... careerism and narrow interests over honesty and moral courage

By Lawrence Davidson * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

There is an interesting phenomenon which we can call "the political retiree’s confession". I don’t mean all those hyped memoirs, ghost written for all manner of high ranking ex-officials. Here I refer to statements by important political leaders and bureaucrats, either out of office or about to vacate their positions, publicly describing what really needs to be done. For instance, what really needs to be done to obtain peace, or accurately pointing fingers at those obstructing peace. These statements can be shocking in their honesty, but curiously enough, are never made, much less acted upon, while the truth sayer is in a position of power. They come to us only with retirement or pending retirement.

Olmert, left, and Gates, right, shake hands at Olmert's office in Jerusalem, April 19, 2007.

For example, take former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Olmert was prime minister from 2006 (replacing Ariel Sharon who had suffered a debilitating stroke) till early 2009. A few months before leaving office Olmert told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot that, in the end, Israel would have to return "almost all" of the West Bank to the Palestinians, including East Jerusalem. There was no other way to achieve peace with the Arab world. Olmert went on to say that "the decision we are going to have to make is the decision we have been refusing for 40 years to look at open-eyed...The time has come to say these things. The time has come to put them on the table." Of course "the time" oddly coincided with a period when the prime minister could not move this insight from theory into practice.

Example 2: Robert Gates on Israel the ungrateful ally

Now we have another example of this strange phenomenon. This time from the United States. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, the national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, former US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, "in a meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee held shortly before his retirement this summer [2011]", gave his expert opinion that the Israeli government was ungrateful for United States assistance. That despite all the Obama administration had done for Jerusalem, "access to top-quality weapons, assistance developing missile defence systems, high-level intelligence sharing ... the US has received nothing in return". On top of that, in Gates’s estimation Prime Minister Netanyahu is "endangering his country by refusing to grapple with Israel’s growing isolation..." No one at the high level meeting disagreed with this analysis.

Gates’s publically revealed anger is nice to hear about but, like Olmert’s epiphany, it means little in practice. Netanyahu has been rude, duplicitous and downright nasty to President Obama in what was actually a replay of the behaviour of Menachem Begin toward Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. Carter’s National Security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, learned to distrust the Israeli leadership and would later, after he was no longer in office, advocate an increasing hard line toward Jerusalem. Indeed, he once suggested military confrontation with Israel if that country’s leaders risked a regional war by attacking Iranian nuclear development sites (he suggested the US Air Force shoot down the Israeli planes). This was a reasonable suggestion given the stakes but, of course, it was made when Brzezinski had no position of influence.
　
Getting back to the article on Gates’s negative opinion of Netanyahu and his government, Jeffrey Goldberg writes that the former defence secretary actually "articulated bluntly what so many people in the administration seem to believe". OK. So what are they doing about this? Absolutely nothing. They will all wait until they no longer have positions of influence to come out and vent. The situation is disgusting. And it is disgusting because in both the US and Israel (and no doubt in many other countries as well) there are leaders and advisers who know what needs to be done in Israel-Palestine to make the world more secure and stable, and yet they stand by and twiddle their thumbs.
　
Why do these leaders do nothing about matters of such importance? Here are two interconnected reasons:

1. In his book Victims of Groupthink (1972) Irving L. Janis shows how governing political elites create self-reinforcing decision-making circles that insulate themselves from serious challenge. It is rare that anyone within these circles "thinks outside the box". However, it turns out that the "box" must always be able to accommodate the demands and interests of other groups whose money and power support the "circle’s" political viability. This is a system that must produce frustration and a sense of powerlessness among (the rare) officials who can see even a little more clearly than their peers. By the way, it is not a problem unique to political elites. It surely exists in most organizational structures. It is just that when it comes to government the stakes are so much higher for all of us.
　
2. Enmeshed as they are in a system of national interest group politics that dictate the fate of their various political parties and their own careers, those who might suspect a world outside the box will stay silent. The narrow fate of party and career is, apparently, worth more than world peace. It is worth more than the lives of millions of doomed civilians and soldiers. It is worth more than justice for nations and peoples. Only when free of this debilitating system do some of these people find their tongues. But by then all they have are impotent words. This is what we are seeing in the belated surfacing of rational criticism and analysis from unexpected sources such as Olmert and Gates.

Conclusion

How often do we read about individuals and groups who, witnessing an accident or a crime, just stand by and do nothing? These people do not want to "get involved". Afterwards, such folks are usually very quiet and meek. They don’t want their neighbours to know that they stood by and did nothing. But the position of these confessing political retirees is quite different. They were already involved. And now, after the fact, these one-eyed men in the world of the blind want us all to know they have seen the light. Great. Now you tell us!

* Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

By James M. Wall * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

We need look no further than the politics of the state of Israel to see what extremist religion can do with power. The Tea Party in the US, which will determine the winner of the presidential Republican nominating process, is ready to show the world that God wants a final say in US political decision-making.

The Tea Party has emerged as a carbon copy of ultra right wing Zionist forces in Israel. The Tea Party and right-wing political Zionism share a single-minded religious worldview that religious ideology can, and should, exercise absolute control over its citizens.

On June 3-4, at Ralph Reed's annual Faith and Faithful gathering in Washington, speakers praised God and Israel in equal measure. Only a few weeks had passed since the leader of a foreign nation came to Washington at the request of Congress.

That leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, showed Americans how to combine religious ideology with political power. The peoples' representatives cheered mightily to demonstrate their loyalty to a foreign nation operating under a religious ideology that served the interests of political power.

Roy Reed invited Republican presidential aspirants to speak to his organization of Christian faithful. Sure, they were also there to talk politics. But their politics are inseparable from their ideological devotion to the modern state of Israel.

Philip Giradi discovered how closely Reed's speakers adhered to the script of political power and religion.

Support for Israel was on the menu du jour in nearly every speech and for every panel. It dominated the conference. One panel had as its subject "Israel: surrounded yet undaunted in the face of evil."

Michele Bachmann

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's oddly named Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, spoke for fifteen minutes about Israel, saying "If we want God to bless America, then we have to bless the Jews. God gave that land to his chosen people forever. That issue is settled by God almighty...Michele Bachmann produced a standing ovation when she cited a "shocking display of betrayal of our greatest friend and ally Israel." She added "I stand with Israel...President Obama...does not speak for us on the issue of Israel."

The Reed gathering was just one of several recent Washington displays of love for Israel. Soon we will know what impact that love will have on two major international events.

The first is the arrival of a flotilla of peace-oriented ships off the coast of Gaza. The second is the September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly where Palestinians will seek admission, as a state, to the UN General Assembly.

The last effort of a flotilla to breach the blockade of Gaza led to the deaths of nine passengers, May 10, 2010. One of the passengers killed by the Israeli military was Furkan Dogan, who held dual Turkish-US citizenship. There was no official American objection to any of the killings, including that of Dogan, who was born in Troy, New York.

One year and one month after the Israeli raid that killed nine passengers in May, 2010, a much larger flotilla sails this week to Gaza.

Ali Abunimah, writing about the flotilla in the Electronic Intifada, was dismayed by Hillary Clinton's response:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to lay the ground – indeed almost provide a green light – for an Israeli military attack on the upcoming Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which will include the US Boat to Gaza.

Among the passengers aboard the American boat will be 87-year old Kindertransport survivor Hedy Epstein, and author and poet Alice Walker. In all it is expected that about 10 ships, carrying 1000 people from over 20 countries will take part.

Here's what Clinton said in remarks at the State Department on 23 June:

"Well, we do not believe that the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza. Just this week, the Israeli Government approved a significant commitment to housing in Gaza. There will be construction materials entering Gaza and we think that it's not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves."

Clinton must know that Gaza is not part of what any country recognizes as 'sovereign' Israeli territory, and therefore neither are Gaza's territorial waters. Any boats entering Gaza's waters would not in fact be entering 'Israeli waters' as Clinton claimed."

Clinton's attitude toward the flotilla does not portend a favorable US response when Palestinian UN membership comes before the General Assembly in September.

If the GA does vote to refer the membership issue to the Security Council, the US will most likely veto the proposal. The US has no veto in the General Assembly, which is why Israel is working feverishly to persuade European Union nations to vote against the proposal in the GA, and to put pressure on smaller nations to vote against it.

Meanwhile, while the flotilla heads to Gaza waters and diplomats face the September vote, Prime Minister Netanyahu holds three trump cards, any one of which would derail any future peace agreement.

First Card: Israel will not negotiate in any forum with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas. Since there can be no Palestinian government that does not include Hamas, negotiations are impossible.

Second Card: Netanyahu insists there can be no "right of return" for Palestinian refugees who wish to move to, or be compensated for, former Palestinian land in what is today the state of Israel. No Palestinian leader could survive as a leader if he or she gives up that right before any final negotiations begin.

The right of the return of refugees is codified in international law. It is also one of those sacred rights symbolized by the keys retained in Palestinian homes wherever Palestinian refugees currently live.

Third Card: Israel will not negotiate with the PA until it recognizes Israel as a "Jewish State". This is the card Uri Avnery has correctly dismissed as "nonsense". This demand for a "Jewish state" was not a part of any Palestinian-Israeli negotiation until it was introduced into the conversation in 2007.

Yonatan Touval was a senior policy analyst with the Geneva Initiative, an Israeli nonprofit organization, when he wrote in a New York Times op ed column, May 12, 2009:

While the demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel's right to exist was unique (after all, it is non-states that customarily seek such recognition from already existing states), the more recent demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state is dangerous. It must be resisted by those who care about Israel's long-term strategic interests.

Israel's leaders had never sought such recognition from any party, friend or foe. The 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, which Begin signed, only expresses mutual recognition of the "sovereignty," "integrity" and "political independence" of both parties. The peace treaty with Jordan that Yitzhak Rabin concluded in 1994 uses the same language. No mention of Israel's Jewishness appears in either treaty.

In fact, it was only on the eve of the Annapolis conference in November 2007 that then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert first trotted out the Jewish card, conditioning his participation on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Fortunately, the international community did not respond and Olmert abandoned his demand.

Not only is this recent addition to Israel's demands without precedent in the international community, it also ignores the fact that 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs live as citizens within the boundaries of Israel.

In their book, Israel's Palestinians: The Conflict Within, Ilan Peleg and Dov Waxman write (page 19):

All too often, people are completely unaware of the large number of non-Jewish citizens of Israel–around 1.8 million people–who make up a quarter of the country's total population of 7.5 million. One in four Israelis, in other words, are not Jewish.

The vast majority of this significant non-Jewish population are Arabs, who at the end of 2009 numbered 1,526,000, more than 20 percent of Israel's population.

Pelig is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College and servesas a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC., His co-author, Dov Waxman, is associate professor of Political Science at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Their book is a rich resource for information on "Israel's Palestinians", the designation, by the way, preferred by Palestinian citizens of Israel instead of the official Israeli government terms, "Arab Israelis" or "Israeli Arabs".

Peleg and Waxman write specifically on the impact that defining Israel as a Jewish state, would have on Israel's Palestinians. They resist it. According to the authors, "The redefinition of the state has become the central demand of the Palestinian minority [within Israel]."

