PIPISTRO

Big news on Haaretz, ironically speaking of course. One marvels at the fact that the following daily feature deserved first page: “The municipality of Jerusalem on Monday approved the construction of 600 new homes in Pisgat Zeev, east of the Green Line.” [...] “Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised the spiritual leader of the Shas Party, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, that he would authorize construction on “Jerusalem envelope” lands which have been thus far frozen, sources from the ultra-Orthodox Party said.” [...] “Meanwhile, the Yesha Council of Settlements said Monday it would continue to build in West Bank settlements, even without the necessary government authorizations.” [...] “Peace Now accused the government of stepping up Jewish construction in East Jerusalem at an unprecedented rate, in a report released Monday.”

Just a step back to fifteen years ago, to the so called Declaration of Principles of 1993, then to the Interim Agreement(s) of 1995, with its seven “annexes”, plus maps, plus atomized deals (Gaza and Jericho, Hebron), etc. Nothing could really lead the world to optimism in the light of Yitzhak Rabin’s speech at the ceremony for the signing of the Declaration of principles, first act of the Oslo accords on September 13, 1993. “We have come from Jerusalem, the ancient and eternal capital of the Jewish people.” [Editor's Note: period.]

According to Shlomo Ben-Ami’s confession (debating Norman Finkelstein on Democracy Now!) Israel got moving without delay against the spirit of Oslo – I’d say also the letter (e.g. art. I of the Declaration: “It is understood that the interim arrangements are an integral part of the whole peace process and that the negotiations on the permanent status will lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.” Art. IV: “The two sides view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit, whose integrity will be preserved during the interim period.” Art. XXXI n. 7 of the Interim Agreement: “Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”)

What make us feel that the Annapolis show & Road Map enclosed (denied since its birth in 14 points by Israel), fifteen years after the Oslo Accords that were officially repudiated by Ariel Sharon and, practically, by everybody, should have a better chance?

“Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, holds hand to the ANP President Abu Mazen. According to the Israeli daily ‘Haaretz’, Olmert offered Abu Mazen an ‘Agreement of Principles’ on the establishment of a future Palestinian State…” Such are the outcomings of Corriere della Sera (Agr) on the eve of July 25, 2007. Those words “holds hand” leave behind a coat of metaphoric grease which no solvent of pragmatism would as well metaphorically succeed in cushioning. Nevertheless, let’s see the merit of such held a hand.
It is unmistakable that the time stopped for PM Olmert on the eve of Summer 2000, and with remarkable nerve he now tries to lead Mahmoud Abbas, the would-be Palestinian Rais, as of today widely delegitimated, toward the path of a complete failure run by the (by many people late lamented anyway) father and master Yasser Arafat.
After having read the general lines of the proposal on a July 25, 2007 report by Haaretz, any Palestinian hypothetical negotiator would stand up, greet and – whereas appropriate – ask who is the maker of this clowning, half way from deja vu to the worst nightmare.
After the calamity of Oslo, the agreements on principles, their inference, Barak’s tricky unwritten proposals, whose “generosity” Palestinian and Israeli people (the normal ones, those who try and live or survive and feed their children) are paying still now, as of today we see that the “Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is offering to hold negotiations toward an “Agreement of Principles” for the establishment of a Palestinian state on most of the territory of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” In practice a newly made a priori agreement on the principles, due to the fact that – I quote – “it will be very difficult to reach agreement on final status issues, such as borders, Jerusalem and the refugees” (let alone the settlements).
Ther rest should follow, maybe, on the path and the issues which made also Arafat not to panhandle anymore.
In the pleasantness of the proposal (two examples follow below), Olmert put forward the same old escamotage grown out of the Yossi Beilin-Abu Mazen draft of 1995 on every issue afterward questioned in Camp David, and – with minor exceptions – in Taba. So it is for Jerusalem (it’s not a joke! “The Palestinians will be able to declare Jerusalem their capital. In the past Olmert has hinted that he would be willing to withdraw from the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem “on the edge,” which have never been considered part of the historical city”) whereas they try again to relegate a mock up of the Palestinian Capital into the peripheral village of Abu Dis. And so it is for the settlements that should remain – along with the whole surrounding of the Israeli army – in the earth of the West Bank (“large settlement blocs that will remain under Israeli control in the West Bank”), with the mirage of very unlikely minor land swaps that cannot amend the atomization of the Territories into sort of Bantustans. The rest of the speech goes along these lines and it has the usual meaning: Israeli Government do not plan to follow any peace path, moreover it has a further aim, running in extremis toward a two state solution while it’s turning into a corpse, in order to counter the demographic problem.
We hope, maybe in vain, most naive European (and US nationals) or the ones in worst faith, will not follow and spread through the media with the usual chorus to appreciate or deal the last unseemly light comedy as it were a sign of opening and good will. In fact the proposal is a wall so high and massive that even Mahmoud Abbas would not have the nerve and dare not to propose this iterate attempt of pax Romana to the Palestinians, not even to the small part of them who hold quisling collaborationism as a matter of survival and are willing to cooperate in the administration of their own open-work prison, rather than starve, be humiliated and submit to the brutality of an apartheid regime for fifty years more.

