Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

I’ve just published my first piece in Truthout, which is a comprehensive account of the Dirar Abusisi extraordinary rendition.  This is the first account of its kind published anywhere outside the Ukraine (there have been previous earlier accounts by AP, the NY Times, and Der Spiegel which were less comprehensive and did not cover major elements of the story which may not have been known to the reporters).

As this is my first piece for Truthout, I hope you’ll read it, recommend it to friends, put it out via social networks, and comment freely in the threads.  Thanks to Max Ajl, who offered me the name of the editor he’s worked with there.

Tomorrow, Josh Breiner will publish an interview he did with me for Walla, the Israeli online news portal.  Link to follow…

UPDATE: For you Hebrew speakers, here it is.  Please add a few positive comments in the Talkbacks if you can.  So far I’ve been called mentally ill, and compared in my “love” for Israel to Adolph Hitler’s.

A friend posted a link to this interview at the far-right Rotter forum and this comment is the highest praise I could imagine, especially coming from someone who probably dislikes my politics intensely:

Just between us, we all rely on him to find out what’s hidden behind these gags.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I do this.

Some of you may’ve erroneously thought Bibi Netanyahu was the leader of Israel’s Likud party.  But you’d be wrong.  He’s actually a Republican representing the U.S.’s 51st state, Israel.  How else to explain the fact that Bibi has given up on having any relationship or impact on Pres. Obama and thrown in his lot with the Republican led Congress, which has invited him to address a joint session and lay out his “bold, new” plan for peace.

As Helen Cooper writes in today’s NY Times, even Bibi knows he’s not going to say anything substantive or persuasive to anyone but his own right-wing back home.  But that’s not the purpose of the speech.  Its real purpose is to pre-empt a (from Bibi’s point of view) far harsher new plan from the Obama administration which Hillary Clinton has been advocating:

Mr. Netanyahu, fearful that his country would lose ground with any Obama administration plan, has been considering whether to pre-empt the White House with a proposal of his own, before a friendly United States Congress, according to American officials and diplomats from the region.

“People seem to think that whoever goes first gets the upper hand,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator…“If Bibi went first and didn’t lay out a bold peace plan, it would be harder for Obama to say, actually, despite what you said to Congress and their applause, this is what I think you should do.”

The political gamesmanship between the two men illustrates how the calculation in the Middle East has changed for a variety of reasons, including the political upheaval in the Arab world. But it also shows the lack of trust and what some officials say is personal animosity between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu.

Bibi is under the deeply mistaken impression that he can divide and conquer by setting a Republican Congress against a “hostile” president.  He seems to forget that it is the latter who determines foreign policy and not the former.  It seems astonishing to me, in that regard, the Congressional Republicans are interjecting themselves directly into a such a debate in a deliberate attempt to upstage the president.  It used to be that the Congress respected the executive branch’s prerogative to make foreign policy.  Not any more obviously.

I think it can only be disastrous for Obama to lay out a new policy initiative regarding Israeli-Palestinian peace talks without committing to do whatever it takes to ensure they will succeed.  Clearly, Obama does not have such will and may never have.  Nor does he have the political capital to enforce his will domestically by staking out such a bold position.  He essentially spent all his capital when he backed a failed effort for a settlement freeze.

The Times article notes that one of the “terms of reference” of a possible new Obama speech would be a demand that Palestinians give up the Right of Return.  This is actually a step backwards from negotiations between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, in which the former conceded Israeli recognition of ROR (though in more a symbolic than substantive way).  To have the U.S. backtrack on that is more than disheartening.  It will leave Palestinians cold and leave the U.S. out in the cold as a viable player in the I-P peace process.

The best Obama can do is to allow an international campaign to take shape calling for a Palestinian state to be created in 1967 borders.  As such an effort gathers steam, he might be able to contribute to it in some way (rather than stymie it as Israel would hope and expect).  I’m sorry to say there is little more that can be expected from the U.S.

Bibi’s upcoming address to Congress is an implicit expression of disdain for Pres. Obama.  The American people, those who care about the Middle East, will sense this and they will not take kindly to it.  They don’t cotton to foreign leaders trying to play one branch off against another.  It seems too cute by half.

