karmalised

by Jack Ross, Antiwar.com, 26 April 2012

Since even before its release last month, Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism has been extravagantly denounced and praised. To his everlasting credit, Beinart has described in vivid and uncompromising terms the corrupting and corrosive impact of the American Jewish establishment he so courageously exposed in The New York Review of Books:

At the core of the tragedy lies the refusal to accept that in both America and Israel, we live in an age not of Jewish weakness, but of Jewish power, and that without moral vigilance, Jews will abuse power just as hideously as anyone else. American Jewish organizations do not deny that Jews wield power, privately, they exult in it. Emotionally, power is what groups like AIPAC sell…. They deny that Jews, like all human beings, can use power not merely to survive, but to destroy. A few years ago, a journalist reported that Malcolm Hoenlein, the influential executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, had a photo in his conference room of Israeli F-15s flying over Auschwitz. It is a photo of a fantasy. Israeli jets never bombed Auschwitz and never will. What they have bombed, in recent years, is the Gaza Strip, a fenced-in, hideously overcrowded, desperately poor slum from which terrorist groups sometimes shell Israel. Hoenlein, in other words, has decorated his conference room not with an image of the reality that he helps perpetuate, but with an image of the fantasy that he superimposes on that reality. In this way, he embodies the American Jewish establishment, which, by superimposing the Jewish past on the Jewish present, is failing the challenge of a new age.

Beinart has offered a powerful indictment of the American Jewish Establishment, to be sure, but he steadfastly refuses to challenge the very legitimacy of that establishment. For the one question that has not been asked is why its loss of the younger generation of American Jews should be regarded as a problematic development in the first place, much less a crisis.

Click here to continue reading “Peter Beinart and the Specter Haunting American Jewry” by Jack Ross.

Karlos Zurutuza, IPS, 13 April 2012

“We recorded 672 cases in January but we know there were many more,” says Hadidi. He projects pictures on to a wall at his office: children born with no brain, no eyes, or with the intestines out of their body.

“In 2004 the Americans tested all kinds of chemicals and explosive devices on us: thermobaric weapons, white phosphorous, depleted uranium…we have all been laboratory mice for them,” says Hadidi, turning off the projector.

Click here to read “Those Laboratory Mice Were Children” by Karlos Zurutuza.

Was this a test or the desired outcome – a predetermined thinning of the herd?

Click here to continue reading “Sarah Gillespie: ‘The War on Trevor’ (tour & clip by Tali Atzmon)”.

JPS Responds to CAMERA
Ben-Gurion and the Transfer of Arabs

On 3 November 2011, the self-appointed media watchdog CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) informed the Journal of Palestine Studies of an incorrect citation in an article by Illan Pappé (“The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”) published in its autumn 2006 issue. The incorrect citation referred to a quotation by Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion supporting the expulsion (“transfer”) of Arabs from Palestine.

CAMERA asked JPS to “issue a correction stating that the quote attributed to Ben-Gurion does not appear in the references cited” in JPS and its website “to prevent further erroneous uses of this quote.”

CAMERA’s accusations (e.g., 3 February 2012) that Pappé “invented” or “fabricated” the quotation, suggesting that the Zionist leader had never supported transfer, led JPS to have the original source—Ben-Gurion’s 5 October 1937 letter to his son—translated into English.

Click here to continue reading “JPS Responds to CAMERA: Ben-Gurion and the Transfer of Arabs”.

By Johnny Barber
22 March 2012

On Sunday it was reported that a young boy had been shot on farmland near the Rafah crossing. The details were unclear. Several colleagues and I traveled to Rafah to find out what happened. After making several inquiries, we entered a Bedouin area several hundred meters north of Gaza’s border with Egypt and three kilometers from the Karm Abu Salem area of the Israeli border on the East. We follow a young man on a motorcycle down dusty roads with small plots of crops and olive trees on one side and dilapidated homes made of corrugated metal, cinder block and plastic on the other.

Click here to continue reading “A Tale of Two Bullets in Gaza” by Johnny Barber.