After having read 919 words of pro-Israel apologies in three subsequent posts on Prof. Alan Dershowitz’s blog (care of The Huffington Post), I happened to write a short answer and wait – as of today – 24 hours for its actual publishing. Without any success. I’m sure that The Huffington Post is not worried at all about my writing but all the same it’s worth while noting that the three relevant posts before mine ended with a few lines of not-so-subliminal ad of Dershowitz’s (and Joan Peters’ “From Time Immemorial”) work: «land grabbing? during the first aliyah in the late 19th and early 20th century when many jews immigrated to israel to escape anti-semetic violence and persecution, there was only a small arab population and the land was marshy and undeveloped. the jews legally bought property from landlords that didn’t even live there. then they build up the land and turned israel into a desirable place to live. in terms of “vicious killing”, what is more vicious–murdering innocent civillians or attacking terrorist bases of operations? though the net number of palestinian deaths is higher, the proportion of innocent to combatant or terrorist deaths is lower than the proportion of israeli innocent to combatant deaths. once again, israel targets terrorists, and terrorists target civilians. i’m not saying israel is perfect, but it has done more good than any other country would under the circumstances. it is circumscribed by enemies and has suffered an exorbitant number of attacks. it has tried to negotiate peace with unreasonable arab leaders who will concede to nothing less than a palestinian state and no existance of an israeli state. i suggest everyone reads dershowitz’s book, the case for israel. it addresses most of your concerns.»

Having been denied the way in, I’m able to past here below almost literally the contents of my comment, for I guess I stepped into some technical bug or sort of one way moderation. Of course I don’t blame at all the author of the posts I began answering to, but, alas, it seems just that kind of naive disinformation that paves the popular way to looking at the modern Israeli Goliath as if it were an everlasting David. In fact I can’t believe that a young reader outside the USA (not in the least from Israel) may be so enthusiastic aboout the all-evil-terrorists mainstream reports actually depicting the situation in the Middle East.

I was wondering what the main source of the comments just above was. Now I know. Without any order and just for the records, about the amount of land actually bought in Palestine, I’d suggest a look at the “Survey of Palestine”, that is the official book produced by Government of Palestine under British Mandate for the years of 1944-1945, about the Jewish ownership of Palestinian land as of 1943 (about 5.8%). No one can doubt about the Arab States selfish behavior in the issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but the blame on the Arab States seems pretty out of topic looking at the actual situation in the Occupied Territories. Just a look at history in books other than “The Case for Israel” can help in finding something new and different from the apologies of unintentional murders, morality of torture, defensive war, and so on and so forth, talking of the Israeli actions. And what about gaining territories after a “defensive” war? First, we’d better find out how much defensive that war was. Second, a look at International Law may be helpful in finding the answer and see by the way how much it fits with the UNSCR 242. Last I’d say that we can avoid abusing terms as Nazi or Antisemitic, but we can erase as well the word Terrorist from our speech, for it is a conventional term mainly or solely referred to the enemy. We can talk of course about terrorism as a weapon, a lethal instrument which can be used (and it is used) by a large amount of entities, such as States, people, armies, guerrillas. To be very clear, if I am a Commander, a General, a Chief of Staff or something, and I lead an attack against unarmed civilians, bomb a resort or use any device whose aim is terrorizing civilians, then I am a terrorist, no matter what kind of entity I’m in, or what the mainstream says. Either if tomorrow someone will call me a hero or – say – will make me a Prime Minister.