As the state's Jewish identity has become a major point of contention domestically, it has also been inserted into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by Prime Minister Netanyahu's insistence that the Palestinian Authority officially recognize Israel as a Jewish state in a final peace agreement.

Such recognition, however,is unlikely to be granted against the objections of the Palestinian minority in Israel–underlining the connection that we emphasize in this book between Israel's external and internal Palestinian problems.

President Obama grew up as a member of a minority community. Existentially, morally, and intellectually, he knows that the rights of a minority must be respected in a democracy, if that democracy ever expects to become "a state for all its citizens".

* James M. Wall is currently a Contributing Editor of The Christian Century magazine, based in Chicago, Illinois. From 1972 through 1999, he was editor and publisher of the Christian Century magazine. Jim launched personal blog April 24, 2008.

The picture of Prime Minister Netanyahu is from the Palestinian Ma'an News Service. The picture of Michele Bachmann is from the New York Times.

By Richard Lightbown* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

After he returned from his ordeal on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, Fiachra O'Luain, the second mate on the Challenger I, was asked if he would go again to break the siege of Gaza. He replied "yes ... and again, and again".

Many of the survivors of the flotilla will be on the next one, due to sail for Gaza towards the end of June. Called Stay Human, it will commemorate Vittorio Arrigoni who gave his life (as did 10 activists on the Mavi Marmara: nine dead and one in a coma) for justice and human rights for the Palestinian people.

In the face of Israeli propaganda, parroted by the BBC and other mainstream media, we should hold fast to the truth that these people are prepared to face. All of the survivors of the previous flotilla were maltreated and humiliated. Many of them were beaten, tasered by electric stun guns, attacked with stun grenades and tear gas, deprived of food and water and subjected, by terrorists in the employ of the state of Israel, to treatment described by a United Nations Fact-Finding Mission [.PDF] as tantamount to torture. Many suffered injury from deliberately over-tightened handcuffs. Several had their passports stolen (for use in who-knows-what future outrage by Mossad criminals), all cameras, mobile phones and computers were illegally seized and many lost large sums of money: plundered in individual acts of piracy by members of one of the world's most criminal and immoral armies. All of the victims experienced first-hand the ruthless contempt for human dignity that the Zionist state considers its right.

On the Mavi Marmara, passengers and crew saw friends and comrades killed, wounded or maltreated by thugs with no more respect for human life than Al Capone's gangsters. Some of these same criminals later appeared on the BBc programme "Panorama". Wary of the daylight they lurked in the night shadows of Haifa docks like wharf rats, referred to their victims as "terrorists", and falsely accused them of shooting at commandos who were indulging a blood bath totally outside of any remit granted by international law. (A terrorist, we should remember, is someone who uses violence against civilians for political ends. The commandos defined the term as someone who comes prepared to commit violence, dressed in military clothing with covered faces. Either definition accurately fitted the commandos themselves, who in any event would never be accorded the protection that internationallaw demands for civilians.)

The blood of men who believed in universal human rights dripped down the stairs of the Mavi Marmara that night as war crimes were committed on the orders of Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak under the guise of defending the state of Israel. Knowing all this, in a few days time an even larger flotilla with even more human rights workers on board will sail for Gaza. Binyamin Netanyahu has tried every trick in the diplomatic book to prevent it. We can be sure that Mossad has been hard at work too, trying to sabotage ships bound for the high seas.

Despite well-publicized claims to the contrary, and despite the recent opening of the Rafah Crossing to many civilians, the sadistic Israeli closure remains firmly locked on Gaza. There has been no confirmation that the 4,500 tons of building materials on the last flotilla ever reached Gaza. Desperately needed sewage pipes from the Malaysian ship the Spirit of Rachel Corrie are in an Egyptian warehouse instead of being delivered to Gaza. (Ironically, this would have helped to reduce pollution in the eastern Mediterranean where the tides presumably wash untreated Gazan sewage onto beaches in Israel and Egypt.) Permitted exports from Gaza amount to around two lorry loads a day in place of the 400 per day that Israel agreed to allow in a deal brokered by Condoleezza Rice in 2005. Meanwhile, the scarcely-reported ceasefire of missiles from Gaza, applied after the successful Palestinian unity talks, attracts no concessions from Israel's continuing occupation of the Gaza Strip.

The heroism and sacrifice of this next flotilla will not be in vain. Despite more brazen lies from Mark Regev and biased portrayals of events by the likes of Jane Corbin, Mr Netanyahu's stubborn, blinkered stupidity will further damage Israel's international image while further advancing the Palestinian cause. No Nobel Peace Laureate will be able to disguise the guilt if more Israeli hoods batter more human rights workers. No selectively edited whitewash report, with of without endorsement from professors of international law, will be able to conceal the truth this time from the people of the world. The flotilla is coming, and just as Mickey Mouse's sorcerer's apprentice merely increased the activities of his animated broom when he attacked it with an axe, Mr Netanyahu only risks further opprobrium in the eyes of the world, further censure for his pariah state and further flotillas if he insists in perpetuating the use of violent crime against lawful protest on the high seas.

* Richard Lightbown - studied the impacts of the Rwandan civil war on four Ugandan forests for his Masters dissertation. He has been a volunteer in Gaza and the West Bank, and assisted with a forestry proposal for the Arab areas of the occupied Golan.

Once the ships sail it will be possible to track them here. Any assault is likely to be before dawn on the night before the anticipated arrival in Gaza.

By Stephen M. Walt* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Illustration by Yaser Ahmad

Last Friday the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council Resolution condemning Israel's continued expansion of settlements in the occupied territory of the West Bank. The resolution didn't question Israel's legitimacy, didn't declare that "Zionism is racism," and didn't call for a boycott or sanctions. It just said that the settlements were illegal and that Israel should stop building them, and called for a peaceful, two-state solution with "secure and recognized borders. The measure was backed by over 120 countries, and 14 members of the security council voted in favor. True to form, only the United States voted no.

There was no strategic justification for this foolish step, because the resolution was in fact consistent with the official policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson. All of those presidents has understood that the settlements were illegal and an obstacle to peace, and each has tried (albeit with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm) to get Israel to stop building them.

Yet even now, with the peace process and the two-state solution flat-lining, the Obama administration couldn't bring itself to vote for a U.N. resolution that reflected the U.S. government's own position on settlements. The transparently lame explanation given by U.S. officials was that the security council isn't the right forum to address this issue. Instead, they claimed that the settlements issue ought to be dealt with in direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians, and that the security council should have nothing to say on the issue.

This position is absurd on at least two grounds. First, the expansion of settlements is clearly an appropriate issue for the security council to consider, given that it is authorized to address obvious threats to international peace and security. Second, confining this issue to "direct talks" doesn't make much sense when those talks are going nowhere. Surely the Obama administration recognizes that its prolonged and prodigious effort to get meaningful discussions going have been a complete bust? It is hard to believe that they didn't recognize that voting "yes" on the resolution might be a much-needed wake-up call for the Israeli government, and thus be a good way to get the peace process moving again? Thus far, all that Obama's Middle East team has managed to do in two years is to further undermine U.S. credibility as a potential mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, and to dash the early hopes that the United States was serious about "two states for two peoples." And while Obama, Mitchell, Clinton, Ross, and the rest of the team have floundered, the Netanyahu government has continued to evict Palestinian residents from their homes, its bulldozers and construction crews continuing to seize more and more of the land on which the Palestinians hoped to create a state.

Needless to say, the United States is all by its lonesome on this issue. Our fellow democracies -- France, Germany, Great Britain, Brazil, South Africa, India, and Colombia -- all voted in favor of the resolution, but not the government of the Land of the Free. And it's not as if Netanyahu deserved to be rewarded at this point, given how consistently he has stiffed Obama and his Middle East team.

For more on this latest sad chapter in the annals of American Middle East diplomacy, see M.J Rosenberg here and here, the Magnes Zionist here and here, and Gideon Levy here.

As these commentators recognize, the real reason for Obama's misguided decision was the profound influence of the Israel lobby. Indeed, few observers have missed this simple and obvious fact. One can only conclude that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's repeated claims that they are "friends of Israel" and devoted to its security are nothing more than empty, politically expedient rhetoric. Whatever they may say, the policies they are pursuing -- including this latest veto -- are in fact harmful to Israel's long-term future. The man who declared in Cairo on June 4, 2009 that a two-state solution was "in the "Israel's interest, the Palestinians' interest, America's interest, and the world's interest" must have changed his mind, because his actions ever since have merely hastened the moment when creating two viable states will be impossible (if that is not already the case). Then remember what former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in 2007, "if the two-state solution fails, Israel will face a South African style struggle for political rights." And "once that happens," he warned, "the state of Israel is finished."

If Obama were a true friend of Israel, in short, he'd be doing whatever he could to keep it from expanding its ruinous occupation and making the Zionist vision unsustainable. And given that Congress remains hopeless on this issue, he could have shown he was a true friend by instructing his U.N. Ambassador, Susan Rice, to vote for the resolution, as a diverse array of foreign policy experts had suggested. He would also have devoted some portion of his first two years in office to explaining to the American people why some "tough love" was needed on both sides (i.e., not just the Palestinians), and he would have recruited America's democratic allies in a genuine effort to bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a fair and stable end. Had he done these things, most Americans would have supported him. Instead, his lame actions are just enabling the occupation, and for the most cynical domestic political reasons (like safeguarding his re-election prospects in 2012). Even worse, he did it at a moment when the Arab world is in ferment, and when the voice of the Arab street is beginning to be heard. But instead of aligning itself with international law, basic principles of justice, and its own stated position, the Obama administration caved. Again.

If the United States hopes to be on the right side of history, it is time to start thinking about what its policy should be when everybody finally acknowledges that "two states for two peoples" is no longer a practical possibility. This is going to happen sooner or later, and anyone who is still advocating for a two-state solution at that point is going to sound like an ignorant fool. Not because of the flaws in that option, but simply because it will be impossible to implement. What alternative solution will the president and secretary of state support then? Ethnic cleansing? A binational, liberal democracy in which all inhabitants of Israel/Palestine have equal civil and political rights? Or permanent apartheid, in the form of disconnected Palestinian Bantustans under de facto Israeli control? That awkward reality may not be apparent while Obama is president (which is probably what he is hoping), but it will be a damning legacy to leave to his successor, as well as a tragedy for two peoples who have already known more than their share.

Postscript: Some readers may think I am being too defeatist here, and they might cite in evidence Bernard Avishai's New York Times Magazine essay detailing the alleged "near-miss" peace talks between Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in 2008. Avishai's account portrays the two leaders as close to a deal and suggests that it would not be that hard to resurrect a similar deal today. It's an interesting article, but there are at least four problems with his optimistic account. First, Olmert was the lamest of lame ducks by 2008, because he was due to be indicted on corruption charges and everyone knew it, so the talks themselves were something of a side-show. Second, even had this not been the case, it is by no means clear that Olmert could have sold the Israeli public on the proposed deal. Third, it is not even clear that the two sides were that close to an agreement, given Olmert's insistence that Israel could not withdraw from Ariel and Maale Adumim (two settlement blocs that thrust deep inside the West Bank). Fourth, and probably most important, political trends in Israel are headed the other way (among other things, Avigdor Lieberman wasn't foreign minister back then), which makes the Olmert/Abbas talks even less relevant. For excellent critical responses to Avishai's piece, see Noam Sheizaf, Matthew Taylor, and Ilene Cohen.

* Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

By Stuart Littlewood * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

One of the most grotesque Wikileaks revelations so far is the disclosure that Palestinian top dog (Fatah section), Mahmoud Abbas, was told in advance about the murderous assault on his countrymen in Gaza two years ago.

Some claim that the Wikileaks eye-openers are a 'dirty tricks' operation by people with a large axe to grind. It is certainly odd that ‘evidence’ is selected to portray Arab states as eager to see Iran zapped for an unproven nuclear threat when, actually, the Middle East is far more anxious about the very real and present nuclear threat from Israel.

That same mentality would no doubt wish to drive an ever bigger wedge between Fatah and political rival Hamas.

So what are we to make of the documents claiming that in a June 2009 meeting between Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and a U.S. congressional delegation, Barak said that the Israeli government "had consulted with Egypt and Fatah prior to Operation Cast Lead, asking if they were willing to assume control of Gaza once Israel defeated Hamas"?

Fatah deny that it happened. Top aid to Palestinian president Abbas, Saeb Erekat, said: "We knew about the war because the Israelis were saying there was going to be a war."

Several months before it started, at a meeting that he, Erekat, attended, Abbas asked Israel's then-prime minister, Ehud Olmert, not to go to war, saying "he would not go to Gaza on an Israeli tank."

So they admit they were talking about it…

I put the question to the Palestinian ambassador in London, Professor Manual Hassassian. "I am surprised to read the Wikileaks revelation that Mr Abbas, along with Mr Mubarak, was informed of Operation Cast lead in advance. I don't recall his issuing a public warning to the unfortunate people of Gaza or appealing to the UN and western powers to intervene. Why would a Palestinian president keep quiet about an evil and horrendous war-crime he knew was about to be committed against his own people? Can you please throw any light on the matter?"

The ambassador replied: "I am surprised as you are, and cannot confirm the Wikileaks revelation whether they are authentic or not."

No flat-out denial then, nor did he say he would refer the question upwards for clarification. You'd think the embassy would wish to show a clean pair of hands.

Abbas, as we all know, is living his elevated lifestyle on borrowed time. Since January 2009, when his term as president officially expired, western-backed Abbas has clung like superglue to power and overstayed his welcome. A year ago, having already taken a one-year extension regarded by many, including Hamas, as unlawful, he announced he had no wish to seek re-election at a presidential poll he promised for last January. But January came and went, and there was still no presidential election. Abbas is now nearing the end of his second year of illegitimate tenure.

I have two vivid images of Palestinians. The first, in Gaza, was the sight of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and the crusty old Catholic priest, Fr Manuel Mussallam, who had guarded his flock through utmost deprivation and the darkest of days (with many more to come), standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the microphones and cameras, both proclaiming that they were Palestinians first and Muslim/Christian second.

That’s unity of a welcome sort.

The other is of Fatah playing Israel's armed poodle, reminiscent of the Vichy French government’s militia set up to fight the French Resistance and do much of the Nazis’ dirty work. Is Fatah prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Gaza Palestinians against the common enemy – the occupier - and proclaim themselves "Palestinians first" and Fatah/Hamas second?

Judging by their track record, no. Arrest and torture of their own people is more their game, we hear.

That’s disunity of the worst kind.

And you have to wonder why, if the story’s true, the Israelis felt comfortable discussing with the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority what would happen after their tanks and aircraft had pulverized the Gaza part of Palestine and shredded and vaporized its women and children.

A genuine leader knowing about plans for such a mega-crime would surely have sounded the alert and raised merry hell at the UN for preventive action.

* Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

Vitriolic racism and hatred has become the Israeli norm

By Omar Radwan | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Israel appears to be awash with Jewish hate preachers. In the past, rabbis who issued racist edicts or offensive remarks about Palestinians or non-Jews were generally dismissed as radicals and extremists who were no more than a trifling annoyance to be ignored in the hope that they would simply go away. However, it is now clear that ignoring this problem has only made it worse. In the current climate in Israel, extremist hate preaching has apparently become the norm and it is being embraced, not just on the extreme political right but also by a disturbing number of Israelis in general, be they preachers, politicians, settlers or simply ordinary citizens. Hate-filled Israelis have become emboldened over the years by the knowledge that they can say and do almost anything without fear, knowing that they will not be condemned or, if they are, that nothing will come of it. That is due to the widespread support for their views across Israeli society as well as their religious leaders and the political elite.

What is particularly disturbing is that leading Israeli rabbis, who are meant to be the spiritual and moral guides of the Jewish people, are actually encouraging racism, physical violence and even the killing of Palestinians.

It is no longer shocking to read headlines such as "Leading rabbi encourages IDF soldiers to use Palestinian human shields". This particular headline relates to Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, who taught his students that "according to true Jewish values, your lives come before those of the enemy, whether he is a soldier or a civilian under protection. Therefore, you are forbidden from endangering your own life for the sake of the enemy, not even for a civilian." This sort of teaching, no doubt, goes some way towards explaining why the number of cases in which Palestinian children are being used as human shields by Israeli forces is increasing.

Vicious levels of discrimination against non-Jews have now escalated to the point that when Israelis of a more reasonable persuasion do something as simple as, for example, rent a property to an Arab, rabbis are now calling for them to be shunned and boycotted by their own Jewish communities. A recent report in Haaretz quoted a letter signed by a group of 18 prominent rabbis, including the Chief Rabbi of Safed, who wrote that renting properties to Arabs would deflate the value of Jewish homes and, "The neighbours and acquaintances [of a Jew who sells or rents to an Arab] must distance themselves from the Jew, refrain from doing business with him, deny him the right to read from the Torah, and similarly [ostracize] him until he goes back on this harmful deed".

It is not just Muslims who are on the receiving end of this campaign of hatred; even Christians in the region have long been subjected to disturbing and widespread campaigns of abuse from Israeli Jews. "I hate to say it", said Roman Catholic Father Massimo Pazzini of the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, "but we've grown accustomed to this. Jewish religious fanatics spitting at Christian priests and nuns has become a tradition."

The term "hate preacher" has often been used in the Western media about Muslims but it seems more appropriate to describe some of the Israeli rabbis for their recent statements and guidance.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef

In the run-up to the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian "peace negotiations" Rabbi Ovadia Yosef wished that "all the nasty people who hate Israel, like Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas], vanish from our world". He went on to say, "May God strike them down with the plague along with all the nasty Palestinians who persecute Israel."

Although his statement was immediately condemned by America it did not come as a surprise to people who were already familiar with his 2001 call for the annihilation of Arabs, at which point he also said it was forbidden to be merciful to them.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro

In his controversial book The King's Torah, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro sanctioned the murder by Jews of non-Jews, including babies and children, who may pose an actual or potential threat to Jews or to Israel.

"It is permissible to kill the Righteous among non-Jews even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation," he wrote. "If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments because we care about the commandments there is nothing wrong with the murder."

This edict was seemingly made in response to the arrest of a Jewish terrorist who confessed to murdering two Palestinian shepherds in the West Bank, and was thus used to justify the killings.

Mordechai Eliyahu

According to a report by Khalid Amayreh in November 2009, "During the Israeli onslaught against Gaza earlier this year, Mordecahi Elyahu, one of the leading rabbinic figures in Israel, urged the army not to refrain from killing enemy children in order to save the lives of Israeli soldiers. He had even petitioned the Israeli government to carry out a series of carpet bombing of Palestinian population centres in Gaza. 'If they don't stop after we kill 100,' said the rabbi, 'then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after we kill a thousand, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop, we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to stop them'."

According to Eliyahu's obituary in the Daily Telegraph in June this year

Rabbi Eliyahu wrote to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to say that, according to Jewish war ethics, an entire city (he referred to Gaza City) holds collective responsibility for the immoral behaviour of individuals.

Thus, he continued, there was no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians during a potential massive military offensive in Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket attacks. He ended his letter quoting from the Psalms: "I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them."

He extended his hatred to those individuals worldwide who even show the slightest incidental support for Palestinians and said of the hundreds of thousands killed in 2004 by the Asian tsunami "those who died were paying for their governments' support of the Palestinians."

With statements such as these it is paradoxical Muslim preachers such as Dr Zakir Naik and Sheik Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, whose views are very moderate in comparison, are labelled as extremists. Although for years now Muslim leaders have (often undeservedly) been vilified as the most hate-filled preachers in the world, that title is now surely more deserved by Israeli rabbis such as those mentioned above.

By any means necessary, no matter how immoral, or corrupt.

It is strange for the spiritual leaders of a "chosen" people who stake their claim to the "holy" land use methods to achieve their goals that are decidedly "unholy". One recent ruling by Rabbi Ari Schvat, for example, gave "his blessing to female agents of Israel's foreign secret service, Mossad, who may be required to have sex with the enemy in so-called 'honey-pot' missions against terrorists." While there is apparently no limit on Jewish men using sex in an effort to infiltrate the enemy, he did make a few remarks about Jewish female 'honey-pots' stating, "If it is necessary to use a married woman, it would be best [for] her husband to divorce her... After the [sex] act, he would be entitled to bring her back." He also added, "Naturally, a job of that sort could be given to a woman who in any event is licentious in her ways." So, not only are these rabbis genocidal, but sexist as well.

That such comments are not causing moral outrage amongst conservative Jews in Israel and, indeed, in Jewish communities worldwide, is worrying. The concept of a woman defiling herself and committing any act of lewdness or adultery is something alien to most religions but the fact that Jewish women are being given the green light by Israel's rabbis to use such lascivious means to achieve the goals of Mossad demonstrates further that Israel really does not have any moral line across which it will not go.

The standard response to an article like this is to condemn it as "anti-Semitic". That is neither the intention nor, it is contended, the result; the statements quoted have been issued or uttered by rabbis and well-publicised. Some may even be directly responsible for the subsequent killings of innocent Palestinian civilians. Instead of lining up to shoot the messenger, detractors should pause instead and really consider what these rabbis have said; and then decide whether reporting anti-Gentile statements made by rabbis really does qualify as anti-Semitism. There are many Jews and rabbis in congregations all over the world who are desperate for peace in the Holy Land and are striving to stand up for the common humanity of us all, regardless of our faith background.

According to New York-based Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, rabbis like those quoted above "do not and cannot represent Judaism or the Torah," Indeed, Rabbi Weiss goes one step further: "The Zionist State of 'Israel', which is a rebellion against the Almighty, cannot represent the Torah or world Jewry true to the Torah." Referring to Rabbi Ovadia Yusef in particular, Rabbi Weiss added: "This rabbi is a member of Sephardic Jewry, Jews from Arab countries. If he would only look back at his own community's history, he would realize that Jews can, and did, live peacefully with Arabs, for many centuries. When Jews were persecuted, killed and expelled in other parts of the world, the Arab countries provided a safe haven and welcomed Jews with open arms. In Palestine as well, Jews enjoyed this hospitality when Palestinians and Jews co-existed in harmony for many generations, as is well-documented in Jewish books of that era. It was only Zionism, with its theft and oppression of the Palestinian people, that put an end to this co-existence." (http://www.nkusa.org/activities/Statements/20100819.cfm)

Racism and extremist preachers must be challenged, not least when they ply their wares in volatile areas like the Holy Land, where words can and all too often lead to murderous acts. People of faith and good faith must stand up to incitement to hatred; it would be refreshing to hear more leading rabbis condemning the hate preachers in Israel. Their silence is deafening.

