Guilt by association is weak adjudicatory framework, but that’s not true of guilt by active association. America is rightly experiencing some of the Flotilla Massacre fallout. As Israel’s patron, protector and enabler, Israeli actions mean American responsibility. Read More »
Mondoweiss 
Israel’s cult of victimhood: ‘Barefoot’ soldiers on the high seas
Why are Israelis so indignant at the international outrage that has greeted their country’s lethal attack last week on a flotilla of civilian ships taking aid to Gaza? Israelis have not responded in any of the ways we might have expected. Read More »
Farewell Helen Thomas
It’s good that Helen Thomas will no longer be in White House press briefings. Not because she sullied the reputation of the Washington press corps with a few undiplomatic remarks, but because those who lack her boldness and bluntness will no longer be able to use her presence to foster the illusion that American journalism still values courage. Read More »
All Palestine is divided into four parts
The Free Gaza Movement and the Freedom Flotilla have succeeded in drawing attention to Israel’s siege on Gaza, which has turned the Strip into a giant prison. There is another aspect to the Gaza prison however, highlighted by Amira Hass in her column today , and that is the systematic separation of Gaza from the West Bank, beginning in 1991. Read More »
Let them eat chips
From the Reuters article “Israel eases Gaza embargo to allow snack food “: Israel is easing its Gaza embargo to allow snack food and drinks into the Palestinian enclave, Palestinian officials said Wednesday, following an international outcry over Israel’s raid on an aid flotilla. Read More »
The flotilla did its job, brought global attention to the persecution of the Gazan people
More evidence that the flotilla worked, and nine lives were not lost in vain– the focus is now on the persecution of the Gazan people. Read More »
What would Obama have said about Bull Connor?
On Thursday evening, three days after the Israeli attack on the activists attempting to bring aid to the people of Gaza, Larry King interviewed President Obama on CNN. Towards the latter part of the interview, the President was asked about his thoughts on these events. KING: Couple of other things. Read More »
The ‘Times’ runs Michael Chabon on the flotilla
I admire Michael Chabon so much–he wrote the line, “My homeland is in my hat,” in the Yiddish Policemen’s Union –that when I read his op-ed about the Gaza flotilla raid in the New York Times I tried to do a mind-meld and believe with him in the need for a Jewish state. Read More »
Payback
American Jewish groups helped to block Armenian genocide resolutions in the Congress because Turkey was Israel’s big ally in the region. No more. Now they’re turning on Turkey. Great reporting by Eli Lake . You rock, Eli. Read More »
In Israel, discrimination against Palestinians justified because they ’strike terror in our …
Bnei Brak is a city of around 150,000, next to Tel Aviv. Apparently , “notices against employing Palestinians in Israel without a permit” have been appearing in the last week. Read More »
Yglesias Thomas
Last night I saw a friend who was jumping up and down about the Helen Thomas news. He was saying, This is so absurd it’s a giant victory, it will expose the hasbara types. Matt Yglesias, from 2002 . Read More »
Chief rabbi/Thomas
Obituary for a former Chief Rabbi of Israel, in the Telegraph , points out his intolerant views that make Helen Thomas look middle-of-the-road: Rabbi Eliyahu wrote to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to say that, according to Jewish war ethics, Read More »
Flotilla was successful: NBC Nightly News airs searing report on Gaza ‘prison’
It finally happened. A network news show did an honest report about conditions in Gaza. Tom Aspell’s report was on NBC tonight . The blockade reduces children to collecting pebbles for concrete and keeps anyone from leaving– “it sentences them to life in a 140 square mile prison.” Half the population is under 15. Read More »
Internet killed the hasbara star
One of the most striking trends following the flotilla attack has been how quickly Israeli hasbara has been exposed and discredited by internet journalists. Read More »
Israel holds passengers’ computers, cell phones, blackberries
Today I tuned in on an Institute for Middle East Understanding presser that included Huwaida Arraf, longtime Palestinian-American activist, and filmmaker Iara Lee relating their experiences in Israeli custody following their arrests on the flotilla. Read More »
Dan Schorr continues to cross-hatch his liberal legacy with unreconstructed Zionism