Anyway, for some less pipistro, we got some more Financial Times, showing on June 4 2007 «a new map of the West Bank (see below), 40 years after its conquest by Israel in the Six Day War, [that] gives the most definitive picture so far of a territory in which 2.5m Palestinians are confined to dozens of enclaves separated by Israeli roads, settlements, fences and military zones. Produced by the United Nations’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, it is based on extensive monitoring in the field combined with analysis of satellite imagery. It provides an overall picture officials say is even more comprehensive than charts drawn up by the Israeli military [...] The Israeli justice ministry branded the report as “one-sided, immoral and riddled with mistakes”. » © Financial Times Limited

So much for the records.

Mr. Dershowitz keeps on doing his work as a lawyer. Actually Randy Shaw says that “Dershowitz is a passionate supporter and defender of Israel and, as he does in his criminal defense work, zealously represented his client regardless of their actual innocence.” So what – ask Dersh (The Huffington Post, May 17, 2007) – about the refusal of the Palestinian and Arab leadership to accept the two state solution offered by the United Nations in 1947-1948? Not that complicate question: Palestinians were asked to give up their own land, while new-born-Israelis were being presented with British’ colonialist gift based on British interests and promises and more specifically on their Balfour Declaration. So Palestinians were fighting for their rights while Israeli were of course [at first] pleased with Westerners’ gift. About the fantasy that “700,000 Palestinians left their homes, some voluntarily, some at the urging of Palestinian leaders and some forced out by the Israeli military”, Dershowitz seems to be the only one who did not read [at least] Morris’. Easy to say that Dersh makes his job when he suggests the parties to “give up rights, rights!” [debate at John F. Kennedy School of Government, Nov. 11th, 2005], as he has to know very well who has rights according to international law and who has nothing but their apologizers’ empty speeches.
In one thing, as of today, I agree with Mr. Dershowitz. I think he’s quite right saying that “the level of discourse has become increasingly dumber.” But at the same time I must underline we’re answering a whole page of not-so-new writing (The Huffington Post, May 31, 2007) about the use of such terms as nazi or apartheid, while just at the end of the long speech the author echoes an old myth as: “the Palestinians [who] could have had their own state if they accepted the Barak-Clinton offer at Camp David.” I mean – in my opinion – on the one hand it is not that important if one says that Sharon’s behavior was more or less a crime than Goebbels’, or if one happens to compare the Nazi Holocaust with the otherwise peculiar, daily, humiliating and slaughtering of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. On the other hand, I’d say the core of the topic is in fact a soft, misleading message, aimed at selling the amateurs and spreading anyway a simplistic stain of disinformation. So I’d ask Mr. Dershowitz, one more time, if he really cares for a just solution of the conflict, namely for peace, as he says he does, why he looks at the ball and does not leave the players alone? More widely, neither lobbying on behalf of the blind pro-Israel minority that tries to implement a would-be ethnic cleansing in fact running against the demographic problem, nor spreading ancient myths as if they were the truth in order to apologize for the past is a right approach to the solution of the conflict, and about that unfortunately we cannot erase either history or international law.

While Dr. Norman Finkelstein has to fight hard for due tenure at DePaul University as a result of Alan Dershowitz’s lobbying at The Doha Debate held this month on May 1st at Oxford Union (aired on May 5th by the BBC) 65.6% of the audience voted for the motion “This House believes the pro-Israeli lobby has successfully stifled Western debate about Israels actions”. Norman Finkelstein was among the speakers. Nonetheless on Jerusalem Post (talkbacks) everyone can view the claque now running against the motion. Link

* In 1954, DePaul adopted its current armorial seal with coat of arms and motto: “Viam sapientiae monstrabo tibi” (“I will show you the way of wisdom.” Proverbs, IV, 11).

