DemocracyNow!: Veteran military and foreign affairs analyst and author Mark Perry reports that CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus dispatched a team of senior military officers in January to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perry reports that the briefers told Mullen that “Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing US standing in the region.”
US-Israel
Israel’s insistence on building new settlements in disputed Palestinian territory has heightened tensions with the United States. Forty-nine percent (49%) of U.S. voters think Israel should be required to stop those settlements as part of a peace deal with the Palestinians.
Israeli Right poster: “Caution! PLO agent in the White House!”
Rightist: “[W]e will teach those Leftists what democracy is,” he added. “Obama is anti-Semitic, pro-Arab, an agent of the PLO and we stand behind what the poster says.”
IOA Editor: Hardly – but there’s no reason for the Israeli Right not to try pushing Netanyahu further to the right. This latest, made-in-Israel diplomatic crisis is reminiscent of the Bush-Baker-Shamir mini-crisis. We know how quickly the US bounced back to letting Israel carry on with the Occupation and inflict a great deal more damage to the Palestinians.
[T]he failure of the peace groups is not simply a strategic one but one of understanding and analysis as well: an inability to fully confront the overwhelming evidence that demolishes the most cherished mythologies in Israel and the American Jewish community.
To wipe the spit off his face, Biden had to say it was only rain. Therefore, he lauded Netanyahu’s assertion that actual construction in Ramat Shlomo would begin only in another several years. Thus Israel essentially received an American green light for approving even more building plans in East Jerusalem.
“The idea that there’s a 501c3 non-profit that raises money for a foreign army seems a little odd,” said Nancy Kricorian, coordinator of CODEPINK in New York, who said “there was something about Cast Lead that was a turning point for us.”
IOA Editor: Video of the demonstration
Also, photos of the demonstration
[T]he battle over Jerusalem’s Mamilla Cemetery, a Muslim cemetery known in Arabic as Maman Allah, where the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center intends to build a Museum of Tolerance, … encapsulates many aspects of Israel’s approach to Palestinian rights since the conflict began.
A fact sheet prepared by the Center for Constitutional Rights
U.S. news coverage of the conflict relentlessly presents the news within this Israeli narrative, primarily because powerful forces in this country find that narrative useful for U.S. strategic interests in the region, and U.S. journalists tend to fall in line with that view.
“They’re using me to attack in the most blatant way the basic principles of democracy and the values of the Declaration of Independence: Values of equality, tolerance, social justice and freedom of speech,” she added. On Thursday, Chazan received an e-mail from Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief David Horovitz, informing her the newspaper would cease publishing her column. Chazan had provided the daily with one of its few leftist voices in recent years.
IOA Editor: Democracy for Jews only. The Declaration of Independence has been a part of Israel’s democratic facade since 1948: it never stopped Israel from robbing the Palestinian people of their homeland and turning them into refugees and third class citizens of the Only Democracy in the Middle East. In addition, unlike the US Constitution, the “Declaration” is just that: a non-binding statement without any legally enforceable powers.
The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.
IOA Editor: The influence of multi-national corporations – led by US-based entities, with extensive participation of Israeli companies, on the ME and the Occupation, is enormous: from high tech and arms-manufacturers to ‘benign industries’ like aviation and transportation – all involved in political systems that, to varying degrees, deprive their subject-citizenry of meaningful political participation.
Two months after the government decision on November 26 to freeze construction in Jewish settlements for 10 months, you’d have to be blind, an idiot, or a member of the Yesha Council of settlements to use the term “freeze” to describe the real estate situation in Judea and Samaria.
Like the Clinton and Bush administrations… the idea that the United States ought to use its leverage and exert genuine pressure on Israel remains anathema to Obama, to Mitchell and his advisors, and to all those pundits who are trapped in the Washington consensus on this issue. The main organizations in the Israel lobby are of course dead-set against it — and that goes for J Street as well — even though there is no reason to expect Israel to change course in the absence of countervailing pressure.
IOA Editor: Whether effective lobbying or effective propaganda – Obama’s “cynical charade” – isn’t quite as obvious as Walt makes it sound.
Obama also needs to take on the Gaza blockade, imposed by Israel and abetted by Egypt. If private diplomacy shows no results soon and Israel does not end its wholesale restrictions on the movement of goods and people, the president should publicly criticize the blockade as collective punishment and specify consequences, including reductions in military aid.
While Israeli soldiers can’t fight in the war in Afghanistan, Israeli drones can. Starting next week, five NATO member countries will be operating unmanned aerial vehicles produced in the Jewish state in anti-Taliban operations in the Central Asian country.
IOA Editor: Controlling the Third World, remotely.