By Stuart Littlewood * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The UK is to become a safe haven for Israeli psychopaths while they continue their brutal military occupation, colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Holy Land, and carry on bombarding blockaded Gaza and executing or abducting anyone bringing humanitarian help.

That's the British government's latest contribution of Middle East peace.

The Zionist entity's Trojan Horse at the heart of our government - otherwise known as the Conservative Friends of Israel - held a reception recently attended by our foreign secretary William Hague.

Hague told the 400 guests:

"We have had good discussions with Israeli ministers on universal jurisdiction where the last government left us with an appalling situation where a politician like Mrs Livni could be threatened with arrest on coming to the UK...

"We have agreed in the coalition about putting it right, we will put it right through legislation that will be introduced... The Justice Secretary will bring into the House of Commons adding to legislation going through the House of Commons later this year and I phoned Mrs Livni amongst others to tell her about that and received a very warm welcome for our proposals".

Who can forget that Tzipi Livni, Israel's former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror that brought unspeakable death and destruction to Gaza's civilians nearly 2 years ago?

And who'd have believed a British government minister would undermine our justice system in order to make the UK a safe haven for the likes of her?

Showing no remorse and with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) on her hands, and thousands more horribly maimed, Livni's office issued a statement saying she was proud of Operation Cast Lead (the murderous blitz she had unleashed). And speaking later at a conference at Tel Aviv's Institute for Security Studies, she said: "I would today take the same decisions."

Few of us would want to touch such a person with a barge-pole. But Hague is so smitten that he said it was "completely unacceptable" that someone like Tzipi Livni felt she couldn't visit the UK. "We cannot have a position where Israeli politicians feel they cannot visit this country. The situation is unsatisfactory [and] indefensible. It is absolutely my intention to act speedily," Hague said.

He even tried to make Livni's monstrous crime look good by claiming, as reported on the CFI website, that "the immediate trigger for this crisis [the war on Gaza] was the barrage of hundreds of rocket attacks against Israel on the expiry of the ceasefire or truce." It is well known that the ceasefire didn't expire. It was deliberately breached by an Israeli raid into Gaza that killed several Palestinians with the intention of deliberately provoking a response that would re-ignite the violence and provide an excuse to launch Operation Cast Lead, which the Israelis had been preparing for months.

The foreign secretary concluded his talk to the CFI by encouraging stronger business links between Israel and Britain and saying he intended to visit Israel in coming weeks.

One of the delights awaiting Hague is a meeting with his opposite number, Avigdor Lieberman, who lives in an illegal squat on stolen Palestinian land and is a wanted criminal on that score alone. He is also pushing for 1.3 million Arabs currently living in Israel to be stripped of citizenship and forcibly transferred outside Israel's future borders.

To that end Israel's military and civil authorities have just finished an exercise rehearsing a crushing response to the riots this latest 'ethnic cleansing' programme will inevitably cause.

Few individuals are more obnoxious than former club bouncer Lieberman, who is a convicted child-beater and described even in Israel as "a virulent racist" and "a certified gangster". He is also reported to be under investigation for corruption. All the same, Hague wants him freely walking the streets of London with Livni. No doubt the media will soon be sprouting propaganda photos of Hague and Lieberman triumphantly shaking hands, smirking, embracing and doing whatever else two crazies do when they get together.

A Masterclass in grovelling

The "universal jurisdiction" fuss flared up again last year after Israeli top brass, including Ehud Barak, Livni and retired general Doron Almog, cancelled engagements in London for fear of being arrested. Israel complained bitterly. The then British foreign secretary David Miliband apologized and, according to a press report, "promised Lieberman to begin working immediately to change the UK laws that enable the issue of arrest warrants against Israeli officials accused of war crimes".

Outraged members of the public were immediately asking who Miliband thought he was, grovelling in their name to Israeli thugs who had the temerity to whinge about the perfectly proper operation of British law, especially when the warrants were issued to answer well-founded charges.

Under universal jurisdiction all states that are party to the Geneva Conventions are under a binding obligation to seek out those suspected of having committed grave breaches of the Conventions and bring them, regardless of nationality, to justice. There should be no hiding place for those suspected of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Applications can be made to a court for private arrest warrants, and this has been happening because the government itself shirks its duty under the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention and drags its feet until the bird has flown.

Livni bleated: "It's about the entire State of Israel and our ability to go on working together against common threats."

The threats Israel faces are caused by its racist expansion, land theft, general lawlessness and hateful attitude towards its neighbours, and by the nuclear threat Israel itself poses to others in the region and the Islamic world generally. To suggest we have anything in common is an insult.

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu's office butted in with this arrogant statement: "We will not agree to a situation in which [former prime minister] Ehud Olmert, [Defense Minister] Ehud Barak and [opposition leader and former foreign minister] Tzipi Livni will be summoned to the bench. We utterly reject the absurdity that is happening in Britain."

And the Israeli ambassador in London, Ron Prosor, had the cheek to chastise the British foreign secretary telling him it was time the British government took action.

Miliband obligingly called the warrants intolerable and said he had asked Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Justice Minister Jack Straw to find an urgent solution.

Dancing to Tel Aviv's tune

The solution is simple enough. If Israel wants talks in London they send people with clean hands. There should be no concessions, anyway, to a regime that shows such contempt for international law and normal codes of conduct.

Instead Brown, a patron of the Jewish National Fund, said Livni was "most welcome in Britain any time", and our Ministers of the Crown are dancing to Tel Aviv's tune. No moves were made by Labour in their last days in office, but it seems the incoming Conservatives and their Liberal-Democrat partners are planning to put the Director of Public Prosecutions in charge of issuing arrest warrants. This turns what should be a strictly judicial process into a political one that keeps any warmongering child-killer our ministers happen to admire out of the clutches of the UK's courts.

William Hague was recruited into the Conservative Friends of Israel at the worryingly tender age of 15.

In 2007, while shadow foreign secretary, he said: "We will always have strong economic and political ties with Israel. We will always be a friend of Israel."

In 2008 he declared:

"The unbroken thread of Conservative Party support for Israel that has run for nearly a century from the Balfour Declaration to the present day will continue. Although it will no doubt often be tested in the years ahead, it will remain constant, unbroken, and undiminished by the passage of time."

Hague told the Jewish Chronicle in an interview: "We don't approve of expanding settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem because it makes the two-state solution more difficult." Not because it's a barbaric crime to dispossess Arabs of their lands, homes and livelihoods... he doesn't approve because it's a bit awkward politically.

"I've traveled across the country," he continued. "I've stood on the Golan Heights and swam in the Sea of Galilee. I've stood on the part of the West Bank where you can see the Mediterranean, where you really understand Israel's strategic fragility."

If he had stood in the rubble of Gaza and seen the devastation to homes and infrastructure and visited the shattered schools and hospitals there... if he had stood in Bethlehem, imprisoned on all sides by the evil separation wall, and made his way on foot with Palestinian workers (those with permits) through the sinister steel barriers and holding pens of the Israeli checkpoint - a process that can take hours - before beginning the journey to Jerusalem, he might have understood how the Israeli jackboot chokes the life out of the Palestinian people.

Hague's Zionist sympathies visibly ooze from every pore. Livni appears to have him eating out of her hand. If Parliament passes his measures to weaken powers of arrest in order to harbour those wanted for crimes against humanity, doesn't that make the whole British nation an accessory to those crimes?

And before MPs approve such measures they should reflect on how it would be the lowest thing they could do.

* Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

By Sam Bahour* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The entire U.S. administration's Middle East A-team--President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and Special Envoy Mitchell--is defying the mass majority of political analysts by dismissing the status quo in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip, and insisting that the latest round of Palestinian-Israeli direct talks has the potential to lead to an agreement which will resolve the conflict. I have a deep fear that they may be correct in predicting an agreement will be signed, but I do not have an iota of confidence that it will end the conflict.

Conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic predicts that the current peace talks will hit a cement wall before the one-year time frame expires. The numerous explanations for the predicted failure are all sensible given the region's track record. International law is blatantly ignored, the logic of might is right trumps justice and the international community continues to turn its back to its own obligations toward the occupied Palestinian people.

On the Palestinian side, reality is a mix between frustration, despair, disunity and betrayal. The Palestinian negotiating team claims to be a legitimate leadership but there is not one functioning institutional body that can claim to be the source of their self-defined legitimacy. This quasi-leadership understands its legitimacy crisis so well that only a few months ago they were forced to cancel legally-required municipal elections out of concern of losing, even though Hamas was boycotting the elections--so much for Palestinian democracy.

The fear is that the Palestinian negotiating team is in their final round in the game of political survival. If these current talks do not reach an agreement--any agreement--the only way for Mahmoud Abbas and his cohorts to remain in office will be by way of the barrel of a gun, similar to how most other Arab states exist today.

However, the Palestinian people are not your average Arab population; they understand that their demise was not served up at the hands of the Palestinian leadership, legitimate or otherwise. First to blame is Israel for its dispossession of Palestinians and what is commonly referred to as military occupation. The 1948 dispossession took place in broad daylight for all to see, although many preferred blindness. Israel was created on the remains--both living and dead--of Palestinians, leaving some 5 million refugees dwelling in squalid refugee camps for over 60 years and many others displaced in their own homeland. It is no wonder that Israel fears for its security.

The military occupation part of Israel's crimes against humanity began in 1967 and is becoming less and less recognizable with every new Israeli settlement and violation of the Fourth Geneva Conventions. International law defines military occupation as a state of affairs which is temporary by nature. After forty-three years it is becoming much harder to classify Israel's occupation as temporary. As a matter of fact, the occupier, Israel, has dumped volumes of professional media spin over the past four decades to convince the world that the lands in question are in fact "disputed" and not militarily occupied. If the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip are not occupied, then what are they? Are the negotiations launched in Washington D.C. aimed at ending an internationally-recognized (and U.S. recognized) military occupation or are they rearranging some other reality which is yet unnamed?

If we view the facts on the ground in Israel-Palestine for what they are today, then only one word applies: apartheid. Realizing this reality as apartheid is not new. President Jimmy Carter referred to it in his recent book title; past Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak both spoke the "A" word as being the direction in which Israel is heading.

True, apartheid is best known for its application in South Africa and for its ultimate collapse there. However, the system of apartheid did not stop with its failure, it moved on to be defined in international law for what it was: a crime. The 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defined the crime of apartheid as inhumane acts of a character similar to other crimes against humanity "committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime." If this definition does not reflect what Israel is doing to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel proper, then blindness reigns supreme.

