The Bureau of Counterpropaganda

Agree to differ

2009-07-13T19:46:00.002+10:00

On her Muzzlewatch blog a couple of months ago, Cecilie Surasky, Director of Communications at Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), excoriates the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for their recent survey of Israeli Jews, headlining the post, ‘ADL completely disappears 25% of Israel’s population- joining efforts with Avigdor Lieberman?’

Nowhere in their lengthy release does it mention what you can only find by reading the actual report, under Methodology, where it says:

The poll was conducted as a telephone survey…constituting a representative sample of the adult Jewish population (aged 18 and higher) in Israel.

So in the eyes of the ADL, if you are not Jewish, you are not Israeli. Some 25% of Israelis are not Jews…

She’s absolutely right to say the press release, which claims that it was ‘a comprehensive poll of Israeli opinions’ and consistently generalizes about ‘Israelis’ without ever mentioning that only Jews were sampled, is downright offensive. And the report, entitled ‘Israeli Views of President Obama and US-Israel Relations’, should have been clearer that it was a survey specifically of Israeli Jews. But it’s not true that you have to read all the way to the Methodology section – the second paragraph of the report – to find this out, because the very first sentence declares, ‘we have conducted an opinion poll among the Jewish public in Israel’.

And yet, a poll of all Israelis that fails to disaggregate Jewish views from those of other Israelis in the sample would be decidedly less interesting, a point I’ll return to. It’s not that the views of Palestinian Israelis are uninteresting – quite the contrary. But when aggregated with the views of the Jewish majority, they dilute and are themselves diluted by Jewish responses.

Importantly and somewhat surprisingly, she observes

Sounds just like “anti-Arab demagogue” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who thinks of non-Jewish Israeli Arabs, whose families lived in Jaffa and Hebron long before most Jewish Israelis made Aliyah, as a fifth column. Some choose to think Lieberman’s open racism is an exception, but it’s not. The kind of thinking which only recognizes Jews as citizens and denies full rights to others has long pervaded Israel and the Jewish Diaspora here.

The poll itself is mainly concerned with Jewish Israelis’ views of Obama and the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Israel. But that’s not what struck me as the most interesting findings.

Asked ‘Obama has declared his intention of bringing about reconciliation with the Muslim and Arab worlds in order to improve the United State’s position and reputation. Do you believe or not that such reconciliation will be at Israel’s expense?’ (Q13), 63% said ‘It will come at Israel’s expense (80% of those who expressed an opinion one way or the other).

Fifty-one percent said, ‘The U.S. should not negotiate with Iran’ and 66% support Israeli

military action aimed at destroying the Iranian nuclear facilities (81% of opinion holders), and 75% of those who supported an Israeli attack still supported it even ‘if the Obama administration opposed’ it.

Finally, 52% said American Jews should not ‘feel free to publicly criticize the Israeli government and its policy’ (Q20), while 35% disagreed. In a 2007 survey, only 36% opposed freedom of expression for US Jews, while 62% supported it. The recent J Street poll of American Jews found that 58% said ‘It does not bother me when American Jews disagree publicly with Israeli government policy’, while 28% said it did.

Last week the Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah wrote a devastating critique of parallel polls of Palestinians in the occupied territories and of Israelis conducted by One Voice in February, two months earlier than the ADL survey. He discerns that the survey, developed by Dr. Colin Irwin of the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, ‘...appears intended to influence international opinion in a direction more amenable to Israel, rather than to record faithfully the views of Palestinians or Israelis...The group's press release unabashedly spun the results to claim popular legitimacy for the two-state solution and to discredit alternatives...’

Nevertheless, I found it remarkably interesting. Unlike any other poll I’ve come across, it gets right down to the nuts and bolts, asking about a broad, if not quite comprehensive, range of options regarding the principal aspects of any solution, including even refugees and the corridor connecting Gaza with the West Bank, as well as process related issues. Although neither Abunimah’s critique nor Irwin’s report mentions it explicitly, a footnote indicates that Palestinian Israelis were included in the Israeli sample and their responses are disaggregable, although not actually disaggregated except with respect to two questions about the division of Jerusalem mentioned in the note. As I mentioned earlier, this pollutes the responses of the Israelis, presumably drawing the Israeli proportions closer to the ‘Palestinian’. For example, when asked about ‘Greater Israel – A Jewish state from the Jordanian border to the sea‘, 47% of Israelis found the prospect ‘Unacceptable’. My suspicion is that this proportion would be lower in a poll of Israeli Jews.

Irwin’s method is to ask respondents to rate various propositions on a five point scale: ‘Essential’, ‘Desirable’, ‘Acceptable’, ‘Tolerable’, ‘Unacceptable’. I’m ambivalent about this approach. The first and last points are true polar opposites and may provide a sound basis for comparison. But I’m not confident that the respondents could distinguish ‘Acceptable’ from ‘Tolerable’. I’m not sure what Irwin wanted to capture with these terms myself. Furthermore, there’s no real middle term – the first four points on the scale are effectively opposed to ‘Unacceptable’. In his analysis, Irwin sometimes sums ‘Essential’ and ‘Desirable’ responses as if this were an ordinary five point scale where the response categories are more balanced around a non committal middle term. In other cases, he sums all four responses – ‘Essential’ through ‘Tolerable’ – to provide the impression of a larger base of support for a proposition.

In the OneVoice press release, we learn that ‘74% of West Bank & Gaza Palestinians and 78% of Israelis are willing to accept a two state solution’. These figures represent the sum of all responses other than ‘Unacceptable’ to the question about the ‘Two state solution - Two states for two peoples: Israel and Palestine’. So we don’t actually know what the respondents found ‘Essential’ or ‘Tolerable’. In all probability, the Palestinians thought they were responding to a question about a version of partition where the border would be drawn along the Green Line (78% ‘Essential’) and East Jerusalem would be incorporated into the Palestinian state (89% ‘Essential’), while the Israelis, or the Israeli Jews, at any rate, thought they were being asked about a partition with the border drawn along the wall (58% ‘Essential’ to ‘Tolerable’), and Israel retaining sovereignty over all of Jerusalem (74% ‘Essential’ to ‘Tolerable’). So it is a distortion to imply that the Israelis and Palestinians surveyed are prepared to tolerate the same two state ‘solution’.

As Abunimah points out, 53% of the Palestinian sample were willing to tolerate ‘One joint state – A state in which Israelis and Palestinians are equal citizens’, but only 18% said it was ‘Essential’, and 43% said it was ‘Unacceptable’, while the Israeli sample wasn’t asked about this option. As for ‘One shared state - Bi-national federal state in which Israelis and Palestinians share power’, 34% of Palestinians and 32% of Israelis were prepared to tolerate it, while 59% and 66%, respectively, found it ‘Unacceptable’.

Note that, as Abunimah also remarks, ‘One Voice asserts that a "very conscious effort was made in this poll to cover as wide a range of potential solutions as possible." But except for the initial question about the type of state, all the other questions assume, and are primarily relevant to, a two-state solution.’

I think it might be instructive to compare what the Palestinian sample found ‘Essential’ and comparing it to what the Israeli population found ‘Unacceptable’, for some key issues, omitting the equivocal middle terms – ‘Desirable’, ‘Acceptable’, and ‘Tolerable’. In this way, we may discover some intractable sticking points. Among the Israelis, there was little consensus on what was ‘Essential’ – they are mainly united in their rejectionism.

The option the highest proportion of Palestinians deemed ‘Essential’ was ‘Historic Palestine – From the Jordanian river to the sea’ with 71%, another option not offered the Israeli sample. On what was ‘Essential’, the highest proportion among the Israelis was 32% for the two state ‘solution’.

A more recent survey, jointly conducted in late May and early June by the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah, asked

According to the Saudi plan, Israel will retreat from all territories occupied in 1967 including Gaza the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and a Palestinian state will be established. The refugees problem will be resoved through negotiation in a just and agreed upon manner and in accordance with UN resolution. In return, all Arab states will recognize Israel and its right to secure borders, will sign peace treaties with her and establish normal diplomatic relations. Do you agree or disagree to this plan?

As is always the case with complex questions like this, ‘disagree’ answers are uninformative because we don’t know which component respondents objected to. But it is probably safe to assume that those who agree accept every component. Only 22.2% of Israeli Jews agreed with this formulation, 7% ‘definitely’. Among the Palestinian sample, 57.3% agreed, 8.3% definitely. Interestingly, in a follow up survey of Israelis only and not disaggregated by ethnicity conducted after Obama’s 4 June Cairo speech, 35% of all Israelis agreed, 13.3% ‘definitely’. This represents a slight decrease from before the speech when 36.3% of all Israelis agreed, 14% ‘definitely’. Although the margin of error is not stated, the drop may not be significant.

On the question of the border, 78% of Palestinians said it was ‘Essential’ ‘Israel should withdraw to the 67 border’, while 60% of Israelis said that was ‘Unacceptable’. There was again no consensus among Israelis on what was ‘Essential’, but 58% would tolerate a ‘Border established by the security wall’, an option 73% of Palestinians considered ‘Unacceptable’.

It was ‘Essential’ for 91% of Palestinian respondents that ‘All of Jerusalem should remain in Palestine’, while 45% of Israelis said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘All of Jerusalem should remain in Israel’. A point of agreement was that majorities of both populations regarded it as ‘Unacceptable’ either to divide the city or to make it an ‘International City of Peace’ under UN or multifaith jurisdiction.

Ninety-eight percent of Palestinians said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘All the settlers should leave the occupied territories/West Bank and settlements demolished’ and 83% that ‘Abandoned settlements and infrastructure should be given to Palestinians’. Without access to the interviewers’ instructions or comparable metadata, I can’t be sure, but I surmise that this apparent contradiction arises because respondents were asked to consider each option independently of the others. These were ‘Unacceptable’ to 53% and 58% of Israelis, respectively. Thirty-seven percent of Israelis said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘All the settlements on the Israeli side of the security wall should be part of Israel’ and 20% that ‘All the settlements should remain as they are’. Significant majorities of both populations agreed it would be ‘Unacceptable’ for settlers to stay in the Palestinian state.

Curiously, the Palestinian sample was not asked about the crucial corridor connecting Gaza to the West Bank, but among the Israelis, 47% said a bridge would be ‘Unacceptable’, 57% rejected a tunnel, and 43% wouldn’t accept a ‘Corridor between Gaza and West bank on land given to Palestine under land exchange’. Only about 8% of Israelis thought it ‘Essential’ for there to be any form of ‘transportational contiguity’ between the two enclaves at all.

Among Palestinians, 96% said ‘Palestinians should have control of their energy, minerals and air space’, while this was unacceptable to 35% of Israelis. Ninety-three percent of Palestinians considered it ‘Essential’ for the Palestinian state to have an army, while 63% of Israelis said that would be ‘Unacceptable’, and 25% said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘The IDF should remain in the Occupied Territories/West Bank’.

On the central issue of the right of return for the refugees, 87% of Palestinians said return with compensation, as provided in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, was ‘Essential’, while 77% of Israelis said it was ‘Unacceptable’, 83% even without compensation. Even the prospect that ‘The number of refugees returning to Israel should be limited to family members and numbers agreed between Israel and Palestine/the Palestinians’ was unacceptable to 49% of Israelis. Similarly, 60% rejected ‘An Israeli recognition of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, while most refugees return to the West bank or Gaza and some return to Israel’.

In summary, in the context of a partition arrangement, an overwhelming majority of Palestinians consider it essential for the Israel to withdraw to the Green Line, evacuating all settlements, with Jerusalem to be incorporated into the Palestinian state, which must have its own army and control its own resources, and the refugees should have the right of return and compensation. A majority of Israelis regard most of these as unacceptable, with a large minority rejecting Palestinian control of resources. A significant plurality says it is essential for Israel to retain all of Jerusalem.

Key issues
	Palestinians – Essential %	Israelis – Unacceptable %
Israel should withdraw to the 67 border	78	60
All the settlers should leave the occupied territories/West Bank and settlements demolished	98	53
Right of return AND compensation	87	77
All of Jerusalem should remain in Palestine	91	-
All of Jerusalem should remain in Israel	-	45 (Essential)
Palestinians should have control of their energy, minerals and air space	96	35
Palestine should have an army	93	63

Finally, only 33% of Israelis said it would be ‘Unacceptable’ that ‘Israeli Arabs should be transferred to Palestine/the West Bank and Gaza’, while 18% thought it ‘Essential’ and another 46% can live with it.

What this shows is that when asked about ‘the two state solution’ majorities among both Israelis and Palestinians say they would tolerate it, but when probed about the details they are diametrically opposed on the main issues – borders, refugees, settlements, and Jerusalem. At the same time, there is no enthusiasm for binationalism on either side and while a small majority of Palestinians would tolerate ‘one joint state’, the prospect was so offensive to Israeli respondents that ‘the interview would often be brought to a close’.

The International Consensus, as I understand it, is more or less captured by the three principal demands of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative:

I. Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.

II. Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194.

III. The acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. [my emphasis]

The Palestinian respondents to the OneVoice poll regard these provisions as ‘Essential’. Their only departure from the Consensus is in demanding all of Jerusalem. It’s clear that they don’t mean just the part that Israel occupied in 1967 because 50% rejected the proposition that ‘Jerusalem should be divided into East and West along the pre 67 border’. Large, but not overwhelming, majorities of Israeli respondents, in contrast, reject all the provisions of the Peace Initiative, including 77% who reject dividing Jerusalem on the old border.

While we’re talking about The International Consensus, I might just point out that there is a wee problem. I mean apart from the problem about partition and all. It calls for an independent Palestinian state and goes on in a later section to offer normalisation of relations with Israel. This has received a lot of coverage lately, as US President Obama is quite keen on that aspect of the Initiative, effectively asking the Arab states to normalise relations before Israel complies with the provisions I quoted. Now the whole point of Israel is to be a Jewish state – state that privileges Jews in some meaningful sense. But what would it mean to achieve ‘a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194’? For reference, here is the relevant passage:

11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible [my emphasis]

Nobody really knows how many of the millions of refugees would actually exercise their right to return, but, as I wrote some time ago,

In other words, it is up to the refugees themselves, and not someone purporting to negotiate on their behalf, to decide whether or not to return, and the place they are entitled to return to is not some arbitrary place, but ‘their homes’. Even if only a small fraction of those currently languishing in refugee camps were to decide to exercise their right, if it were a meaningful right – to return to their homes - it would almost certainly entail a non Jewish majority within the Green Line. The compensation due to those choosing not to exercise their right, if it were just, would almost certainly bankrupt Israel.

As I read it, therefore, any two state arrangement that provides the minimum just redress for the 1948 refugees would create a non Jewish majority in the Jewish state, which is precisely why the Zionists reject the right of return as ‘national suicide’. The inevitable outcome of two states in historic Palestine turns out to be two non Jewish Palestinian states, which defeats the purpose.

But of course, since the purpose of the two state ‘solution’ from the 1947 UN partition resolution to the Geneva initiative and the Road Map is precisely the creation or retention of a sectarian racist ethno-religious Jewish state, the question of justice - for the refugees or anybody – doesn’t arise. And in the absence of justice, there will not be peace.

A drop in the bucket

2009-06-13T11:20:00.003+10:00

The other day I received an appeal from the American Task Force for Lebanon (ATFL) requesting tax deductible donations to assist in clearing mines in Lebanon.

During the 2006 war, Israel air-dropped and ground-launched cluster munitions into South Lebanon. These munitions are supposed to open in mid-air so that the bomblets contained inside scatter and explode. Except the bomblets do not always explode.

HERE ARE THE GRIM STATISTICS: From August 14, 2006 to March 31, 2009: 21 civilians were killed; 204 civilians were injured...

Hardly more than a year and a half into the mine clearing operation,

Since March 2008, the ATFL has been working with the U.S. Department of State, Congress, and Lebanon's Ambassador to the U.S. to ensure that additional funding is available to continue the clearance operations in Lebanon. Thankfully, in 2008, the Department of State provided $825,000 from the global de-mining budget for this urgent, life-saving cluster munitions clearance operation.

In 2009, the ATFL again worked with the State Department, which was able to secure an additional $1.5 million for the demining operations in South Lebanon. However, these funds are not sufficient to clear the remaining cluster bomblets strewn in South Lebanon.

When we asked the State Department for more funding, they challenged us to raise funds for the demining operations and committed to match what we raise at the rate of two-for-one.

As I reported last month, the funding shortfall is well in excess of US$300,000. More importantly, according to Christina Bennike, country programme manager for the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), the largest international demining organisation working in Lebanon, ‘…with 20 demining teams working in Lebanon clearing 800 square metres per working day, clearing the remaining 12 million square metres of affected land will take over eight years to finish’.

If it costs $300,000 to field ten teams for one month and it’s going to take 20 teams eight years to complete the demining, that would bring the total cost to some $8.64 million. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, the arms and legs of Lebanese kids are not in the same league as the mansions and yachts of the banksters. Still $200k, or even $1.5 million, seems a trifle stingy for the US government, which did after all supply the cluster bombs in the first place.

The other grim statistic ATFL cites is ‘14 deminers were killed; and 43 deminers were injured’ since the 14 August 2006 ceasefire. While Briton and Bosnian deminers are sacrificing their feet and their lives, nobody is calling for the Israeli government, who are even more directly responsible for the bombs, most of which they dropped in the last two days of the war with the clear intention of creating the disaster we are now observing, to contribute to the clean up operation.