Analysts say it is no surprise that the main effort to restore the relationship is coming from the two militaries, which have formed its bedrock ever since the alliance was formed in the mid-1990s… Israel and Turkey signed more than 20 military agreements in the 1990s. One called for four joint air force training sessions a year in each country. The two navies participated in joint exercises and staff officers collaborated on war-game simulations…
IOA Editor: In addition to being an important Israeli military industries’ customer and a strategic military partner, Turkey also provides the “Northern Route” alternative for an Israeli air-force attack on Iran, which is not mentioned in this WSJ article. See Anthony Cordesman and Abdullah Toukan’s Israeli attack on Iran: A Study of Options and Consequences
IOA Editor: A pro-Israel Democratic party activist enumerates the many ways in which president Obama supports Israel and its aggressive policies, including the 42 year long Occupation – no less, and perhaps more, than Republicans. A required reading for those who feel that the recently minted Nobel Laureate is a “Man of Peace.”
Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare… In 10 to 15 years, one-third of Israel’s military machines will be unmanned, predicts Giora Katz, vice president of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., one of Israel’s leading weapons manufacturers.
IOA Editor: As covered in detail by Amira Hass and others, Israeli high technology warfare plays a lead role in spying on and killing Palestinians, most recently in Gaza, a development zone for Israel’s military industries. This will undoubtedly continue – paid for generously by the US, and by Third World client regimes – as Israelis are increasingly intolerant of death of their own, while they readily accept the death of thousands of innocent Palestinians.
A general who was once in charge of Israel’s nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a “very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability”. Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.
The U.S. Army will double the value of emergency military equipment it stockpiles on Israeli soil, and Israel will be allowed to use the U.S. ordnance in the event of a military emergency, according to a report in Monday’s issue of the U.S. weekly Defense News.
Egyptian FM Abul Gheit: “Egypt will no longer allow convoys, regardless of their origin or who is organising them, from crossing its territory”… Egypt accused Galloway, who once called at a London rally for the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, of trying to embarrass the country, which has refused to permanently open its Rafah border crossing with Gaza.
More on Mubarak’s position in Seumas Milne’s Terror is the price of support for despots and dictators
Israel’s relentless drive to establish “facts on the ground” in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that “achievement,” one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from “the only democracy in the Middle East” to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.
From the wider international perspective, it is precisely this western embrace of repressive and unrepresentative regimes such as Egypt’s, along with unwavering backing for Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land, that is at the heart of the crisis in the Middle East and Muslim world… The poisonous logic of this imperial quagmire is now leading inexorably to the spread of war under Barack Obama.
The United States has recently signed major arms deals with several Arab states. Israeli officials have expressed concern at the scope and content of the agreements. Among the recipients of the advanced arms included in the agreements are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. The shipments are to include anti-ship and antitank missiles as well as so-called smart and bunker-busting bombs.
Ismail Haniyeh: “The Palestinian nation will never give up its national aspirations or its right to Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine and the Islamic people,” [speaking] to the 300 Israeli activists positioned at the Erez crossing via Israeli Arab MK Taleb A-Sana’s mobile phone. On the Gazan side of the border, nearly 100 international activists joined about 500 Palestinians, chanting and carrying signs denouncing the blockade.
More on the Gaza protest: Boycott / Protest / Resistance
[A]ccording to a senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bureau, “everything was carried out with transparency vis-a-vis the Americans, even if there are disagreements.”
IOA Editor: Indeed. The Obama Administration is well aware of Israeli development activities in Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories and is not doing what it can, and should, do to stop it.
The Palestinian Authority may be seeking renewed talks with Israel even in the absence of an Israeli freeze on settlements.
Egyptian security forces on Tuesday prevented dozens of American activists from reaching the U.S. embassy in Cairo, where they hoped to ask the ambassador to help them reach the Gaza Strip.
The siege prohibits the export of Palestinian goods and severely limits the import of humanitarian supplies, such as food, medicine and reconstruction materials. The United Nations reports that Israel allows into Gaza less than 25% of the goods it did before the siege began in June 2007.
According to a current prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague… the significance of the Goldstone report… lies in its conclusion that Israel’s leaders “planned and predetermined the grave violations [of international law] and human rights abuses” long before the attack on Gaza.
We can wait no longer to restart the peace process. The human suffering demands urgent relief… US objections have impeded Egyptian efforts to resolve differences between Hamas and Fatah that could lead to 2010 elections.
US agency co-operating with Palestinian counterparts who allegedly torture Hamas supporters in West Bank.
WASHINGTON – President Obama is not as unpopular in Israel as has been previously reported, according to a new poll released yesterday by the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.
You open the newspaper on any day and you can be sure to find at least one front-page article related to the Middle East. It will be something ugly or depressing, something implicating the United States directly or indirectly — Israel and Palestine, the Iraq war… And you wonder how much of the story is true, how much is distorted, and how much is omitted outright. It is not just for lack of space.
Jonathan Cook gave a talk to a visiting delegation from Belgium in Bethlehem on 5 December 2009. Much of the talk, presented in five parts, is included here. It covers a wide range of topics, including Israel’s development of the homeland security industry, its economic dependence on US aid, its use of Gaza as a laboratory for experimentation in warfare, its need to promote a global clash of civilisations, and the increasing promotion of Jewish religious fundamentalism.
For additional Jonathan Cook interviews: www.jkcook.net/Interviews
