who by hate.

Letters to a Zionist friend (3): It's them, not me

Yitzchak Goodman is easily the most civil blogger on the web. He is calm and mild-mannered and always finds a polite way to say even the most outrageous things. When you get angry at him, you know you can't tell him to do something to himself, because he'll never reciprocate.

Now Goodman has a strange obsession. A huge amount of his blogging is devoted to exposing North Korea's autocratic regime -- for instance, here, here and here, just from this last week. This fixation defies explanation. North Korea is not very much newsworthy, and while its human-rights record is dismal, it pales next to that of Congo, where 5.5 million were killed in the last war, and Pygmies were eaten.

Granted, he's not the only one with difficult-to-explain obsessions. My countryman Andrés Oppenheimer, for instance, specializes in trashing Cuba. He appears on TV, writes for newspapers in Spanish and English and has even authored a few books whose sole purpose is to highlight Cuba's failures and belittle its achievements. This, at a time when Cuba has become utterly irrelevant on the international scene.

So that I suppose you were right, my dear Zionist friend, to call Goodman an anti-North-Korean bigot, and Oppenheimer an anti-Cuban bigot.

What?? You didn't call them bigots?

Wait a minute. Your star argument all these years has been that I slam Israel and not Sudan, so I must have a special prejudice against Israel and, in fact, the Jewish people, which turns me into, well, an antisemite. But look at Goodman and Oppenheimer: they also talk too little about Sudan, and too much about North Korea and Cuba. They must also harbor hateful feelings, mustn't they?

Oh, I can see what your response to that is. It's not only that I devote a disproportionate fraction of my time to bashing Israel. It's also that there's a huge wealth of other bloggers, pundits, journalists and commenters who do the same: by contrast, Goodman and Oppenheimer are relatively isolated in their North Korean and Cuban obsessions. Such collective fury directed against a small country can only be dictated by deeply-ingrained hatred, probably the result of milennia of Jewish blood-libeling.

And know what? I'll agree that many, many critics of Israel are vicious antisemites. A majority, a minority? I don't know, but there are many. But what does this say about individual anti-Zionists? Nothing. Nothing at all.

See, Goodman's and Oppenheimer's cases illustrate the fact that, statistically, there will always be people who develop an interest, a negative interest, in a certain country for no reason at all. So how do you know that I'm not the guy that statistically must arise with a specialized interest in finding Israel's defects, just like others criticize Poland, Sri Lanka or Argentina? You don't know, and if you don't know you must give me the benefit of the doubt. Trust me: I am that guy. And I'm not an antisemite, and the proof is that -- I don't have a single Jewish friend! (i.e. I didn't befriend one only to deflect criticism. I do have a left-handed wife, however. Not the same, I know.)

The rest of anti-Zionists? I don't know. Some will hate Jews, some others won't. But here's a piece of advice for you: if you believe you can charge individual Israel critics with antisemitism, don't look at me, look at them.

Israel as a wife beater

It sometimes seems to me that in defending itself Israel uses some of the arguments depoloyed by wife abusers to excuse their behavior.

"She provoked me." That is a standard defense. She cursed me, she slapped me in the face, she even kicked me in the knee with her sharp-pointed shoes, and it did hurt. Can you expect me not to react? By the way, since I punched both her eyes black, she has stopped attacking me, either verbally or physically.

But no court, be it in the US, Argentina or Israel, would accept that defense. The judge would tell the defendant that while his wife has the power to cause him a modest amount of pain, he has the power to kill her with his fists. The overwhelmingly stronger side in a conflict has a greater obligation to show restraint than the side that is basically unable to cause any actual harm. If the husband doesn't want to be kicked or scratched, he must seek an arrangement, for instance by leaving the house (leaving the house altogether, not just one room) and paying support money to his spouse and children.

That is, in a nutshell, what judge Goldstone has told Israel. Hamas' attacks were mostly a nuisance, with people in Israel being more likely to die as bystanders in drive-by shootings from internecine Jewish mafia warfare than from a Qassam or a Grad. Few Israelis took Hamas' toothless rockets seriously; on the contrary, bloodthirsty Israeli Jews flocked to Sderot to watch the carnage live undeterred by the (extremely low) chances of being hit by one of the enemy's imprecise devices. In that context, Goldstone affirms, the amount of death inflicted by Israel is unwarrantedly disproportionate. He's being hated a lot for saying so, and, more to the point, for being a Jew who says so.

Another defense wife-batterers usually put up is, "I don't know how this could come about." The wife is bruised and bleeding and has missing teeth and two or three broken bones, yet the guy doesn't know how it all happened, as if he was seized by supernatural forces he had no control over. This is what the Israeli government says re the continual illegal outpost expansion in the West Bank. It just happens; the IDF can't do anything. As Haaretz reported a few days ago, quoting a defense official:

"The settlers are very much in tune with the ticking political clock," the senior defense source said. "You can sense it on the ground, with the infrastructure work that is being done, but also in more minor things. They are acting without any legal authorization and are ignoring the state.