Saving Israel

2009-05-24T11:39:00.001+10:00

University of Chicago political science professor, John J. Mearsheimer, co-author of the infamous dog wagging hypothesis, has an article in the latest American Conservative [subscription only, apparently; hat tip to the person who sent it, and shall therefore remain unnamed], ‘Saving Israel From Itself: The two-state solution is the only way to guarantee the Jewish state’s long-term security—and our own’.

According to Mearsheimer,

President Obama would like to change the situation because he understands that a two-state solution would be good for America, good for Israel, and good for the Palestinians. But Netanyahu seems determined to thwart his efforts.

Citing the July 2008 J Street poll, he cannily remarks that even though 78% of American Jews say they support the two state ‘solution’, there was also ‘substantial opposition to dismantling Israeli settlements and making East Jerusalem part of Palestine’ (41% and 56% opposed, respectively). For Mearsheimer, like most who profess support for partition of Palestine, this seems like a contradiction.

Furthermore, ‘a February 2009 poll found that 59 percent of Israelis opposed a Palestinian state; only 32 percent supported it’. If he is referring to the OneVoice poll, it actually found that 32% said a two state ‘solution’ was ‘Essential’; 13% ‘Desirable’; 16% ‘Acceptable’; 17% ‘Tolerable’; and 21% ‘Unacceptable’. [I’m analysing this survey in more depth – watch this space!]

In any case, assuming he is right about what Obama would like, the Israeli PM, Israeli Jews, American Jews, and of course The Lobby, will exert themselves to thwart him.

Obama’s only hope—and it is a slim one—is that a substantial part of the American Jewish community will come to understand Olmert’s warning that Israel will become like white-ruled South Africa if there is no two-state solution

Apparently for a doyen of the curiously named Realist School of international relations, that constitutes a strategy. Throughout the article, he displays a similar level of political nous and intellectual rigour.

Clinging to the same old Israel Lobby trope – that the US government uncritically supports everything Israel does even when it contradicts American interests,

...it makes little sense for Washington to back Israel no matter what it does because sometimes there will be circumstances in which the two countries’ interests clash. For example, it probably made good sense for Israel to acquire nuclear weapons in the 1960s, since it lives in a dangerous neighborhood and a nuclear arsenal is the ultimate deterrent. But a nuclear-armed Israel was not in the American national interest. Both countries would be much better off if the Obama administration treated Israel the way it treats other democracies...

It should go without saying, but apparently doesn’t, that it makes no sense to speak of ‘countries’ interests’. The commonsensical notion of ‘national interest’ camouflages the radical contradiction between the interests of the ordinary people who make everything and do everything and our rulers, who own everything and control everything. Higher wages, shorter hours, longer holidays, stricter occupational health and safety regulation and enforcement, and so forth, for instance, are transparently in the interests of the vast majority of people, but they are not in the national interest because they may impact profits. Hurling trillions at insolvent banks, on the other hand, benefits few, but to all appearances is in the national interest, or at least the democratically elected representatives of all stripes in one country after another seem to think so. ‘Examples’, as Nikolai Trubetzkoy always used to say, ‘can easily be multiplied’. I’d like to give Mearsheimer the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s articulated a viable definition in his academic writings, but if truth be told, I suspect that he writes of ‘countries’ interests’ in precisely this sense without considering what it means terribly deeply.

As for the example he chooses, the loose thinking remains in evidence. It may or may not have made good sense for Israel to develop nuclear weapons, but if it did, it’s not because it was a deterrent against her near neighbours. Israel could never nuke Lebanon or any populous area of Syria, Jordan, or Egypt without irradiating its own territory. Nor is it obvious that a nuclear armed client state perched on the edge of ‘one of the greatest material prizes in world history’ is not in the US’s national interest, as defined. Now he doesn’t explicitly say that ‘both countries would be much better off if’ the US had prevented Israel from developing nukes, but he does suggest it, which makes you wonder why Israel would be better off if it had eschewed them if it ‘made good sense’.

The United States is in deep trouble in the Middle East and has a serious terrorism problem in good part because of its unconditional support for Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories. Backing Israel at almost every turn also makes it harder for Washington to get open support from moderate Arab states, even when dealing with common threats like Iran.

The US has a serious terrorism problem in much the same sense as it has a serious bee sting problem or a serious lightning strike problem, at least in terms of threats to American lives. It has much more serious problems with smoking, obesity, traffic accidents, and of course work related injury and disease. From the perspective of the national interest, on the other hand, terrorism is not a problem at all. It’s an opportunity. Anyway, it’s not just US support for Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza that inspires people to want to kill Americans. It’s at least as much to do with the support for a colonial Jewish ethnocratic Sparta in their midst, for the continuing dispossession of the refugees, and for the occupation of Syrian and Lebanese territory. Lest we forget, terrorism – the terrorism that Mearsheimer is almost certainly talking about – arises from exactly the same nationalist assumptions that underlie his whole analysis. That is, the belief that ordinary Americans are responsible for and can effect change in US foreign policy. As for the moderate Arab states, it’s precisely because of their support for the US that they have earned the epithet ‘moderate’, unless, that is, he’s aware of some political or economic moderation in the Saudi monarchy or the Mubarrak dictatorship that he’s not telling us about. Iran does seem to be a threat to US hegemony in the region, due largely to the American adventure in delivering democracy to Iraq, but it’s not obvious that the oppressed living there, or even their oppressors, would be worse off if Iran really did manage to make things more difficult for the US in its crusade to control energy supplies to its economic rivals.

To get to the point, thinking strictly inside the box, Mearsheimer reckons,

Given present circumstances, there are three possible alternatives if the Palestinians do not get their own state, all of which involve creating a “greater Israel”—an Israel that effectively controls the West Bank and Gaza, or all of what was once called Mandatory Palestine.

In the first scenario, greater Israel would become a democratic binational state in which Palestinians and Jews enjoy equal political rights. This solution has been suggested by a handful of Jews and a growing number of Palestinians. It means abandoning the original Zionist vision of a Jewish state, however, since the Palestinians would eventually outnumber the Jews in greater Israel...

Like the sainted Jimmy Carter, godfather of the Mujahideen, ‘the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers’, the only objection to the first, binational state, scenario is that it would be democratic and undermine the racist ‘original Zionist vision of a Jewish state’. As he writes later in the piece, ‘bringing democracy to greater Israel would also mean the end of the Jewish state because the more numerous Palestinians would dominate its politics’. He goes on to explain that the vast majority of Israeli Jews and their American supporters have no interest in such an outcome, but not why it is not in their interests. There is some dispute about when the Palestinians in the area of Mandatory Palestine will outnumber the Jews, if they haven’t already, but it is imminent, not something that will happen eventually. And that’s on the assumption that none of the millions of refugees would return to such a state, when one of the principal justifications for a one state solution is to allow just such an outcome. But the refugees obviously don’t count for squat in anybody’s calculation of the national interest.

Second, Israel could expel most of the Palestinians from greater Israel, thereby preserving its Jewish character through an overt act of ethnic cleansing...

Nor does he elucidate how this second, transfer, scenario disadvantages the Israeli or US national interest, except that it ‘would do enormous damage to Israel’s moral fabric, its relationship with Jews in the diaspora, and its international standing’. To speak of a county’s ‘moral fabric’ makes, if possible, even less sense than its national interest. But even if it were intelligible, it’s hard to fathom how the moral fabric of a country founded on the basis of racism, colonialism, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing, not to mention all the atrocities committed since 1948, could do much further damage to its threadbare moral fabric.

Nor indeed to its international standing. Mearsheimer himself actually mentions that ‘only 47 percent of Americans think that Israel’s influence in the world is “mainly positive”’. If, as seems probable, he is referring to the 2005-06 BBC World Service poll on this issue, it was actually only 41% of Americans, and the average among the 27 countries surveyed was 17%, the lowest of any country they asked about, which I might just mention, included Iran, North Korea, and even the US. Overall 56% said that Israel’s influence was mainly negative.

I’ve given up thinking of non Israeli Jews as ‘the diaspora’, as it buys into the myth that we all originated from Palestine and were dispersed by Roman imperialism. Anyway, the American Jewish community was not scandalised by the mass ethnic cleansing of 1948 and was delighted with that of 1967. Mearsheimer is characteristically silent on what leads him to believe that it would be any different this time.

The final and most likely alternative is some form of apartheid, whereby Israel increases its control over the Occupied Territories, but allows the Palestinians limited autonomy in a set of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves.

I agree that this is the most likely scenario. But I don’t agree that ‘some form of apartheid’ is a departure from the status quo. I surmise that he shares the common assumption that apartheid is not apartheid unless the minority is oppressing the majority. But if the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid is any guide, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as within the Green Line, comfortably meets the definition in Article 2 of the Convention,

For the purpose of the present Convention, the term "the crime of apartheid", which shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa, shall apply to the following inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them:

(a) Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person:

(i) By murder of members of a racial group or groups;

(ii) By the infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;

(iii) By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups;

(b) Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part;

(c) Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association;

d) Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof;

(e) Exploitation of the labour of the members of a racial group or groups, in particular by submitting them to forced labour;

(f) Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.

Mearsheimer asks, ‘would it not be in Israel’s best interests for President Obama to put significant pressure on both Israel and the Palestinians to agree to a two-state solution?’ As Ali Abunimah wrote on Thursday,

Let us assume for the sake of argument that Obama applies unprecedented pressure to force Israel to make a deal with the Palestinians. What would such a deal look like? The outlines were suggested in the recent report sent to Obama by a group of US elder statesmen headed by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. The document, warning that there was only a "six to twelve month window" before all chances for peace evaporated, called on the US to forcefully advocate the creation of a Palestinian state. But this would be a demilitarized truncated state "based on" the 1967 borders. Israel would annex large West Bank settlements and there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees. This "state" would be occupied indefinitely by a NATO-led "multinational force," which the Scowcroft group suggests could also include Israeli soldiers (see "A last chance for a two-state Israel-Palestine agreement, 2009).

Of course the Scowcroft proposal does not necessarily represent Obama administration thinking, but it expresses the pervasive peace process industry consensus that views such an outcome as "reasonable," "pragmatic" and all but inevitable, and it accords with Obama's own statements opposing the right of return and supporting Israel's demand to to be recognized as a "Jewish state."

In other words, what the vast majority of Palestinians would view as a horrifying plan to legitimize their dispossession, grant Israel a perpetual license to be racist, and turn the apartheid regime set up by the Oslo accords into a permanent prison, is now viewed as bold and far-reaching thinking that threatens to rupture American-Israeli bonds.

Over the last few days the press have reported that Obama has cobbled together his own peace plan, in collaboration with Jordan’s King Abdullah, that he will propose in a speech in Cairo next month.

The hugely ambitious plan aims for an “independent, democratic and contiguous Palestinian state,” which would not have a military of its own and would be forbidden from entering into military pacts with other nations “for Israel’s security.”

The Palestinan state would have East Jerusalem as its capital, and the US would arrange for Israel and the Palestinians to swap territory to settle on the borders. Jerusalem’s old city would be an international zone. Palestinians would also be required to give up any claim to a right of return...

The real problem with this third alternative to the two state ‘solution’ is that it is not an alternative. It is the two state ‘solution’.

Right to refuse

2009-05-24T11:14:00.003+10:00

During talks with US President Obama last week, the Jerusalem Post reports, Israeli PM Netanyahu

spoke of the possibility of a "two peoples to live side by side in security and peace" if the Palestinians recognized Israel as a Jewish state and agreed to an end of conflict.

In an interview with the Globe and mail’s Patrick Martin, ‘Daniel Gordis, author of Saving Israel: How the Jewish State Can Win a War That May Never End , and senior vice-president of the Shalem Centre, an influential right-wing think tank in Jerusalem’ justified the demand for recognising Israel as a Jewish state, averring, ‘The concept has always been part of our history’

[Daniel Gordis, Shalem Center photo]

Ever solicitous of the Palestinians’ best interests,

...It wouldn't be exclusive...Minorities would be free to practise their own religion and culture...But if there was to be a successful Palestinian state right next door, I believe Arab Israelis would be more comfortable moving to a state of their own kind.

Above all,

If the Jewish state is not central to our status, then we have no real right to refuse the return of [Palestinian] refugees.

So there you have it. Without recognition of Israel as a racist state, the ‘right to refuse’ would be wholly artificial.

Ortiga cultivo

2009-05-21T19:36:00.001+10:00

Writing under the headline, ‘1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Finds’, Elizabeth Bumiller acknowledges that

The Pentagon has provided no way of authenticating its 45 unnamed recidivists, and only a few of the 29 people identified by name can be independently verified as having engaged in terrorism since their release. Many of the 29 are simply described as associating with terrorists or training with terrorists, with almost no other details provided.

That was in the eighteenth paragraph. The article begins,

An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials. [my emphasis]

And continues,

...the Pentagon believes that 74 prisoners released from Guantánamo have returned to terrorism or militant activity, making for a recidivism rate of nearly 14 percent... report says are again engaged in terrorism...

The assumption is that all of those incarcerated at the US ‘coaling station’ at Guantánamo Bay were involved in terrorism in the first place, otherwise they could not return to it. In reality, none of those released was ever convicted of anything, and not for want of trying – unconstitutional ‘military tribunals’, ‘evidence’ extracted under duress, you name it. If there were any convincing evidence that they had had anything at all to do with terrorist activities, even as broadly defined as the W regime liked, they would still be in Cuba.

Among all the 74 recidivists, it transpires than only two of the 29 ‘independently verified as having engaged in terrorism since their release’ are actually accused of anything in particular.

They are Said Ali al-Shihri, a leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch suspected in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Sana, Yemen’s capital, last year, and Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, an Afghan Taliban commander, who also goes by the name Mullah Abdullah Zakir. [my emphasis]

No doubt a Taliban commander must be some kind of terrorist. But what of al-Shihri, a suspected terrorist effectively acquitted of terrorism, now suspected of further terrorism, and that makes him a recidivist?

If any of these guys really does take up arms against the occupier, it’s less likely that they do so by way of returning to old habits than by way of revenge for their treatment at Guantánamo.

Surrogate

2009-05-21T17:24:00.002+10:00

Yesterday’s Ha’aretz reported that the Edinburgh International Film Festival has decided to refund a £300 grant from the Israeli Embassy that was to have funded travel to the festival for Tali Shalom Ezer, director of the 57 minute film Surrogate.

According to the EIFF site,

In light of recent press reports and in the interests of clarity, the EIFF confirm the following:

The programmed film screenings of SURROGATE are unchanged. The filmmaker’s attendance at the EIFF is still anticipated and will be funded by the Film Festival from their own budget.

This is a tremendous victory for the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Committee and all those who demanded EIFF return the blood money to whence it came. Ha’aretz credits British filmmaker Ken Loach with swaying the organisers and it wouldn’t surprise me if his intervention carried considerable weight.

And yet it’s disappointing that the EIFF has not withdrawn their invitation to Ezer and still intends to screen her film, not once, but twice, as well as two other Israeli shorts, Olga Sitovotsky’s Mexico, and Michal and Uri Kranot’s The heart of Amos Klein.

If we’re serious about getting a cultural boycott to bite, we’re going to have to do better next year.

Elephant of demography

2009-05-21T14:52:00.002+10:00

Speaking at a special Jerusalem Day session of the Knesset, Israel Kimchi, the director general of the Jerusalem Institute of Israel Studies reported the alarming news that ‘Jerusalem will lose Jewish majority by 2035’.

I haven’t managed to find the Institute’s website or any link to anything that would explain the projection methodology Kimchi deployed. But that’s beside the point.

It’s imaginable, if only just, that you’d find a comparable headline in some other country. But it may only be in Israel where the purportedly left wing newspaper of record could report on the hysteria over the demographic time bomb without mentioning the transparent racism that underlies it and without attracting a single comment drawing attention to the elephant.

In yet another triumph of the hasbarists’ art, Israel claims to be at one and the same time Jewish and democratic and has persuaded The International Community that Zionism is not ‘a form of racism and racial discrimination’.

=============
Update:

Roland Rance has provided this link, commenting,

Interestingly, although Haaretz quotes Kimchi as saying "in my personal opinion, the city is united", in a 2007Yediot article reprinted on the JIIS website he writes: "There's no doubt that the city is physically unified, but the question is whether it's socially unified, and there's a big question mark on that"

...But are you sure that Haaretz is quoting Kimchi accurately? His other articles on the JIIS site seem more in line with the Yediot piece I noted, so perhaps Haaretz is simplifying or distorting a more equivocal remark.

On the front lines

2009-05-21T13:27:00.003+10:00

In a wonderful article on ZNet the other day, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, cites ‘the late Israeli philosopher Ruth Manor’ who wrote of the IDF’s ethics doctrine, ‘the Code specifies that the solider should spare human life except when it conflicts with the success of the military mission at hand...’

Khalidi elucidates,

In its own words, the ethical code states that the military serviceman "will place himself or others at risk solely to the extent required to carry out his mission." This wording clearly undermines the claim that the preservation of human life is a supreme value in the military code.

Taken in isolation, this is a possible interpretation. But in the context of the following paragraph – the one headed ‘Purity of arms’, which I’ve had occasion to quote before – it strikes me as implausible.

