I'm afraid I don't have a link for this, but I have just been sent a press release on a debate held last night at the Oxford Union:

66% OF OXFORD UNION AUDIENCE BELIEVE THE PRO-ISRAELI LOBBY STIFLES WESTERN DEBATE ABOUT ISRAEL'S ACTIONS

Oxford, UK: 2nd May – A series of heated exchanges marked the arrival of the Doha Debates at the Oxford Union last night, where two-thirds of the student audience approved a motion claiming that Israel's supporters are stifling western debate.

This was the first time that the Doha Debates, a unique forum for free speech in the Arab world, have held an event outside Qatar.

The debate, hosted by award winning broadcaster Tim Sebastian, took place amid mounting controversy over the role of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States and accusations that it has suppressed criticism of Israel – a charge that the lobby vigorously denies.

Norman Finkelstein, a leading academic critic of Israeli policies, argued in favour of the motion claiming that the Pro-Israel lobby sows confusion to avoid being held to account: "they claim that the conflict is so complicated that it would require rocket science to penetrate its mysteries."

Finkelstein maintained that the American people are ignorant of solutions to the conflict that have been available for 30 years due to the "misinformation, disinformation, and sheer fraud which masquerades as scholarship that is validated by mainstream media."

The journalist and writer Andrew Cockburn supported this view, claiming there are "red lines" in discussing Israel that no politician or journalist in the US would dare cross for fear of being demonised or driven out of public life.

Dr Martin Indyk, former US Ambassador to Israel, and Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, argued strongly against the motion, saying that last night's event in Oxford was proof of a lively debate on the subject. He said controversy over a recent book by former US president Jimmy Carter – branded anti-Semitic in some quarters – was further evidence that criticism of Israel was not being stifled.

His fellow panellist David Aaronovitch, the journalist and broadcaster, dismissed accusations of conspiracy around the lobby, insisting that Americans naturally identified with Israel, a country surrounded by autocracies, because of their belief in democracy: "It wasn't the Israeli lobby that made Egypt, Jordan, or Syria dictatorships," he said.

He added that what may be true in the US is not the case in Europe where there is no such movement to sow confusion or stifle debate: "But if debate is stifled it isn't coming from the pro-Israeli lobby as some Danish cartoonists found out to their cost."

The debate will be broadcast on BBC World on Saturday 5th May and on Sunday 6th May.

Do you think any of the '66%' (and I'm deeply suspicious of any vote which has such a neat figure as two thirds) who believe that the pro-Israeli lobby stifles debate has spotted the irony in recording their vote in the Doha Debates, described as "a unique forum for free speech in the Arab world". That's free speech - in which people can debate issues such as, oh, Israel, Hezbollah and anything else they choose to discuss - being "unique" to the Doha Debates as in not existing elsewhere. Debate is oh-so-free in the Arab world, in Iran, and in the Palestinian Authority, isn't it?

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It's always instructive to go by what people say, rather than the perception of them that mainstream opinion holds. So here's a question to those who say that Hamas is moderating in office - that the reality of authority is leading to greater promise for peace: have you actually read what they say? Do you listen to their words?

Sheik Ahmad Bahr is the acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council. And here's what he said on Friday:

Ahmad Bahr began: "You will be victorious" on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet. Yes, [the Koran says that] "you will be victorious," but only "if you are believers." Allah willing, "you will be victorious," while America and Israel will be annihilated. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah. That is why America's nose was rubbed in the mud in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and everywhere.

Bahr continued and said that America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain. The Muslims "will be victorious, if you are believers." Oh Muslims, I guarantee you that the power of Allah is greater than America, by whom many are blinded today. Some people are blinded by the power of America. We say to them that with the might of Allah, with the might of His Messenger, and with the power of Allah, we are stronger than America and Israel.

The Hamas spokesperson concluded with a prayer, saying: "Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent down His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them."

The voice of peace: Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one.

(5)

This I love (it's a hip hop rendition of Hatikva).

(Via Harry's Place, which also links to this famous and unbearably moving recording by Patrick Gordon Walker of liberated inmates of Bergen Belsen singing Hatikvah on 20th April 1945.) /a>

There are few murkier and more dispiriting stories of late than the kidnap of Alan Johnston and the events which have followed it.

As Caroline Gluck rightly points out in the Jerusalem Post:

POOR JOHNSTON was so biased in favor of the Palestinians that he could have been forgiven for believing he would be safe from Palestinian terror. As the BBC's Middle East Bureau chief Simon Wilson put it, Johnston "is regarded as a Gaza journalist foremost and a foreign journalist second." The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said that Johnston is "famous for his opinions which are supportive of the Palestinians."

Will the fact that the kidnappers seized - and, so it seems, murdered - a journalist so friendly to the Palestinians contribute in any way to a more level-headed assessment of the nature of Palestinian terrorism? Of course not. Anyone who has ever followed the media would know what the next stage of this affair would be: blame the Israelis.

Right on cue, the NUJ voted to boycott Israeli goods.

When this decision came under attack, the NUJ defended it on the grounds that the boycott was a quid pro quo for the Palestinian journalists' union opposing the kidnap of Johnstone.

Do I really need to point out what this means? Reversing the logic: Palestinian journalists think it's fine to kidnap other journalists but in this instance are prepared to oppose a kidnapping if a foreign union votes to boycott Israel.

Not that anyone can really think that that was all there is to it. Any observer of the NUJ would not be in the least bit shocked that the union decided to boycott for no other reason than that Israel exists.

The boycott is, in any case, puzzling. As Caroline Gluck continues:

It will be interesting to see how they manage to implement their boycott and work as reporters at the same time. Since Israeli engineers developed their cell phones, their Pentium chip computers, their voicemail and their instant messenger software, boycotting Israel will involve giving up their ability to quickly amass their anti-Israel propaganda, vomit it out on their computers and send it off to their Israel-bashing editors.

It's important in all this not to lose sight of the fact that a man has been murdered by Palestinian terrorists. It is entirely right that there were demonstrations, protests and attemots to free him. But isn't it about time that the same standard was applied by those who were protesting for Johnston's release to Israeli victims of Palestinian terror?

(8)

Tom Gross highlights a letter in the New York Times:

To the Editor:

David Brooks reports that "moderate Arab reformers" have traced the problems in Iraq, Iran and other Middle East hot spots to a country roughly the size of Massachusetts that dominates the affairs of its Arab neighbors and operates a puppet government in Washington as well.

O.K., but what do the hard-liners think?

Michael Smith
Cynthiana, Ky.

Melanie Phillips has a superb post, wrapping up two examples of what passes today for BBC analysis (by Ed Stourton and - him again - Jeremy Bowen) and a vile piece in yesterday's Guardian by Geoffrey Wheatcroft:

Stourton assumed that Israel’s attempt to defend itself against that aggression was illegitimate — and that no reasonable person could disagree. He asked the former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, why the Americans and the British had not supported the international calls for an immediate cease-fire.

...ES: Your former UN colleague the Syrian ambassador said to us that America was deliberately frustrating diplomatic attempts during those last two weeks of July precisely so Israel could have its head. From what you have just said, that’s a fair analysis of what was happening.

JB: I was damn proud of what we did.

Bolton was reacting to this line of questioning just as any normal person with a sense of justice would react. Faced with the proposition that a country had finally attempted to defend itself against an enemy which had constantly waged war against it, and that it did so by trying to destroy that enemy, he asked: ‘What was wrong with that?’ And of course, to a normal person there’s not only nothing wrong with it but it is the right and moral thing to do, to protect one’s country against further attack by attempting to destroy the enemy.

But in the twisted world of BBC values, it appears, Israel has no right to defend itself. Because when Stourton says the US and UK refused to call for a ceasefire, that’s not quite correct. They actually called upon Hezbollah from the start to stop its aggression. What Stourton — and the UK media and Labour party — found so unacceptable was that Bush and Blair didn’t insist that Israel should stop defending itself. In other words, that they did not insist that Israel surrender. And surrender, what’s more, to an army of Iran which has declared not only its intention to wipe Israel off the map but also to destroy the west and conquer the Arab world too.

Which is why Stourton goes on to report — in apparent amazement — that the Arab world was secretly hoping that Israel would indeed crush Hezbollah. Because the Arab world has every interest in Iran being defeated —as does the west, as do Bush and Blair and as do all sane and sentient people. That’s why it was in everyone’s interests for Israel to be allowed to defend itself by destroying its Iranian enemy before that enemy destroyed it. That’s why the US and the Arab world were so put out when Israel failed to destroy it.

But astoundingly, the BBC and the British left and a considerable proportion of the rest of Britain thinks the real problem was not Iranian aggression but that Israel might actually have defeated the army of Iran. They find it simply unconscionable that Israel was not required to surrender. According to Stourton, it is apparently a scandal that the US supported Israel in its self-defence; indeed, he represents this as some kind of sinister conspiracy that he has now unearthed through his amazing journalistic acumen. Democratic allies supporting each other in the great fight against fascism! What an outrage!