Thus, if these current direct talks are aiming to produce an agreement that ignores or attempts to coexist with the unrelenting, slow-motion, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that Israel continues to this day, then it will be worthy of merely a few photo-ops that will be forgotten before the negotiating teams return to their respective homes. Even the creative idea floating around of using a failure in the talks to get the UN to admit Palestine as a state--if it does not remove the underlying system of apartheid--would merely be rearranging the legal status to serve the continuation of Israel's crimes against humanity.

The most dignified failure these talks can hope for is that the international community finally come to its senses, preferably with the U.S., and passes a UN resolution with specific punitive actions that identifies the status in Israel-Palestine, all of historic Palestine, for what it is: the crime of apartheid.

Only when the definition of the problem is crystal clear can we formulate an appropriate solution and have renewed faith in the international community's ability to act on what it knows very well to be reality: that Israeli actions over the last six decades have nullified the two-state solution. A new model of co-existence must be envisioned, a model built not on racism, separation and exceptionalism, but on mutual and equal human and civil rights across all of Palestine and Israel.

If the current peace talks surprise the world and result in a true sovereign Palestine, free of Israeli control and domination, then I'd be happy to be mistaken; if not however, it's time for the world to at least call reality for what it is. Anything less is an insult to our collective intelligence.

* Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant living in the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh in the West Bank. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994).

(Foreign Policy)

By Christopher Bollyn* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Badness always manifests in destruction and corruption, while goodness always manifests in preservation and benefit.
- Socrates in Plato's Republic (ca. 374 B.C.)

"Wanted" posters of Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak in Jerusalem, April 2010. Olmert and Barak are accused of bribery and corruption in Israel and indictable for serious war crimes in Gaza. Both men are architects of the false-flag terror attacks of 9-11. Olmert, for example, was on a secret visit in New York City on 9-11. When will we see posters in the United States calling for the arrest of Olmert and Barak?

IT IS ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CERTAIN that 9-11 was a Mossad operation - period.
- Dr. Alan Sabrosky, former director of Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College

"And how can it be profitable for a person's immorality to go unnoticed and unpunished? The consequence of a criminal getting away with his crimes is that he becomes a worse person."
- Socrates in Plato's Republic, "Happiness and Unhappiness"

Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, has been in the United States for a week of meetings and speeches. He is, in my opinion, the key suspect of being the mastermind of the false-flag terror attacks of 9-11. I am providing this brief article to explain how I think he did it.

Within minutes of the airplane crashes on 9-11, Ehud Barak (the founder and master of the Israeli military's covert operation force, the Sayeret Matkal) was in the London studio of the BBC World ready to provide a plausible (and political) explanation to the world. Barak, the real mastermind of 9-11, was the first person to call for a "War on Terror" - and U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East. This is how false-flag terrorism works. The perpetrator is the first one to assign blame by pointing his finger at his enemy in order to shape public opinion, which is the real purpose of such atrocities.

Ehud Barak (Brug) was born at Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon on 12 February 1942. He enlisted in the Israeli Army at age 17, became a career army officer, and helped to found and lead the elite Sayeret Matkal covert operations commando unit. After serving as head of Israeli Intelligence and Central Command during the 1980s, Barak was appointed IDF Chief of Staff, in 1991. Barak was Israel's minister of defense during Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009. Based on the report of the U.N. Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, written by Justice Richard Goldstone, Barak is legally responsible for a host of war crimes committed during that assault. The United States (and all other nations who have ratified the Geneva Conventions) are obliged to arrest Ehud Barak based on the evidence and findings presented in the Goldstone report.

Socrates' point that unpunished criminals become worse is very much the story of modern Israel. The most serious criminals of the Zionist state have never been punished in any meaningful way by the international community - or the United States. This laissez faire attitude regarding Zionist criminals has only enabled and emboldened the most unscrupulous and aggressive criminals to rise to the top of the Israeli government, where they sit today. The criminal audacity of Israel's leaders is, however, simply not sustainable for the long term because their rampant criminality endangers the Zionist state, its citizens, and even its supporters.

Zionist Jews and Israelis living in America, for example, may find themselves in a very uncomfortable position when millions of Americans realize that Israel and its supporters are behind the mass murder of 9-11 and the cover-up of the truth, as Dr. Alan Sabrosky, former director of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, has repeatedly warned. It seems to be only a matter of time before this uncomfortable situation becomes a reality. It should be noted that the Israeli prime minister at the time of the attacks was Ariel Sharon, a Zionist extremist and terrorist who believes that American Jews (actually all Jews) should live in Israel. Sharon had a dream that one million American Jews would emigrate to Israel, while in reality more Israelis have chosen to live in America. Was 9-11 designed to force Jews to move to Israel?

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak (left) talks with Minister of Pensioner Affairs Rafi Eitan as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (center) waits to start the weekly cabinet meeting May 25, 2008 in Jerusalem. Eitan is wanted by the FBI for his role as the spymaster of Jonathan Pollard. Olmert was in New York City on 9-11 on a visit that has been kept secret. These three men know very well who was behind the terrorism of 9-11 - and it wasn't Osama Bin Laden and his band of twenty thieves.

Ehud Barak was prime minister of Israel from July 1999 until March 7, 2001, when he was replaced by Ariel Sharon. I attended an event at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois where both Barak, then prime minister, and Sharon were involved shortly before the election that brought Sharon to power. The fact that Barak and Sharon had travelled to Chicago together illustrated the utter fakeness of their rivalry.

Previous positions held by Barak include Head of Defense Planning and Budgeting, Head of the Israeli Intelligence Community, Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Minister of the Interior in Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin's cabinet, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Shimon Peres cabinet, and Labor Party Chairman. If Israel is involved in 9-11, as Dr. Alan Sabrosky says (and which the evidence strongly indicates) Barak certainly knows all about it.

When Sharon assumed power in March 2001, Barak came to America. He supposedly came to the United States to work as a special advisor for Electronic Data Systems and as a partner with SCP Partners, a Mossad-run private equity company focused on "security-related" work - but this was merely his cover. His real assignment was to oversee the terror attacks of 9-11. As a partner with SCP Partners Barak was well placed to supervise the false-flag terror operation. The complex false-flag terror attacks of 9-11 required that the mastermind of the operation be in the country to manage the critical details.

One of the key aspects of 9-11 that Barak needed to arrange was the production and application of an advanced form of super-thermite, an extremely powerful explosive produced using nano-technology. In 2001, SCP Partners happened to have a suitable company in their portfolio, a private company called Metallurg Holdings, Inc., which has its office in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Today, SCP has another company called Advanced Metallurgical Group, N.V. (AMG) in its portfolio. AMG and Metallurg actually share the same phone number and address at 435 Devon Park Drive in Wayne. SCP Private Equity Partners L.P. and its management company named Safeguard International, which controls the metallurgical subsidiaries, are also both based at this address. AMG/Safeguard International have several subsidiaries, including one that specializes in the production of atomized aluminum (a crucial component of super-thermite) and others which manufacture specialized coatings of nano-composites.

SCP Partners, where Ehud Barak worked from 2001 until 2007, clearly had the capability in 2001 to produce nano-composite explosives like the super-thermite used to pulverize the World Trade Center on 9-11. There are very few companies or countries in the world that had the capability to manufacture super-thermite in 2001, but Ehud Barak and his SCP Partners did. Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida, on the other hand, did not and could not have had anything to do with the super-thermite found in the dust of the pulverized Twin Towers. The government version is a pack of lies designed to start a pre-planned war of aggression against Afghanistan. Ehud Barak was actually the first person to call for the U.S. to invade Afghanistan, something he did only hours after the attacks.

Chips of super-thermite found in the dust of the World Trade Center by Dr. Steven E. Jones

Rafi Eitan, the octogenarian Mossadnik who ran a spy operation against the United States using Jonathan Pollard, fled to Israel after Pollard was caught in 1985. Eitan was then offered the position as head of state-owned Israel Chemicals Corporation, which also has production and manufacturing facilities in the United States. In 1978, when Israeli intelligence began planning the false-flag terror operation of 9-11 (according to the documented comments of senior Mossadnik Isser Harel), Eitan was serving as Menachem Begin's "advisor on terrorism". This is the real reason that Rafi Eitan remained in the Israeli security cabinet until 2009 - he is one of the architects of 9-11.

Rafi Eitan was also involved in the 1968 theft and illegal smuggling of nearly 600 pounds of plutonium from a plant in Pennsylvania to Israel for the production of nuclear weapons. As the Pittsburgh Tribune reported in a series of articles about the stolen plutonium, Eitan is the key suspect:

Four other Israelis visited NUMEC on Sept. 10, 1968, and met with Shapiro [then-NUMEC President Zalman M. Shapiro, a staunch supporter of Israel] to "discuss thermoelectric devices (unclassified)," according to a Sept. 12, 1968, letter from Bruce D. Rice, NUMEC security manager, to Harry R. Walsh, director of AEC security and property management, seeking AEC approval for the visit.

The four visitors were: Avraham Hermoni, Ephraim Beigon, Abraham Bendor and Raphael (or, Rafael) Eitan.

In their 1991 book, "Dangerous Liaison," Andrew and Leslie Cockburn wrote, "At the time of his visit to Apollo in 1968, Eitan was acting as an agent for Mossad on special assignment to LAKAM ... a shadowy intelligence agency ... born in the 1950s with the express purpose of acquiring nuclear technology by any means."

Soon after the men's visit, 587 pounds of weapons-grade uranium reportedly went missing from NUMEC, according to Udall's papers.

In a recent article entitled "America's Loose Nukes in Israel," Grant Smith wrote: "To date, all of the uranium-diversion masterminds, financiers, and beneficiaries have escaped criminal prosecution, even as U.S. taxpayers fund a nuclear waste cleanup at the (now defunct) NUMEC Apollo facility."

Eitan's unscrupulous character can be seen in a comment he made to the wife and lawyer for Jonathan Pollard, the captured spy he had managed:

Eitan told us the only thing he regrets about the Pollard affair is that he did not 'finish the job' before leaving the States. We asked him what he meant by this. Eitan replied, "If I had been at the embassy when Pollard came to seek asylum, I would have put a bullet through his head. There would have been no Pollard affair."
- Esther Pollard, Maariv, March 30, 2006

Raphael Hantman a.k.a. Rafi Eitan

"In principle, when there is a war on terror you conduct it without principles. You simply fight it." – Rafi Eitan to Ha'aretz, February 19, 2010

At SCP Partners Barak worked closely with another Mossadnik named Eitan - Yaron I. Eitan. Although Yaron Eitan looks very much like Rafi Eitan, the relationship between the two Eitans is not known. Rafi Eitan was actually born Raphael Hantman in Mandate Palestine to Noah Hantman from Minsk, Byelorussia. Rafi reportedly has three children, named Yael, Sharon, and Yuval.

Yaron I. Eitan

Sources and Recommended Reading:

"America's Loose Nukes in Israel", by Grant Smith, April 14, 2010:
http://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/2010/04/13/americas-loose-nukes-in-israel/

Biography of Ehud Barak:
http://www.zionism-israel.com/bio/Ehud_Barak_biography.htm

"Government agencies investigated missing uranium, NUMEC", by Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, August 25, 2002:
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/specialreports/buriedlegacy/s_87948.html

Hillary Clinton laughing at her "friend" Ehud Barak's joke about her bat mitzvah as if his joke (delivered in barely understandable English) was hilarious. This is bizarre behavior (for a U.S. Secretary of State) and a classic example of how one overreacts to conceal an unpleasant situation. Clinton's reaction is meant to mask a sordid and sinister relationship between high-level criminals. Americans and Israelis certainly deserve better leaders.