Human Life - The IDF servicemen and women will act in a judicious and safe manner in all they do, out of recognition of the supreme value of human life. During combat they will endanger themselves and their comrades only to the extent required to carry out their mission.

Purity of Arms - The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.

I think it’s clear that the intent is to enjoin soldiers to minimise risk to themselves within the parameters of the mission, but to eschew violence against noncombatants altogether. Of course, that’s what armies always say they do, even as they drop bombs on urban targets.

An interesting point, however, that Khalidi doesn’t mention is that the ‘Purity of arms’ clause condones using ‘their weapons and force to harm human beings who are’ prisoners of war. Now Article 3 (1) of the ‘Third Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War’ is unequivocal on this matter,

Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

So it turns out that even in articulating the principle of ‘purity of arms’, Israel is content to thumb its nose at the alleged norms of warfare. It wouldn’t be surprising if the hasbara brigade were to exert their casuistical skills to determine that those they capture are not technically within the meaning of the Convention’s definition of prisoners of war. But that would be irrelevant, as the doctrine countenances violence against PoWs, however defined.

The main issue Khalidi discusses, however, is

a follow-up document, which was adopted recently by the Israeli army, goes well beyond this--not only does it subordinate the value of human life to the success of the military mission, it also subordinates the value of the enemy's civilian lives to those of one's own combatants.

Asa Kasher, professor of philosophy and linguistics at Tel Aviv University, and Major General Amos Yadlin, currently head of Israeli military intelligence, have developed a new approach in their 2005 article ‘Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective’ (Journal of Military Ethics 4 (2005), pp.3-32). [Kasher and Yadlin have another couple of articles apparently on related topics: ‘Assassination and Preventive Killing’ (SAIS Review - Volume 25, Number 1, Winter-Spring 2005, pp. 41-57) and ‘Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: Principles’ (Philosophia 34 (1) (2006)). The first two of these articles are apparently only available by subscription – nudge, nudge; wink, wink.]

Kasher [TAU photo]

Among the innovations Khalidi discusses is that ‘...we define ‘act of terror' in a way that makes it possible for the victims of such an act to be combatants, even exclusively so’. For reference, here is the definition of an ‘act of terror’ articulated in the 2006 article:

an act, carried out by individuals or organizations, not on the behalf of any state, for the purpose of killing or otherwise injuring persons, insofar as they are members of a particular population, in order to instill fear among the members of that population (‘terrorize’ them), so as to cause them to change the nature of the related regime or of the related government or of policies implemented by related institutions, whether for political or ideological (including religious) reasons.

Another is that ‘They enunciate a moral doctrine that attaches greater value to the lives of their own combatants than the lives of non-combatants’. Dismissing ‘many centuries of theorizing about jus in bello (laws concerning acceptable conduct in war)’, Kasher and Yadlin write,

We reject such conceptions, because we consider them to be immoral. A combatant is a citizen in uniform. In Israel, quite often he is a conscript or on reserve duty. His blood is as red and thick as that of citizens who are not in uniform. His life is as precious as the life of anyone else.

In a February interview with Ha’aretz’s Amos Harel that Khalidi cites, Kasher says,

Sending a soldier there to fight terrorists is justified, but why should I force him to endanger himself much more than that so that the terrorist's neighbor isn't killed? I don't have an answer for that. From the standpoint of the state of Israel, the neighbor is much less important. I owe the soldier more. If it's between the soldier and the terrorist's neighbor, the priority is the soldier. Any country would do the same.

In other words, in the view of these philosophers, an individual or a group resisting occupation is not justified in targeting occupation soldiers, but a state is justified in targeting unarmed civilians just because they live in proximity to ‘suspected terrorists’. Kasher and Yadlin’s 2006 article in Philosophia is much more nuanced than this, resting on a cascade of definitions and an elaborate, but unelaborated, risk analysis mechanism. But I think Khalidi captures the gist of it fairly.

Yadlin [Wikipedia]

Khalidi recalls ‘the moral basis of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in wartime’, pointing out that combatants ‘are armed, prepared for combat, and capable of defending themselves militarily’and ‘have intentionally embarked on acts of violence and are actively seeking to endanger others’. It may be worth emphasising the other side of the coin – we civilians do not threaten combatants and are defenceless against them, even if we deliberately act as ‘human shields’.

But according to Kasher,

The concept of proportionality has also changed. There is no logic in comparing the number of civilians and armed fighters killed on the Palestinian side, or comparing the number of Israelis killed by Qassam rockets to the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza.

What I find particularly frightening is that, echoing the sentiments of Bush’s anonymous ‘senior advisor’ on ‘the reality-based community’, Kasher told Harel,

The Geneva Conventions...were appropriate for classic warfare, where one army fought another. But in our time the whole business of rules of fair combat has been pushed aside. There are international efforts underway to revise the rules to accommodate the war against terrorism...We in Israel are in a key position in the development of law in this field because we are on the front lines in the fight against terrorism. This is gradually being recognized both in the Israeli legal system and abroad...What we are doing is becoming the law...

Pity the nation

2009-05-17T19:56:00.004+10:00

Bylining AP, Ha’aretz reported last week ‘that the Israel Defense Forces has handed over data on cluster bombs fired during the 2006 war’, confirming their moral purity. After all, legend has it that the US still hasn’t provided maps of their landmines in Vietnam more than three decades down the track.

Photo: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

Cluster bomblets gathered to be destroyed by de-miners in Tyre, southern Lebanon. Israel fired over four million bomblets during last year's war, according to the UN [IRIN caption]

And in case you were entertaining any lingering doubts, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’s Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) reported in December 2007 that no less an authority than

Israel's military advocate-general, Brig-Gen Avihai Mendelblit, has said the military's use of cluster munitions during the conflict in Lebanon in 2006 was in accordance with international humanitarian law. Human rights groups and the UN had previously condemned the use of the bombs.

The " majority of the cluster munitions were fired at open and uninhabited areas", but in some cases the military hit residential areas, responding to rocket attacks by Hezbollah. In Maroon a-Ras, the bombs were used to "allow the evacuation" of Israeli soldiers.

But,

In August 2006, Jan Egeland, then the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, had harshly condemned Israel's use of cluster bombs, calling it "shocking and completely immoral."

"Ninety percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution," he said, adding that populated areas, such as homes and agricultural land were now covered with unexploded bomblets.

Last Thursday, IRIN reported

Coming nearly three years after the war ended, despite repeated requests by the UN, Lebanon and other governments, the move was met with little cheer by the Lebanese authorities.

Since the end of hostilities in 2006, 40 Lebanese have been killed by unexploded ordnance and a further 300 injured, many left permanently disabled.

Photo: Dina Debbas/IRIN

Marwa, an 11-year-old from Aita Shaab in southern Lebanon, receiving treatment last year for injuries stemming from a cluster bomblet that exploded while she was playing with it [IRIN caption]

Diplomatically neglecting to mention the three years between the requests and the delivery of the maps, the Ha’aretz article reports, ‘The move follows UN and Lebanese calls for information that could help eliminate the threat...’

Unfortunately, it takes more than maps to demine Southern Lebanon.

Deminers in south Lebanon clearing hundreds of thousands of unexploded Israeli-dropped cluster bomb sub-munitions will lose two thirds of their teams this year unless a drastic funding shortfall is addressed.

...with 20 demining teams working in Lebanon clearing 800 square metres per working day, clearing the remaining 12 million square metres of affected land will take over eight years to finish...

Having started the year with 26 demining teams, plus five from UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon, the number of teams will fall to just nine plus UNIFIL by the end of the year, according to figures from the Lebanon Mine Action Centre (LMAC), which has recently been absorbed into the Lebanese Army's demining division.

As always, it goes without saying that it’s The International Community that is left to pick up the tab for cleaning Israel’s mess.

So it’s beginning to look like it will be more than another eight years before it’s safe for kids to play and farmers to cultivate their land, assuming, that is, that Israel doesn’t drop any more over that period. We know that the US made an emergency shipment to Israel as the war on Lebanon had depleted their existing supply.

In February 2007, Dianne Feinstein introduced her Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act, which banned sales of cluster munitions with a failure rate exceeding 1%. But never mind, at least it’s not the reported 40% of the older models. This past February, Ms Feinstein reintroduced her bill, which now languishes in committee. So there’s no major impediment to Israel importing more vintage bombs, and even if it ever passes, with up to 2000 ‘submunitions’ in each cluster bomb, we’d still end up with 20 little landmines scattered around each bomb site.

Higher and deeper

2009-05-05T17:10:00.005+10:00

In a survey 'American Public Opinion on West Bank Settlements' conducted between 25 March and 6 April WorldPublicOpinion.org poll found 'that three-quarters of Americans think that Israel should not build settlements in the Palestinian territories'.

Of course it's not as simple as that. In reality, they asked this question twice:

Do you think it is all right for Israel to build settlements in the Palestinian Territories, or do you think they should not?

First they divided the sample into four groups, presumably of equal size and equally representative of the population sampled. They asked groups A and B – half the sample - the question prefaced with the wording:

A highly controversial issue is that Israel has built villages for Israelis, called settlements, in the Palestinian territories in the West Bank.

If nothing else, the results of the survey suggest that the issue isn't as controversial as all that, and I think it's a trifle disingenuous to describe the settlements, which house nearly 10% of the Jewish population of Israel, as 'villages'. But at least it's a little more honest than the 'neighbourhoods' you find in the media. It was 75% of this group (claimed 'margin of error' ±4.5%) that said Israel 'should not build' settlements.

They then presented three quarters of the sample – groups B, C, and D – with these statements, which they claim are based on advice from 'the Israeli embassy in the US and the Palestinian Mission at the UN':

Here are two statements, one in support of the Palestinian position and one in support of the Israeli position. Please tell me if you find them convincing or unconvincing.

Q35 UN resolutions 242 and 338, which were endorsed by nearly all members of the UN, including the US, called for Israel to withdraw from territories it invaded in the 1967 war. Thus, for Israel to build new settlements in these areas is illegal under international law.

Q36 Israel has a right to build settlements in the West Bank because Jews have lived in these areas for centuries and have legitimate historical claims to property there.

It may be valid to describe a position that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs advocates as 'the Israeli position' [my emphasis], although I doubt more than a handful of Israeli Palestinians would agree. But that certainly is not the case with the Palestinian UN delegation, which only represents the PA, and not Israeli Palestinians or the millions of refugees in the diaspora. Furthermore, as currently constituted, the PA is a 'government' appointed by Fateh, the party that lost the 2006 election, so it doesn't actually represent anyone.

UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 were carried by a majority of the fifteen members of the Council, not 'nearly all members of the UN'. UNSCR 338 is only relevant insofar as it calls on the parties to implement 242. The withdrawal clause in 242 is relevant, but perhaps not quite as apropos as Article 49 of the 4^th Geneva Convention, which states, 'The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies', although both are subject to cynical, casuistical interpretation. What's most disturbing about Q35 is the reference specifically to 'new settlements', which leaves you wondering how respondents might have interpreted it – are the illegal settlemets the ones that were new in 1967, when 242 was passed; in 1973, the date of 338; or just the ones that haven't been built yet?

Q36 is also problematical. The obvious interpretation of the English 'present perfect' – have lived – is to depict a situation that extends into the present. While this is not the only possible interpretation, the suggestion of continuity distorts the actual situation.

At any rate, 62% of the three quarter sample (margin of error ±3.7%) found Q35 very or somewhat convincing, while 54% were convinced by Q36.

After answering Q35-36, the second half of the sample - groups C and D - were asked the same question as groups A and B answered without reading the two statements.

Q37 (=Q34) Do you think it is all right for Israel to build settlements in the Palestinian Territories, or do you think they should not?

This time, only 60% said they should not build settlements, the same proportion that J Street found opposed expanding settlements in their poll of American Jews a month earlier. Notwithstanding the 'new settlements' wording in Q36, I find the 60% who think it's not all right to build settlements in this poll more encouraging than the 60% who oppose expanding them in the J Street poll. And the 75% who opposed settlements outright in Q34, without the 'new settlements' distraction, more encouraging still.

There are other interesting comparisons to make between the two surveys. This one, conducted by Knowledge Networks, is based on a sample drawn from the entire US population. When selected households did not have internet access, KN provided it. Gerstein | Agne, who developed the J Street survey, and YouGovPolimetrix, the company to which they outsourced the conduct of the poll, are not as forthcoming about their sampling methodology as KN, as discussed in my post about the J Street poll, 'Across the Potomac'.

The demographic composition of the two samples differs markedly. I assume that these differences reflect differences in the populations and are not just an artifact of sampling. With respect to the age profile, note that a much higher proportion of the Jewish sample is in the older age groups.

Even more interesting is the education profile. While only 18% in the general population have a degree, more than three times that proportion of the Jewish population – 66% - are graduates, including 36% who claim to have done at least some postgraduate study. Everybody in the J Street sample had finished high school, while 14% of the population in the PIPA study had not.

Discrepancies also appear in political party affiliation. Fifty-seven percent of the J Street sample said they were 'weak' (13%) or 'strong' (44%) Democrats. In this poll, only 37% said they were Democrats. If you include those identifying as 'Independent-lean Democrat' in the J Street poll among those comparable to the Democrat category in this poll, the total comes to 67%.

Although Q.60 in the J Street survey, 'From what you know about Israeli settlements in the West Bank, do you support or oppose expanding these settlements?' [my emphasis], is not strictly comparable to Q34/37 in this poll, there is J Street data that may illuminate the issue.

We know that 75% of groups A and B, who answered Q34, that is, without the distraction of the reference to 'new settlements' in Q36, oppose settlement construction. In groups C and D, the proportion opposed was 60%. I think it's fair to split the difference and say overall some 67.5% oppose building settlements.

The J Street poll asked respondents whether they supported a peace agreement, outlining a typical two state 'solution'. Although I discussed the question in 'Across the Potomac', I reiterate it here for your convenience.

Q.62 Eight years ago, Israeli, Palestinian, and American negotiators came very close to reaching a final status peace agreement, but ultimately fell short.

The details of that agreement include: a demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza; internationally recognized borders that include some land swaps allowing for most Jewish settlers in the West Bank to be inside Israel while the Palestinians get comparable land areas in return; Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem become part of the new Palestinian state while Israel retains control of Jewish neighborhoods and the Western Wall in Jerusalem; international forces to monitor the new Palestinian state and border crossings; and financial compensation for Palestinian refugees while allowing some refugees to return to Israel if they meet specific family reunification criteria and the Israeli government approves. [my emphasis]

It's hard to be confident that all those who agreed with this formulation are firmly committed to every provision and nuance in a long and complex question, which is one of the central problems with the J Street survey. But at the same time, I can't see any alternative to assuming that they read it carefully and knew what they were supporting. I surmise, therefore, that if the J Street poll has any credibility, the 76% who said they supported such a deal reckon it was ok to build some settlements on occupied land at some stage. Since we don't know which provision or provisions of the outlined proposal those who didn't support it found objectionable, a maximum of 24% opposed settlements outright. In the 2007 and 2008 AJC Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion, however, 58% said 'In the framework of a permanent peace with the Palestinians', Israel should not 'be willing to compromise on the status of Jerusalem as a united city under Israeli jurisdiction'. It seems plausible, therefore, that many of those who rejected the J Street 'peace proposal' did so because it provides for the division of Jerusalem. So the proportion of Americans who oppose settlement construction is nearly three times as high as the proportion of American Jews who do so, probably more.

This is actually a bit of an eye opener for me. I had the impression that American Jews were not exceptional in their banal acceptance of Zionism and sympathy for Israel – that this was the norm for Americans generally. It's a mild relief to learn that support for Israeli war crimes is so significantly lower among the general population, even though the sample included 26% who described themselves as 'born–again' or evangelical' Christians.

Still it's troubling that the Jewish community lines up so firmly behind the occupation and, as the J Steet poll found, the slaughter in Gaza (75%). The other day on a comments thread on Jews sans Frontiéres, J. Otto Pohl introduced the concept, novel to me, of PEP, which turns out to stand for 'Progressive Except for Palestine'. While I think it's the case that a proportion of US Jews think of themselves as 'progressive' (17% in the J Street poll), it's hard to reconcile that with the positions they take on Palestine. As far as I'm concerned, anyone willing to countenance ethnic cleansing, extrajudicial executions, depriving millions of political rights, and so forth, is not progressive as I understand the term. When they actually abhor all these crimes in principle, as I'm confident most of them do, but are prepared to look the other way when perpetrated in their name, it strikes me as even more deplorable. Clearly the wisdom of age and the advantages of higher education do not, by and large, insulate American Jewish 'progressives' from this kind of hypocrisy.

Across the Potomac

2009-04-07T21:03:00.004+10:00

[Apology: I wrote of Phil Weiss's headline, 'I wouldn’t look too closely at his headline, by the way, as the ratio of those opposing expansion to those supporting it is actually 3:2. ' The proportion of the entire sample is 3:2, but what he wrote was 'Influential Jews are against settlement expansion 3 to 1' [my emphasis], which it is.]
===================================

When J Street released the results of its most recent poll last week, Richard Silverstein welcomed the survey’s findings on his Tikun Olam blog, headlining his post, ‘J Street Poll: American Jews Believe Gaza War Failed, Support Hamas in Palestinian Government’. Similarly, Phil Weiss, entitled the post on his Mondoweiss blog, ‘First the good news: Influential Jews are against settlement expansion 3 to 1’. While I’m sure there’s a place for a glass half full approach, I don’t think they’ve read the results closely enough and may have misrepresented the outcomes in crucial respects.