Saturday morning on NPR : DAN SCHORR: Good morning, Scott. And what a world we inhabit on this balmy Saturday morning, where we have an oil blockade of our southern shores and a hate blockade of Mediterranean shores. SIMON: Do – you were able to listen to the report from Gaza. Read More »
The nighttime attack on the chocolate flotilla
An overview of the flotilla initiative, the raid and its consequences, by Pamela Olson : A flotilla of six ships carrying nearly 700 people from 40 countries set sail for Gaza last month to challenge the siege on the Gaza Strip imposed by Israel and Egypt. Read More »
Israeli settler opens fire on schoolboys, wounding two 16-year-olds
And other news from Today in Palestine: Land Theft and Destruction/Ethnic Cleansing 80 olive trees uprooted in Walaja Bethlehem – Ma’an – Israeli bulldozers began overturning agricultural land and uprooting trees in the Al-Walaja, a village south of Jerusalem inside the 1967 Green Line, Palestinian landowners said. Read More »
Walt tells Obama how to be bold, creative, and get back his Cairo form
Brilliant post. Steve Walt, the realist advocate for the prudent uses of American power , who is the best hope that the two-state-solution today possesses in the U.S., says the U.S. should break the blockade with an international flotilla . He touches on my point that it’s not a humanitarian problem when he says we’d have to deal with Hamas. Read More »
‘Pigs for Palestine’
Just look at this amazing post by Cecilie Surasky from a demo against the flotilla raid outside the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation the other day. You will see a lot of Jews protesting Israel’s actions silently, and look at the response. It’s not considered, it’s fearful and angry and hateful. Read More »
Huckabee said Palestinians should leave Israel, and he’s golden
Are people rallying around an American icon demolished for one statement? Yes: A great piece at the Raw Story on the Helen Thomas execution, by Stephen C. Webster, showing the American double standard. Memo to Chris Matthews, this is your story, man . Read More »
In Helen Thomas case, the world sees a taboo being enforced
Moving statement on Helen Thomas’s ejection by Ann El Khoury at Pulse : are occupied and it’s their land. It’s not Germany, it’s not Poland. Read More »
When neocons say Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis, they’re right
It’s not about wheel chairs and cardamom and textbooks. “This is not a humanitarian problem,” we were told repeatedly a year ago in Gaza. Read More »
Kucinich cong’l letter says Israeli raid on flotilla endangers ‘lives of American soldiers’
Dennis Kucinich is circulating a great letter on the flotilla attack that is already getting pushback from the National Jewish Democratic Council, which calls it “reckless.” Notice the emphasis on the strategic liability that Israel now represents. Wonder if he’ll get any signatures. Read More »
I think Matthews feels Helen Thomas’s pain
Chris Matthews had to talk about Helen Thomas tonight, but he didn’t say much. It was all over the Nightly News, but he didn’t say anything besides the fact that she had been covering the White House since 1960 and had apologized on her website. As he described her offense against “Israel” (not against the Jews), he seemed unusually contained. Read More »
Hitchens advises the Palestinians on how to get freedom
Christopher Hitchens, blasting the flotilla, at Slate . Those who care about justice and self-government for the Palestinians might want to be helping Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as they build up the institutions of an embryo state on the West Bank. Read More »
Mother of nine dies after being run over by settler
And other news from my Today in Palestine list: Land Theft/Destruction and Ethnic Cleansing Jordan Valley families given 10 days to leave homes The move, described as “devastating” to the families by head of the Atuf village council Abdallah Bisharat, would see more than 50 Palestinians made homeless and deprived of their livelihoods. Read More »
Pro-IDF, Anti-Turkish Rally in Tel Aviv (or a Glimpse Into Collective Israeli Derangement)
On June 1, 2010, thousands of Israelis gathered spontaneously in front of the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv to demonstrate in support of the Israeli Naval commando unit that killed nine passengers on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-backed boat from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Read More »
‘TNR’ says Judt wants to turn many of world’s Jews into refugees
Jonathan Chait at New Republic says that Helen Thomas’s formula for Israel/Palestine is the same as Tony Judt’s : Judt advocates dissolving the state of Israel and replacing it with a a bi-national democratic state where Jews can live happily and peacefully as minority citizens of Palestine. It’s an utterly fantastical proposition. Read More »