As for Wheatcroft's rant: let's just say it trots out pretty much every classic antisemitic theme going. As Melanie puts it:

Wheatcroft’s final charge, that British foreign policy is based on the interest of ‘another country’ —by which he presumably meant Israel — is simply contemptible. Once again, it is astonishing that this kind of sub-Protocols of the Elders of Zion racial libel about the Jews being a sinister conspiracy to subvert the foreign policy of Britain against the national interest is published in a mainstream British newspaper.

Indeed, it more or less proves my point in my Telegpraph piece below, prompting comments such as this on the Guardian site:

Jews in the UK are not normal people, they are Anglo-Jewish, and their loyalty to the UK is in question. No matter how many generations or centuries they have been in England, they are still outsiders.

Do read Melanie's full piece.

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Another day, another UN report proving that Robert Fisk is spewing out nonsense again.

Here's what Mr Fisk wrote last October:

[S]cientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hizbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium-based munitions may now also be included in Israel's weapons inventory - and were used against targets in Lebanon.

…Asked by The Independent if the Israeli army had been using uranium-based munitions in Lebanon this summer, Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: "Israel does not use any weaponry which is not authorised by international law or international conventions." This, however, begs more questions than it answers.

…Chris Bellamy, the professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University, who has reviewed the Busby report, said: "At worst it's some sort of experimental weapon with an enriched uranium component the purpose of which we don't yet know. At best - if you can say that - it shows a remarkably cavalier attitude to the use of nuclear waste products."

…Many Lebanese, however, long ago concluded that the latest Lebanon war was a weapons testing ground for the Americans and Iranians, who respectively supply Israel and Hizbollah with munitions. Just as Israel used hitherto-unproven US missiles in its attacks, so the Iranians were able to test-fire a rocket which hit an Israeli corvette off the Lebanese coast, killing four Israeli sailors and almost sinking the vessel after it suffered a 15-hour on-board fire.

What the weapons manufacturers make of the latest scientific findings of potential uranium weapons use in southern Lebanon is not yet known. Nor is their effect on civilians.

It's the usual Fisk style of piece - entirely partial, pulling together all sorts of outlandish and wild accusations against Israel based on the default premise that everything Israel does is wrong.

And it's the usual Fisk style of piece because it's completely wrong:

A panel of experts from the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other international agencies announced a unanimous determination Monday that no depleted-uranium weapons had been used in the summer 2006 war in Lebanon. "To date, there is no evidence of depleted-uranium-ammunitions use during the 2006 conflict in Lebanon," Didier Louvat, IAEA head of radioactive waste issues, told a news conference hosted by the National Council for Scientific Research in Bir Hassan.

…Senior UNEP' scientist Mario Burger conducted intensive research on soil samples collected in South Lebanon at the Spiez government laboratory in Switzerland. "No use of weapons containing depleted uranium" was found, he said, adding that "no use of weapons containing any uranium - depleted, natural, or enriched" was found.

An above-normal level of concentration of uranium had been found in Khiam, Burger said, but an investigation showed the level of uranium was consistent with levels naturally occurring in soil in the area.

The findings contradicted claims made in December by Chris Busby, secretary for the European Committee on Radiation Risk, who said there was "no way the signs of uranium found in Khiam were the result of natural or industrial materials. Their only source is nuclear reactors."

Not, of course, that Fisk believes anything he is told which paints Israel in a bad light. Of course not.

(3)

This is an astonishing piece:

Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Ed-ward Lawrence - better known as "Lawrence of Arabia" - and renowned as a champion of Arab independence, actually had "a sort of contempt for the Arabs" and was an advocate of Jewish statehood from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, according to acclaimed British historian Sir Martin Gilbert.

Lawrence believed that only with a sovereign Jewish entity in the area would the Arabs "ever make anything of themselves," according to Gilbert.

T.E. Lawrence, immortalized on film by Peter O'Toole, fought with Arab irregulars against the Ottoman Empire in World War I, wore Arabian clothes and adopted many Arab customs. He is widely perceived, Gilbert told The Jerusalem Post this week, as "the great Arabist, right? The man who supported the Arabs, and who pushed for Arab nationhood in the 1920s. He's always pictured wearing Arab robes."

The "astonishing" truth, however, Gilbert went on, is that Lawrence was "a serious Zionist. He believed that the only hope for the Arabs of Palestine and the rest of the region was Jewish statehood - that if the Jews had a state here, they would provide the modernity, the 'leaven,' as he put it, with which to enable the Arabs to move into the 20th century."

Gilbert, who said he had written about this issue in his forthcoming book, Churchill and the Jews, went so far as to say that Lawrence "had a sort of contempt for the Arabs, actually."

"He felt that only with a Jewish presence and state would the Arabs ever make anything of themselves. And, by a Jewish state, he meant a Jewish state from the Mediterranean shore to the River Jordan," said Gilbert, adding his own comment that this "will never come to pass."

Blimey.

(4)

If you don't already look at Tom Gross' Middle East despatch, I thoroughly recommend it. He always unearths nuggets. This week he makes a very good point about the use of the word 'apartheid' in his coverage of 'Israeli Apetheid Week':

Israel is, of course, not an apartheid state. Indeed it is the opposite. It is by far the most egalitarian state in the Middle East. Arab Israelis enjoy social and political freedoms and benefits only dreamed of by minority groups in most other countries in the world.

Israel grants full freedom of speech to its Arab parliamentarians, even when they call for Israel to be dismantled and for Hizbullah to bomb Israeli Jews. There is almost no another country in the world which permits such a degree of freedom to its internal opposition groups.

By saying that Israeli Arabs and Palestinians are being subjected to apartheid, Carter and others not only insult Israeli Jews, but also grossly malign black South Africans. Nelson Mandela and other black South Africans have been an inspiration to the world in the way they have demonstrated peaceful coexistence with the white population, whereas both the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas leadership and their supporters have repeatedly called for the mass murder of Jews, and taught kindergarten children that blowing up buses full of Israeli children is a glorious objective.

There's also a link to a superb piece by Irshad Manji.

(2)

A few days ago I revealed the now infamous Jeremy Bowen memo.

This week's Socialist Worker has this piece on the Middle East.

Question: Spot the difference,

Answer: As far as I can see, there isn't one.

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Via Samizdata, this from Denis Leary:

I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people live in one place and get it over with.

I have a short piece on the Carter book at The First Post.

(3)

Joy of joys. Via Clive Davis, here's the wonderful Al Jazeera spoof on the Daily Show. When I saw it on TV (if you don't watch it on More 4 at 8.30 you're missing funniest programme around) I laughed out loud.

Like Clive, I too watch Al Jazeera. Before it started I assumed it would be grotesque anti-Israel, anti-Western propaganda. I couldn't have been more wrong. The opinion slots are just that, but the news is by far the best coverage of the Middle East I have ever seen. Israelis are given proper air time, as are Palestinians. All sides of a story are covered. I couldn't be more impressed. And not least because it blows away any credibility the BBC might have when it claims to be objective.

UPDATE: I realise there is a big difference between the English and Arabic versions of Al Jazeera.

(4)

A BBC mole has sent me this briefing for BBC staff from the BBC's Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, on what lies ahead this year.

It’s all too predictable. The "fragmentation" of Palestinian society has, in Mr Bowen’s view, nothing to do with the Palestinians and everything to do with Israel (“the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government”). Indeed, Israel is to blame for almost everything. The Palestinians are not responsible for anything; Israel is the culpable party.

He has contempt for every Israeli politician he mentions; Ehud Barak, for instance, is described as having killed "various Palestinians", written as if he did so for the sake of it.

If this is what passes for high-level analysis at the BBC, is it any wonder its reporting is so poisonous?

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Bowen
To: Editorial Board; Newsg World-Bureaux-Eds; Newsg World Asseds; News Leadership Group; Mark Byford & PA; Simon Wilson-NEWS; Jerusalem Bureau;
Newsg World-Affairs-Unit
Sent: Fri Jan 05 15:16:16 2007
Subject: FW: Mini briefing on the Israeli and Palestinians

2007 has started as unpromisingly as 2006 ended. The outlook is bleak because of fundamental instabilities and weaknesses on both sides.

Israel's major military incursion into Ramallah on Thursday, killing four Palestinians after a botched arrest operation, was a reminder of the non stop pressures of the Israeli occupation.

What is new in the last year, and will be one of the big stories in the coming twelve months, is the way that Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting.

The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government which are destroying Palestinian institutions that were anyway flawed and fragile.

The result is that internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah is getting worse. On Thursday six people were killed in clashes between them in Gaza. The death of a major figure on either side would spark something much more serious.

In Israel the political turmoil that followed the inconclusive war with Hezbollah last summer continues unabated.

There are signs that PM Ehud Olmert is trying to set up his coalition partner Amir Peretz as a scapegoat for Israel's problems during the war and since, by ousting him from the defence ministry. Olmert may be hoping he'll get away with it because Peretz's position as Labour leader is already under attack from within his own party. Peretz's people say
that if Olmert tries it, the government will fall.