To begin with, the J Street poll follows on from the poll Gerstein Agne conducted for them last July. Gerstein writes,

Gerstein Agne Strategic Communications designed the questionnaire for this survey of 800 self-identified adult American Jews, conducted February 28-March 8, 2009. The survey has a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percent; the margin of error in the split samples is +/- 4.9 percent. Gerstein Agne contracted the research company YouGovPolimetrix to administer the survey by email invitation to its web-based panel, which is regularly updated and consists of 1.2 million Americans.

An internet poll removes the looming problem of ‘wireless households’ – those that don’t have a landline connection – but at the same time, it restricts the population just to those who use the internet.

Advances in technology and sophisticated web-based panel techniques have greatly helped researchers seeking to gain a trustworthy understanding of small populations, such as American Jews, and web-based panels are a rapidly growing method across numerous audiences that are difficult to reach by traditional land line telephone surveys.

I must confess, I’m dubious about this methodology. It seems to me that it would be impossible to calculate the probability that those responding display the same attitudes as those entirely outside the sample frame with no chance of selection with the same confidence that you can in a traditional random sample where each sampling unit has an equal chance of selection. Furthermore, Gerstein is not explicit about how YouGovPolimetrix identified Jewish respondents or constructed their panel, nor what proportion of those selected actually participated. Omissions like this do little to ameliorate my doubts. If the pollsters have developed some method of imputing the responses of those outside the population sampled and overcoming the bias that arises from non response, they’re not telling us how it works.

In their code for ‘Conducting market and opinion research using the internet’, ESOMAR World Research ‘the world organisation for enabling better research into markets, consumers and societies’, insist,

Users of research and the general public must not be in any way misled about the reliability and validity of Internet research findings. It is therefore essential that the researcher:

a. follows scientifically sound sampling methods consistent with the purpose of the research;

b. publishes a clear statement of the sample universe definition used in a given survey, the research approach adopted, the response rate achieved and the method of calculating this where possible;

Neither the Gerstein Agne nor the YouGovPolimetrix sites appear to provide this information.

As evidence of the poll’s reliability, Gerstein asserts,

It is important to note that the demographics (such as denomination, synagogue attendance, age, region) and political measures (party identification) in this survey reflect those in other surveys of American Jews, including the 2007 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the 2008 American Jewish Committee Annual Survey, and the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey.

The age profile of the population polled in March does not match the sample in the July iteration of the J Street poll, but is well within the margin of error for each age range. Discrepancies with the sample in the 2000-01 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), however, are more dramatic. Those aged 50-59 comprised 20% of the NJPS poll, but only 14% in the latest J Street poll, while 34% of the NJPS sample were 60 and over, compared to just 23% in this poll. It’s worth pointing out that the NJPS identified the Jewish population using a screening questionnaire that asks explicitly about religion, and not about ethnicity. To be honest, I don’t know how well this works. If memory serves, in the 2006 Australian Census, only 15,637 gave ‘Jewish’ as an ancestry, while 88,834 claimed to be Jewish in the religion question. On the face of it, it would seem that the vast majority of Australian Jews are converts, but more realistically, I suspect that Jews are using the religion question as a proxy for ethnicity. If NJPS respondents did that, then, bearing in mind that we have no idea how the J Street poll identified its population as Jewish, it’s conceivable that J Street and NJPS were sampling comparable populations.

The AJC’s Annual Survey of American Jews, conducted in September last year, which does not report age, found 39% were ‘Slightly liberal’, ‘Liberal’, or ‘Extremely liberal’, while only 33% of the J Street poll respondents said they were ‘Liberal’. If we include those identifying as ‘Progressive’ in the J Street poll as comparable to part of the ‘liberal’ spectrum in the AJC poll, the proportion would come to 50%. Or if the 17% identifying as ‘Progressive’ in this poll correspond to the ‘Extremely liberal’ category in the AJC poll, then the discrepancy is even starker, as they were just 4% of the AJC sample.

The proportion identifying their denomination as ‘Reform’ in the AJC poll was 30%, but 34% in this poll, while ‘Conservatives’ comprised 29% and 25%, respectively.

Some of these discrepancies are within the margin of error, but they do raise doubts about how representative the sample was. Still, I’ll assume they know what they’re doing and will take their results, including stated ‘margin of error’, at face value.

I never bothered trying to analyse the results of the July poll largely because the questions were so unwieldy that I didn’t think it would reveal much of interest. Granted, in an internet poll, where respondents can review the wording until they’re sure they understand the intent of the question, there may be scope for asking more complex questions. Still, demanding close reading of long and complicated questions exacerbates ‘respondent load’ and is generally considered bad practice. But more importantly, such questions make it difficult – sometimes impossible – to determine the respondent’s intent. Although the questions in this month’s iteration still leave a great deal to be desired, they are a big improvement over July’s.

Phil starts out,

First the good news. 60 percent of American Jews are against expanding the settlements and the same number say the Gaza war didn't gain anything. When you break out the subgroup of "political donors," i.e., influential Jews, the number who oppose settlement expansion rises to 72 percent.

Assuming these results really do reflect American Jewish opinion, it’s mildly encouraging that 60% are against settlement expansion, but it’s hard to get excited when 40% support expanding them, and they weren’t asked whether they supported dismantling them, which I think would be more informative. As Phil writes,

There's evidence of some obdurate attitudes among J Street's Jews. Look at my headline. It's just "settlement expansion." A good start, but we're not talking about occupation.

The 72% who oppose expansion are a proportion of the 44% who said they gave money to political campaigns. Far be it from me to criticise anyone for reading into survey questions, but since we don’t know whether they donated five cents or 5 million dollars, I couldn’t leap to the conclusion that this population is uniformly ‘influential’.

Speaking of sub populations, Gerstein reports that ‘Orthodox Jews [who] strongly support settlements (80 percent support)’. What’s interesting about this is that only 8% of the sample – 64 respondents – claimed to be Orthodox. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t expect anyone to mention such a statistic, as the confidence that such a small sample represents the population it’s supposed to represent would be extremely low.

Siverstein writes,

57% believe that in George Mitchell’s role as Israel-Palestine envoy he should be an honest broker, rather than an Israel partisan.

Only 25% agreed with the second of the two options offered to half the sample in Question 44:

The new United States envoy to the Middle East, former Senator George Mitchell, should act as a fair and impartial broker in order to achieve a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.

The new United States envoy to the Middle East, former Senator George Mitchell, should side with Israel during peace negotiations in order to protect America's democratic ally Israel.

Bear in mind that the margin of error claimed for questions to a split sample like this is ±4.9%. What I found most interesting about this question was that 8% replied ‘Both’, and 10%, ‘Neither’. The two options offered do not exhaust the possibilities – they could have asked whether Mitchell ought to side with the aggrieved party. By omitting possible responses, the pollsters introduce an additional layer of bias into the survey, which is unconscionable. But while it doesn’t mitigate the bias, 10% at least had the opportunity to specify, ‘Neither’. Still, we don’t know whether these respondents answered as they did because they thought the US negotiator should side with the Palestinians, or because they didn’t agree that the US should be involved in negotiations (12% ‘oppose the United States playing an active role in helping the parties to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict’), or that it should be George Mitchell.

Although Gerstein’s question departs from standard practice in failing to provide an exhaustive set of possibilities, it does adhere to the practice of ensuring that the possibilities offered are mutually exclusive. Clearly Mitchell can’t ‘act as a fair and impartial broker’ at the same time as he sides with Israel. Yet 8% said they thought he could. How could this have come about? One possibility is that respondents read the question inattentively, if at all, an aspect of ‘non sampling error’ that would undermine the entire survey. From what we know of the selection of the sample, however, I consider this implausible. Another possibility is that those 32 or so respondents are just hopelessly confused and really can’t tell when two options contradict each other. Again, in a sample 85% of whom claim at least some tertiary education, that would seem unlikely, although when one of America’s most prestigious universities can confer a degree on a candidate with the reasoning skills of George W Bush, I couldn’t rule it out. What strikes me as most probable is that American Jews perceive Israel as a good thing, while ‘the Arabs’ are an irrational horde who want nothing better than to drive ‘us’ into the sea. From this perspective, applying a different standard to Israel than to anyone else may seem like evenhandedness. Although inherently preposterous, this is exactly the position espoused by the hasbara establishment – terrorism is evil, but the Irgun and the Stern Gang were good; ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity, but ‘the Arabs’ have so many countries of their own, why don’t they just go live there and leave ‘us’ in peace…you know the sort of thing.

In the same vein, Silverstein reports that

Jews are willing to see Pres. Obama crack heads, if necessary, to achieve those ends. 86% are in favor of an active U.S. role if that means publicly stating disagreements with the parties. 66% favor an active role if it means publicly disagreeing with ISRAEL. 64% support an active role if it means exerting pressure on Israel. 77% support naming the party responsible for blocking an agreement. Almost half would support reducing Israeli military aid if it is such a party. Those are surprisingly robust numbers considering the questions allowed for quite strong criticism and pressure on Israel if it was the recalcitrant party.

That is not how I would read the results. First of all, apart from Q66 on reducing military aid, none of the questions say anything about ‘strong criticism and pressure’. In the context of US-Israel relations, of course, a harsh word might be perceived as such.

No fewer than nine of the 41 questions ((Q32-36, 39, 43, 44, 46) not counting responses categories as separate questions) canvassing views on political issues are specifically about ‘the United States playing an active role in helping the parties to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict’. These questions all assume that the US, which has underwritten Israel’s oppression of Palestinians for decades and has committed itself to provide US$3 billion in military aid per year until at least 2017, including the Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to raze houses and the 1000lb bombs for extrajudicial executions, can now serve as a dispassionate mediator. It’s not just that the US can turn on a dime and reverse these policies, as Uri Avneri hopes. It’s that it can arbitrate between two parties while arming one to the teeth and exerting itself to prevent any means of self defence from reaching the other. They also assume that there is some sort of parity between the coloniser and the colonised, that each is aggrieved by the other and must make painful compromises, etc.

The 86% who said they’d tolerate ‘stating disagreements with the parties’ were a proportion of half of the 88% of respondents who had already agreed that the US should help the parties reach agreement, i.e. out of 354 respondents. What’s interesting is that the proportion who would countenance the US stating disagreement with Israel is so much lower.

In Gerstein’s analysis,

Not surprisingly, support for America playing an active role drops off considerably if it means disagreeing only with Israel (support drops 88 to 58 percent) or pressuring only Israel (support drops from 88 to 57 percent). These findings underscore how strongly Jews want the U.S. to assert itself to achieve peace, but also how much more effective it is when America is even-handed and addresses both sides instead of just one side.

Bearing in mind that these two options were presented to separate halves of the 88% supporting US involvement, what it suggests is that a significant minority are unprepared for the US to criticise Israel no matter how obstructive it is to achieving a peace agreement. Furthermore, I suspect that many, perhaps most, of those 86% who said it would be ok to criticise either party don’t really expect that the recalcitrant party will be Israel. After all, isn’t it Israel that has always bent over backwards to extend the hand of friendship?

Similarly, the 64% who would allow pressure on a refractory Israel, also based on a split sample, contrast with the 81% who favour ‘exerting pressure on both the Israelis and Arabs to make the compromises necessary to achieve peace’.

The ‘almost half’ (49%) who ‘support reducing Israeli military aid if it is such a party’ – reducing, mind you, not eliminating – contrast with the ‘more than half’ who oppose it. Note that 59% supported reducing ‘humanitarian aid for the Palestinians if they block the agreement from being reached’ [my emphasis] and 75% support the blockade of Gaza under such circumstances. Curiously, Gerstein didn’t ask respondents to consider a blockade of an intransigent Israel. These questions (Q64-69) were only asked of the 76% who supported a particular form of two state agreement, specifically,

Q.62 Eight years ago, Israeli, Palestinian, and American negotiators came very close to reaching a final status peace agreement, but ultimately fell short.

The details of that agreement include: a demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza; internationally recognized borders that include some land swaps allowing for most Jewish settlers in the West Bank to be inside Israel while the Palestinians get comparable land areas in return; Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem become part of the new Palestinian state while Israel retains control of Jewish neighborhoods and the Western Wall in Jerusalem; international forces to monitor the new Palestinian state and border crossings; and financial compensation for Palestinian refugees while allowing some refugees to return to Israel if they meet specific family reunification criteria and the Israeli government approves.

Silverstein describes this as ‘a future Israeli-Palestinian agreement along the lines of the Geneva Accords’, which is true enough, but in the context of the wording about ‘eight years ago’, Phil describes it more accurately as ‘a peace deal along the Clinton parameters’. According to all accounts, the famous generous offer of eight years ago was nowhere near reaching agreement. Indeed, even abu Ammar could never have sold its take it or leave it provisions to Palestinians. Whichever version of the two state ‘solution’ Gerstein’s description resembles most closely, there is no question that it can or could deliver a just peace. It strips the refugees of their right to return and leaves the rump Palestinian state at the mercy of their predatory neighbour, protected only by ‘international forces’ who have been so effective in protecting Lebanon from Israeli incursions. And the cynical land swaps, as I’ve written before,

Furthermore, when Gerstein asks about ‘comparable land areas in return’, I’m pretty confident he doesn’t intend, and respondents don’t expect, that for every Israeli road transecting the West Bank, there will be a Palestinian bypass road interrupting Israel’s territorial contiguity; for every strategic hilltop settlement in the West Bank, there will a Palestinian outpost in ‘Israel proper’; for every precious aquifer annexed to Israel…well, you know what I mean.

It would be nice to comfort myself with the knowledge that 24% of respondents rejected such a ‘peace plan’, but I suspect most of those who did so had nothing like a just solution in mind.

Silverstein is disappointed that 75% approved (47% ‘strogly’) ‘of the recent military action that Israel took in Gaza’, but is consoled that

69% believe Israel’s response to Hamas rockets was “disproportionate.” 56% believe Israeli military actions that involve killing civilians “create more terrorism.” 65% believe that Israel’s siege against Gaza and the notion of collective punishment is wrong.

I suppose it’s worth reiterating that to ask whether ‘Israel's response to Hamas' attacks was disproportionate’ is a trick question, as it invites the respondent to presuppose that Israel’s ‘military action’ was a response to Hamas rockets, when in reality the rockets were the response to Israel’s 4 November incursion. In any case, 69% agreeing with this statement means that at least 45% of respondents approved the massacre even though they thought it was disproportionate. Similarly, at least 31% approve even though it ‘creates more terrorism’, and 40% even though they disapprove of collective punishment. Small consolation, indeed. In a response to a comment to the post, Silverstein is also heartened that

there is a rise of 4% or so regarding issues related to treatment of the Gazans, lifting the siege, and openness to talking to a Palestinian gov’t including Hamas. It’s not an earth-shattering change, but is noteworthy nonetheless.

But since the questions he refers to were asked of a split sample, a movement of 4% is well within the claimed margin of error, and unlikely to be noteworthy at all.

In this connection, Silverstein reckons, ‘Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any polling of Jewish support for the 2006 Lebanon war. I’d be interested in comparing the two’. It’s kind of surprising that he’s not aware of the AJC’s 2006 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion, which asked four questions about this very issue. When asked whether they ‘approve or disapprove of the way the Israeli government has handled the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon?’, 55% approved.

Reporting on the survey results, Gerstein effuses,

The survey also probed deeply into Jewish perspectives of this winter’s military action in Gaza. The results demonstrate complex attitudes among American Jews, who are torn between support for Israel at a time of war and doubts about the effectiveness of military action that results in large civilian deaths…It is very clear from this survey that American Jews have a sophisticated approach toward the Middle East and the challenges Israel faces, which contrasts sharply from conventional wisdom and the hawkish or hard line characterization of Jewish attitudes often suggested by some Jewish organizational leaders.

When I read this kind of self aggrandisement, I’m embarrassed for the author, but I suppose that’s what you have to do if you want to make it on J Street, although Jim Gerstein turns out to have a place on J Street’s advisory council. Anyway, as I read them, the questions did not probe deeply at all. They were leading questions that provided erroneous context: ‘With Hamas launching rockets into southern Israel that killed many Israeli civilians…’, ‘With hundreds of Palestinian civilian deaths and a humanitarian crisis resulting from a month of no electricity and clean water throughout Gaza…’,’Israeli military actions that target terrorists, but kill Palestinian civilians…’, ‘Israel has the right to defend itself…’ [Q53-56] As for the ‘complex attitudes’ and ‘sophisticated approach’, it looks a great deal more like confusion to me.

Phil Weiss reckons,

These Jews are for peace. 72 percent are for the U.S. putting pressure on Israel and the Palestinians to bring about a peace. 69 percent are for the U.S. talking to a unity government that includes Hamas. 76 percent are for a peace deal along the Clinton parameters.

But as I’ve written, with ongoing military and moral support for Israel, US pressure is a cynical exercise, at best. Talking to a unity ‘government’ that includes Hamas is just a means to an end, and the end of a ‘peace deal’ like the one outlined (not ‘a very detailed description’, as Gerstein avers) in Question 62, can only deliver peace as in ‘peace and quiet’, not a peace that provides justice to the Palestinians. Phil Weiss has proclaimed himself antizionist and from what I read on his blog, I see no reason to doubt this, so it’s a little alarming that he interprets these numbers as he does. Of course not everyone reads opinion poll questions the same way I do, and I readily concede the possibility that Phil’s reading may correspond more closely to how respondents read them. Still, I don’t see how anyone can reconcile support for partition with support for peace.