At the American Jewish Committee gala dinner on April 29 Clinton again displays bizarre behavior vis-a-vis Ehud Barak. Is this proper behavior for a U.S. Secretary of State?

* Christopher Bollyn is an independent American investigative journalist

By Khalid Amayreh* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The recent arrest warrant issued in London for former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is more than justified.

This woman, along with two other Israeli leaders, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, stood at the helm of the Israeli government that ordered, supervised and charted the genocidal onslaught against the Gaza Strip this time last year.

She was a chief participant in the decision-making process who also supervised the progress of the hideous massacre from the beginning to the end.

Needless to say, the decisions taken by Livni, and other suspected Israeli war criminals, did lead to the murder of more than 1440 people, including hundreds of innocent children whose lives were terminated by indiscriminate bombings from air, land and sea. This is in addition to the pornographic destruction of a huge part of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including tens of thousands of homes, mosques, and public buildings of every kind.

The monstrous, satanic and evil lady knew perfectly what she was doing. She knew that her SS-like army was murdering kids in their mothers’ laps, annihilating entire families, frightened and huddling in their refugee shanties or whatever other places they thought would shield them from death.

She saw the pornographic death and destruction on television screens. She was alerted by human rights organizations, including Israel’s own B’tselem, that the Israeli army was murdering civilians knowingly and deliberately. But she chose to ignore what was too obvious to most people.

And instead of ordering an immediate halt to the massacre, she resorted to mendacious propaganda by blaming the victims and accusing Hamas of using civilians as human shields.

There is a huge mountain of evidence indicting this evil woman. She is an Adolph Hitler in a feminine form. She carries on her sinful hands tons of blood of innocent children and innocent men and women.

Livni may have a diplomatic immunity, but diplomatic immunity is not a license allowing bearers to murder children in cold blood as Livni did nearly 12 months ago.

It is sad that the British government is behaving in a perplexed manner, reluctant to tell Israel that Israel and its leaders are not above the laws of nations, including the British law.

Well, the UK should never compromise its own laws for the sake of shielding a war criminal, a mass murderer and child killer, from justice.

A crime is a crime is a crime, irrespective of the religion or race of the perpetrator. I know that certain diplomatic and political considerations may be pressing 10-Downing Street to seek a solution that would appease Israel.

However, appeasement, it should be understood by all, would only embolden Israel to commit more genocidal crimes against the helpless Palestinians and other peoples of the Middle East. After all, crime unpunished is crime encouraged.

In any case, the British government, including Foreign Secretary David Milliband who reportedly described the arrest warrant against Livni as “insufferable” will find itself in an unviable situation, having to defend Israel’s Nazi-like behavior against the people of the Gaza Strip.

First, the British government would have to prove beyond doubt that the 21-day onslaught against Gaza, during which all weapons of death, including white phosphorus, precision missiles and laser-guided bombs were used against the nearly totally unprotected inhabitants of Gaza, didn’t constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity.

However, a claim as such wouldn’t be viewed seriously as it has been established beyond doubt by the UN-mandated investigating commission headed by judge Richard Goldstone that what Israel did in Gaza in last December and January did constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

However, if the government does accept the Goldstone report, but still refuses to allow the British justice system to prosecute the diabolical lady because of certain diplomatic and political considerations, then it will be showing extraordinary flaccidity toward Israel and utter contempt for the entire system of justice in the UK.

After all, a justice system that is selective in applying justice, is not a true system of justice.

This is why, the British government should not cower before the Israeli bully or be intimidated by Israeli threats such as the often-made threat that Israel wouldn’t allow the UK to take part in the so-called “peace process” in case Israeli war criminals were arrested or prosecuted for war crimes before British courts.

Britain must not allow itself to be bullied by this bullying criminal entity whose very existence is based on murder, ethnic cleansing, land theft and lying.

A last word to those known and unknown soldiers who monitor the movement of Israeli war criminals. You are God’s means to make these hateful criminals realize that murdering innocent people has a price.

So, chase them wherever they go, hound them, narrow their horizons, and try to get them apprehended and arrested.

We owe it to these innocent children, who were mercilessly annihilated by the Nazis of our time, to seek justice for them and their families. We betrayed them when they were alive by failing to protect them from the Nazis of our time, we must not betray them again by denying them justice, even as they are dead.

* Khalid Amayreh a journalist based in the Occupied Palestinian town of Dura. He obtained his MA in journalism from the University of Southern Illinois in 1983.

A few weeks ago, Ehud Barak was given diplomatic immunity 'in emergency' in order to avoid arrest in the UK. Ehud Olmert in turn was heckled and booed by his audience in Chicago and a few hours later by another audience in San Fransisco, where criminal accusations were thrown at him in addition to calls for him to be tried for war crimes against the Palestinian and Lebanese people. Few days ago, Danny Ayalon attempted to give a lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science about the Israeli point of view regarding the Middle East conflict. Evidently nobody in the LSE was interested in hearing Danny Ayalon or the rhetoric of any other Israeli official. Audiences in the US and UK not only protested Israel's war crimes against the Palestinian people, but they also protested the fact that Israeli officials were still being given a platform to even speak from. Ayalon like Olmert, didn't manage to 'lecture' as Israel was accustomed to in the past. Students and audiences around the world seem to have had enough with Israeli rhetoric, lies and propaganda. Wherever Israeli officials travel now to 'lecture' and/or spread their lies, they tend to be received with a different kind of 'welcome' then they used to receive in the past.

Protest against ayalon at london school economics:

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qes2Y7Sbuys

Citizen's arrest and mass disruption of former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert in San Francisco:

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=491GOKwrN1s

Students and activists protested and disrupted a lecture tonight at the London School of Economics (LSE) by Daniel Ayalon, the controversial Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel.

By James Caspell

Over 50 students and activists greeted Ayalon outside of the lecture on LSE’s campus with placards and banners, whilst inside audience members heckled the controversial Minister as a "racist" and "murderer" in relation to the illegal occupation and violence carried out by the Israeli state.

Ayalon was in the UK to meet British government officials and speaking at the LSE ahead of these talks in a lecture s titled "The Middle East: The View From Israel". Security at the university was tight, with private security and police officers keeping a close watch on protesters. The Minister began and ended his lecture amid boos and chants of “Free, Free, Palestine” whilst his speech was interrupted relentlessly throughout with audience members questioning Israel’s atrocities.

The action was organized by the LSE Students’ Union Palestine Society and the Palestine Solidarity Initiative. The London School of Economics Students' Union is officially twinned with Al-Najah University and has previously voted to divest funds from those companies profiting from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The motion also called on LSE to respect human rights and follow suit in embracing a divestment agenda with regards to such companies. Students also held a week long occupation in January as a response to the Israeli attacks on Gaza last winter, resulting in LSE aggreeing to practically support Palestinian students affected by the violence.

Mira Hamed who attended the lecture and is the Chair of the LSE SU Palestine Society said after the protest, "The Palestine Society at LSE has grown in support since the atrocities committed in Gaza which explains the huge turnout tonight. We will continue to support the growing international resistance against the occupation of Palestine until a just peace is achieved."

Merna Al Azzeh, a Palestinian Masters student who was in the audience added, "As an LSE student, I find it disgusting that LSE could invite a Minister to speak from a racist government that has been committing war crimes for the last 60 years."

"The recent Goldstone Report overwhelmingly condemns the genocide waged against Gazan civilians last winter and as a Palestinian I am reassured by the growing international resistance to Israeli Apartheid".

For more information:

1. LSE SU Palestine Society: www.palsoc.org.uk
2. Palestine Solidarity Initiative: www.palestinesolidarity.org

Source: www.indymedia.org.uk

By Maureen Clare Murphy*, The Electronic Intifada

Approximately 30 activists -- mainly students from area universities -- disrupted a lecture given in Chicago by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday which was hosted by the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. While Olmert's speech was disrupted inside the lecture hall, approximately 150 activists protested outside the hall in the freezing rain.

Protesters inside the hall read off the names of Palestinian children killed during Israel's assault on Gaza last winter. They shouted that it was unacceptable that the war crimes suspect be invited to speak at a Chicago university when his army destroyed a university in Gaza in January. They reminded the audience of the more than 1,400 Palestinians killed during the Gaza attacks and the more than 1,200 killed during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 2006. Both invasions happened during Olmert's premiership.

With interventions coming every few minutes throughout his appearance, Olmert had difficulty giving his speech and often appeared frustrated. At one point he appealed for "just five minutes" to speak without being interrupted.

The demonstration was mobilized last week after organizers learned of the lecture, paid for by a grant provided by Jordan's King Abdullah II. Within hours an appeal was issued, urging those concerned with Palestinian rights to call the university and demand that the lecture be canceled. The call was put out by major community organizations such as the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC)-Chicago, American Muslims for Palestine and the United States Palestine Community Network, as well as solidarity organizations al-Awda, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, the International Solidarity Movement, the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago and area campus groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at DePaul University and the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as the Arab Student Union at Moraine Valley.

The security presence at the lecture was severe with university police, the US Secret Service and Israeli security present -- many of them visibly armed -- with Israeli security checking in those who had registered in advance to attend the lecture. Video and photography was banned inside the hall and media were not allowed to cover the lecture. Despite these restrictions, activists managed to take video inside the hall and drop an eight-foot-long banner from the mezzanine that read "Goldstone" in both English and Hebrew, referring to the recently published UN report investigating violations of international law during the Gaza invasion. One activist was arrested and put in a headlock by a police officer, witnesses said, and released around midnight. Approximately 30 supporters waited for him at the police station while he was detained.

Towards the end of the lecture, Olmert put his hand over his brow and squinted to search out the source of the shout, "There's no discussion with a war criminal -- the only discussion you should be having is in court!" That call was made by Ream Qato, who graduated from the university in 2007, and added, "You belong in the Hague!" Qato told The Electronic Intifada that yesterday's protest "Set the stage for University of Chicago students and students in the Chicago area ... no one should be afraid of speaking out against someone." She added that the demonstration was significant because "The Palestinian community [in Chicago] for the first time went to a university campus to protest."

Approximately 150 protesters demonstrated outside the University of Chicago hall where former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was speaking. (Maureen Clare Murphy)

Mohiuddin told The Electronic Intifada that "it was ironic that they searched us [instead of him]," considering that Olmert is suspected of war crimes. She added, "As a University of Chicago student I was upset with the lack of commotion on behalf of the student body before the event ... No one has protested the event."