Even if does manage to demote Peretz, he probably won't improve his parlous position in the polls. It is exactly a year since Ariel Sharon's stroke, so Israelis are comparing their lost leader with the one they have now, and finding him wanting. An air of incompetence hangs around Olmert when it comes to military matters. Typical was the timing of the
raid in Ramallah, which ruined yesterday's summit with Mubarak which was supposed to bring closer the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Olmert wants to replace Peretz at the defence ministry with Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister. Barak is a retired general, former head of the Israeli army and its most decorated soldier. (Among his many exploits was disguising himself as a woman during a raid in Beirut to kill various Palestinians). The feeling in Israel is that 2007 will be a year of wars, so aside from coalition politics Olmert wants to have a warrior next to him when they make the tough decisions. The intray could include whether or not to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

Another serious problem for Olmert is that yet another corruption scandal is lapping close to him. This time the head of the PM's office in Jerusalem is under house arrest for her alleged role in corruption in Israel's tax authority. Olmert is not yet implicated, though he's already been under investigation over separate allegations.

The political crises in Israel - and violent political disintegration among the Palestinians - are not just internal matters. They make it impossible for the Israelis and the Palestinians to engage in a meaningful political dialogue, assuming that their protestations that they want one are true. (The one meeting that Olmert has had with Mahmoud Abbas can hardly be called a process.)

Only strong Israeli and Palestinian leaders would be able to make the tough choices necessary to relieve the serious pressures that are building up in the holy land. To persuade their people to make the necessary concessions, they would need a strong political base, which neither Olmert nor Abbas possess.

Because they are weak - many would say lame ducks - don't expect any progress. And since an uneasy status quo cannot hold, no political progress will equal more violence.

UPDATE: One of the commenters points out that, as the subject line starts 'FW:', Mr Bowen might not have written this. That's a good point, but I have seen the original and the subject line on my version has been altered to protect the identity of the source. (Nothing else has been changed.) It is indeed written by Jeremy Bowen.

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Here's a must-read review by Alan Dershowitz of Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It seems to be the sort of book where the title says it all:

"Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" is so biased that it inevitably raises the question of what would motivate a decent man like Jimmy Carter to write such an indecent book. Whatever Mr. Carter's motives may be, his authorship of this ahistorical, one-sided, and simplistic brief against Israel forever disqualifies him from playing any positive role in fairly resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. That is a tragedy because the Carter Center, which has done much good in the world, could have been a force for peace if Jimmy Carter were as generous in spirit to the Israelis as he is to the Palestinians.

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This piece by Moshe Arens on the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as minister for strategic thinking about Iran is well worth a read:

[A]s we know the irrational player, the "crazy one," has certain advantages in such a situation. Ever since John von Neumann pioneered the game theory, the study of the interaction between parties having conflicting interests, the difficulties of dealing with a non-rational player have been clearly recognized.

...But when a rational player confronts an irrational one, the irrational player has a decided advantage. While he is counting on the rational response of his opponents to his moves, they don't know what to expect of him. Maybe their best bet is just to let him have what he wants, rather than risking his irrational response to their move. Given the reticence of the U.S. and European nations in facing up to the bellicose, adventurous leaders of Iran and North Korea pursuing their nuclear ambitions, one begins to wonder whether they have not decided to revert to such a strategy. Maybe it is better to be at least temporarily safe than sorry.

But what if the irrational player is confronted by an irrational opponent? Now here is a brain-buster. And maybe this is what Olmert had in mind. Let Lieberman act the role of the irrational player, and now let's see what Ahmadinejad will do. Maybe this is the way to outwit the madman in Teheran. Lieberman's past statements about bombing Teheran, destroying the Aswan dam, laying waste to Gaza, and stripping Israel's Arab citizens of their citizenship might very well make Ahmedinejad believe that now he is up against an entirely different type of opponent.

(1)

The distinguished scholar, Emanuele Ottolenghi - the new director of the Transatlantic Institute - is anwering questions all week at Ha'aretz. You can catch up here.

Alan Dershowitz has a truly damning piece about The Guardian's distortions here at the Jerusalem Post.

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If you haven't already discovered it, Tom Gross' 'Mideast Dispatch' is a regularly updated treasure trove of background and stories. His latest, just posted, is typical. The contents list is varied and intriguing:

CONTENTS

1. Benedict XVI shoots and kills on al-Jazeera
2. A cartoon from Australia
3. And the pope with a swastika
4. And the pope connected to a fuse
5. Not your usual messages by the Cathedral
6. Danish newspaper reprints Iranian Holocaust cartoons
7. Greek government includes Iranian Holocaust cartoonist
8. "Night of Bush (and Blair) capturing"

You can read it here.

South African ministers are now, it seems, allowed another kind of hatred: that of Israel.

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Here's a good Alan Dershowitz piece on how Human Rights Watch and AI redefine 'war crime' so it comes to mean 'anything Israel does'.

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Hot Air has a great post on what looks like more 'fauxtography', as they call it.

This picture by AP photographer Nasser Nasser, taken on August 6th, comes vis that post, and shows what purports to be a car hit by an Israeli missile:

You and I might think that it looks more like a car which has been given the Basil Fawlty treatment with a couple of hammers. Especially when you look at what a Katyusha rocket - less powerful than an Israeli missile - does to a car (via Little Green Footballs):

(4)

Almost as bad as my comments section:

Two Palestinian families went after each other with knives and clubs at a wedding after one guest cursed the leader of Lebanon's Hizbullah guerrilla group, Palestinian security officials said Monday. Seven people were seriously wounded, they said.

It took police three hours to break up the brawl that erupted Sunday night in the village of Aqada near the West Bank town of Jenin after a critic called Sheik Hassan Nasrallah "a dog," they said.

Iain Dale has a video of a German TV news programme's exposure of the 'Green Helmet Man' in Qana, using dead children as propaganda puppets for Hezbollah. Do look at it.

Given Hezbollah's contempt for Lebanese lives, it wouldn't surprise me if he'd killed the boy himself to use as a tool.

(3)

This is what the President of the International Red Cross has to say about the 'destruction' of Lebanon:

The beaches in Beirut are packed and businesses downtown are doing well, Kellenberger said...

I've taken down a picture here which on reflection is in poor taste.

(2)

The story behind the story in the Middle East today is the proxy war, as Israel, on behalf of the US, takes on Hezbollah, which fights on behalf of Iran and Syria. Indeed, one can widen it further and describe the participants as proxies for the West versus militant Islam.

This analysis of the conflict sometimes mentions, in passing, Russia’s declining influence. But there is another player that has somehow received almost no coverage.

For decades China has been building up influence in the Middle East. It suits China’s strategy well that coverage has been almost non-existent. As Deng Xiaoping once put it, China must “hide brightness and nourish obscurity . . . to bide our time and build up our capabilities”. As China develops into the role of global power, its influence on the region is no longer obscure; it cannot now be ignored.

The original postwar Middle East proxies were the US and the Soviet Union. Washington supporting Israel and the Kremlin sponsoring enemy regimes and their terrorist offshoots. But the Sino-Soviet split, which began in the 1960s, meant a lifting of the constraint on China getting involved, and it soon began to develop ties to countries that were not under Soviet influence, such as Egypt under Sadat.

A brilliant analysis of China’s role by Barry Rubin, in the Middle East Review of International Affairs, describes China’s first steps thus: “As hope for global revolution faded and Beijing switched its partners from tiny opposition groups to governments, China now projected itself as leader of the Third World, struggling against the hegemony of the two superpowers, the USSR and the United States. Lacking the strength and level of development of other great powers, China would try to make itself the head of a massive coalition of the weaker states.” That meant, in the Middle East, Israel’s enemies.

Today countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan — all key states in the region — have strong ties to China, which they are all likely to see as a counterbalance to American power in the Middle East and beyond.

As President Jiang Zemin put it in 1994, US “hegemony” should be opposed, in part by helping countries such as Iran, which were already fighting that battle. But China’s strategy dovetailed geopolitics with economic necessity. Without access to oil markets, China had to fuel economic expansion by turning to more neglected suppliers, such as Iran, Iraq and Sudan. And with a growing consumption of Gulf oil, so China has had to direct its security policy towards ensuring that the US will not be able to interfere with the flow of oil. This means developing ever stronger political and strategic relationships with oil exporters.

Jiang’s state visit in 1999 to Saudi Arabia cemented what he termed a “strategic oil partnership”. In 1996 Saudi exported 60,000 barrels per day to China. By 2000 exports stood 350,000 bpd (17 per cent of Beijing’s oil imports). Iranian oil exports rose even faster, from 20,000 bpd in 1995 to 200,000 bpd in 2000.

The Middle East is now China’s fourth largest trading partner. But its trade is hardly traditional. As Rubin puts it: “Being so late in entering the region — and having less to offer in economic or technology terms than the United States, Russia, Japan, and Europe — China must go after marginal or risky markets . . . supplying customers no one else will service with goods no one else will sell them.” What that means, of course, is arms.