Phil writes, ‘J Street's doing good work, and it can work with those numbers. (Richard Silverstein echoes my view here.)’, which begs the question of what work J Street is doing.

J Street represents Americans, primarily but not exclusively Jewish, who support Israel and its desire for security as the Jewish homeland, as well as the right of the Palestinians to a sovereign state of their own - two states living side-by-side in peace and security.

Leaving aside the racist crap about ‘the Jewish homeland’, J Street, as I understand it, aims to serve as a counterweight to AIPAC. Part of their agenda is to demonstrate that American Jews are much more ‘liberal’ than the mainstream Jewish organisations that purport to represent them, even on issues pertaining to Palestine, and that J Street can claim to be more representative than their rivals across the Potomac. The Gerstein Agne polls are an important element of this project and they construct their surveys in pursuit of that objective.

On the whole, J Street is getting what it wants. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that J Street was Gerstein Agne’s only client, but apparently the connection is somewhat looser than that. The finding that 88% support ‘the United States playing an active role in helping the parties to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict’ conforms closely with J Street’s stated mission:

J Street was founded to promote meaningful American leadership to end the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israel conflicts peacefully and diplomatically.

At the same time, it reveals that 100% of American Jews, at least those polled – whether they supported or opposed the US role, whether ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ – are prepared to accept J Street’s assumption that the US is in a position to play such a role.

On the other hand, while 72% approve ‘of the way Barack Obama is handling the Arab-Israeli conflict’, 76% said they thought he supported Israel, which suggests that a large proportion approve of his ‘handling’ of the ‘conflict’ because he supports Israel. That, too, is probably close to J Street’s position, although I sometimes get the feeling that they would prefer to appear more evenhanded. A frightening 97% said they themselves supported Israel, 85% specifically for bizarre ideological reasons (‘I am Jewish and Israel is the Jewish homeland’ – 35%; ‘Israel is an American ally in the Middle East and strengthens our national security interests’ – 31%; ‘Israel is a democracy which shares my values’ – 19%). To give credit where credit’s due, this is the first survey I’ve seen that actually offers respondents the opportunity to say, as Phil and 3% of the sample did, ‘I don't support Israel’.

What this shows is that a huge majority of US Jews can somehow reconcile themselves to the basic assumptions that underlie support for Israel, among other things:

That Jews are a ‘people’ for the purposes of exercising the ‘right to self determination’
That to achieve that right, Jews were entitled to engage in terrorism and ethnic cleansing to achieve the desired Jewish majority
That in exercising that right, it is acceptable to privilege Jews in terms of land tenure, national symbols, public holidays, language, etc.
That it was ok for Israel to annex territory beyond that stipulated in the UN partition resolution (181) by force in 1948.

And that’s the case for those who support Israel within the Green Line, without cynical land swaps. The 76% who supported Gerstein’s outline peace plan also assume that:

Refugee rights are negotiable, and may only be exercised to the extent permitted by Israel
It’s fair, reasonable, and viable to leave an unarmed Palestinian state at the mercy of the most heavily armed state in the region
Acquisition of territory by force in 1967 and consolidated through cynical settlement ‘facts on the ground’ is legitimate.

In those respects, J Street and the majority of American Jews do not depart from AIPAC’s position. Where J Street departs from the mainstream Jewish organisations is in preferring a kinder, gentler image of Israel, a velvet curtain for the iron wall.

J Street supports diplomatic solutions over military ones, including in Iran; multilateral over unilateral approaches to conflict resolution; and dialogue over confrontation with a wide range of countries and actors when conflicts do arise.

But it turns out that only 39% preferred negotiation with Iran to sanctions, by a margin of two percentage points, well within the 4.9% margin of error. Similarly, while 41% said the US should not attack Iran ‘if they are on the verge of developing nuclear weapons’, 40% said they should, and it goes without saying that Gerstein didn’t ask about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. As mentioned, even though 69% thought the massacre of Gaza was disproportionate, 59% said it didn’t make Israel ‘more secure’, 65% said Israel ‘should avoid collective punishment’, and 56% said killing civilians ‘create[s] more terrorism’, 75% approved of the slaughter, 47% ‘strongly’, while only 9% strongly disapproved. So perhaps American Jews are not as dovish as J Street would prefer, after all.

But then, J Street isn’t all that dovish itself. In answer to the cynically worded FAQ, ‘Was Israel justified in attacking Hamas?’, J Street writes,

Israel has the right and obligation to defend its citizens from short and long-term threats, such as rocket attacks – including taking military action designed to address the specific threat.

It does differ from AIPAC, however, on tactical issues. Where AIPAC has nothing but praise for Israel’s restraint, J Street reckons

The more relevant question is whether Israel’s attack on Hamas will accomplish its security goals…We think escalating the conflict will prove counter-productive and only deepen the cycle of violence in the region. This attack will deepen animosity between the Palestinian and Israeli people.

Similarly, while they seem to oppose Israel’s siege of Gaza, or at least its severity, this too is on strictly practical grounds tied to their perception of what best serves Israel’s ‘security goals’.

Had Israel eased the blockade, it would have created deeper incentives for Hamas and the Palestinian people to renew the ceasefire, giving civilians in Gaza a tangible sense that they had more to lose in a military confrontation.

‘The ceasefire’, by the way, ‘was 6 months but began to unravel in November’!

There is a real difference between AIPAC and J Street. Even though the J Street website evidences no acknowledgement that Palestinians are real people with real needs and real grievances, rather than an obstacle to Israeli security to assuage, I have little doubt that if the US and Israeli governments adhered to their prescriptions, it would perceptibly mitigate the immediate material circumstances for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But a just peace is not on their agenda.

One nuclear weapon

2009-03-09T07:59:00.002+11:00

The ABC's Washington correspondent Kim Landers reported last Monday, ‘The United States' top military officer [Admiral Mike Mullen] believes

Iran

has stockpiled enough nuclear fuel to make a bomb’. ‘The International Atomic Energy Agency,’ she continued, ‘reported last month that it believed

Iran

had built up a stockpile of nuclear fuel which could be enough for one nuclear weapon.’

It may come as a surprise that one US official’s belief about the IAEA’s belief is deemed so newsworthy, particularly when Mullen’s boss, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, claims ‘They're not close to a stockpile.’

Waxing hysterical in response to the same announcement, the American Jewish Committee’s tireless Executive Director David A. Harris opined,

A nuclear Iran presents a grave, perhaps catastrophic, threat to the Middle East and beyond. While we welcome the international consensus that Iran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear arsenal, as reflected in numerous UN Security Council resolutions, the window of opportunity to prevent this from happening is closing fast…We must not wake up one morning and find ourselves in a new era where Iran has the bomb and the means to deliver it…Iranian terrorist proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah, seek a "dirty bomb"; and Iran's neighbors rush to embark on their own nuclear programs to confront the Iranian threat.

In AJC-speak, it’s self evident that the Lebanese nationalist Hizballah and the Palestinian nationalist Hamas are ‘Iranian terrorist proxies’, but this is the first I’ve heard about those outfits seeking a dirty bomb. A quick search reveals that some crackpot posting under the name Iqbal Latif alleged in a comment on Sara Roy’s review of a book about Hamas that both organisations were hiding dirty bombs in mosques. Doubtless ample evidence for David Harris.

As for Iran’s immediate neighbours, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan, we know for sure that one of them will not be rushing to embark on its own nuclear weapons program, because Pakistan’s program culminated in a successful test 11 years ago. Another nearby country, already endowed with tested nukes, long range missiles, and a world class air force, a country that unconditionally refuses any IAEA inspections whatsoever and hasn’t even signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, has been threatening Iran for years. But it’s inconceivable that the UN Security Council’s ‘goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery’ applied to Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which could never instigate a regional arms race.

Anyway, there’s no need for Harris to be so worried. A few weeks ago, Philip Sherwell reported in The Telegraph that Mossad has matters well in hand.

Reva Bhalla, a senior analyst with Stratfor, the US private intelligence company with strong government security connections, said the strategy was to take out key people.

"With co-operation from the United States, Israeli covert operations have focused both on eliminating key human assets involved in the nuclear programme and in sabotaging the Iranian nuclear supply chain," she said.

Mossad was rumoured to be behind the death of Ardeshire Hassanpour, a top nuclear scientist at Iran's Isfahan uranium plant, who died in mysterious circumstances from reported "gas poisoning" in 2007.

Other recent deaths of important figures in the procurement and enrichment process in Iran and Europe have been the result of Israeli "hits", intended to deprive Tehran of key technical skills at the head of the programme, according to Western intelligence analysts.

Israel has also used front companies to infiltrate the Iranian purchasing network…The businesses initially supply Iran with legitimate material, winning Tehran's trust, and then start to deliver faulty or defective items that "poison" the country's atomic activities.

Harris concludes by magically transforming Mullen’s belief, ‘His assessment follows a recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran had understated by one third the amount of uranium it has enriched.’

The source of Mullen’s hyperbole is the most recent IAEA report on their quarterly inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities.

The IAEA report showed a significant increase in Iran's reported stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) since November to 1,010 kg -- enough, some physicists say, for possible conversion into high-enriched uranium for one bomb.

But according to IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming,

The (IAEA) has no reason at all to believe that the estimates of LEU produced in the (Natanz) facility were an intentional error by Iran. They are inherent in the early commissioning phases of such a facility when it is not known in advance how it will perform in practice.

In other words, if Iran were planning to build nuclear weapons, and if they had enough centrifuges to enrich the ‘stockpile’ to the required degree, and if they could do this without the IAEA noticing, and if they had the knowledge and technology to weaponise the uranium, they might at some stage be able to produce a nuclear weapon. At least according to ‘some physicists’.

In reality, not only has Iran denied such an intention, but the US National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate reported, ‘We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.’

The IAEA ‘has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran, including all declared low enriched uranium.’ Fleming asserts that ‘Iran has provided good cooperation on this matter’. Furthermore, ‘No nuclear material could have been removed from the facility without the agency's knowledge since the facility is subject to video surveillance and the nuclear material has been kept under seal.’

Significantly, the NIC also reported,

We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame…All agencies recognize the possibility that this capability may not be attained until after 2015.

It’s worth remembering that a country with enough Highly Enriched Uranium to build one bomb is not in a position to threaten anyone with it, as they would have to test it before risking nuclear annihilation for shooting off a dud. It doesn’t even have deterrent value. If I’m not mistaken, no country has ever announced that it was developing a nuclear weapon. There are accusations, of course. But, although North Korea provided six days’ warning of its 2006 test, the successful test is the announcement. And you don’t carry out the test until you’ve built more than one bomb, which you can’t do with just enough LEU to process into enough HEU to build one bomb.

Typically evenhanded, the ABC report concludes, ‘Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful, energy-related purposes.’

But they can’t fool cluey American ‘Likely Voters’, 77% of whom told Rasmussen in a poll conducted on 29 and 30 January that they believed Iran's nuclear program was ‘for weapons development’.

Taking a leaf out of the push pollsters’ book, what Rasmussen asked was,

Iran says its uranium enrichment program is for peaceful energy purposes. The U.S., Israel and the European Union believe it is intended to develop nuclear weapons. Do you believe Iran's nuclear program is for energy purposes or for weapons development?

Only 6% believed a rogue pariah state like the Islamofascists in Iran, when credible sources like the cuddly US, Israel and the EU contradict them. The US, that is, except for the National Intelligence Council.

In a demented reprise of the old ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ trope, Rasmussen went on to ask,

Before a meeting is allowed between the President of Iran and the President of the United States, should Iran be required to stop developing nuclear weapons capabilities?

While 56% said President Obama should not condescend to meet Ahmedinejad until Iran stops developing nuclear weapons capabilities, 27% said he should, and 17% weren’t sure, 100% of those answering the question at all accepted that Iran was in fact developing nuclear weapons capabilities.

What a dilemma!

2009-02-22T08:32:00.002+11:00

Not many people remember his name, but everyone knows Muntadhar al-Zaidi’s shoe size. In one glorious moment on 14 December, the 29 year old al-Baghdadia TV journalist recruited the whole world’s media to display what no analysis or opinion poll, no insurgency or election had, that Iraqis don’t like living under the bootheel of US occupation. Since then, his action has become iconic, with shoe tossing now a staple of protest tactics.

So inspiring was his protest that within a week of the incident, the Baydan Shoe Company in Istanbul, allegedly the manufacturer of al-Zaidi’s shoes, had to hire 100 new workers to cope with 300,000 orders for their Model 271 Ducati, making it perhaps the only employer in Turkey not laying off staff.

Arrested on the spot and consigned to al-Maliki’s gulag, he was beaten into signing an apology to al-Maliki. While he languished in prison, orphans in Tikrit helped sculptor Laith al-Amiri construct a monument in his honour, unveiled on 29 January and removed the next day,

"We will not allow anyone to use the government facilities and buildings for political motives," said Abdullah Jabara, Salaheddin deputy governor.

Three months down the track, he is finally to stand trial, ‘charged with assaulting a foreign leader and faces a maximum sentence of 15 years’. Unfortunately, Bush was agile enough to evade al-Zaidi’s missiles, although I daresay he’d be facing even more serious charges if they had hit home. Initial hearings in December were held at the prison, where he has been held ever since. presumably to allow time for him to recover from his injuries before appearing in a public courtroom.

In his first public appearance since his arrest, Mr Zaidi was met in court by applause, ululating and chanting…He appeared fit and well, despite reports from friends and family that he was badly beaten shortly after his arrest.

The facts of the case are not in dispute, nor has al-Zaidi denied the charges against him. And in all fairness, it’s inconceivable that a capitalist state would neglect to criminalise assaulting a foreign head of state. But at the same time, the new democracy Mr Bush has so magnanimously bestowed upon the grateful Iraqi people must show its respect for freedom of expression. What a dilemma!

We can only hope that Iraq’s thoroughly independent judiciary will acknowledge what every Iraqi knows and release al-Zaidi immediately, honour him as a hero, with an abject apology and compensation, and let him return to recording the depredations of US occupation.

A respectable majority

2009-02-21T19:56:00.000+11:00

After what I suppose must be ‘a decent interval’, Israeli President Shimon Peres has finally invited Binyamin Netanyahu to try and form a government. Although Bibi’s Likud, with 28 seats, has received the explicit endorsement of Yisrael Beiteinu (15 seats) and the rest of the extreme ultra right – Shas (11), United Torah Judaism (5), Habayit Hayehudi (‘The Jewish Home’; 3), and National Union (4), sufficient to form a government with a small majority in the 120 member Knesset, he has reached out in the spirit of reconciliation to ‘the centrist Kadima Party, led by Tzipi Livni, and the center-left Labor Party, led by Ehud Barak, to join him in a unity government’, as Isabel Kershner wrote in yesterday’s NY Times, ‘He said national unity was necessary in order for Israel to contend with the formidable challenges ahead’. Kadima leader Tzipi Livni is to meet with Netanyahu tomorrow, but many in the media doubt she will buy into his ‘national unity’ proposal.

The principal division between the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ is supposed to be over the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. As Jamie points out on his Heathlander blog, Likud, Kadima, and Yisra’el Beiteinu are of one mind on the issue of loyalty oaths: ‘[Vice Premier Haim] Ramon told Ynet that 90% of Yisrael Beiteinu’s positions correlate with Kadima’s policy. “Even on the subject of loyalty and everything concerning national service – we agree,” he said.’ In a memo to Yisra’el Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, Likud wrote, ‘We believe that all Israeli citizens, let alone the country’s selectmen, must profess their loyalty to the State of Israel’.

The point is that a Likud led coalition of ‘the right’ ‘would also set Israel on a possible collision course with the new administration in the United States, which has pledged an active and aggressive pursuit of peace’. I’m not convinced that President Obama really wants to see peace, much less justice, in Palestine. But I’m sure he’s committed to ‘the peace process’ and might even insist on the establishment of some kind of rump Palestinian state over the life of his regime. Interestingly, a coalition formed on the understanding that this will not happen could prove to be the acid test of the Walt and Mearsheimer dog wagging hypothesis. Or it might not. After all, it would be imprudent in the extreme to take a slimy character like Bibi’s word at face value. Indeed, my understanding is that Lieberman himself supports, at least as an interim measure, establishment of a Palestinian state, which would annex parts of ‘Israel proper’ with concentrations of Palestinian population in the envisaged land swap. That could mean that Netanyahu would have to relinquish his position whether he forms a coalition with Yisra’el Beiteinu or with Kadima – and even with the support of the four ultra parties, a Likud led government would have to include one or the other, except in the improbable scenario of a highly unstable Likud-Labour coalition with an even slimmer majority, which would also require some compromise on this issue in any case. On the other hand, I suspect Lieberman could content himself with annexing all of ‘Eretz Yisra’el’, provided only those swearing fealty to the ‘Jewish and democratic state’ would be entitled to the franchise.

Advocates of partition often make the point that, as Hussein Agha and Robert Malley wrote (on 17 December, before the Gaza slaughter) in the 15 January issue of the New York Review of Books, ‘Throughout the years, polls consistently showed respectable Israeli and Palestinian majorities in favor of a negotiated two-state settlement’.

