L.A. Jews mull boycott of Israel university over ‘apartheid’ op-ed

Members of the Los Angeles Jewish community have threatened to withhold donations to an Israeli university in protest of an op-ed published by a prominent Israeli academic in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, in which he called to boycott Israel economically, culturally and politically.

Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, a veteran peace activist, branded Israel as an apartheid state and said that a boycott was “the only way to save it from itself.”

For full article, visit http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1109275.html

Quiet slicing of the West Bank makes abstract prayers for peace obscene

The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip-service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating a situation on the ground that will render such a solution impossible. The dream underlying Israel’s plans is encapsulated by a wall that separates a settler’s town from the Palestinian town on a nearby West Bank hill. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall – but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass and trees. Is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as empty, virginal and waiting to be settled?

For full article, visit http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/18/west-bank-israel-settlers-palestinians

Arab MKs slam Yishai for seeking power to cancel citizenship

“Yishai wants to cancel court decisions and to take the authority over political revenge into his own hands. Revoking citizenship is forbidden by international law – citizenship is not a favor, but comes as a result of the fact that we are products of this land,” Zahalka said.

MK Ahmed Tibi (United Arab List-Ta’al) connected Yishai’s initiative to a recent series of legislative initiatives that Arab lawmakers say all targeted Israeli Arabs, including the Nakba Bill and the bill to require a loyalty oath as a condition for receiving a national identity card.

For full article, visit http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1244035011656&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Bowen ‘breached rules on impartiality’

The BBC Trust yesterday called into question the corporation’s reporting of the most sensitive news story of modern times, publishing findings that the BBC Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, had breached guidelines on accuracy and impartiality. The ruling will be seized upon by campaigners who claim that BBC News is prejudiced against Israel in its coverage of the Middle East.

But the decision to censure Bowen caused anger within the BBC, with some alleging that the trust, which oversees the corporation, was undermining the credibility of its news.

For full article, visit http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/bowen-breached-rules-on-impartiality-1669278.html

The BBC Trust’s editorial standards committee ruled on complaints about two pieces by Bowen, one online and one on Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent.

References in the web article to “Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier”, Israel’s “defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own” and Israeli generals’ sense they were dealing with “unfinished business” left over from the 1948 war of independence, broke BBC rules on accuracy, the committee said.

For full article, visit http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/5158689/BBCs-Jeremy-Bowen-breached-guidelines-on-accuracy-in-Israel-reports.html

Bowen’s online article, published last year, put the present-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict in context by explaining the events of the 1967 Six Day War.

But the committee said he should have done more to make clear that there were other views on the matter.

Ruling that the article had breached the rules on impartiality, the committee said: ‘Readers might come away from the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war.’

For full article, visit http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1170239/BBC-rebukes-Middle-East-correspondent-Jeremy-Bowen-anti-Israel-comments.html

The Trust was responding to complaints filed separately by London-based barrister Jonathan Turner and by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

For full article, visit http://fr.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1239710697409

Ziyaad Lunat: The rhetoric of “peace”

Netanyahu’s “economic peace” proposal should not only be seen in this context but crucially too as the beginning of a new stage of colonization. Israel has been successful in dividing the Palestinians into different groups, separated politically and geographically. Israel has also been successful in creating a collaborating political class. Israel failed however to squash their desire for freedom and their right to resist aggression. In other words, Israel was successful in the physical colonization of the land, de facto controlling the whole of historic Palestine, but failed to colonize Palestinian minds, for the most part, at least. This new stage will target the latter.

A sample of what is to come can already be seen within the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority’s bureaucracy. Employing roughly 300,000, it is the biggest employer in the occupied territories. These employees and their families are dependent on the bureaucracy to sustain their livelihoods, raising incentives for compliance and creating costs for dissent, namely loss of income and political reprisals. Netanyahu’s “economic peace” will mean that further to the existing political stratification of the Palestinian society, a capitalist class will be co-opted to subordinate the Palestinian working class to the requirements of the market. It is expected that the Palestinians will become too comfortable with the newly bestowed economic freedoms and relegate political rights to a secondary concern. The plan strives for the creation of a homo economicus, an individualist, self-interested man, a slave to the capitalist structures of inequality. Dependence on this neo-liberal structure-in-formation is aimed at removing individual and collective agency. The resulting false consciousness — under the framework of hegemonic capitalism — betrays the true relation of forces between the occupier and the occupied.

For full article, visit http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10466.shtml

Film review: A Zionist state where “The Land Speaks Arabic”

Maryse Gargour’s 61-minute film The Land Speaks Arabic documents the founding of the Zionist movement and the expulsion of Palestinians in the early part of the 20th century. The historical narrative is reconstructed by weaving archival materials such as photographs, films, news reels and official documents, with the testimonies of Palestinian survivors of the forced expulsion of 1947-48, referred to as the Nakba, and the findings of British-Palestinian historian Nur Masalha.

