Azmi Bishara - The Legend Begins

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

1. Will I hang the flag?
By Gideon Levy (Source: Ha’aretz)

There is a flagholder installed in my garden. The previous residents used it to fly the flag of their favorite soccer team. Since they left, the holder has remained orphaned. During my childhood, there was no question about it: My parents would take the national flag out of the cupboard each year, proudly display it on the balcony, and it would drown in the street’s sea of blue and white. I would look with excitement at our decorated balcony: I was proud of the flag…

I clearly remember when I stopped hanging the flag. It was after I saw the settlers dashing through Palestinian villages, fearsome flags waving from their cars to confront and provoke the residents of the land they had invaded. I said to myself that a flag intended for provocation and confrontation is not my flag. I later saw the flag as a land marker, establishing ownership that is not ours. In every settlement and outpost they hung the flag that was my flag as well to “establish facts on the ground.”

2. When an Anti-Semite is Not an Anti-Semite
By Arthur Neslen (Source: CounterPunch)

What do Einstein, Mahatma Ghandi, Ehud Olmert and, yes, me all have in common? We could each be censured for racism according to the European Union Monitoring Centre’s ‘working definition of anti-Semitism’ which was last week adopted by the UK’s National Union of Students as official policy.

This definition has lately been sweeping all before it, taking endorsements everywhere from the All Party Parliamentary Report on anti-Semitism to the US state department’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism. The British government has pledged to re-examine its own definition of anti-Semitism if the EUMC’s successor body, the Fundamental Rights Agency, ratifies the new lingua franca…

By the new standard though, it might be an anti-Semitic ‘double standard’ to single him out for criticism when the hateful words of the former Indian leader, Mahatma Ghandi, are still being taught in British schools. In 1938, Ghandi said he believed that ‘Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.’ Thus might he disbar himself from speaking at a British college today.

Einstein though would really bomb. After the Deir Yassin massacre that killed more than 250 Palestinian civilians in 1948, he signed a letter to the New York Times describing the Herut Party (a.k.a Likud) as ‘closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties’. Its then-leader (and Israel’s future prime minister) Menachem Begin, represented ‘fascist elements’ in Israel, and his party had ‘openly preached the doctrine of the fascist state’. So Einstein, would flunk the EUMC’s ‘comparing Israeli policy to the Nazis’ test.

3. Let Taibeh go to Palestine
By Gilad Sharon (Source: Ha’aretz)

Change the citizenship of Israel’s Arabs

On the issue of a Jewish state versus a state of all its citizens, it must be said without embarrassment and without apology: Of course we want to live in a democratic country, but at the same time we want to live in a Jewish country. Israel was not established to bring a democratic regime to a benighted region. Israel was established as a national home for the Jewish people.

Representatives of the Arab sector and Knesset members from the Arab parties are discriminated against; this is a fact. It is possible to try to whitewash this. It is possible to appoint someone as deputy Knesset speaker, or bring a representative into the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, but then it is impossible to talk about security matters, and all the reports are moved to the subcommittees.

Therefore, as I see it, the goal has to be a significant Jewish majority among the citizens of Israel, forever. Minorities have to be totally loyal to the state, to fulfill all the obligations and enjoy all the rights, like the Druze, some of the Bedouins and the Circassians. An example of action in this direction is changing the citizenship of the Arabs of Umm al Fahm, Taibeh, Jaljulya, Kafr Bara and so on - as far as and including Kafr Qasem. After all, there is no real reason why Qalqilyah and Tul Karm should be Palestinian and Taibeh Israeli. This is a mistake and nothing more.

4. U.S. eyes potential $65 million bomb sale to Israel
By Jim Wolf (Source: Reuters)

What happened to Peace?

The Bush administration announced on Friday what would be the first officially disclosed sale of U.S. military equipment to Israel since the end of Israel’s armed conflict with Lebanon in 2006.

In a notice to Congress, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency said Israel had requested as many as 3,500 MK-84 “general purpose” bombs, spares and repair parts plus U.S. government technical assistance in a deal worth up to $65 million if all options are exercised

5. Irish Peace Laureate Shot By Israeli Troops at Non-Violent Protest - Why Isn’t This News?
By Robert Naiman (Source: MyDD)

Those who blame the Palestinian people for their fate, attributing it to Palestinian violence, and faulting the Palestinians for not emulating Gandhi, King, or Mandela (whose role in the “armed struggle” is always conveniently elided for the purpose of this comparison) should periodically ask themselves, when Palestinians do engage in nonviolent protest, and are subjected to brutal repression as a result, how come the mainstream U.S. media don’t pay any attention?

Wouldn’t this be a precondition for a successful nonviolent protest strategy? That people find out about it? Imagine if U.S. news organizations had not reported on lunch counter sit-ins in the South, Freedom Rides, or the Montgomery bus boycott - and the repression that resulted. What if no-one reported on the deaths of Evers, Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney. Would these protests have been as effective?

That U.S. political, diplomatic, and financial support for the Israeli government’s policies in the West Bank provide crucial support for these policies should be beyond debate. Don’t the American people have a right to know what’s going on?

6. Prisoners in Israel
By MWC NEWS

Tamimi, 46, was jailed in 1993 for killing an Israeli settler in the West Bank. His own background is also bloody – two of his brothers were killed by Israeli troops, as well as his wife’s father and sister.

His case has sparked controversy in Israel, where a judge and a member of the Israeli Knesset have opposed giving him the US $90,000 operation because he was convicted of killing an Israeli.

Overall, the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel are not significantly discriminated against when it comes to medical care because all prisoners in Israel receive poor treatment regardless of background, claims NGO Physicians for Human Rights, Israel (PHR).

7. What cease-fire?
By Amira Hass (Source: Ha’aretz)

“Cease-fire” is yet another hollow term, showing that the Palestinian representatives - elected or not, Hamas or Fatah or Palestine Liberation Organization-Tunis, from Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to the last spokesman of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ “Brigades” - keep falling into the traps set for them by the politics of Israeli occupation.

On the Saturday and Sunday before the Palestinians “broke the cease-fire,” Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed nine Palestinians. Among them was a 17-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy and a policeman who was on the roof of his house and was not involved in any “battle.”