In all probability, what they have in mind is responses to questions like

Q16. If the Palestinians committed to stop using violence against Israel and in fact stopped all violence for an extended period, would you favor or oppose Israel allowing the establishment of a Palestinian state outside the 1967 borders, except for some agreed-upon land swaps?

The November 2002 poll that asked that question found that 51% of the 508 Israeli Jews polled favoured allowing such a state. Not what ordinarily passes for a ‘respectable’ majority, even if such a view were respectable at all.

Needless to say, the question starts from the assumptions that the obstacle to Israel allowing a Palestinian state is Palestinian resistance and that it is up to Israel whether to allow it or not. The pollsters are asking respondents to accept these assumptions before they even consider their answer. It would not be terribly surprising if they were willing to do so. The question is more explicit than some in specifying ‘outside the 1967 borders’, even if that form of words is inherently ambiguous. It could mean all of the West Bank and Gaza, or it could just mean Nablus. But doubtless the intent was for the border to follow the Green Line more or less, squiggling to incorporate the big settlements, and I daresay that’s how respondents interpreted it.

Land swaps are part of every proposal for partition of Palestine, in recognition of the ‘facts on the ground’ that Israel has created over the last four decades with the intent of establishing a ‘matrix of control’ over the Palestinians living in the West Bank and ultimately annexing the whole area. As I’ve argued somewhere before, to countenance land swaps is to provide retrospective legitimation for the whole settlement project, sending the unambiguous message that under ‘international law’ if you hold out long enough, you can get away with anything. The point is that to answer the question in the affirmative, you need to accept that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are entitled to an absolute maximum of 22% of Mandate Palestine, regardless of their needs. Furthermore, as it is silent on the status of Jerusalem and the refugees, those favouring a Palestinian state may want to keep all of greater Jerusalem, or relinquish it, or share it. They may want the refugees to ‘return’ to the new Palestinian state, or receive compensation from The International Community, or really get to exercise their right to return ‘to their homes’. In all likelihood, most of the Israeli Jewish ‘left’ who said they favoured partition would not accept the right of return as expressed in UN General Assembly resolution 194, and few would relinquish any part of Jerusalem.

So while it may be fair to say that 51% of respondents favour a ‘negotiated two-state settlement’, few if any support one that would be acceptable even to abu Mazen. I hasten to add that when they write of a ‘negotiated two-state settlement’, there is an assumption that someone is empowered to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians, presumably the PA, specifically, the unelected ‘moderate’ PA installed by Abbas and not the elected Hamas terrorists. In other words, the refugees would be represented by a ‘government’ that they had no role in choosing and has squat credibility even among those who did. As for the Israeli Arabs, who also have a stake in any outcome, the Israeli government would obviously represent their needs scrupulously.

In any case, if there was ever a ‘respectable majority’ of Israeli Jews who really supported a Palestinian state west of the Jordan, it seems to have vanished. A poll conducted by Maagar Mochot / Channel 2 on 2-3 February asked 1,894 Israeli adults

In light of the experience with disengagement, the Second Lebanon War and the war against Hamas in Gaza, do you support or oppose the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria?

Note that the question envisages a state that excludes Gaza. Nevertheless, only 32% said they supported such a state, with 51% opposed.

As for the Palestinians, only 42.5% of the 1,360 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip polled 18-20 September 2008 by An-Najah National University said they supported partition when asked

Do you support or reject the creation of two states on the historic land of Palestine (a Palestinian state and Israel)?

The proportion saying they rejected partition was 54.3%. Curiously, support for partition appears to be on the increase, with 39.5% supporting it and 57.6 rejecting it last May, presumably, but not explicitly, in answer to the same question.

A more recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between 3 and 5 December 2008 asked 1270 adults three related questions.

When asked,

29) There is a proposal that after the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and the settlemnet of all issues in dispute, including the refugees and Jerusalem issues, there will be a mutual recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the state of the Palestinians people. Do you agree or disagree to this proposal?

52.5% agreed (7.4% ‘definitely’) and 45.8% disagreed (12.6% ‘definitely’). But in answer to a questions specifically about the Saudi plan,

38) According to the Saudi plan, Israel will retreat from all territories occupied in 1967 including Gaza the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and a Palestinian state will be established. The refugees problem will be resoved through negotiation in a just and agreed upon manner and in accordance with UN resolution 194 which allows return of refugees to Israel and compensation. In return, all Arab states will recognize Israel and its right to secure borders, will sign peace treaties with her and establish normal diplomatic relations. Do you agree or disagree to this plan?

65.9% agreed (9.2% ‘certainly’) and 30.4% disagreed (7.8% ‘certainly’).

Another question outlined six elements of ‘a permanent compromise settlement’, apparently modelled on the Geneva Accord, and then asked whether respondents agreed or disagreed with each element individually, and with all six as a package.

41) When Palestinians and Israelis return to final status negotiations the following items might be presented to negotiators as the elements of a permanent compromise settlement. Tell us what you think of each item then tell us what you think of all combined as one permanent status settlement

1. An Israeli withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip and the evacuation of its settlements. But in the West Bank, Israel withdraws and evacuates settlements from most of it, with the exception of few settlement areas in less than 3% of the West Bank that would be exchanged with an equal amount of territory from Israel in accordance with the attached map {show map}.

2. An independent Palestinian state would be established in the areas from which Israel withdraws in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; the Palestinian state will have no army, but it will have a strong security force but an international multinational force would be deployed to insure the safety and security of the state. Both sides will be committed to end all forms of violence directed against each other.

3. East Jerusalem would become the capital of the Palestinian state with Arab neighborhoods coming under Palestinian sovereignty and Jewish neighborhoods coming under Israel sovereignty. The Old City (including al Haram al Sharif) would come under Palestinian sovereignty with the exception of the Jewish Quarter and the Wailing Wall that will come under Israeli sovereignty.

4. With regard to the refugee question, both sides agree that the solution will be based on UN resolutions 194 and 242 and on the Arab peace initiative. The refugees will be given five choices for permanent residency. These are: the Palestinian state and the Israeli areas transferred to the Palestinian state in the territorial exchange mentioned above; no restrictions would be imposed on refugee return to these two areas. Residency in the other three areas (in host countries, third countries, and Israel) would be subject to the decision of the states in those areas. The number of refugees returning to Israel will be based on the average number of refugees admitted to third countries like Australia, Canada, Europe, and others. All refugees will be entitled to compensation for their "refugeehood" and loss of properties.

5. When the permanent status agreement is fully implemented, it will mean the end of the conflict and no further claims will be made by either side. The parties will recognize Palestine and Israel as the homelands of their respective peoples

6. The Palestinian state will have sovereignty over its land, water, and airspace. But Israeli will be allowed to use the Palestinian airspace for training purposes, and will maintain two early warning stations in the West Bank for 15 years. The multinational force will remain in the Palestinian state for an indefinite period of time and its responsibility will be to insure the implementation of the agreement, and to monitor territorial borders and coast of the Palestinian state including its international border crossings.

Only 41% agreed with the full package, and 57.4% disagreed, 14.7% ‘strongly’. To be honest, I find it mysterious that 52.5% agreed with Q29, 65.9% with Q38, but only 41% with Q41. Just speculating, though, Q29 explicitly demands ‘recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the state of the Palestinians people’, wording I would consider objectionable. I don’t know how familiar respondents would have been with the wording of The Arab Peace Initiative, but it is short on detail and may enjoy some undeserved credibility because it is the consensus of ‘the Arab world’. As for Q41, when presented with a detailed proposal for six central issues, it doesn’t look very enticing. Specifically, 58% rejected the plan for the refugees in point 4; 63.3% objected to the partition of Jerusalem in point 3; 68.5% didn’t like the ‘security’ arrangements in point 6, and 72.5% disagreed with the multinational force, etc. in point 2.

Ultimately, though, the Palestinians surveyed were not optimistic about the prospects for a Palestinian state. When asked

32) Now 40 years after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, what in your view are the chances for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state next to the state of Israel in the next five years? Are they high, medium, low, or none [sic] existent?

34.6% said they were nonexistent, 34.9% low, 23.9% ‘medium’, and just 4.8% high. If ‘an independent Palestinian state’ means something along the lines of Barak’s 2000 ‘generous offer’, or worse, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance we’ll see such bantustans by 2013, particularly if Livni agrees to join Bibi’s coalition. But meaningful independence? Fuggeddaboudit.

Principles at stake

2009-02-12T20:40:00.003+11:00

UNRWA must have read my post last Sunday, because, according to Ron Kampeas, they resumed distributing aid in Gaza on Monday. Now, UNRWA’s former chief legal counsel, James Lindsay, has prepared a critique for WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) – a den of hasbarists founded by Martin Indyk and boasting on its advisor board, Edward Luttwak, Richard Perle, George P. Shultz, and R. James Woolsey, among others – calling UNRWA ‘part of the problem’. Apparently UNRWA ‘allows itself to be politicized by the Palestinians’. According to Kampeas, ‘He noted instances in which UNRWA did not immediately condemn Hamas rocket fire into

Israel

.’

Meanwhile,

In the U.S. Congress, Reps. Steve Rothman (D-N.J.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) are reviving their campaign to cut U.S. funds to UNRWA until it comes clean about what the lawmakers say are its irregularities and its coziness with terrorists. The United States provides between a fifth and a quarter of UNRWA's $440 million to $540 million annual budget.

It seems that there are allegations that UNRWA may have employed members of Hamas, even though they have adopted a ‘practice of periodically running staff names through Israel's intelligence services and summarily removing staffers with suspected terrorist ties’.

Rothman and Kirk have also approached the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to write to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggesting she cut funding ‘until a U.S. review of the agency is completed’ instead providing aid through ‘bilateral assistance mechanisms’.

The beauty of bilateral aid is that it’s a good way to dump your agricultural surplus. Aid agencies also approve projects that require the recipient to retain the services of a service provider in the donor country, typically at a net cost to the ‘beneficiary’. Approval of projects requires – I kid you not – pre-feasibility studies, feasibility assessments, semiannual evaluations, post project monitoring, etc., providing a goldmine for donor country ‘consultants’.

Kirk is scandalized because

"It's against U.S. law to have U.S. taxpayer dollars flow to a terrorist organization," he said. "During the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, it is unacceptable that an organization receiving U.S. financial aid should not be required to be accountable for every dollar it receives."

"There are basic principles at stake here," Kirk said. "The spending of U.S. taxpayer funds should be transparent and accountable, and bad activities should have consequences."

It goes without saying that basic principles don’t apply in the case of the no strings attached US$3 billion per annum in military aid to Israel, the Arms Export Control Act notwithstanding. Considering his profound concern for accountability, you may be astonished to learn that Mark Kirk was not among the five Illinois Republicans who voted against Bush’s $700 billion bank bailout.

A shift to the right?

2009-02-12T19:09:00.001+11:00

With only a few thousands absentee ballots left to tally, it appears that Israel’s next prime minister is likely to be the Likud’s thuggish Binyamin Netanyahu, as expected. Recall that the reason this election was called in the first place was that Kadima leader Tzipi Livni was unable to cobble together a coalition following Ehud Olmert’s resignation in disgrace a few months ago.

At that time, when Kadima, Labour, Meretz, and Gil, the pensioners’ party held 60 seats between them, she still needed the religious Shas party to garner a majority in the Knesset, and Shas declined to join her coalition. Now, with the three parties of the so called ‘left’ scoring a total of 44 seats – Gil has not won any seats in the new Knesset – it will be impossible to form a majority government without including either Likud, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, or Shas, even if she were to invite Hadash, or one of the Arab parties – Ta’al or Balad – which of course is unthinkable.

So I reckon the most probable outcome is that President Peres will ask Netanyahu to form the next government, although it is possible that as the leader of the party with the largest bloc in the Knesset, she will have the first go and either bite the bullet and form a coalition with a party of the ‘right’ or fail to form a coalition within the required six weeks again, in which case, I believe, the role will fall to Netanyahu, anyway.

One way or the other, a party of the ultra right will be in a position to veto any initiative by threatening to leave the coalition and bring down the government. Not that I think it’s going to make a great deal of difference. It was, after all, only late in 2005 that the unlamented Ariel Sharon split from Likud, the party he led at the time, to form Kadima, because his Likud colleagues refused to endorse his plan for unilateral ‘disengagement’ from Gaza. Kadima, like Likud, is inspired by ‘Revisionist’ Zionism. Livni is an admirer of Vladimir ‘Ze’ev’ Jabotinsky. When push comes to shove, there’s not much distance between Labour and Revisionist Zionism. They may appear to be more or less tolerant of Palestinians in the Jewish homeland, but in their heart of hearts, and often enough in their speech, they want them gone one way or another. Their difference, such as it is, is tactical.

There is one other difference. Publicly, Labour Zionists have always tried to pretend that they were settling terra nullius. I think that’s where all this ‘A land without people for a people without land’ and From time immemorial stuff comes from. Jabotinsky, at any rate, was perfectly explicit about needing to uproot the natives.

Netanyahu, left to his own devices, will not consider relinquishing any part of the West Bank or any Palestinian ‘state’ west of the Jordan. Livni, if not hamstrung by coalition partners – an unlikely scenario, would complete the wall, annex the main settlements, aquifers, and corridors, and leave the Palestinians on the West Bank in three or four little enclaves divided from each other, as well as from Gaza, and Jordan, by Israeli territory. Israel will control all borders and airspace. Basically, Barak’s famous ‘generous offer’. In short, they would find themselves in much the same situation as Gaza has been since the ‘disengagement’. True, for a couple of years there were no Israeli soldiers on the streets of Gaza, but I’m not sure encirclement and siege by a ‘hostile entity’ is much of an improvement, if any.

Furthermore, on 3 February, Livni told Globes,

I agree to concede part of the Land of Israel, but the moment I undertake this, it must be clear that Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, and a future Palestine is the full national solution for the Palestinians, wherever they are.

In other words, once she permits the Palestinians to print their own postage stamps, whether through negotiations with the quisling PA, or through unilateral ‘disengagement’, those postage stamp size ghettos will be ‘the national home’ of the Palestinians, thereby washing her hands not only of those living in the West Bank and Gaza, but the four or five million refugees. It’s not absolutely explicit, but she expressed similar sentiments a few months ago, and as I read it, that would mean the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, too. In this, her position is indistinguishable from Lieberman’s, who campaigned on a platform of requiring Israeli Arabs to take an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state or relinquish their citizenship. As far as I know, every country requires such oaths of immigrants seeking citizenship, and none demands it of the native born, as it would render them stateless. If any other country did so, it would meet with howls of indignation, not least from those who applaud Lieberman’s initiative.

Ultimately, I don’t think it means very much to say this election evidences a shift to the right. I’ve often criticised opinion polls that ask respondents, mainly in the US, to place themselves somewhere on a continuum between ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’ on the grounds that that only comprises a sliver of the political spectrum. The distance from left to right in Zionist politics is narrower still. Even Meretz was delighted to see Gaza bombed to smithereens. From my perspective, it makes no sense to call a party favouring ethnocracy, as all Zionist parties must, by definition, ‘left’. Left and right are of course relative terms, but I don’t think you can distinguish them by subtle differences over the timing or mechanism of ‘transfer’.

Join the fun

2009-02-08T10:43:00.006+11:00

‘With international aid organizations describing the Gaza situation as a humanitarian crisis following the recent war,’ writes Jenna Hanson in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Associated Press writer Josef Federman reports that

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees suspended aid to the Gaza Strip on Friday, accusing the territory's Hamas rulers of stealing a delivery of humanitarian supplies for the second time this week…"Hamas has got to hand back all the aid that they have taken and they have to give credible assurances that this will not happen again. Until this happens, our imports into Gaza will be suspended," said UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness.

So, with hundreds of thousands of grieving, homeless, destitute people facing starvation, UNRWA, the agency responsible for their welfare, has determined that they can just go ahead and starve due to a demarcation dispute over who gets to distribute the flour and rice. Much as I deplore The International Community picking up the tab for Israel’s rampage, I want to see ample relief flow to the suffering Gazans as a matter of urgency. The UN’s latest exercise in cynicism, coupled with The International Community’s refusal to end Israel’s siege, and agreement that a ‘durable ceasefire’ must preclude Hamas from ‘rearming’ at all costs, illustrates just what value they place on the lives of Palestinians.

‘Israel is grappling with how to allow in necessary aid while keeping material that could be used against Israel out of the hands of Hamas,’ Hanson explains.

Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the office of Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, distinguishes ‘immediate needs, such as medical supplies, food, fixing the windows -- all the things that are needed right now’ from ‘more long-term needs, such as rebuilding buildings and fixing hospitals and schools’.

According to Ran Yaron, director of the Occupied Territories Department at Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, ‘The windows of many homes and hospitals were broken during the war, and Israel is currently not allowing glass into Gaza.’

Gisha: The Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, spokesman Itamar Shachar said Israel is obstructing spare parts for water, sewage and power systems to enter the strip and has only permitted the passage of 64 percent of the fuel necessary to run Gaza's power system.

‘We will not allow hoses to pass in freely because hoses are put into rockets. We will not allow an unchecked amount of cement and concrete to enter because they will be used to build bunkers and underground tunnels for use against our soldiers,’ Lerner added. ‘My first job is to protect the citizens of Israel.’