Mohiuddin's frustration was echoed in a commentary published by the University of Chicago's student publication The Chicago Maroon earlier this week, in which third-year student Nadia Marie Ismail decried the lack of protest by the university community towards the Olmert speech. She contrasted this silence with the pressure the Center for Middle Eastern Studies faced after a lecture earlier this year by The Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunimah (who was the first to disrupt Olmert's speech yesterday), University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Norman Finkelstein, whose lost bid for tenure at DePaul University is attributed to outside pressure by Israel government apologists. "[T]hat University center was put under unprecedented pressure for weeks before and months after the event, with claims that University centers and schools should not host 'one-sided' speakers," Ismail wrote.

Olmert's lecture in Chicago was one of several scheduled throughout the United States. His speech at the University of Kentucky the previous day was disrupted by activists and met with a protest outside. These demonstrations are part of a wave of notched-up dissent towards Israeli officials implicated in war crimes and racist policy. In 2003, former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky was greeted with a pie in the face by an activist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Last year at the UK's Oxford University, a speech by Israeli President Shimon Peres was drowned out by protesters outside while students inside the hall disrupted his talk.

One of the organizers of the protest, Hatem Abudayyeh, National Coordinating Committee member of the United States Palestine Community Network, hoped for a larger count of protesters despite the adverse weather. However, he said, "The fact that there's people around the world who know about it, the fact that PACBI [the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel] sent us a letter of support and endorsement of our action, the fact that there was coordination with the outside protest and the inside disruption -- all of these components and aspects of the action made it one of the more successful ones that we've done."

He added, "There is real change happening, whether it's the international response to the Lebanon war or the international response to the Gaza war. The US is the most powerful country in the world, Israel is a powerful military as well, but the Palestinians have the world on their side."

Video shot and produced by The Electronic Intifada.

* Maureen Clare Murphy is Managing Editor of The Electronic Intifada and an activist with the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago, which co-sponsored the demonstration.

By Jeff Gates*

Can't smell Israel

On September 24th, U.S. President Barack Obama will preside over a U.N. Security Council session on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. In March 2010, Moscow will host a Global Nuclear Summit that the U.S. has agreed to attend.

The next six months could prove hopeful or harmful-depending on the impact on Israel's nuclear arsenal. With U.S. backing, Tel Aviv has thus far avoided compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty-joining North Korea, India and Pakistan.

President John F. Kennedy tried to stop Israel from starting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. In a June 1963 letter to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, he insisted on proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Israel was not developing nuclear weapons at its Dimona reactor facility. Though his letter was cabled to the U.S. embassy, Ben-Gurion resigned (citing undisclosed personal reasons) before the message could be physically delivered.

With Israel's nuclear ambitions under attack by its key ally, that strategically well-timed resignation duped an inexperienced young president and denied him a diplomatic victory that might well have precluded the wars now being waged in the Middle East.

With Ben-Gurion's resignation, JFK was left without an Israeli government with which he could negotiate. By the time a new government was formed, the Kennedy threat had been eliminated and Tel Aviv could start haggling from scratch with successor Lyndon Johnson who was far more sympathetic to the goals of the Zionist state.

That strategy resurfaced in the recent resignation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert just as the Road Map gained traction and the threat of peace loomed on the horizon. Olmert's successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, then used the terms of the Road Map as a bargaining chip to start haggling-with an inexperienced young president-over sanctions against Iran.

Democrat Lyndon Johnson proved himself a reliably pliant pro-Israeli president as did his successor, Republican Richard Nixon. Described by Prime Minister Golda Meir as "the best friend Israel ever had," Nixon agreed in 1969 to endorse "constructive ambiguity" as a means for Tel Aviv to obscure its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile Colonial Zionists brandished the threat of that arsenal to seize land they sought for Greater Israel.

Israeli incursions provoked the reactions one would expect, enabling Tel Aviv to portray itself as a hapless victim in need of U.S. support in a hostile and anti-Semitic neighborhood. Four years after Kennedy wrote to Ben-Gurion, Israel mounted a massive six-day assault on neighboring nations, occupying lands that remain at the heart of the hostilities against which Tel Aviv insists it needs nuclear weapons to defend itself.

With the war in Iraq poised to expand to Iran, the next six months offer a rare opportunity to revisit not only Israel's nuclear arsenal but also-in light of the consistency of its behavior over six decades-the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise.

Managing the Threat to Zionism: JFK, RFK and Fulbright

In 1962, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, convened hearings to ensure that the American Zionist Council-funded by the Jewish Agency-register as the agent of a foreign government. JFK was then president and brother Robert his attorney general. Edward ("Ted") Kennedy was elected to the Senate that year to fill his brother Jack's seat. In October 1963, the Department of Justice-led by Robert Kennedy-demanded that the Council register as a foreign agent.

Following the Kennedy assassination in November 1963, Nicholas Katzenbach succeeded RFK as Attorney General for Lyndon Johnson. To avoid registration, the Zionist Council morphed into the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). That umbrella organization-still disguised as a domestic lobby-continues to coordinate the efforts of dozens of organizations that sustain a U.S. policy environment favorable to a foreign nation.

The Kennedy brothers shared a little-known insight into the confidence with which Israel wields political influence across party lines. In the closing weeks of his 1960 presidential campaign, candidate Kennedy traveled to New York to seek financial support from Jewish business leaders. On his return to Washington, he called his old friend Charlie Bartlett who had introduced Jack to Jackie.

According to Bartlett, Kennedy was livid after those he met in Manhattan assured him that the funds he sought were available but only if he turned over to them the formulation of U.S. policy in the Middle East. With brother "Bobby" his chief campaign strategist, that experience doubtless came to mind when, in 1963, JFK confirmed that Israel-while portraying itself a U.S. ally-repeatedly lied to him about its development of nuclear weapons.

Israel vs. the Kennedys

At the height an unpopular war in Vietnam, Robert Kennedy emerged to challenge the policies of the Texan who replaced his brother as president in 1963. No one knows for sure that, as president, RFK would have followed JFK's stance on the Zionist state's nuclear arsenal. Nor do we know for certain that he would have renewed his insistence that the Israel lobby register as the agent of a foreign government.

When a second Kennedy threat was eliminated with an assassination in June 1968, Tel Aviv welcomed to the White House Richard Nixon who supported Israel's strategically essential "ambiguous" policy on nuclear arms. Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell was a partner in the same New York law firm (Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander) that Nixon joined in 1963 after his failed bids as president, losing to JFK in 1960, and as governor of California two years later. In honor of Nixon's arrival, the dominantly Jewish firm was renamed Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander.

In 1973, five years after RFK's death, Senator Fulbright could announce with confidence that "Israel controls the U.S. Senate." By 1974, he was replaced in the Senate. Journalist Helen Thomas was then covering Nixon, one of ten presidents in her lengthy career as White House correspondent. In Obama's first press conference, she sought to clarify the ambiguity about just who posed a nuclear threat in the region. Her question for this latest Commander in Chief: which nation in the Middle East has nuclear weapons?

In response, Chicagoan Barack Obama did the "Tel Aviv Two-Step." Rather than answer the question, he spoke about the need for nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. Not since then has Thomas been allowed to ask another question. Instead she was subjected to a withering barrage of personal attacks by pro-Zionist broadcasters who sought to make it appear that she-not the answer to her question-is the problem.

At every opportunity, Tel Aviv insists that Tehran's nuclear energy program poses an "existential threat." That claim is correct though not for the reason that the Israel lobby would have Americans believe. If Israel cannot persuade the U.S. to join (or condone) an attack on Iran, some faint semblance of stability may yet be attained in the Middle East. With stability will come an opportunity to confirm the common source of the fixed intelligence that induced the U.S. to invade Iraq in response to the mass murder of 911.

Only one nation had the means, motive, opportunity and, importantly, the stable nation state intelligence to mount such a deception inside the U.S. As that fact becomes apparent, an informed American public will insist that its leadership revisit the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise along with the costs that this "special relationship" has imposed on the U.S. in blood, treasure and hard-earned credibility.

Israel is the Real Threat to Israel

The existential threat to Israel is real but its source is not Iran. The real threat is the facts that Tel Aviv may again obscure if it succeeds in provoking yet another crisis in the region. Those facts confirm the illegitimacy of the Zionist enterprise as a nation state.

The threat to Barack Obama could become existential should he act consistent with his oath of office. As yet he has shown no inclination to address the perils that this entangled alliance with Jewish extremists imposes on U.S. national security and on the prospects for peace.

As the source of the duplicity that induced the U.S. to war becomes known, Americans will insist on accountability. Zionist fanatics may choose another course. A modern-day Masada is a nuclear possibility. With their vast arsenal (estimates range from 200 to 400 warheads), these religious extremists could preempt accountability by creating chaos worldwide while affixing blame on "Islamo" fascists in an attempt to keep their victim status plausibly intact.

To eliminate the existential threat posed by nuclear-armed religious extremists requires that the U.S.-as Israel's key ally-isolate the Zionist enterprise, withdraw its recognition as a legitimate state and reclassify its advocates as foreign agents. That long overdue change in the legal status of the Israel lobby-first sought in 1962-will enable U.S. law enforcement to pursue its operatives for giving aid and comfort to an enemy within.

The focal point for peace in the Middle East should not be those nations that do not have nuclear weapons but the one nation that does. Absent external pressure, Israeli behavior will not change. Those who seek peace in the region must boycott Israeli exports, divest from Israeli firms and insist on sanctions against Israel akin to those it seeks against others. Anything less will ensure that Zionist extremists continue to endanger us all.

* Jeff Gates is a widely acclaimed author, attorney, investment banker, educator and consultant to government, corporate and union leaders worldwide; an adviser to policy-makers worldwide; former counsel to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee; and author of numerous articles and books including his latest book Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution. See www.criminalstate.com

See also:

"McCain Family Secret: The Cover-up"

http://criminalstate.com/press/Chapter4.pdf

"Appeasing Israel – At What Cost?"

http://intifada-palestine.com/2009/08/25/appeasing-israel-at-what-cost/

"How Israel Controls the US"

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=124829&d=24&m=7&y=2009

By Elias Akleh*

Cartoon by Mahdi Bakhtiari - Afghanistan

The Israeli moves:

In their annual meeting, on February 18th 2009, The Israeli military leaders had officially declared Iran as their number one strategic enemy in the region, and that the alleged Iranian nuclear arms program constitutes an “existential threat” to the state of Israel. They declared the elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat a top priority for the Israeli military and political leaderships.

Yet the Israelis seem to differ in the method of dealing with the Iranian threat. One group, represented by Barak, Netanyahu, Olmert, and Lieberman, called for a military strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities. Such strike, they claim, would at least set the Iranian nuclear program back by ten years. They site Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility in June 1981, and the bombing of alleged Syrian Al-Kibar nuclear facility in September 2007 as safe and effective solution to any nuclear threat. They claim that since Western countries, especially US, and the neighboring Arab states are opposed to Iran’s nuclear program, Israel’s attack would receive tacit approval, and similar to Iraqi and Syrian bombings Israel would not face any military or political consequences.

The second group, represented by the Israeli intelligence agencies, warns that Israel, alone, is not capable of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, and is in dire need of American help. They remind the Israelis of the events of previous wars such as 1973 war against Egypt and 1982 and 2006 wars against Lebanon, both countries are not as strong as Iran. They recommend that Israel should be only a partner in a joint military strike against Iran.