In the war-by-proxy analysis, Iran is rightly said to be the power and arms supplier behind Hezbollah. But the issue of where Iran’s arms come from has been ignored. China has sold Iran tanks, planes, artillery, cruise, anti-tank, surface-to-surface and anti-aircraft missiles as well as ships and mines. It is also Iran’s main supplier of unconventional arms and is thought by almost all monitors to be illicitly involved in supplying key elements in Iran’s chemical and nuclear weapons programme. This is despite China being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

China has sold nuclear reactors to Algeria, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and Chinese nuclear weapons designs were found in Libya. It has also negotiated with Syria on the sale of M11 ballistic missiles. China is one of the few global suppliers of ballistic missiles. and can charge a heavy price. It demanded of the Saudis, for instance, to whom it sold CSS2 missiles, payment in cash, ensuring both the cementing of a key strategic relationship and total deniability of the sale.

Both nations have kept the relationship as secret as possible, but one expert, Robert Mullins, estimates that at least 1,000 Chinese military advisers have been based at Saudi missile installations since the mid-1990s. Such secret deals are handled by Polytechnologies Incorporated, a defence firm controlled by the People’s Liberation Army, which both installs weapons and trains handlers.

But like all the most successful illicit traders, China is ideologically profligate in its relations. Keen to supply weapons to Israel’s enemies in return for oil, it is equally happy to trade with Israel in return for its technology. As Benjamin Netanyahu put it to the Chinese when, as Prime Minister, he championed an Israeli investment in China: “Israeli knowhow is more valuable than Arab oil.” The estimates are that there has been between $1 billion and $3 billion of arms trade between China and Israel. But in this case the flow of arms and weapons technology has been from Israel to China.

In the immediate analysis of the present conflict, it is clearly Iran and Syria that, as President Bush put it, should “stop doing this shit”. But any deeper explanation of the realpolitik of the Middle East has to include the insidious role of the Chinese, the 21st century’s next superpower.

(2)

One of the great myths of World War Two is that the Dutch somehow protected Jews. The claim is nonsense. A higher proportion of Dutch Jews were murdered by the Nazis than anywhere else in Western Europe, in large measure because they were given up by collaborators (Simon Kuper's brilliant book about Ajax football team is fascinating on Dutch antisemitism).

The real heroes were the Danes. And it's heartening to learn that they remain strong in their opposition to the murder of Jews. This story from the Copenhagen Posthttp://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1679131/posts gives the details:

Danes staunchly support the Israelis in their current battle against Hezbollah, according to a new Gallup poll initiated by the daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende. The poll indicates that 57 percent believe Hezbollah is to blame for the conflict, while only 37 percent point the finger at Israel.

By the same token, 48 percent of Danes sympathise with Israel, while only seven percent support Hezbollah.

There is also a majority backing for the government's handling of the situation in Lebanon. Sixty-one percent of the Danish public supports the government's decisions not to move forces from Iraq to Lebanon as a peacekeeping force, and also its hesitance to criticise Israel more forcefully over the Lebanon situation.

'I'm happy about the support for the government's course in this complex conflict,' stated Minister of Foreign Affairs Per Stig Møller.

(3)

Not, of course, that a peace-loving nation such as Syria has anything but honourable intentions in supporting Hezbollah, but this is what the Syrian Foreign Minister has to say about the proposed UN resolution:

He added that a US-French draft resolution to end the war "adopted Israel's point of view only." Underlining his support for Hizbullah, Moallem said, "as Syria's foreign minister I hope to be a soldier in the resistance."

Salloukh said that "Israel cannot take in peace what it had failed to take in war."

Since Israel has spent the last few years withdrawing from Lebanon and Gaza and has no wish to make new inroads, and the key things Israel hasn't secured are peace and freedom from terror, his words can have only one meaning: that Syria will not allow Israel to live in peace.

(1)

James Higham links to a very interesting piece from The Age on Arab disquiet over Hezbollah over the Sunni-Shiite divide:

Zabadani, a Syrian resort in the mountains facing Lebanon, fills with Gulf Arabs each summer. Many interviewed along the main street said they supported Hezbollah in its fight with Israel, but some made their distaste for Shiites clear.

"They think they will be the leaders of all Muslims, and I don't want that," a 45-year-old high school maths teacher from Riyadh said. "Hezbollah is Iranian; everyone knows that."

...Since the beginning of this outbreak of violence, extremist Sunni groups such as al-Qaeda have tried to portray their struggle as parallel with Hezbollah's, as a fight against Zionism and the sinful West. But the late al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, issued long screeds that labelled all Shiites heretics deserving death. Even mainstream Sunni leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan spoke darkly of a "Shiite crescent" emerging from Iran through the Persian Gulf to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

(2)

The Times had an interview with Ehud Olmert on 2nd August. One answer in particular deserves to be read in full:

Q: But there is a sense in the world, and you must be aware of it, of lack of "proportionality". Many people question how after two soldiers kidnapped and eight killed by Hezbollah we are now seeing upwards of 400 dead and rising in Lebanon. How can such an initial incident justify such a huge response from Israel?

A: I think that you are missing a major part. The war started not only by killing eight Israeli soldiers and abducting two but by shooting Katyusha and other rockets on the northern cities of Israel on that same morning. Indiscriminately.

Now we know that for years Hezbollah - assisted by Iran - built an infrastructure of a very significant volume in the south part of Lebanon to be used against Israeli people. The most obvious, simple, way to describe it to the average British person is: can you imagine seven million British citizens sitting for 22 days in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham in Newcastle, in Brighton and in other cities? Twenty two days in shelters because a terrorist organisation was shooting rockets and missiles on their heads? What would have been the British reaction to that? Do you know of a country that would have responded to such a brutal attack on its citizens softer than Israel did? Based on my knowledge of history no country in Europe would have responded in such a restrained manner as Israel did.

I don’t want now to draw comparisons [but] one could ask the question what precisely did the European forces [do] in Kosovo 10 years ago. How many innocent civilians were killed in Kosovo 10 years ago? We can draw on and on these comparisons.

What are we talking about? More than a million Israelis are sitting 22 days in shelters because of the fear of terrorists. In every single case...that we kill an uninvolved civilian in Lebanon, we consider it as a failure for Israel. And you know how many Israelis raise their voices as a result of this? And they don’t have to because we feel that we failed when we killed uninvolved people.

The difference between us and Hezbollah is that when we kill innocent people we consider it a failure, when they kill innocent people they consider it a success.

Tell me, who are they aiming at when they shoot already 2800 rockets on Haifa, Hanariya, Akko, Sefat, Afula and the rest of the places, if not to kill innocent people? So I’m sorry for every individual that was killed that was not involved.

And by the way, how do you really know that 400 innocent civilians were killed? How do you know who is innocent and who is not? Why? This is not an army. They don’t wear uniforms that distinguish them from other civilians. We didn’t attack any of the Christian quarters of Beirut. We didn’t attack any of the Christian residential areas in any part of Lebanon. We attacked only those areas where they had the Katyusha launchers, where they had the missile launchers, where they had the command positions of Hezbollah, where they had the storage houses, the logistic centres and so on and so forth.

So the fact that people were killed there who were not dressed in uniforms doesn’t mean that they were innocent civilians. There were Hezbollah people, they are the terrorists. Did you ever see terrorists dressed with military uniforms like we have in our army? No.

(1)

Tom Gross, a one-man truth machine, has this terrific piece on media bias against Israel. I have my issues with the BBC, but his piece makes clear the Beeb is far from alone.

(2)

Here's what a CNN reporter has to say about Hezbollah's tactics:

We'd come to get a look at the damage and had hoped to talk with a Hezbollah representative. Instead, we found ourselves with other foreign reporters taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah. Young men on motor scooters followed our every movement. They only allowed us to videotape certain streets, certain buildings. Once, when they thought we'd videotaped them, they asked us to erase the tape. These men are called al-Shabab, Hezbollah volunteers who are the organization's eyes and ears.

...Hezbollah representatives are with us now but don't want to be photographed. They'll point to something like that [CDs on a wall] and they'll say, ‘Well, look, this is a store.’ The civilians lived in this building. This is a residential complex. And while that may be true, what the Israelis will say is that Hezbollah has their offices, their leadership has offices and bunkers even in residential neighborhoods. And if you're trying to knock out the Hezbollah leadership with air strikes, it's very difficult to do that without killing civilians.

As bad as this damage is, it certainly could have been much worse in terms of civilian casualties. Before they started heavily bombing this area, Israeli warplanes did drop leaflets in this area, telling people to get out. The civilian death toll, though, has angered many Lebanese. Even those who do not support Hezbollah are outraged by the pictures they've seen on television of civilian casualties.

Civilian casualties are clearly what Hezbollah wants foreign reporters to focus on. It keeps the attention off them — and questions about why Hezbollah should still be allowed to have weapons when all the other militias in Lebanon have already disarmed.

After letting us take pictures of a few damaged buildings, they take us to another location, where there are ambulances waiting. This is a heavily orchestrated Hezbollah media event. When we got here, all the ambulances were lined up. We were allowed a few minutes to talk to the ambulance drivers. Then one by one, they've been told to turn on their sirens and zoom off so that all the photographers here can get shots of ambulances rushing off to treat civilians. That's the story that Hezbollah wants people to know about.

These ambulances aren't responding to any new bombings. The sirens are strictly for effect.