To her credit, Hanson resists the obligation to write, as Federman does, ‘Israel unilaterally halted its devastating Gaza operation, meant to halt years of Hamas rocket attacks, on Jan. 18’. Nor is it just the dispassionate media who insist on painting Israel’s slaughter as self defence. In an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled ‘The slaughter in Gaza’, 34 Australian luminaries, ‘condemn Israel’s disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force in response to Hamas’ rocket attacks’!

Meanwhile, the 700 courageous girls and boys who are patrolling the border to keep Israelis safe from window- and hose-wielding Palestinians are hungry, too.

Just in case you’ve been wondering why Israel expects its adversaries to stash their weapons in mosques, Noa Kocharek and Yuval Goren reported in Ha’aretz

Two Israeli curators on Thursday stumled [sic] upon an arms cache dating back to the British Mandate at a Synagogue in Hod Hasharon.

The weapons, which included grenades and bullet casings, were apparently stored in the building by the Hagannah Jewish militia.

Klein said that during the British Mandate, the synagogue used to serve as a shelter from Arab rioters, and therefore has long and narrow windows, and slits for firing. These slits apparently made the synagogue an ideal location for stashing the weapons.

But then, of course, the Hagannah were freedom fighters, not terrorists, like Hamas.

Land rights when?

2009-01-30T21:57:00.003+11:00

The ABC reported today

The [Northern] Territory Government and [Larrakia Aboriginal] traditional owners have reached an in-principle agreement over 65,000 hectares of land on the Cox Peninsula, ending the longest-running land claim in Australia's history.

The claim was first lodged in 1979.

Actually, according to a chronology by David Parsons published in the Indigenous law bulletin in 1998, what happened on 20 March 1979 was a

consolidated claim for entire area lodged by the Northern Land Council. The claim includes various islands and reefs to the west of the Cox Peninsula, Bynoe Harbour, Port Patterson, and the Cox Peninsula itself. This consolidated claim is what became known as the 'Kenbi Land Claim'. The original claimants, 7 named members of the Danggalaba clan, are replaced by 3 groups of Larrakia and Wagaitj people.

The first formal Larrakia land rights claim for the Cox Peninsula and adjoining islands dates to 23 September 1976.

On 22 December 1978, Parsons writes,

the Administrator of the NT makes regulations under the Town Planning Act (NT), which were notified in the Gazette of 29 December 1978. By these regulations the NT Government declares Cox Peninsula a portion of the town of Darwin (the expansion of the town from 142.4 km2 to 4,350 km2 makes it about 3 times the size of Greater London). The townships of Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs are similarly expanded. Section 3 of the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act excludes 'land within a town' from claims under the Act.

The expansion of all the significant population centres in the NT well beyond any possible need provides an inkling of how desperately the NT government and the business interests were to prevent Indigenous people from securing rights to any of their land. When I write, ‘significant’ by the way, I use the term rather loosely – Darwin’s population of about 120,000 is four times that of the next largest town, Alice Springs. Katherine’s population is under 10,000, and Tennant Creek’s about 3000.

While Mandora, the nearest point to Darwin on the Cox Peninsula is just a 15 minute ferry ride from Darwin, it’s 138km by road.

Google Earth image

And after all that, the Larrakia will only be getting 52,000 of their 65,000 hectare claim declared Aboriginal land. Not only that, it’s not over yet, as the Commonwealth Government still has to seal the deal, and who knows how long that will take. I don’t believe it would be the first time a land claim has dragged on so long that none of the claimants live to see it settled.

Sympathy for the Devil

2009-01-30T20:08:00.002+11:00

Four days after Israel tanks rolled into the Gaza strip, the Pew Research Centre for People and the Press conducted a poll of 1503 Americans, asking, ‘In the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, which side do you sympathize with more, Israel or the Palestinians?’. Their principal finding was that 49% sympathised more with Israel, and 11% with the Palestinians. Another 5% volunteered that they didn’t sympathise with either side, and 15% with both, while a remarkable 20% didn’t know. Since Pew did not offer ‘Neither’ and ‘Both’ as response options, but only recorded them when respondents insisted, some, possibly all, of those who ‘Don’t know’ may actually have sympathised with both or neither.

As always, there are problems with the question, although in my view they are far from the most egregious I’ve seen in recent opinion polls. It suggests that there is some kind of parity between ‘Israel’ and ‘the Palestinians’, without actually presupposing or even implying it. Indeed, by naming the country in the case of Israel, and the group of people in the case of the Palestinians, there is almost a hint that there may be some difference, at least in status, but I’m dubious that respondents would have been terribly sensitive to the distinction, except insofar as they might think that being an actual country confers some special legitimacy on Israel. What I suspect would have influenced their answers most is a warm visceral reaction to ‘Israel’ and a corresponding aversion to its perceived enemies. I doubt many respondents would have interpreted ‘the Palestinians’ as incorporating those with Israeli citizenship or in the diaspora.

Now people who read blogs like this are well aware that there was nothing defensive about ‘Operation Cast Lead’, but I’m not entirely confident the same can be said about those who rely on the mainstream media for ‘information’. Since virtually every article about Gaza incorporates a compulsory reference to Israel’s wish to end rocket attacks, casting Israel in the role of victim, I find it surprising that there wasn’t even more support for Israel. But even given the propaganda environment, even for those who firmly believe the hasbarists’ claims about the lengths the IOF went to in avoiding civilian casualties, it’s appalling that only 11% found it in their hearts to sympathise with the mangled orphans on their television screens.

The Pew report, which uncharacteristically omitted to mention the ‘margin of error’, compares the results of the 7-11 January poll with polling results for six European countries from April-May 2007, during the period of the Hamas-Fatah unity ‘government’ in the West Bank and Gaza, concluding that there was ‘more support for the Palestinians than the Israelis’. Under such different conditions, the comparison isn’t really valid. But it seems likely that support for Palestinians in Europe would be higher now than it was in 2007, before the abortive June Fatah coup in Gaza. What they found then was that in Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, there was a significant margin of support for the Palestinians over the Israelis, while in Germany more supported Israel. Half of those polled in Italy volunteered, ‘Neither’. Overall, among the six countries, 22% supported Israel, 27% the Palestinians, and 32% volunteered ‘Neither’.

I remain very sceptical of self identification as an indicator of political orientation, but there is a clear correlation between orientation, as measured by Pew, and sympathy to Israel over the Palestinians. Sixty percent of ‘Conservative’ respondents, 50% of ‘Moderates’, and 33% of ‘Liberals’ sympathised more with Israel, while 8% of Conservatives, 11% of Moderates, and 21% of Liberals sympathised with the Palestinians. In every group, there was significantly higher support for Israel than for the Palestinians,

Overall, sympathy for Israel over the Palestinians in the US has increased by 9 percentage points since a poll conducted just prior to the destruction of the World Trade Centre in September 2001, but declined from 52% in August 2006, immediately after Israel’s depredation of Lebanon. It would have been interesting to see the movements in sympathy for the Palestinians over time, but Pew doesn’t report them.

Meanwhile, for the first time, a group of US academics have launched a campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Eight days into the initiative, it appears that only 52 have endorsed the call for

1) Refraining from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions that do not vocally oppose Israeli state policies against Palestine;

2) Advocating a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions;

3) Promoting divestment and disinvestment from Israel by international academic institutions;

4) Working toward the condemnation of Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organizations;

5) Supporting Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.

As I’ve written before, I think it weakens the initiative considerably to exempt institutions that ‘vocally oppose Israeli state policies against Palestine’, because it ‘would put them in the invidious position of taking action to undermine their colleagues without being willing to accept the consequences themselves’. Furthermore, while a selective boycott like this may provide an incentive for universities to express vocal opposition, while sectors outside academia remain untouched. Still, you have to start somewhere, and I certainly encourage any American academics who happen to read this to sign on by emailing the campaign at ‘uscom4acbi [at] gmail.com’.

In contrast, when Alan Dershowitz called on ‘Academic and Professional Colleagues From Around The World’ in June 2007 to endorse this statement

"We are academics, scholars, researchers and professionals of differing religious and political perspectives. We all agree that singling out Israelis for an academic boycott is wrong. To show our solidarity with our Israeli academics in this matter, we, the undersigned, hereby declare ourselves to be Israeli academics for purposes of any academic boycott. We will regard ourselves as Israeli academics and decline to participate in any activity from which Israeli academics are excluded. "

4568, including some who were themselves Israeli or affiliated with Israeli institutions, responded within the first 11 days or so. Although the petition was relaunched last May, it, too, has now closed. The total now stands at 12,113, well short of their goal of 20,000 signatories, but still rather intimidating. I hope that the USACBI initiative will soon overtake Dershowitz’s, but I’m not holding my breath.

In another encouraging recent development, a Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) delegates meeting in Western Australia on Tuesday adopted the following resolutions, among others:

1. This delegates’ meeting of the WA branch of the MUA [hereafter this meeting] calls on the Rudd government to denounce the latest Israeli aggression against Gaza, and to cut all economic, diplomatic, cultural and political ties with the Israeli state until this aggression and the Israeli siege of Gaza ends.

…

4. We will participate fully in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign when it is initiated and support actions related thereof when they are called by either Friends of Palestine WA or other interested parties (including other trade unions). We call on the ACTU and Unions WA to join us in supporting the BDS campaign and specific actions related thereof

5. In furtherance of resolution 4, this meeting recommends State Conference adopt a position of boycotting all Israeli-registered vessels, and all vessels known to be carrying either goods destined for Israel or goods sourced from Israel. [Hat tip to Amy Thomas]

There’s not a great deal of trade between Israel and Australia, but what there is would almost certainly pass through Western Australian ports. While these resolutions are just a first step to the MUA actually blacking Israeli goods, it’s hard to exaggerate the move’s significance as a gesture. If wharfies in Europe and the US were to follow the WA MUA delegates’ lead, they could cripple the Israeli economy. Which just goes to show, when push comes to shove, it’s the ordinary working people who can really make a difference.

Natural adherence

2009-01-26T10:14:00.003+11:00

Although I’ve often criticised Uri Avnery in the past, you can’t help admiring the guy. He’s 85 and still writing a weekly column and still active in the Israeli peace movement, such as it is.

Still, in his piece this week, where he optimistically envisages an ‘abyss’ opening between the Obama regime and whatever government eventuates in next month’s Israeli election, one paragraph just leapt off the page.

Where are the American Jews? The overwhelming majority of them voted for Obama. They will be between the hammer and the anvil – between their government and their natural adherence to Israel. It is reasonable to assume that this will exert pressure from below on the “leaders” of American Jewry, who have incidentally never been elected by anyone, and on organizations like AIPAC. The sturdy stick, on which Israeli leaders are used to lean in times of trouble, may prove to be a broken reed.

The assumption that American Jews, who have never shown much interest in bringing their ‘leaders’ to heel, are now suddenly going to ‘exert pressure’ on officials who are not and never have been accountable to anybody in part precisely because nobody has ever elected them, and that they’re going to do this on the basis that they voted overwhelmingly for Obama, is decidedly not reasonable.

But you get used to that kind of pollyannaism.

What sticks out like dogs’ balls is not the imagined conflict ‘between their government and their natural adherence to Israel’ but the concept of a ‘natural adherence’. It’s not in doubt that a significant majority of American Jews have some kind of adherence to Israel. The American Jewish Committee’s 2008 Survey of American Jewish Opinion reveals that the proportion claiming to feel ‘Very close’ or ‘Fairly close’ to Israel had only declined slightly from 70% in December 2007 to 67% in mid September 2008, while the proportion who feel ‘Fairly distant’ or ‘Very distant’ rose by two percentage points to 23%.

But what’s so natural about that? He can’t be suggesting that American Jews are inherently hardwired to adhere to the Zionist state. After all, the 23% who feel distant from Israel suggests that it couldn’t be natural in that sense. So he must mean that there’s something about Israel’s Jewishness that attracts American Jews’ adherence, because they are Jews. But there’s nothing intrinsically attractive to American Jews, or anybody anywhere, about an explicitly imperialist endeavour to establish a racist ethnocracy on the basis of a campaign of terrorism and ethnic cleansing. Indeed, many American Jews are quite adamantly opposed to racism, ethnocracy, terrorism, and ethnic cleansing. There’s nothing in the least natural about adherence to Israel – it’s drummed into American Jews from their first day at Hebrew School, if not from infancy.

Since I’ve raised the AJC survey, I might as well provide a little more detail. Back in December 2007, I posted an analysis of the 2007 iteration. Unsurprisingly, the release of the report last September went right by me even though it was the first item in the AJC’s 3 October News update. Better late than never.

The 2008 Survey, carried out in mid September, once again by polling firm Synovate, only asked 15 questions, less than half the 38 asked in 2007, and with a focus on the US presidential election – three (20%) specifically asked about candidates. The sample in 2008 was also nearly 9% smaller than the 1000 ‘self-identifying Jewish respondents’ surveyed in 2007, although they claim the same 3 percentage point margin of error.

Bearing the margin of error in mind, as well as my critique of the question in ‘Who pays the piper’, in 2008, the proportion describing themselves as ‘Extremely liberal’, ‘Liberal’, or ‘Slightly liberal’ increased by a probably insignificant one percentage point, from 43% to 44%, while those claiming to be ‘Extremely conservative, ‘Conservative’, or ‘Slightly conservative’ correspondingly declined from 24% to 23%. It’s not clear where the thousands of hasbara-addled fanatics shrieking for blood on the streets of New York, or the dozens of protesters who blockaded the Israeli consulate in San Francisco and Los Angeles, would place themselves on the AJC’s political spectrum.

Thirty-eight percent ‘think there will come a time when Israel and its Arab neighbors will be able to settle their differences and live in peace’, one percentage point more than in 2007, while the proportion who don’t think so also rose by the same amount to 56%. More significantly, 22% now ‘think that Israel can achieve peace with a Hamas-led Palestinian government’, five percentage points more than the previous year, with 68% disagreeing, compared with 74% in 2007. But that was in September, long before Israel’s very existence came under mortal threat again when Hamas inexplicably started launching Qassam rockets in November.

Perhaps the most telling among the fifteen questions asks whether respondents support or oppose ‘...the United States taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons?’. Those opposed declined significantly by ten percentage points to 47% while the proportion supporting a war on Iran has risen from 35% in 2007 to 42%. Since only 23% said they were ‘Conservative’, at least 12% of the American Jews who have swallowed the line about Iran developing nuclear weapons and accepted the US’s role as cop of the world must have been ‘Liberals’ or ‘Moderates’.

J Street, the ‘liberal’ Jewish lobby, commissioned an internet survey of ‘800 self-identified adult American Jews’ that was designed by Gerstein | Agne Strategic Communications and conducted by YouGovPolimetrix between 29 June and 3 July last year. If Synovate asks leading questions that beg all kinds of assumptions, Gerstein | Agne have certainly outdone them. Each of the 91 questions are so long and complex that it’s hard to make any sense out of National Survey of American Jews, even if you believe that respondents followed the questions. One question (Q51), however, although not collecting the same concept as the AJC survey’s, may provide a comparative measure.

A plurality of 48% said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate enunciating the following position:

America must do everything it can to protect Israel's security. This means militarily attacking Iran if they pursue a nuclear weapons program, supporting an Israeli pre-emptive strike against Iran, cutting off aid to the Palestinians if their schools allow textbooks that don't recognize Israel, and letting the Palestinians know where we stand on Jerusalem by moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

J Street’s analysis alleges, ‘Instead of holding the hawkish or hard line positions often expressed by many established Jewish organizations and leaders, American Jews overwhelmingly favor assertive peace efforts’. When nearly half of US Jews admit that that kind of bellicose rhetoric would draw them to a congressional candidate, I’d come to quite a different conclusion. As for the 41% who said they’d be less likely to vote for such a candidate, there’s no way of knowing whether they oppose attacking Iran, disagree about the extent of American protection of ‘Israel’s security’, object to dictating the content of foreign textbooks, or any of a range of other combinations of assertions and implications contained in the statement.

I haven’t seen any polling of US Jews since 27 December, but in a Rasmussen telephone survey of ‘1,000 Likely Voters’ – not just Jews – on 9-10 January, more than two weeks into the slaughter, 56% blamed ‘the Palestinians’ for ‘the current situation’, as Rasmussen so delicately put it. A plurality of 45% said Israel should ‘have taken military action against the Palestinians’ in preference to trying ‘to find a diplomatic solution’.

Change we can believe in

2009-01-26T08:44:00.002+11:00

I was planning to post excerpts from Mark Steele’s column in Wednesday’s Independent. But when I went to retrieve the URL, guess what

Sorry but we haven't been able to serve the page you requested - please try again

Well, I have tried again, and again. As there’s no problem loading other content on the site, I surmise this column has been removed, probably for reasons that won’t be hard to fathom. So here it is in full for your delectation.

Mark Steel: Now we've all seen through the Israeli government's excuses

If the Hamas rockets are so lethal, why doesn't Israel swap an F-16 for some?

Wednesday, 21 January 2009

The worrying part about whether the ceasefire in Gaza can hold together will be whether the international community can stop the flow of arms to the terrorists. Because Israel's getting their planes and tanks and missiles from somewhere and until this supply is cut off there's every chance it could start up again.