Inhumane siege is fueling international outrage (inc’g American poets)
On Saturday, the Irish Times ran this poem by Richard Tillinghast, an American poet living in Ireland, called “What Is Not Allowed”: No tinned meat is allowed, no tomato paste, no clothing, no shoes, no notebooks. These will be stored in our warehouses at Kerem Shalom until further notice. Read More »
‘Increasingly vocal’ Jewish left is taking over the American Jewish ’street’
I try and keep up on the shift within the Jewish establishment, the “seismic shift” that a year or so back MJ Rosenberg predicted was coming, and that Peter Beinart’s piece was the best evidence of. Read More »
What 1967, and 1948, tell us about today
“Secure the children first. I want you all to know where to hide when the bombs fall,” my grandmother instructed us. It was June 1967, and I was 11, during the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arabs. The victorious Israeli army was advancing. Soldiers from the fleeing Palestine Liberation Army filled our street. Read More »
O’Keefe: Gandhi would have defended the ‘Mavi Marmara’
“All I saw in Israel was cowards with guns.” These are the words of Ken O’Keefe, a former US Marine who was just deported from Israel after surviving the Mavi Marmara massacre. Read More »
Netanyahu’s psyche
On Netanyahu and the Entebbe motive : psychoanalytic explanation was a reflex of our parents’ time. It is now is too little used. Netanyahu is the emotionally tunneled sibling of a martyr brother, son of a big man, great man, man-mountain of scholarship (the highest calling for an Israeli). Read More »
A Jew explains why he is leading flotilla protest
This afternoon at 5 in Middletown, Orange County, New York, a demonstration will be held to oppose the attack on the Gaza flotilla. Details below. One of the organizers is Goshen, N.Y. Read More »
An unqualified defense of Helen Thomas
Her comments do not reflect a desire to see Israel/Palestine judenrein , but rather an ominous sense of what a dangerous place Israel has become, and will only increasingly be, for its people. Read More »
In fairness to CFR
I spent the weekend bashing the Council on Foreign Relations for its party line. I missed this: Mohamad Bazzi is at the Council on Foreign Relations and has called for lifting the blockade. (Thanks to Sean Lee). Read More »
Headline says it all
Haaretz : Turkey to Israel: If you have nothing to hide, accept international probe. The pressure is mounting on Israel to allow an international investigation of the flotilla raid. This is the other shoe dropping. The first was Goldstone. Read More »
Israeli discourse on Gaza flotilla makes our press look poodle
I haven’t seen anything like this in the Times or the Washington Post. Uri Avnery’s column likening raid to the raid on the Exodus in ‘47 ran in Israel’s second largest paper : is Chapter 2 of “Cast Lead”. Then we aroused most countries in the world against us, shocked our few friends and gladdened our enemies. Read More »
Israel, your Sun City moment has arrived
“We shall overcome”– Roger Waters’s ravishing treatment of the American civil rights anthem for Palestinians. “And we’ll break down those prison walls!!!” Check out the faces of Palestinian children. They’re human beings. Oh and the big news: the Pixies cancelled their Israel gig, with sly reference to the flotilla. Read More »
I wish the American Jews who feel misrepresented by the lobby would stand up
Today’s On the Media , a Sunday show on National Public Radio, featured a dialogue between Steve Rosen, formerly of AIPAC, and Peter Beinart, writer of the bombshell essay criticizing the American Jewish leadership for its blind support of Israel. Read More »
Your nonviolence is violent, they told us, and you need us to get your freedom
CT Vivian, Freedom Rider in the segregated American South, speaking to Eric Etheridge in Etheridge’s book about the Freedom Riders, Breach of Peace : The normal white response is that we were creating violence, and some of them jeered at the idea of our being nonviolent. No, you’re not nonviolent. You actually are creating the violence. Read More »
(Wake up, blind America) 10,000 protest flotilla attack in Israel
Uri Avnery has circulated the following “web report” (by whom I don’t know, maybe Gush Shalom) on his narrow escape yesterday. Read More »
The Freedom Riders (and the flotilla)
My old friend Eric Etheridge, a Mississippian, responded to my post saying that Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, who were killed in Mississippi in ‘63, were like the Gaza flotilla members : 1. CSG were not Freedom Riders but Freedom Summer volunteers. Rides were 1961, Freedom Summer 1963. Read More »
Finkelstein: Did Netanyahu OK nighttime commando raid to restore Israel’s Entebbe glory?