Here's a further, more accurate map of the 'devastation' of Beirut:

(via Honest Reporting)

(2)

Here's more on the idea that Qana is not what it seemed:

Anti-Syrian elements in Lebanon openly point finger at Hizbullah as guilty of killing of dozens of civilians in order to curtail plans for disarming group. 'Hizbullah has placed rocket launcher on building's roof and brought invalid children inside in bid to provoke Israeli response,' they write

Here's what Iran has to say:

Iranian FM calls for immediate Lebanon cease-fire

And here's what the EU has to say:

EU draft statement calls for immediate cease-fire

I make no comment, merely observe.

These two stories, taken together, are interesting. They may turn out to have no salience, but they are both certainly possible:

First this, from Haaretz:

The Israel Defense Forces indicated yesterday that it might not have been responsible for the deaths of at least 54 Lebanese, including 37 children , when a building bombed in an Israeli air strike in the village of Qana collapsed yesterday - but was unable to offer an alternative explanation.

There is an unexplained gap of about seven hours between the one Israeli air strike that hit the Qana building housing the civilians, which took place around 1 A.M. Sunday, and the first report that the building had collapsed, said the chief of staff of the Israel Air Force, Brigadier General Amir Eshel. Speaking at a press conference at the Kirya military complex in Tel Aviv last night, Eshel said that of three Israeli air strikes on Qana early Sunday, only the first strike hit the building in which the civilians were staying. The other two hit areas at least 400 meters away.

"I can't say whether the house collapsed at 12 A.M. or at 8 A.M.," said Eshel. "According to foreign press reports, and this is one of the reports we are relying on, the house collapsed at 8 A.M. We do not have testimony regarding the time of the collapse. If the house collapsed at 12 A.M., it is difficult for me to believe that they waited eight hours to evacuate it."

Then there is this, too:

This morning, I posted some speculation that the 30-foot banner of Secretary of State Rice that miraculously showed up in Qana yesterday was probably prepared in advance, leading to questions whether the entire event was staged. Tonight, reader Postermaker made the following comments about that blog post:

Since I do banners like this for a living, I can tell you it take more than a few hours depending on the equipment. A banner that large can be done one of two ways. With a grant format printer. It would probably take about 3-4 hours to print, then hours more to sew and grommet so it could hung. It would have to be Made of heavy duty material or one that was reinforced or the sheer weight would rip it apart.

The other way it to use a smaller series of machines all color calibrated and produce sections. At that point they would have to be stretch the length of the banner ( read large facility) and sewn together. Additional support would go on the tops and bottoms.

In short if it was related Qana and went up within two hours- four hours, it was done prior to the bomb hitting. No other way. Just putting an image together that large on a computer with Type would take a few hours.

Then color tests, proofs and finally printing. That would be an all day affair for most print houses even with a grand format printer. The cost would be in the thousands.

Then you would have to transport it.

As I say, both may - indeed, probably will - be red herrings. But given Hezbollah's media savvy, and their contempt for human life, it's far from impossible that they staged the entire thing.

(via The Corner.)

(4)

Here's the man who is supposedly caught in the middle of Hezbollah and Israel has to say:

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud said that Hizbullah's victory was a victory of the entire Lebanese nation. He warned that the Lebanese army "would join the battle" if Israel launches a large-scale invasion of Lebanon.

Lahoud stressed that Hizbullah cannot be disarmed since the Lebanese army was not as strong as the IDF. He objected to the deployment of a new international force in southern Lebanon but noted that Lebanon would support the strengthening of the existing UNIFIL force.

(1)

Here's what the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, who is supposedly unable rather than unwilling to disarm Hezbollah, had to say when asked about a call from Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah to take advantage of Hezbollah's s fight against Israel:

We are in a strong position and I thank the Sayyed for his efforts. I also thank all those who sacrifice their lives for the independence and sovereignty of Lebanon.

Find me the reference to disarming Hezbollah, or the call for it to stop bombing Israel, in that.

(1)

Not all of the European establishment are misguided. Some people get it; this is Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister:

The current war in Lebanon is not a war by the Arab world against Israel; rather, it is a war orchestrated by the region's radical forces - Hamas and Islamic Jihad among the Palestinians, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria and Iran - which fundamentally reject any settlement with Israel.

Conflict was sought for three reasons: first to ease pressure on Hamas from within the Palestinian community to recognize Israel; second to undermine democratization in Lebanon, which was marginalizing Syria; and third to lift attention from the emerging dispute over the Iranian nuclear program and demonstrate to the West the "tools" at its disposal in the case of a conflict.

Moderate Arab governments understand full well the issue at stake in this war: It is about regional hegemony in the case of Syria with Lebanon and Palestine and, on a wider level, Iran's hegemonic claim to the entire Middle East. Yet the war in Lebanon and Gaza could prove to be a miscalculation for the radicals. By firing missiles on Haifa, Israel's third-largest city, a boundary has been crossed. From now on, the issue is no longer primarily one of territory, restitution or occupation. Instead, the main issue is the strategic threat to Israel's existence.

(4)

Charles Krauthammer has a superb piece in the Jewish World Review:

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities — every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians — and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

Hearing the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.

Read it all.

(1)

The truth of Charles H Spurgeon's aphorism that “A lie travels round the world, while Truth is putting on her boots” is shown daily by the credulous reporting from the Hezbollah propaganda machine.

But the truth will out. Just as the supposed Jenin 'massacre' was first shown to be no such thing by a map which showed the affected areas, so too Israel's current actions are not the destruction of Beirut which the BBC would have us believe, but a carefully targeted action against the key terror points. Have a look at this map, which shows the affected area in grey, and tell me how it shows that most of Beirut has been attacked.

UPDATE: The source of the above map has made clear that it is now out of date, but that although it now has innacuracies, "the general idea of a small part of the city being affected is accurate".

(6)

There's been - understandably - a lot of coverage of the Israeli bombing of a UN observer post. But what's less understandable is that there has not been any coverage, as far as I can see, of Hezbollah's attacks on the UN.

Here's what today's latest UNIFIL bulletin has to report:

Another UN position of the Ghanaian battalion in the area of Marwahin in the western sector was also directly hit by one mortar round from the Hezbollah side last night. The round did not explode, and there were no casualties or material damage. Another 5 incidents of firing close to UN positions from the Israeli side were reported yesterday. It was also reported that Hezbollah fired from the vicinity of four UN positions at Alma ash Shab, Tibnin, Brashit, and At Tiri. All UNIFIL positions remain occupied and maintained by the troops.

The Israelis deny their bombing was deliberate. But what about Hezbollah's bombings? Perhaps they were also an accident. Perhaps they weren't. But isn't it indicative of the bias in reporting that when Israel issues a denial, there is near universal treatment of that denial as a lie. When Hezbollah bombs the UN, the incident isn't even reported.

(1)

Harry's Place has a transcript of an interview with CNN's Nic Robertson on Hezbollah's restrictions on media coverage in Lebanon. It's well worth a read as an example of how perceptions of reality are being affected by their slick media operation:

ROBERTSON: Well, Howard, there's no doubt about it: Hezbollah has a very, very sophisticated and slick media operations. In fact, beyond that, it has very, very good control over its areas in the south of Beirut. They deny journalists access into those areas. They can turn on and off access to hospitals in those areas. They have a lot of power and influence. You don't get in there without their permission.

...And absolutely, when you hear their claims they have to come with -- with a -- more than a grain of salt, that you have to put in some journalistic integrity. That you have to point out to the audience and let them know that this was a guided tour by Hezbollah press officials along with security, that it was a very rushed affair.

KURTZ: Right.

ROBERTSON: That there wasn't time to go and look through those buildings. The audience has to know the conditions of that tour. But again, if we didn't get all -- or we could not get access to those areas without Hezbollah compliance, they control those areas.

KURTZ: Right.

ROBERTSON: And I think to bring the audience the full picture of what's happening in Beirut, you have to go into those southern suburbs.

KURTZ: All right.

ROBERTSON: Because that's where the vast majority of bombs were falling.

KURTZ: I understand.

ROBERTSON: Again, they come with a health warning that we cannot vouch for everything that Hezbollah is saying. And I think the audience is sophisticated enough to appreciate that, Howard.

I wonder how Jeremy Bowen holding a teddy bear in a bombed building fits in with his last two sentences.

As a friend with close connections to many of those involved emailed me this morning:

This whole news coverage reminds me a lot of defensive shield - when the dust settles people will realise that a tiny bit of Beirut has been targetted and that, as per normal, the media have completely over-reacted. Last night on the 10 they followed the Israel story with the 4m dead in the congo civil war....shows they've got their priorities right.

(3)

Today's Times has a succinct letter shredding Matthew Parris' silly piece:

Sir, Matthew Parris states that “the past 40 years have been a catastrophe . . . for world Jewry”.

In analysing the period 1967-2006, Jews have regained control over the holiest place in their religion, Jerusalem, have established more Jewish educational schools, colleges and seminaries worldwide than at any other time in our history, created more Nobel prize winners, been at the forefront of research and invention in the fields of science, medicine, IT and music, have outlived the Soviet labour camps and seen the release of the refuseniks, rejoined Ethiopian Jewry with its brethren, enjoyed relative economic stability and relative political freedom.