For full article, visit http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10390.shtml

Uri Avnery: Biberman & Co.

The addition of the Labor Party solves everybody’s problem. If the social democrats are joining the government, all this talk of fascism must be nonsense. Obviously, Liberman has been misunderstood. He has been misrepresented. He is not a fascist at all, God forbid. He is not a racist. He is just a traditional right-wing demagogue who exploits the primitive emotions of the masses to garner votes. Which elected politician could object to that?

For full article, visit http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=14958

Waltz with Bashir – Reviews

Waltz with Bashir

Film review: “Waltz with Bashir”
Naira Antoun

“To say that Palestinians are absent in Waltz with Bashir, to say that it is a film that deals not with Palestinians but with Israelis who served in Lebanon, only barely begins to describe the violence that this film commits against Palestinians. There is nothing interesting or new in the depiction of Palestinians — they have no names, they don’t speak, they are anonymous. But they are not simply faceless victims. Instead, the victims in the story that Waltz with Bashir tells are Israeli soldiers. Their anguish, their questioning, their confusion, their pain — it is this that is intended to pull us. The rotoscope animation is beautifully done, the facial expressions so engaging, subtle and torn, we find ourselves grimacing and gasping at the trials and tribulations of the young Israeli soldiers and their older agonizing selves. We don’t see Palestinian facial expressions; only a lingering on dead, anonymous faces. So while Palestinians are never fully human, Israelis are, and indeed are humanized through the course of the film. “

For full article, visit: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10322.shtml

‘Antiwar’ film Waltz with Bashir is nothing but charade
Gideon Levy

“However, it must also be noted that the film is infuriating, disturbing, outrageous and deceptive. It deserves an Oscar for the illustrations and animation – but a badge of shame for its message. It was not by accident that when he won the Golden Globe, Folman didn’t even mention the war in Gaza, which was raging as he accepted the prestigious award. The images coming out of Gaza that day looked remarkably like those in Folman’s film. But he was silent. So before we sing Folman’s praises, which will of course be praise for us all, we would do well to remember that this is not an antiwar film, nor even a critical work about Israel as militarist and occupier. It is an act of fraud and deceit, intended to allow us to pat ourselves on the back, to tell us and the world how lovely we are.”

For full article, visit: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1065552.html

“Dance of Death: ‘Waltz with Bashir’ and Sympathy for the Killer
As’ad Abu Khalil

“The film strives, as always happens in the liberal Zionist media, to introduce, up close, every soldier who appears in the film. You see the soldier as a child, helping his mother in the kitchen, you see him with his sweetheart, you see him sea-sick and vomiting, and there is nothing but for the viewer to lament and sympathize with the suffering Israeli murderer. There is a particular school in the Zionist Left that expresses its displeasure—nay, more—that some of the practices of Israeli wars and various aspects of the occupation are detrimental to “the Israeli spirit” or “the psychology of soldier.” In other words, for some of these people—like the thousands who demonstrated after the massacres of Sabra & Shatila—opposition to the slaughter came not out of sympathy with the victims or consciousness of the disaster that befell them, but out of support for the national (and, for some, even religious) fighting élan of the colonialist army. The humanization of the murderer and sympathy for him are both the flip side of the dehumanization of the Palestinian Other, for he is not a complete person in their view. Read Zionist literature from the beginning to find in their representation—if they were there at all—backward peasants or lowly bedouins or nondescript refugees without citizenship, later transformed into “saboteurs” (and this is the same name that the Phalangist “Voice of Lebanon” radio used in the course of the war) in the 1960s, until Zionist propaganda finally settled upon the description “terrorist”. The film doesn’t deviate from the formula, even with regard to that splendid boy when he fires an RPG launcher in the face of the occupier.”

For full article, visit: http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/03/translation-of-my-dance-of-death-waltz.html

Nimer Sultany: Lieberman is no abnormality

“Likewise, it would be mistaken to think of the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, as a major development or as the main source of concern for the Palestinians. Focusing on Lieberman (charitably called by the Guardian a “hardliner”) distracts the discussion from the real issues to the person of one unpleasant politician who says ignominious things others are generally unwilling to say. This logic seems to suggest that the political disappearance of Lieberman will bring about a serendipitous resolution of major problems in the Middle East. Lieberman, however, only exacerbates an already existing problem, and he cannot be easily dismissed as a marginal case of excess or abnormality of the Israeli political system.”

It would be mistaken to think of the rise of Avigdor Lieberman as a major development or as the main source of concern for the Palestinians.

Source: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10420.shtml