A day or so back the Jerusalem Post ran a propaganda piece called “Duped,” saying that the Turkish passengers of the Mavi Marmara included a bunch of jihadists who were bent on a violent confrontation with Israel, and lo, they won. Read More »
Beinart and Mearsheimer now closer to one another than Frum (and wait–Who’s Jewish?)
I was struck watching a Canadian television broadcast of John Mearsheimer, David Frum, Peter Beinart, and Derek Penslar (University of Toronto, Jewish history) called “Israel’s Newest Critics,” that the real outlier in the four was not Mearsheimer Read More »
A Palestinian-American family slept. Till 9/11
Editor’s note: Anyone who is active in Palestinian issues in New York has come to recognize an attractive, outspoken family– Debbie Mardon and Mahmoud Bitar and their kids Joel and Jenna. Debbie looks like the girl next door, but she is unstoppable, Mahmoud has the softest smile you could ever see. Jenna is a compelling speaker. Read More »
CFR party line ignores everything Cordesman, Petraeus and Mossad chief have been saying
Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations continues his critique of me for going after the CFR for publishing five Jewish experts on the Gaza flotilla attack: I know it’s Shabbat, but the least you can do is a little bit of research. Read More »
Remember that Herzl came up with Zionism when he heard Parisians crying ‘Death to the Jews!’
One of my themes is that Americans, including me, have very little idea what Israeli society is really like. Read More »
Israeli Strangelove now at Harvard calmly lays out ‘Armageddon scenario’
To understand the news involving Israeli nuclear-armed subs off Iran, I recommend an important post by Jerome Slater on his blog about a crazy/chilling paper from a former high Israeli security adviser now at Harvard, named Chuck Freilich . Read More »
(Gulp) Israel deploys nuclear cruise missiles near Iran
The other day on Russian TV , Norman Finkelstein said Israel is a lunatic state and it has a bunch of nukes. Well the Times of London says: Three German-built Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles are to be deployed in the Gulf near the Iranian coastline. Read More »
‘NYT’ opens ‘inflammatory’ discussion–Israel as strategic liability
Wow. The Times is beginning to open the door. It has a big Week in Review piece by Helene Cooper asking, “Washington Asks: What to Do About Israel” that begins with the disclaimer, this is an “inflammatory” subject. (Guess what, we’ve been talking about it anyway. Read More »
The Helen Thomas moment
I was surprised as anyone by the Helen Thomas video that came out the other day showing the veteran White House correspondent saying that the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine,” and she wasn’t talking about the occupied territories. She said they should go back to Germany. Read More »
Questions Ethan Bronner could have asked
The New York Times lately published a story on the flotilla raid , by Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise. Read More »
My heart wanted to ask her: What will it take for Jews to say, Enough!
I’m not very proud of myself right now. Yesterday, I was one of those shouting at the men and women who had come with their Israeli flags, their righteous arrogance, their anger to disrupt our protest organized to declare support for the Freedom Flotilla and the Free Gaza movement. Central to this story is that I am a Jew. Read More »
Judah Magnes is rolling in his grave
Judge Goldstone’s removal from the board of governors of Hebrew University is quite possibly the greatest in a long history of grave insults to the legacy of Judah Magnes, founder of the Hebrew University. Read More »
Uri beats narrow escape from crazed rightwingers
Leftwing rally in Tel Aviv is attacked by rightwing soccer thug types. They target 86-year-old Uri Avnery. Police have to hustle him from the scene. Read More »
In Houston, they sport coonskin cap and kuffiyeh
(The counterprotest, above) Report from Robinson Block, a student at University of Houston : I was worried about how the candle light vigil would come together when my friend Julia called me 10 minutes before it was scheduled to start, and asked me whether it was happening–no one was there. Read More »
Jewish group said to prepare boat to go to Gaza
Yes the Rachel Corrie has been seized by the Israelis. But, from Ma’an , and at Palestine Libre too: She will be sailing to Gaza during the second half of July. In order to avoid sabotage, the exact date and name of the port of departure will be announced only shortly before her launch…. Read More »