In 1927-67, there was the Holocaust, postwar pogroms in Poland and the attempts by Britiain to return refugees to Germany or imprison them in Cypriot prisons. In 1887-1927, there was the persecution of Jews and pogroms in Tsarist and then Bolshevik Russia, the displacement of millions of Jews from Eastern Europe, the Dreyfus affair in France and Jewish poverty in the UK and the US.

The past 40 years have been a golden period for world Jewry. But many of us now believe the clouds are back.

ANDREW BESSER
London EC2

There's also another version of the voice of the British foreign policy establishment, this time from Lord Howell and Baroness Symons. You don't have to read it to know what it will say:

Israel has now set itself not just against Hezbollah but against the entire Lebanese people and the Lebanese State. Incredibly, the Lebanese Government, Israel’s neighbour and the only other democracy in the region, has been declared Israel’s foe. Its very attempts to bring Hezbollah representatives into the process of government have been depicted not merely as tolerance of, but actual collaboration with, terror, giving credibility to those militants and killers for which Israel holds Lebanon responsible. The state of Lebanon must therefore now be punished. From the Israeli military the word seems to have gone out: Lebanon delenda est.

Blah, blah, blah.

(Mind you, this bit is downright hilarious:

The impact will go further. America’s reputation in the region is already at zero, with the conviction, almost universal, even if only half-true, that Israel is the proxy of the United States and relies on its technological weapons superiority (although that may now be eroding). But Britain, which always had a reputation for greater wisdom in the region, can still be the friend of small nations, the friends of the resurgent Lebanon and the friend of moderation and restraint.

Here's the thing, Dave and Liz. There's one encouraging thought attached to your piece. It will have precisely zero impact. Zilch. Sweet Fanny Adam. And you know why? Because there are few voices less qualified to give instructions to Israel in how to defend its citizens than the authentic inheritors of the British foreign policy tradition.

(6)

There was a superb piece by Amos Oz - hardly a hawk, he - in Wednesday's LA Times:

Many times in the past, the Israeli peace movement has criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. This time, the battle is not over Israeli expansion and colonization. There is no Lebanese territory occupied by Israel. There are no territorial claims from either side.

...The Israeli peace movement objects to the occupation and colonization of the West Bank. It objected to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 because the invasion was aimed at distracting world attention from the Palestinian problem. This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages by attempting to smash Hezbollah wherever it lurks.

...The real battle raging these days is not at all between Beirut and Haifa but between a coalition of peace-seeking nations — Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia on the one hand — and fanatic Islam, fueled by Iran and Syria, on the other.

If, as we all hope — Israeli hawks and doves alike — Hezbollah is going to be defeated soon, Israel and Lebanon will be the winners. Moreover, a defeat of a militant Islamist terror organization may dramatically enhance the chances for peace in the region.

(2)

Oliver Kamm has an excellent post about the military action in Lebanon (even though he has a strange blind spot over the BBC's bias).

He is particularly strong in pointing out the fundamental flaw in my Times colleague Mary Anne Sieghart's strange and deeply misguided piece today:

The kicker is in Mrs Sieghart's conclusion:

Mr Blair has moved too swiftly from defending Israel’s right to exist to supporting Israel right or wrong. It is bad for the Middle East and it is dangerous for Britain. He ought to know better.

This is a false dichotomy of extraordinary blatancy. I would be concerned, as any liberal or progressive ought to be, if the PM's stance were one of "defending Israel's right to exist". Israel has a right to sovereignty and independence; in order to exercise sovereignty it needs to protect its civilians from rocket attacks from a private army backed by a theocratic tyranny. When I assert the need for an eventual settlement (I do not see it happening any time soon) encompassing two states, I do not write of Palestine's "right to exist"; I wish to see a sovereign and independent Palestinian state. As I understand the PM's position - and I believe I understand it perfectly, because it's stated clearly - the PM does not "support Israel right or wrong": he defends Israel's ability to act as a democratic and sovereign state must. He is right.

Rod Liddle has a terrific piece in the Spectator on the British evacuees from Beirut:

...Were they grateful and full of humility? For the most part, were they hellers. Everyone was to blame for the uncomfortable time they’d endured in the previous seven days — the British embassy, America, Israel and so on — but not themselves. And not Hezbollah either, who were exonerated by all and sundry either by omission or quite explicitly.

There was, for example, the breathtakingly cretinous girl who explained that she’d just come to Beirut to ‘do some deejaying, like’ and was appalled that the British embassy hadn’t got its act together and flown her home when the first bombs landed. I have the feeling we will see her again soon enough, looking bemused standing with her rucksack by a landing strip in Quetta or Khandahar, other places where her ‘deejaying’ sojourn runs into a spot of bother. There were people angry that their ‘beach holiday’ hadn’t turned out as they’d expected, what with the heavy ordnance and everything. Now, I don’t wish to be callous, but don’t phrases like ‘on your head be it’ and ‘you made your bed’ etc., spring to mind here? A beach holiday, in Beirut? Didn’t they wonder why it was so cheap? Might they not have guessed that Beirut would be a little different from Biarritz?

There then followed, from the embassy coach on to the Royal Navy ship, a grim procession of implacably Arabist hags who spewed forth a tirade of anti-Israeli, anti-British and anti-American propaganda, during which the phrase ‘Israeli war crimes’ cropped up with remarkable regularity. The British embassy was not merely negligent, they averred, but sort of complicit in the Israeli action; it had conspired to hide from the world these Israeli ‘atrocities’ (clearly they weren’t aware that, far from being hidden, we’d watched it all unfold every night on our news programmes). There was not the slightest gratitude to the embassy, or the navy, or the British government, that we’d hauled them out of a pit they had dug for themselves. They wanted the rights which are traditionally afforded British citizens — the right to be removed from the presence of excitable, swarthy foreigners as soon as the first gunshot is heard — but also the right to pledge their political allegiance to the country from which they were determinedly fleeing. Horribly, unforgivably, John Betjeman’s nasty little phrase ‘Come friendly bombs’ drifted through my mind as I watched them walk up the gangplank to HMS Gloucester where they were to be served, according to the starchy navy spokesbabe, ‘a tasty meal prepared by our chef’. Let them eat hummus, for the rest of their lives.

...People who expect the rest of the world to treat them rather as they are treated in Wilmslow or Wokingham and somehow find it possible to blame the British government when they are treated somewhat differently. For many of the British citizens fleeing Lebanon, there was nothing in the way of a mumbled admission that perhaps, all things considered, Magaluf might have been a better bet this year. Nor, from those domiciled in Beirut, the careless shrug, a heigh-ho and ‘well, that’s what you expect if you live in a country which allows extremists to shell its closest neighbour’. Instead, just a fugue of concerted whining and spite directed, bizarrely, at the very people who were helping them. Travel may have got them nearly killed, but it certainly didn’t broaden their minds.

(5)

In his latest Mideast Disptatch, the indefatigable Tom Gross has this wonderful quote from Robert Fisk:

I travel the roads of southern Lebanon every two weeks and there are no such [Hizbullah] missiles, as the UN force there will confirm… Hizbollah resistance … missiles are a myth.

(The Independent, April 15, 2003)

(1)

What has happened to Con Coughlin? His writing always used to be rather good, but his recent outpourings are full of mistaken premises and plain errors of fact. Take his piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph, which argues that the real problem is that the Israelis are led by Olmert:

Unlike some of the more flamboyant characters who have occupied the Prime Minister's office - the devious Moshe Dayan...

There's a small problem with that contrast between Olmert and Dayan as PM. Dayan was never Prime Minister.

Then this:

It is not just that Mr Olmert's military career was limited to occasional stints as a reporter for the Israeli army's in-house magazine.

Eh? Coughlin seems to have developed an uneasy relationship with facts which don't suit his argument. No one is ever going to argue that Olmert's military career was especially distinguished, in the style of Sharon or Rabin. But writing that it was "occasional stints as a reporter" is plain wrong:

"Olmert served with the Israel Defense Forces in the Golani combat brigade. While in service he was injured and temporarily released. He underwent many treatments. Later he completed his military duties as a journalist for the IDF magazine BaMahane. During the Yom Kippur war he joined the headquarters of Ariel Sharon as a military correspondent. Already a Knesset member, he decided to go through an Officer's course, at the age of 35, in 1980."

(6)

I wonder if I should instigate a 'hypocrite of the week' award. If I did, this week's winner would be clear: Mikhail Kamynin, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, lecturing the Israeli government on how to behave in response to Hamas' kidnap of Cpl Gilad Shalit:

The right and duty of the government of Israel to defend the lives and security of its citizens are beyond doubt.

But this should not be done at the cost of the lives of many lives and many Palestinian civilians, by massive military strikes with heavy consequences for the civilian population.

The sentence he forgot to add, presumably, was this: Don't do in Gaza what we did in Chechnya.

(11)

It looks as if the BBC's new Israel correspondent, Caroline Hawley, is carrying on from where her predecessor, Orla Guerin, left off:

BBC correspondent Caroline Hawley in Jerusalem says it is not clear why the army moved against Hamad.