Third group, represented by Israeli President Shimon Perez, seemingly wants a political solution. Perez stated to George Mitchell, the American special envoy to the Middle East, last April 2009 that Israel has no plans to strike Iran. He urged for an international alliance against Iran to be formed in order to politically deal with the Iranian nuclear program.

Despite Perez’s seemingly political approach the Israeli military leaders are preping the army for a coming strike against Iran. They have purchased and acquired the most sophisticated American fighter planes, 100 advanced LJDAM (Laser Joint Direct Attack Munition) smart bombs, and small tactical (nuclear) bombs. The Israeli army has been testing the Arrow interceptor missile defensive shield in the Mediterranean Sea as well as in the American missile range in the Pacific Ocean west of California. The Israeli air forces sent their F16C fighter jets to participate with the Americans in war exercises, named Red Flag, at American Nillis Air Force base in Nevada, and their C130 Hercules aircraft to compete in the Rodeo 2009 competition at McChord Air Force base in Washington.

The Israeli navy has sent one of its six Dolphin class nuclear missiles carrier submarines accompanied by two Saar class missile boats through Suez Canal ostensibly heading towards the Persian Gulf.

Israeli leaders are crying wolf everywhere they go. Distorting Ahmadinejad’s speeches they declared him the new Hitler, who wants to wipe Israel off the map. They accused Iran of sponsoring terror by arming Hezbollah and Hamas. They keep claiming that Iran is only few months away from building its first nuclear bomb and such a weapon in the hands of the mad Mullahs is an existential threat to Israel. Such a threat, they keep claiming, endangers the whole region including the oil producing Gulf States, and could expand to endanger the rest of the world.

The American moves:

The American administration, on the other hand, seems to favor a diplomatic solution for now. Yet like the previous Bush administration the Obama administration has also declared that all options, including a nuclear military strike, are still on the table if Iran did not respond positively to the diplomatic solution. Obama is also pressuring Israel to freeze its illegal settlements in Palestinian occupied territory, at least for the time being, in order to gain the support of Arab countries (Egypt, Jordan, and Gulf States). Putting Israel, the American watchdog in the region, on a leach has always worked to garner the Arab support for attacking a neighboring country.

Although a US National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear arms research program in 2003, Obama issued a deadline of mid September for Iran to respond to the American offer. He had also warned Israel not to surprise his administration with a strike against Iran that might sabotage his diplomatic approach, and could drive the whole region into wider conflict.

At the same time Obama’s administration had sent Iran many hostile messages such as American determination not to allow Iran to build its bomb, expressing America’s strong support and commitment to the security of Israel, supplying Israel with the most advanced weapons and fighter planes, conducting joint military training with the Israelis in preparation for possible strike, having many congressmen and military experts stating openly that an Israeli strike is the only and best solution, sending American aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf to flex its muscles in war games, and openly broadcasting America’s own military preparation to strike Iran such as accelerating the development of the largest bomb ever dubbed “MOP”; Massive Ordnance Penetrator. With its 20 feet long, 30,000 pounds weight, and 5,300 pounds of explosives this bomb is designed to penetrate through 200 feet of hardened surfaces before detonation in order to destroy underground structures such as the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility.

The Iranian moves:

Iran, on the opposite side, is adamant on exercising its own legal right of developing its own peaceful nuclear program similar to any other nuclear member countries in the NPT. Since 2003 Iran had been harassed by the Bush Administration over its nuclear program. Being a member of the NPT the IAEA was sent several times to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities, but found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. Refusing to accept the outcome the Bush administration pushed the UN to impose economical sanction on Iran until it suspends its nuclear program.

In order to address any concern about its nuclear program Iran offered to place additional restrictions on its enrichment program including ratifying the Additional Protocol to allow more stringent inspections by the IAEA, open its nuclear program to foreign private and public participation, and allow the participation of foreign representatives within its Natanz facility among others. But the Bush administration rejected the Iranian offer, pushed the UN to impose the sanctions, and in a threatening move sent American military fleet into the Persian Gulf.

Putting Iran under real existential threat, being surrounded on the four sides by American troops, and continually being threatened by the Israelis and the Americans of being hit by nuclear bombs, Iranians had no choice but to exhibit their deterring muscles through their own war games on land, sea, and air. They also purchased the most sophisticated Russian missiles, and recently had joined the Russian navy in their military maneuvers in the Caspian Sea dubbed “Regional Collaboration for a Secure and Clean Caspian”.

Besides Russia the Iranians formed an alliance with Syria and Turkey, and gained the support of the Non-Aligned countries, and lately signaled its readiness to improve cooperation with North Korea.

As for the threat of the Israeli strike the Iranians warned that such a strike would only come as a joint effort with the US, and that Iran’s “firm and precise” response would reach all American assets in the Gulf region and the Israeli nuclear sites.

The real intentions behind the moves:

Israelis know very well that they cannot strike Iran. They fully recognize that decisions concerning the Iranian issue are exclusively American due to Iran’s strength and geopolitical importance in the region. Iran is a large and a strong military country. Economic sanctions did nothing but helped Iranian rely on their own resources. The threats of possible attacks forced the Iranians to strengthen their military forces. Netanyahu’s “Iran first”, “Israel’s existential threat”, and “striking Iran” messages are directed towards the international political community first and towards the Israeli population second.

With the convening of the UN General Assembly this September, Netanyahu is trying to divert and engage the Assembly’s attention into the alleged Iranian nuclear threat. He hopes that such diversion would not give the Assembly enough time to discuss Israel’s war crimes and human rights violations in Palestine and especially in Gaza Strip as reported by Human Rights Watch groups. Netanyahu’s "Iran first" message is also meant to freeze re-opening any peace negotiations with the Palestinians and to escape American and European pressure to suspend colonial settlements in the West Bank.

Internally Netanyahu, like all previous Israeli Prime Ministers, is manipulating the media to bombard the Israeli population with a propaganda campaign filled with the images of the monstrosity of the enemy (Israel’s existential threat) to incite the feelings of fear and hatred of others and of elitecism (God’s chosen people) to unite and to rally the Israelis behind his leadership.

Israelis have come from different countries with different nationalities, social norms, backgrounds, and political ideologies. To unite them together Israeli leaders resort to tactics of fear, hatred, elitecism and war to create some type of national bond among them.

The US wants to control all the energy resources in the Middle East and South East Asian regions. The US has firm footings in the Gulf States, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union it started expanding in South East Asia starting with Afghanistan, jumping to Iraq then back into Pakistan. Now Iran is left in between as a gab in the US continuum presence.

The US wants also to control and manipulate the nuclear technology. After securing Indian and Pakistani nuclear bombs and facilities, the US is now directing its attention towards North Korean and Iranian nuclear facilities. It seems hypocritical of the still nuclear arms producing US to deny the Iranians peaceful nuclear technology. This is especially so since the US had agreed to provide India with nuclear fuel for its reactors, and had entered into agreements with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan to help them build their own peaceful nuclear facilities.

The US knows very well that it could not stop Iranian nuclear program especially with the present Iranian government. To delay Iranian nuclear program the US is threatening to use the UN to impose economic sanctions not only on Iran alone, but also on countries who would continue dealing with Iran on any level especially those selling refined oil products to Iran. The effectiveness of such sanctions is still to be seen since a lot of countries have trade and business dealings with Iran.

The endgame:

Since the US is heavily involved in at least three open military confrontations, and since many of the American military assets are sitting ducks in the Persian Gulf region for possible Iranian retaliatory strike, and since Iran is a large country that is not weak militarily or been weakened yet by economical sanctions, and since Iran might withdraw from the NPT and might pursue an accelerated nuclear military program if faced with more pressure and more existential threats, the US has no viable solution but to accept Iran as a nuclear country compliant to the NPT and subject to IAEA monitoring.

The nuclear threat or attack of the US, a nuclear country, against Iran, a non-nuclear country, would be a fatal attack on the NPT itself. Other NPT-member countries might withdraw from the treaty and start developing their own nuclear arsenals as a deterrent weapon against nuclear threats from nuclear countries. The NPT would be annulled and nuclear proliferation would become world spread.

An attack, even surgical, on Iran would not happen for it has a catastrophic consequences on the whole world. A draw seems to be the most reasonable endgame.

Concluding remarks:

Accepting Iran as a nuclear country would not stop the US and Israel from supporting terrorist attacks within Iran as they have been doing for the last six years. The two countries have been supporting terrorist organizations such as Mujahedeen Khalg, Jundallah, and Kurdish groups within Iran. These terrorists are responsible for attacks against Iranian military targets, interrupting power and communication lines to the nuclear facilities, and assassinations of some Iranian nuclear scientists such as Ardeshire Hassanpour. The US will also continue funneling American tax money to the Iranian opposition, as was done during the Iranian election (as confessed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an interview with CNN’s reporter Fareed Zakaria) to topple down, to weaken, and to hinder the operation of the Iranian government.

Meanwhile the US is planning to take full advantage of the Iranian threat in the region in order to strengthen its grip on the oil producing Gulf States, and to siphon their oil money into the budgets of the American military companies under the guise of security. Hillary Clinton touched briefly on that plan during a televised interview in Thailand stating that nuclear Iran could be contained by an American so-called “defensive nuclear umbrella” over the region. The notion of this nuclear umbrella, if there is such a thing, was the brainchild of Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Dennis Ross, then senior editor of Middle East Quarterly in 2004. Of course such an umbrella would be developed, built, and paid for by oil money from the Gulf States.

Clinton in her remark had acknowledged the inevitability of Iran, faced with existential nuclear threats from both US and Israel, gaining a nuclear arsenal, and the inevitable American acceptance of this fact.

* Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit Jala. His family was first evicted from Haifa after the "Nakba" of 1948, then from Beit Jala after the "Nakseh" of 1967. He lives now in the US, and publishes his articles on the web in both English and Arabic.

The long awaited final Winograd's report came out with unsurprising (or surprising? doesn't make a difference here) conclusions that saved Olmert's ass and his sick cabinet, however, that's not what I'm interested in at all. The real interesting part is the relation between Hillary Clinton and Winograd report.

How?

Winograd report states that the Israeli occupation forces use of cluster bombs in Lebanon was NOT in line with international law. Does this remind you with anything? Once upon a time in the West, our Big Sister, Hilary Clinton, once voted FOR the use of these cluster bombs:

"On 6 September 2006 the US Senate had a rollcall vote on an amendment on the FY 07 DOD budget, the Feinstein-Leahy Amendment, which would restrict the usage of cluster bombs in civilian areas throughout the world. The amendment failed, the result of the vote was 30 ayes, all by Democrats and one Independent, and 70 nays, including all Republicans and a sizeable number of nominal Democrats."

Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Evan Bayh, supposed potential candidates for the Democratic nomination for President included themselves among the Nays. We must ask why. [Source]

Ha'aretz today:

"Israel must consider whether it wants to consider using cluster bombs in the future, because its current manner of employing them does not conform to international law. The Winograd Committee made this recommendation in the chapter of its report dealing with Israel's conduct in the Second Lebanon War as it relates to international law.

She didn't know, maybe... Hillary never knows what she is voting for. Or maybe it depends on what vote means...

Hope someone sends her a copy of the report!