The disregard for life from these terrorists and their supporters is shocking. For example Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, wrote that the purpose of the Israeli attack must be to "inflict a heavy death toll and heavy pain on the Gaza population".

Replace "Gaza" with "western", and that could have been written by al-Qa'ida. Maybe this is the problem: the Israelis are writing their policies by downloading statements from an Islamic Jihad website and just changing the place names. Also, if the Israelis think the Hamas rockets are as lethal as they say, why don't they swap their F-16 fighters and Apache helicopters for a few of them?

These things are capable of terrorising a whole nation for years apparently, yet the Israelis have neglected to buy any, wasting their money on gunboats and stuff. Given that their annual arms budget is $7.2bn plus $2.2 bn in "aid", they'd save enough to buy a selection of banks in every country in the world.

The military advantages would be enormous because the Israelis' complaint about Hamas is the use of tunnels to smuggle arms. But if Israel gave Hamas a few planes and tanks and helicopters, they could probably be persuaded to shut down those tunnels that seem to be the cause of such bad feeling.

Whatever you say about Israel, at least it moves its weapons about legally – except for when it secretly built a nuclear arsenal against an array of international agreements. But they did it above ground and not in a tunnel and that's the main thing. [Note: I’m not sure most of the Dimona nuclear facility is in fact above ground. Part of it is. EH]

Watching the reports from Gaza, another reason why the ceasefire may break down becomes apparent. The Israelis might claim that their satellite pictures now show Palestinians in possession of huge mounds of rubble – lethal if thrown over the border. Luckily these weapons are easy to spot. Most of them are next to women howling, "Look what they've done to my house," but perhaps the airforce should bomb them again – just in case. The Israelis say they fear Hamas will once again break the ceasefire by sending over those rockets. But the whole point of the operation was to make that impossible. Because they must have asked themselves the question, "If we slaughter 1,300 people, including 300 children, is that likely to make people: A. less cross or B. more cross?" And presumably they concluded it will make them much less likely to grow up full of hatred and determination to retaliate. Perhaps they saw medical research that shows when someone is suffering from anxiety and bouts of irascible ill-tempered behaviour, the best treatment is to pen them in with no food or medicine and then kill some of them, and that calms them down a treat.

Another way to allay their worries about Hamas breaking the ceasefire is to read the report from their government's own Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre. This states that during the ceasefire "Hamas did not take part in any rocket fire and sometimes prevented other organisations from attacking." Still, with all that's been going on I suppose they haven't had time for reading.

Despite all this there might be one cheery sign, which is that never before have so many people seen through the Israeli government's excuses for handing out mass destruction. The demonstrations in support of Palestinians have been bigger than ever before, and even the United Nations and the Wall Street Journal have suggested Israel has committed war crimes. One poll in America suggested that 60 per cent of people opposed the bombardment, and the change of opinion reached the point that an Israeli diplomat has admitted that "The harm to civilians in Gaza is causing us huge damage."

Maybe, best of all, was genetics expert Steven Rose who appeared on Radio 4's Today programme to talk about a new study that's located "morality spots", the part of the brain that deals with our morality. [Gary Olson on the ‘mirror neuron system’ alleged to hardwire human beings for empathy. EH] Asked how we could know whether this was true, he said in a marvellously posh academic Radio 4 voice "Well we could test the brains of the Israeli cabinet and see if they've got no morality spots whatsoever."

And the most immoral part of all is the perfectly cynical timing, as if three weeks ago Bush shouted: "Last orders please. Any last bombing, before time's up? Come along now, haven't you got homes to demolish?"

Back in the States, President Obama has wasted no time clarifying his position on the slaughter in Gaza. Over at Jews sans frontiers, Gabriel has already deconstructed Obama’s remarks.

Let me be clear: America is committed to Israel's security. And we will always support Israel's right to defend itself against legitimate threats…Hamas must meet clear conditions: recognize Israel's right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements…the United States and our partners will support a credible anti-smuggling and interdiction regime, so that Hamas cannot rearm…

Or, as Joseph Massad put it on Electronic Intifada on Tuesday,

…while Israel has the right to defend itself, its victims have no similar right to defend themselves. In fact, the logic is even more sinister than this and can be elucidated as follows: Israel has the right to oppress the Palestinians and does so to defend itself, but were the Palestinians to defend themselves against Israel's oppression, which they do not have a right to do, Israel will then have the right to defend itself against their illegitimate defense of themselves against its legitimate oppression of them, which it carries out anyway in order to defend itself legitimately.

Obama continued,

Now is the time for Arab states to act on the initiative's promise by supporting the Palestinian government under President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, taking steps towards normalizing relations with Israel, and by standing up to extremism that threatens us all.

That would be the same President Abbas whose term expired a fortnight ago, and the same Salam Fayyad who abu Mazen himself appointed to the position after Israel abducted and incarcerated many of the elected Palestinian Legislative Council members and Abbas dissolved the ‘unity government’ that Hamas had agreed to form in spite of winning the January 2006 election outright.

That election, by the way, is often described as ‘free and fair’. I beg to differ. There is no such thing as a fair election under military occupation – voters are always conscious of and sensitive to the Damoclean sword of looming unspoken but well understood consequences of electing the wrong candidates. Even if it were possible, the restrictions placed on the movement of candidates, the harassment many of them suffered, the influx of US funds for Abbas to distribute to his supporters…ensured that in this case, the election was anything but fair, even if observers detected no widespread fraud on the day. What surprised me, and I think just about everyone, was that with the deck stacked so comprehensively against them, Hamas still managed to secure a decisive majority of seats. Aside from the fact that there is no Palestinian state and therefore no ‘Palestinian government’, by identifying the Presidential overstayer who usurped the elected Council and his illegally appointed PM as the ‘government’, President Obama signals his attitude to democracy, even to the democratic trappings of elections and terms of office.

The United States will fully support an international donor's conference to seek short-term humanitarian assistance and long-term reconstruction for the Palestinian economy. This assistance will be provided to and guided by the Palestinian Authority.

As many have written, one of the expected outcomes of Israel’s slaughter and demolition of Gaza is to transform Gaza from a political to a humanitarian issue, reducing the Palestinians to objects of pity and recipients of charity, at Israel’s pleasure, of course. An ancillary objective may well have been to ensure that Hamas is to have no role in reconstruction. Since much of Hamas’s popularity and street cred arises specifically from its provision of services that the Fatah led PA was too corrupt to manage, that could be a comparatively effective tactic for undermining Hamas. But short of keeping troops within Gaza, it’s hard to imagine how they intend to exclude Hamas.

The BBC’s refusal to broadcast, in accordance with an arrangement in place for over four decades, an appeal for donations from the Disasters Emergency Committee, a consortium of 13 British charities, is despicable. Far be it from me to discourage individuals and organisations from making donations, but it does seem a bit rich that after all the destruction Israel has perpetrated against the people and infrastructure of Gaza, infrastructure largely built with donations from The International Community in the first place, it’s back down to us to pay for the damage Israel quite deliberately carried out. But then, it’s typically the losers who end up forced to pay war reparations, and since Israel killed 100 times as many Palestinians, and 300 times as many civilians, as Palestinians killed Israelis, I suppose Israel must be the winner. So we have to clean up after them.

Some actually perceive this as a loss for Israel. In conflicts between adversaries of such unequal capacity for destruction, for the underdog, survival is victory. Furthermore, Hamas’s steadfastness in the face of Israel’s onslaught is likely to buy them a lot of support in Gaza and beyond.

The outpouring of rage around the world in response to Israel’s most recent spate of atrocities, the occupation of eight British universities, the demonstrations against the BBC, and now the occupation of the BBC’s Glasgow office, are all encouraging signs. Venezuela and Bolivia have expelled their Israeli ambassadors; Israel is girding its loins for the anticipated spate of war crimes prosecutions; NATO member Turkey’s PM, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has called for Israel’s expulsion from the UN, notwithstanding Turkey’s military ties with the Jewish state since the Fifties; calls for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions are gaining more traction than ever; cogent comparisons to the Warsaw Ghetto are becoming commonplace. Even the bourgeois media have displayed some of the carnage.

And yet, in my little backwater here, the Palestine solidarity group decided to cancel the rally we had planned and announced for last Friday, on the grounds that Israel had declared a ‘unilateral ceasefire’. In yesterday’s New York Times, Ethan Bronner, writing of the first day back at

Jabaliya refugee camp’s middle school, couldn’t resist slipping in, ‘…Israel’s 23-day war aimed at stopping Hamas’s rockets’. An AFP report yesterday insists on making the same point, ‘The Israeli offensive, aimed at stemming rocket and mortar fire from the territory…’ In other words, they are still casting the whole adventure as a case of Israel exercising its ‘right to self defense’ and must assume that they can divert their audiences from understanding that Israel is the aggressor.

Despite Obama’s embarrassing genuflection to Aipac, his support for Israel’s attack, and his current insistence on excluding Hamas, Uri Avnery is optimistic. He perceives ‘between Israel and the United States a gap has opened this week, a narrow gap, almost invisible – but it may widen into an abyss…While the US has made a giant jump to the left, Israel is about to jump even further to the right.’

I’m optimistic, too. Literally millions of Americans decided to ignore Obama’s record and explicit policies, and placing their own interpretation on his promise of hope and change, poured heart and soul into getting him into the White House. Their expectations are high, and utterly unrealistic. Since at least last August, he has proclaimed his intention to attack Pakistan, ‘If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.’ True to his word,and wasting no time, on Friday, US drones struck two targets in Pakistan, slaughtering twenty. True to his word, he has announced the closure of the Guantánamo Bay torture centre, although it’s not due to happen for another year, and even then, the inmates are just to be incarcerated elsewhere. As Eli Stephens points out, he has not undertaken to withdraw US forces who have been occupying that part of Cuba since 1903.

Obama’s most ardent supporters believe he was serious about the hope and change – the reactionary policies were just part of his remarkably successful marketing campaign. Sooner or later, they are going to realise that he meant everything he said about policy and the hope and change were the window dressing. There is a real danger that their disappointment will lead to despair and demoralization. But my hope is that they’ll get good and pissed off. Then we may really see some change we can believe in.

'Subliminal xenophobic behaviour'

2009-01-22T17:28:00.002+11:00

In a comment on ‘No Turkish coffee’, two posts down, Ablokeimet alerted me to potentially confusing wording. When I wrote,

Australia’s Retailers’ Association has enthusiastically embraced a call from Brisbane radio 4BC shock jock, ex cop Michael Smith, to ban covered women from shops, banks and post offices.

I made the unwarranted assumption that there was just the one lobbyist representing shopkeepers in Australia. Apparently I am not the only one to fall into this trap. On 14 December, the ABC made the same mistake and had to issue a clarification.

It transpires that Scott Driscoll’s outfit, QRTSA – The Retailers Association, the one that endorsed Michael Smith’s call to ban the hijab from shops, is the rebadged Queensland Retail Traders & Shopkeepers Association. The QRTSA went national, opening offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and Adelaide early in 2008.

Nor are the The Retailers Association and the Australian Retailers Association the only ones claiming to represent Australian retailers on a national basis. According to smartcompany.com.au, the list includes:

ARA – Australian Retailers Association.
ANRA – Australian National Retailers Association.
NRA – National Retailers [sic – should be Retail]Association.
NARGA – National Association of Retail Grocers of Australia.
NIRA – National Independent Retailers Association.
MGA – Master Grocers Australia.
FCA – Franchise Council of Australia

Anyway, the Australian Retailers Association put out a press release on 16 January distancing themselves from Driscoll. Richard Evans, Executive Director of the ARA, is quoted as saying,

… Mr Driscoll's comments are extreme and harking back to a day when xenophobia was rife and serves to create a culture of angst, anger and mistrust…No one who takes the rich culture of modern Australia seriously would diminish themselves by suggesting cultural or custom clothing is a security risk. This is subliminal xenophobic behaviour and it saddens to have someone from a respected Queensland retail organisation not realise the consequences of such lazy speech.

My apologies to the ARA and anyone who thought they were the ones who had taken this racist stand.

Louder than words

2009-01-18T16:14:00.004+11:00

A few images from Norman Finkelstein's evocative photomontage. [Hat tip to Eli Stephens.]

No Turkish coffee

2009-01-18T13:41:00.006+11:00

Australia’s Retailers’ Association has enthusiastically embraced a call from Brisbane radio 4BC shock jock, ex cop Michael Smith, to ban covered women from shops, banks and post offices.

According to Robyn Ironside in the Courier-Mail,

Smith called for Muslim women who wear an Islamic hijab in public to be fined for offensive behaviour.

He made the remarks on-air and on the 4BC website, saying: "Any reasonable person would find this offensive."

Of course, this has nothing to do with targeting Muslim women.

"Retailers should not have to fear any form of retribution or backlash for requiring the removal of any obscuring headwear, including hijabs, as a condition of entry," [Association executive director, Scott] Driscoll said.

"This is about ensuring a more safe and secure retail environment for all and being able to readily identify any and all perpetrators of armed hold-ups or shop theft."

All he’s doing is saying that if you are a women who thinks her religion requires women to cover their heads in public, you should not be able to deposit money in a bank or buy a postage stamp, but if you’re a man who thinks his religion requires women to cover their heads in public, you should.

Meanwhile, over the Tasman, Mustafa Tekinkaya, the Turkish born proprietor of the Mevlana café in Invercargill has come under fire for expelling two Israeli women, reports Will Hine in New Zealand’s Southland Times.

‘Everyone is going on about racism. This has nothing to do with racism. This is all about the killing of innocent children,’ Tekinkaya is quoted as saying. ‘He said he would not serve anyone from Israel until it stopped killing innocent babies and women in the Gaza Strip.’ His wife and business partner, Joanne, added, ‘Those dead women and children don't have a voice. No one's sticking up for them. Innocent women and children are being punished, so how can we be quiet and stand by and support that...?’

Laudable sentiments, no doubt. And yet, what have Natalie Bennie, who apparently lives near Invercargill, and her sister Tamara Shefa, visiting from Israel, have to do with the slaughter in Gaza? In my view, nobody gets to decide who their parents are or where they are born, and we are therefore not culpable for the crimes of our ancestors or the state that claims our allegiance. Bennie and Shefa may be among the most rabid supporters of the massacre, or they may not. They may even have made the error of discussing their views while in the Mevlana. But I for one would take great exception if some petty bourgeois interrogated my nationality or my political views before agreeing to sell me a cup of coffee, or ejected me because they disagreed with me.

The Israeli ambassador Yuval Rotem, based in Canberra, Ambassador Rotem said the New Zealand ‘government needed to make a declaration or statement giving the "red light" to such actions’.

Far be it from me to agree with an Israeli diplomat, but he’s right about that.

When he describes Tekinkaya’s views as ‘anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiment’, however, he crosses the line. Tekinkaya has said nothing remotely anti-Semitic. By inferring from his objection to the Gaza massacre that Tekinkaya displays ‘anti-Jewish sentiment’, he buys into the anti-Semitic trope so popular among Israeli spokepersons, that to criticise Israel is to be an anti-Semite, which tars all Jews with the Zionist brush.

Echoing His Excellency, Natalie Bennie, who lodged a complaint with the NZ Human Rights Commission, claimed ‘It was very anti-semitic behaviour…He might as well have put a sign outside his shop saying `No Jews Allowed'.’

The Anti Defamation League, the EU Monitoring Commission, and the US State Department will doubtless be howling before long about the unprecedented increase in anti-Semitic incidents in New Zealand.

Some ceasefire!

2009-01-18T11:48:00.001+11:00

The long awaited ceasefire has just come into effect. Reuters/AFP reports that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced, ‘At two o'clock in the morning we will stop fire…’

Welcome news indeed. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘we will continue to be deployed in Gaza and its surroundings’. Somehow, I don’t see all those soldiers doffing their Kevlar, putting on their tuxedos, and going out to enjoy the opera. They’ll still be swaggering around, fully armed, ensuring that whatever quiet may prevail, there will be no peace for the suffering Gazans. ‘…the Israeli army will regard itself as free to respond with force.’

Olmert nailed the real reason Israel has decided to stop shooting for the nonce, if that even happens. ‘We have reached all the goals of the war, and beyond.’ Clearly, they could never have considered a ceasefire while there remains any prospect of Palestinian self defence.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum pointed out, ‘A unilateral ceasefire does not mean ending the [Israeli] aggression and ending the siege…These constitute acts of war and so this will not mean an end to resistance…The Zionist enemy must stop all its aggression, completely withdraw from the Gaza Strip, lift the blockade, and open the crossings.’

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said, ‘This should be the first step leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza’. But, ‘Any durable solution must include the reopening of the [Gaza border] crossings and the prevention of illicit trafficking in arms’.

And that’s the main thing, ensuring that the Palestinians locked down within the tiny Gaza Strip have no means to defend themselves when Israel next decides to violate a ceasefire agreement. ‘Britain, France and Germany offered to join an international effort to prevent arms smuggling into the Gaza Strip.’ The reports don’t quote Olmert or anyone undertaking to lift the siege, nor an international effort to open the borders and keep them open.

The movement to end the carnage in Gaza has quite explicitly demanded withdrawal of invading forces and ending Israeli restrictions on movement in and out of Gaza. We’ve seen how Israel honours its agreements, including significantly, the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access. It’s crucial that we maintain the pressure until Gaza is free of the IOF and people and goods move freely. At least.