The Israeli leader is taking a calculated risk believing that the new Republican Congress has sufficiently weakened Obama that there is little he can do to impose his will on Israel.  This may be true.  But there is much that Obama can refuse to do that can harm Likudist interests as well.  He could refuse to lobby strenuously against a General Assembly vote endorsing Palestinian statehood.  He could tacitly encourage the EU to recognize a Palestinian state.  He could decide not to fight efforts to sanction Israel for refusing to recognize a Palestinian state.  I don’t see Obama doing this yet.  But the time may come…

David Wilder packing on mean streets of Hebron: 'I come to you today with a gun in one hand and tzitit in the other' (apologies to Yasser Arafat)

The settlers of Hebron are a particularly nasty bunch, the meanest of the mean, most vicious of the vicious.  For many of them, the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian.  As if to prove my point, the chief propagandist media-whore of the Hebron community released a statement about the Itamar killings that was breathtaking in its scope and audacity.  I hope that many of you, as you read this, will think back on various tragic historical events in Jewish history and note the parallels and ironies lost on David Wilder:

“The butchers from Awarta…must not be allowed to continue to live. They must be tried, as quickly as possible, and executed. As the verse says, evil must be burned from our midst. Those who directly helped them, before and after the massacre, they must die too. There can be no mercy for participants of a massacre. The entire village, Awarta, must be razed and burned to the ground, all its citizens expelled to Lebanon or Egypt. For they all knew, and did nothing. And that site must remain ash, just as Hametz is burned and left as ash, an eternal reminder that the Jewish people are not meek, that we know what to do and how to do it, when necessary.”

I practically heard the strains of Hitlerian trumpets as I read this.  Note the ironies: who else razed a community and burned it to the ground?  Why, the Romans of course, who destroyed Jerusalem including the Second Temple.  The Babylonians too destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple and sent its inhabitants into exile.  What other people lived in exile in Egypt?  Israelites of course.  It seems especially horrific for Wilder to note this one day before the Pesach seder when we commemorate our own liberation from slavery in Egypt. What other city was burned to the ground and left as ash?  Jerusalem again.  I seem to recall that they even sowed the soil with salt to prevent any agriculture from resuming for future inhabitants. And yes, we Jews, just like leaders of another European country of a few decades ago, “know what to do and how to do it.”  The only difference is the Nazis knew what to do to Jews and how to do it and perpetrated a Holocaust.  Is that what the Wilders of the world want?  A show-Holocaust to persuade Palestinians that we Jews mean business and are prepared to slaughter them if they resist us? In 1942, Czech partisans assassinated SS chief, Reinhardt Heydrich and the Nazis responded by executing many of the men of the town of Lidice, which the Nazis used as a example to the entire population of what happens when you kill a Nazi:

Himmler ordered a series of deportations and executions in Lidice, including the execution of all male residents over 16. The town was later completely eradicated — demolished and burned to the ground, even the graveyard was excavated, the remains therein destroyed.

And guess what?  The Czechs remained largely quiescent throughout the war.  This is what Wilder aims for.  Blood-lust-vengeance on a large-scale to persuade the Palestinians we will kill every last one of them if we have to. Is this the Israel that we want?  H/t to Michael Levin.

NOTE: Apparently, there’s been a Twitter tempest in a teapot earlier today because an Israeli blogger several days ago published a post, Between Lidice and Awarta:  the Nazification of Occupation, which likened Israel’s treatment of Awarta to the Nazi pogrom in Lidice.  The author of the post felt that I’d deliberately taken his idea in the above post and not credited him.  Others joined in and it wasn’t a pretty sight, I gather.  Two commenters here also criticized my alleged pilfering of another author’s ideas.

I want to assure them that I did not read this Hebrew language post and didn’t even know of his blog.  I also want to assure him that had I read his post, I would gladly have credited and linked to his work as I’ve done in this Note.  I’ve written here many times that links are the coin of the realm in blogging.  I link to others as a matter of respect, and I get just as pissed as this author did when people appropriate my stories and ideas without credit.  I sometimes even name such people when I think they should know better and it really ticks me off.  I know how important it is to credit others.  I believe in doing so fervently.

I wish I could say that I was familiar with his blog, Germany, 1933–Israel Today…and Everything in Between.  But I’m much more current with English language blogs than Hebrew.  It’s all I can do to keep up with the Hebrew language media I use in my reporting.  That being said, I welcome readers and fellow bloggers sending me links to Hebrew language blogs that I should read or might want to blog about myself.