Hamas has not carried out any suicide attacks for 15 months and Israeli military operations in the past few months have focused instead on the militant Islamic Jihad group, which has been responsible for most of the recent bombs.

Yes, it's difficult to fathom why the Israelis would want to arrest a man they have been after for years, who is behind the mass murder of Israeli citizens. I'm still scratching my head wondering why they arrested him.

UPDATE: A commenter has alleged that I removed the word 'now' from the first sentence I quoted. I did not. I copied it as posted. The word 'now' was, it seems, then added.

(20)

Why is it that there is almost no coverage in the media, either broadcast or print, of the daily round of rocket firings from Gaza into Israel? And when there is coverage of incidents, it tends to be wilfully distorted.

Take this from - yes, it's him - Chris McGreal in the Guardian:

Israeli tanks killed one Palestinian and wounded seven others, including a mother and her baby, after firing shells into a town in the north of the Gaza Strip yesterday. One of the shells hit a house in Beit Lahiya while others landed in open ground that the army said is used to fire rockets into Israel.

Here's what really happened:

Five Qssam rockets were fired Tuesday from the northern Gaza Strip at southern Ashkelon. Two of the rockets landed in the area of kibbutz Zikim, one fell in kibbutz Karmiya, one in the area of the Nativ Haasara community and the fifth landed in Ashkelon's industrial zone, just south of the town. As of now, no injuries have been reported. In response to the attack, the IDF shelled Qassam launching sites in the Strip. One of the rockets that landed in the area of Zikim fell near an army base. The rocket that landed in the Ashkelon industrial zone could have caused heavy damages, according to employees at the place.

"A great disaster was prevented today," a source at the industrial area stated. "The rocket landed near a stockpile of highly inflammable materials. One flare could have caused grave damages to the entire vicinity," he added.

Most of the commentary I've read on the Israeli elections is, while not exactly wrong, certainly missing a crucial element.

The result - with Kadima doing less well than at one time seemed likely, Labour doing better and Likud collpasing - has been portrayed as showing that the Israeli electorate has moved to the centre-left.

The main sense in which Israel has turned left, however, has little to do with issues of security and foreign policy. Likud collapsed not because of its stance vis-a-vis the West Bank and the Palestinians, but because it was led by Bibi Netanyahu, who as finance minister was responsible for some hugely unpopular (but wholly necessaary and successful) reforms to the economy. Labour ran a campaign under Amir Peretz, the former Histradut Trade Union federation leader, almost wholly focussed on those reforms and the economy.

Israel, it must never be forgotten, was founded as a socialist country, and in its heart largely remains that. Labour's tactics were thus bound to strike a chord with many voters who disliked the more bracing economic world which Netanyahu recognised needed to be acknowledged. I was in Israel during part of the campaign, and this was an obvious factor.

That explains to the somewhat perpelxed reporters I've seen on TV why Likud collapsed but Yisrael Beitenu prospered. I'm sure the exit polls will show a large transfer of votes from Likud to Yisrael Beitenu. There was no mass switch from 'the right' to 'the left' - and certainly not on security issues. But there was a very large anti-Bibi current.

In any case, the old Labour versus Likud, left verus right, doves versus hawks terminolgy became redundant when Kadima was founded - or, more specifically, when the notion of a unliteral withdrawal took hold in Sharon's mind, and then spread.

The main problem faced by Israeli governments of all complexions has been the lack of a genuine negotiating partner. Arafat's rejection at Camp David of Barak's proposal showed that he was not really interested in moving towards a settlements. It's not possible to negotiate in such circumstances.

With terror increasing, the only realistic response was to act unilaterally - to be done with the Palestinians altogether. Thus last year's withdrawal from Gaza. Thus Olmert's talk of further withdrawals. Thus Kadima - an idea, and a policy, whose time had come. The success of the fence in dramatically stopping the number of suicide bombings added demonstrable evidential support to the idea that the best repsonse to the Palestinians' behaviour was to 'opt out'. The old formulae and the old doctrinnes of the old parties did not work, and could not work - especially with Hamas now in power.

That is the policy which Kadima ran on (essentially backed by Labour, too, who when forced to talk about security, an issue on which Peretz was weak, knew better than to take on the majority view of the electorate). It's not left wing, it's not right wing. And it's only really centre because it has majority support. It's something different altogether. That's the real shift by the Israeli electorate.

UPDATE: Perhaps the best analysis is provided here, on BICOM's site.

As always, there's more to Chris McGeal's pieces in G2 than first meets the eye.

Let's take a closer look at the final 2 paragraphs:

Or perhaps the conflict will evolve into something worse; something that will produce parallels even more shocking than that with apartheid.

Arnon Soffer has spent years advising the government on the "demographic threat" posed by the Arabs. The Haifa university geographer paints a bleak vision of how he sees the Gaza strip a generation after Israel's withdrawal.

"When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day," he told the Jerusalem Post.

"If we don't kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings."

Looks like McGreal has found a devastating quote from a serious Israeli demographer - a key adviser to Ariel Sharon - to back up his take on the situation. But even a cursory look at the original source of the quote shows that McGreal has taken Soffer entirely out of context. He is making a very different point, as part of a discussion (pre-Gaza disengagement) about what would happen immediately following the Israeli withdrawal:

How will the region look the day after unilateral separation?

The Palestinians will bombard us with artillery fire - and we will have to retaliate. But at least the war will be at the fence - not in kindergartens in Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Will Israel be prepared to fight this war?

First of all, the fence is not built like the Berlin Wall. It's a fence that we will be guarding on either side. Instead of entering Gaza, the way we did last week, we will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won't allow their husbands to shoot Kassams, because they will know what's waiting for them.

Second of all, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.

Soffer then argues that this will eventually lead to an unofficial peace between both sides.

His language in referring to the Palestinians as animals may be pretty vile, but concentrate instead on what the full source says about McGreal's handling of supposed evidence he uses to bolster his case. He has taken a prediction which was wrong, removed it from its context of time and place, and then reapplied it as a general comment on Israel's future. And he has done that to make the point that Israel will end up like Nazi Germany.

Contemptible.

Chris McGreal's reports from Israel have long been a byword for anti-Israel bile, every word dripping with his contempt for the place and people. But even for him, his diatribes in the Guardian in the past couple of days have been so distorted and so warped in their analysis that it takes the breath away. Other than the desire to drop a nuclear weapon on Israel, there appears to be not a cigarette paper between McGreal and President Ahmadinejad.

BICOM has put out a suitably robust rebuttal of McGeeal's rantings:

This extensive piece of work published in the Guardian offends not only British Jews but all friends of democracy as well as friends of Israel. Direct comparisons to apartheid South Africa and insinuations about collusion between Jews and Nazis are simply abhorrent.

The content and associated imagery are inflammatory and one-sided. They are conveyed with a degree of emotion and hatred that should have immediately alerted the Guardian’s editors to question the writer’s professional integrity.

There is a difference between criticising what Israel does and what Israel is. This article puts Israel’s right to exist in question and therefore crosses a very dangerous red line.

Indeed, as Shuli Davidovich, spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy points out:

The Guardian devoted 14 pages today to present Israel in the most negative manner, while the murder of an innocent Israeli citizen by a Palestinian terrorist only appeared at the end of a news item on page 23, which only mentioned that an Israeli woman was stabbed to death by a Palestinian and that the police reported that the act was politically, nationalistically-motivated.

HL Mencken said that reading a newspaper every morning was like having poison for breakfast. He surely had in mind the Guardian.

Still, McGreal is not alone in his crazed views. According to a new Populus poll in The Times, so too are 46% of Muslims:

The Jewish community in Britain is in league with the Freemasons to control the media and politics

Agree 46% Disagree 22%

Clearly the 46% have never read the Guardian (or any other newspaper for that matter) or watched the BBC.

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Scott Burgess' Daily Ablution is one of the few daily must-reads. His post today , a line by line demolition of the Guardian piece by Khalid Mish'al of Hamas, is typically on the button. And it made me laugh out loud at the end.

I was privileged last week to be invited by BICOM to be their guest at the annual Herzliya conference on security issues. I was proud to be the recipient of such hopitality in Israel, a nation from which we in the UK could learn much about the seriousness of the threat to the West and to the civilised way of life. The denial in which so many of us still live, even after 9/11 and 7/7, is still shocking.

With the PA elections, it was a fascinating time to be in Israel. In addition to the conference, I had a series of private meetings with key Israeli and Palestinian politicians and advisers. Since the meetings were off the record I cannot give specifics, and I will be posting on this topic more extensively later this week, but suffice it to say for now that there were, as one would expect in so vibrant a democracy as Israel, a variety of responses to the possibility of a Hamas victory - and it would be wrong, as some have reported, to assume that Israeli 'doves' were more sanguine about Hamas than the 'hawks'. The truth is there was no uniform response, nor is it possible to be certain what will happen inside Hamas now that it has to deliver to the Palestinians.

One key adviser to Abu Mazen told me that there is a wing inside Hamas which accepts that terror has to stop, and that were Hamas to be included in the Cabinet (the meeting was before the election so we did not know the extent of Hamas' victory) the split would become obvious and would help facilitate an acceptable modus vivendi.