In Italian see pipistro on line

The news was obviously embarrassing for L’Unità [Italian left wing newspaper] that didn’t even mention it in its homepage. On the contrary the same news filled up for some time the homepages of the main Italian newspapers, before falling into the emphatic, benedictory notes of the tv reports lead by a legion of ordinary valets, then being forgotten.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano celebrated the Remembrance Day by equating, substantially, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, as he stated that “anti-Zionism means negation of the inspirator source of the Jewish State, namely, of the reasons of its birth, yesterday, and of its emergency today, beyond the governments who alternated to the guide of Israel.” (Corriere della Sera, January 25, 2007)
Perhaps his speech – be it right or wrong – made the joy of those who would gain credit for the politics of the State of Israel and forget that the moral credit of the Jewish State does not rest on Israeli’s morality how much as it rests on the European past immorality.
Useless to summarize, or copy-and-past the works by a plethora of academics, journalists, politicians. Useless to remember the writings of Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt, Livia Rokach, Edward Said, Baruch Kimmerling and Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe and Tanya Reinhart, Avi Shlaim and Gideon Levy, Michael Warschawski and Norman Finkelstein, or to be astounded by Benny Morris’, Bill Clinton’s, Dennis Ross’, Shlomo Ben-Ami’s somersaults, or watch at Alan Dershowitz’s law techniques, at Moshe Sharett’s, Yossi Beilin’s rethinkings and at the surreptitious circumlocutions made by Ehud Barak. Superfluous to be indignated at Abraham Foxman’s and John Bolton’s statings, at Yasser Arafat’s market, at Bernard Lewis’ misleading precognition. And horrify at Menachem Begin’s, Yitzhak Shamir’s and Ariel Sharon’s misdeeds, as shivering at Golda Meir’s words and annotate Ben-Gurion’s eloquent gestures.
Then it is useless debating, confronting the sources, analyzing the documents, winnowing the interpretation of documents. And useless watching more at the facts than leaning to the labels. Eventually history got to the history books and over people’s skin and life. Someone, sooner or later, read the history books. But meanwhile, skin and life are lost.
Therefore, we cannot but wait (in order to avoid undue, preposterous accusations of anti-Semitism and in order to clear the birth and the premises, the aims, the tools, the goals and the limits of the Zionist movement) the comments written by those, who from the inside, never leant to that drift. “…That’s called covering your ass—because whatever an Israeli scholar says, you’re pretty safe: no one can accuse the journal of anti-Semitism, none of the usual stuff works.” (Noam Chomsky “Understanding Power” – The New Press, 2002)

“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, ‘What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’” (Yitzhak Rabin, July 1948, in occasion of the conquest of Lydda and Ramla)

“We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them, … we’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” (Ariel Sharon, 1973, talking to W. Churchill III about Zionists’ aims)

[in Italian see pipistro on line]

«The Anti-Defamation League on Thursday blasted the United Nations Human Rights Council for appointing Desmond Tutu as head of its fact-finding mission to the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanun. The mission is charged with investigating a botched Israel Defense Forces shelling in Beit Hanun which killed 19 Palestinian civilians. “The appointment of Desmond Tutu as head of the fact-finding mission to Beit Hanun is an extension of the anti-Israel kangaroo court tactics used by the UN Human Rights Council,” said ADL National Director Abraham Foxman [...] Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, has spoken out against Israel in the past and publicly denounced the Beit Hanun operation. “It is an outrage that cries out to heaven and we must condemn it unequivocally as we do the atrocities committed by suicide bombers against Israeli civilians,” Tutu said…». (Ha’aretz) Maybe Mr Foxman liked better John Bolton for the Job. Unfortunately, one can`t choose his prosecutor, and everyone must rely on the second`s morality and skillfulness. Maybe Abraham Foxman could choose professor Dershowitz to write down another “Case for Israel” in order to justify Tzahal’s attacks and killings in Beit Hanoun, but I doubt he would find out any other comfortable Joan Peters’ quotes of Mark Twain that fit to the issue. Mr Foxman’s remarks about Tutu’s past speaking against Israel (and I quote, “It is an outrage that cries out to heaven…”) seem pretty ridiculous. By the way the man indeed – I mean Tutu – has to deal with an issue that really cries out to heaven, the alleged “mistakenly slaughtering” of some 20 civilians.