"The approach at this time is that whoever can, goes ahead and builds," the source continued. "It begins with the official leadership of the Yesha Council [of settlements] and ends with the hilltop youth."

The source is fully aware of the hindrance this means in terms of an eventual evacuation as part of a two-state solution:

He pointed out that the phenomenon of unbridled construction is evident in both the more established settlements and in the illegal outposts.

"Whoever can, lays the floor in preparation for constructing a building; and in factories they add extensions to roofs. In some settlements, they've built factories for rapid construction of caravans on site, so that they can bypass the ban - on transporting caravans - which was issued by the Civil Administration. Everything was done with the intent of creating a critical mass in many different locations at once, which will make evacuation in the future [more] difficult," he said.

Note how this security source speaks of it as if it were fate-ordained. It's all illegal, he has no qualms admitting that, just like a wife abuser admits that battering his wife is also illegal. But then he describes the process as something that just goes on, as if the defense establishment he belongs to had no power whatsoever to stop it.

Mr. Unnamed Official, I believe Israel has a procedure to deal with illegal construction. What was the name for it? Oh, yes -- house demolitions. As for those factories where they make the caravans, here's an idea you may have not thought of -- factory demolitions. Is it too much to ask why you are not using your army's proven capabilities for removing lawbreakers from where they're illegally residing? Can you be seriously describing with a straight face the criminal actions of Israeli citizens without facing up to the fact that it's your duty to stop them -- very much like a violent husband describes the abuse he inflicted on his wife while maintaining that he wasn't actually aware of what he was doing?

Who is going to jail wife-battering Israel? Although Richard Goldstone is a judge, he cannot convict the offending country. There's only one judge who can. A judge who for a while seemed to have gathered the courage to indict Israel over its "unwilling" expansion in the West Bank. But he finally showed his true colors and dropped the case. Shame on you, Judge Obama, for letting shepherd-clubbing, grove-burning, land-grabbing Israel to walk free once again, in spite of the harm it visits on the wife it forcibly took.

A report is not a genocide

Yes, Zionist blogs are, as a rule, boring and predictable and not much fun to follow. But I'm a Hasbara buster, and to bust the Hasbara first I must read it. So the other day I was browsing Ben Cohen's Z-Word when I noticed the following paragraph:

At 5PM EST today, you can watch a live debate between Judge Richard Goldstone - of Goldstone Commission fame - and Dore Gold, now of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, formerly the Israeli Ambassador to the UN. Their debate comes one day after the House of Representatives dismissed the Goldstone report as a sham and as the UN General Assembly deliberates over a non-binding resolution to refer the report to the Security Council (bit of a foregone conclusion, that one.)

It has always stricken me how landslide votings are considered proof of the justness of the vote when done by the US Congress, but of antisemitic prejudice when done by the UN. Cohen thinks (OK, he actually doesn't, but haven't you heard about figures of speech) that the US Congress's resolution, unlike the UN General Assembly's, was not a foregone conclusion. It was a reflection of the American lawmakers' careful and thorough reading of the Goldstone report, and not of their fear of being targetted by a smear campaign if they supported the document. There's a world of difference between them and the countries that automatically voted for the resolution at the General Assembly without having even paid a cursory look at it.

An impartial reader (same observation as before re figures of speech) might, however, wonder if the UN actually has a pattern of knee-jerk anti-Israel voting, like Cohen would have us believe. It turns out not. While the General Assembly did vote to equate (correctly but unnecessarily) Zionism to racism in 1975, it voted to repeal the equation in 1992. Israel has been censured many times, but it has never (yes, that's never) been subjected to sanctions. Meanwhile, Iraq, one of Israel's foes, was met with sanctions by the Security Council. Also, while Israel has been allowed to develop WMDs, Iran, another foe of Israel, has been ordered to stop its nuclear program, despite its having rigorously complied with international regulations in the field. And who can forget that it was the UN General Assembly that voted to partition Palestine in 1947?

The US Congress, by contrast, has solidly thrown its support behind Israel. It has many times repudiated Israel's enemies and even mild critics, but it has never criticized Israel. The most striking fact is how swiftly both houses move to express their unconditional support for the Jewish state when there's no actual need for the vote. We all know that when the Goldstone report gets to the Security Council it will be killed by the US under direct orders from Hillary Clinton with the Congress playing no role whatsoever. However, showing their lapdogness to the Lobby will have favorable repercussions for the genuflected legislators, for instance in terms of campaign donations.

This contrasts with the Congress's foot-dragging over other votes that might have a potentially greater importance. Case in point, the Armenian Genocide Resolution, which would recognize the slaughter of 1.5 M Armenians by the Turkish state. It was passed by a House committee, and then -- put to sleep. And guess what was the most important private American institution that opposed the bill?

So that when pro-Israel forces want a resolution passed, Congress rushes to overwhelmingly vote for it; but when pro-Israel forces don't want a resolution passed, Congress rushes to shelve it. But the only Pavlovian voters, they have the chutzpah to tell us, are those at the UN General Assembly.