The most sensible piece I have read so far on this comes from Emanuele Ottolenghi whose view accords with that of many of the most sober analysts I encountered.

And now, forgive me for posting the picture below, but Shimon Peres has long been a hero of mine, and I was thrilled to have the chance to talk to him. And if blogs aren't a form of vanity publishing, what are they?!

I think this falls into the 'if only' category:

GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian gunmen briefly seized the parents of slain U.S. activist Rachel Corrie as they visited the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, but relented after being confronted by a member of the security forces, witnesses said.

They said Craig and Cindy Corrie, whose daughter was fatally run down by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in 2003, were at the home of a friend in the Gaza town of Rafah when it was stormed by gunmen.

The gunmen appeared set on kidnapping the two Americans, the witnesses said. Gaza has seen a rash of foreigner abductions since Israel withdrew from the territory in September after 38 years of occupation.

But a local security officer intervened and the gunmen beat a retreat.

"A neighbor known to be a member of the security forces told the gunmen to leave," a witness said.

Neither the Corries, who are from Olympia, Washington, nor their host, Samir Nasrallah, could immediately be reached for comment.

A few days earlier and they could have shared a room with the Burtons.

I was about to post something on the surreal reporting of the kidnapping of Kate Burton, and the even more asotnishing attitude she has shown since her release in refusing to be debriefed:

A security source said: ‘We had huge problems with Kate…she had to be debriefed — it’s standard procedure and for the very simple reason that other lives might one day depend on it. We’ve been trying to impress on her that she was kidnapped and she wasn’t just having long chats with her Palestinian friends’...Her aunt, Wendy Hagenbuch, told the Mail last night: ‘Kate will be very forgiving of these men because she believes they wouldn’t do this sort of thing without good reason. She has a very sympathetic nature’.

(Daily Mail)

And then I read Melanie Phillips, every word of whose post is on the button and who provides a welcome dose of reality. As she writes:

From what has been published, the Burton family appears to furnish a perfect example of the truly shattering nature of Britain’s twisted mindset.

Do read the whole thing.

Harif, the Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, has a fascinating week of events in November under theme of 'Jews From Arab Countries'.

You can see the programme here.

Oliver Kamm points out in The Times that

None but a dedicated apologist for tyranny should demur at a strategy of confrontation [with Syria].

Two and a half years ago I wrote that If Syria Isn't Next On America's Hit List, it Should Be. What I said then still stands.

A friend tells me a a popular joke in Cairo.

Mubarak's aide asks the president, "Isn't it time you write a farewell speech to the Egyptian people?" The president looks at him, confused. "Where are they going?".

Lindsay Hilsum on Channel Four News this evening, on the extremist organisation, Kach (many of whose supporters were removed by the IDF from the Palm Beach Hotel, Gaza):

...so extreme that even the Israeli government has banned it.

Note the sly use of the word 'even', which is entirely unncessary to make the (valid) point about Kach being extreme. By adding the word 'even', she changes the entire emphasis of the sentence: Kach is so extreme, she is saying, that even a government as extreme as the Israeli government has banned it.

That's the type of 'objective' reporting we've come to expect from Ms Hilsum.

While I was away, Condi Rice, the war-mongering imperialist's lap dog, has been up to the Bush Administration's usual trick, going around the world urging freedom and democracy. The cheek of the woman. Who does she think she is, daring to criticise the likes of Egypt and the Saudis? Doesn't she understand the way the world works?

Oops. Ignore the above. I thought for a moment I had to be on the left.

Anton La Guardia is always worth reading on the Middle East. His piece today is as good as ever:

Despite their misgivings, Palestinians should take up the prime minister's challenge. They should make Gaza a model of Palestinian statehood, proof to the Israeli public and the world that they are reliable "partners". This means that, whatever happens in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip must remain an oasis of peace. More than four years of bloodshed may have convinced Israelis that they cannot hold on to all of the Occupied Territories; Palestinians need to show them it is safe to let go.

A vital question will be the external borders of the Gaza Strip. Israel has a justifiable fear that terrorists and weapons will flow freely into Gaza, turning it into "Hamastan". But if extremists are to be undermined, then Palestinians must be able to experience freedom: Gazans must be able to trade, travel to the rest of the world, and be in contact with their brethren in the West Bank.

The prime responsibility will be on Abu Mazen to build credible security forces that will resolutely keep the peace. The rest of the world can help. Egypt, in particular, must secure the land border with Gaza and destroy arms smuggling tunnels. The West - meaning America or, at a stretch, Nato - should offer security monitors to watch the border, examine cargoes coming into Gaza's port and airport, oversee the performance of the Palestinian forces and deter the Israelis from carrying out reprisals.

When he meets the Palestinian leader today, President Bush should make the following pledge: deliver on security, and America will make sure that Israel negotiates a fair deal in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, within a reasonable timeframe. A freeze on Jewish settlements is essential. Mr Bush must help convince Palestinians that they have more to gain from the olive branch than from Arafat's failed strategy of the gun.

There's an encouraging poll reported in today's Independent.

According to the Palestinian Centre for Policy Survey and Research, 67 per cent of the voters opposed last month's Islamic Jihad attack on a Tel Aviv disco, in which five Israelis were murdered. Only 29 per cent supported it.

That's very different from the figures recorded in August last year, when 77 per cent said they supported the double bus bombing that murdered 16 in Beersheba.

It's certainly not all good news:

Less encouragingly, the pollsters also logged an erosion of support for his mainstream al Fatah party and a slight gain for the radical Islamic Hamas. Support for al Fatah was down to 36 per cent from 40 per cent last December, and the Hamas vote went up from 18 per cent to 25 over the same period.

There are, however, other more positive signs. Last week, a senior Israeli Cabinet minister on a private visit to London told me that he, and the rest of the Cabinet, had been deeply impressed with Mahmoud Abbas' actions so far. The most striking example, the minister told me, was the tracking down by the IDF of a vast stockpile of explosives which, intelligence had discovered, was intended to blow up a school bus, and possibly a school itself.

What made the discovery remarkable was that the intelligence was not Israeli but from the PA, which co-operated fully and unreservedly with the Israelis in helping them to impound the explosives and track down the terrorists.

There is still a long way to go, but so long as Abbas demonstrates that he he is a very different leader from Arafat, there must be some hope of progress.

Some people understand the thanks that are owed to the USA.

(from The Australian)

Melanie Phillips analyses a disturbing piece by Mike O'Brien in Muslim News.

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I will believe this when I see it:

The Palestinian Authority leadership has ordered PA-controlled media to stop all incitement against Israel and Jews, the London-based Arabic daily A-Shark Al-Awsat reported Monday.

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Next Sunday (5th December), SOAS is hosting a conference on the Middle East.

If the title - Resisting Israeli Apartheid - doesn't make clear the bias and preaching of hatred which the conference entails, the timetable and speakers will:

10.00-10.15 Welcoming Remarks Victoria Brittain, UK

10.15-10.45 Keynote address
Tom Paulin, Oxford University, UK
Partition and Literature: Reflections
Palestine/Israel and Northern Ireland
Chair: Steven Rose, Open University, UK

10.45-11.00 Coffee Break

11.00-13.00 Isolating Apartheid: Divestment, Sanctions, Boycott
Chair: Victoria Brittain, UK

11.00-11.15 Lisa Taraki, Palestine
The Cultural & Academic Boycott of Israel

11.15-11.30 Lawrence Davidson, USA
Divestment: Isolating Apartheid Financially

11.30-11.45 Betty Hunter, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, UK
The Boycott Israeli Goods (BIG) Campaign

11.45-12.00 Omar Barghouti, Palestine
Boycott as Resistance: The Moral Dimension

12.00-13.00 Discussion

13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.00-16.00 Isolating Apartheid: Scope & Principles
Chair: Nur Masalha, UK

14.00-14.15 Ilan Pappe, Israel
The Meaning & Objectives of Boycott

14.15-14.30 Ur Shlonsky, Israel and Switzerland
Resisting Apartheid and the Charge of Antisemitism

14.30-14.45 Mona Baker, UK
On the Distinction between Institutions & Individuals

14.45-15.00 John Docker, Australia
Settler Colonialism as Genocide. Implications for a Strategy
of Solidarity with the Palestinians

15.00-16.00 Discussion

16.00-16.30 TEA BREAK

16.30-18.00 Isolating Apartheid: Strategies and Actions
Chair: Karma Nabulsi, UK

16.30-16.45 Hilary Rose, BRICUP, UK
Building the Academic Boycott in Britain

16.45-17.00 Haim Bresheeth, UK
Organising the Academics: Our Duty to Expose Israel, the
Extra-Judicial Pariah State

17.00-17.15 Ben Young, Jewish Students for Justice for Palestinians, UK
The Role of Students: Lessons from South Africa

17.15-18.00 Discussion

18.00-18.15 Summary & Close
Jeremy Corbyn MP

It would be almost impossible to draw up a list of more biased anti-Israel speakers, many of whom do not even support Israel's right to exist, and at least one of whom - Tom Paulin - has advocated the mass murder of Israeli citizens.

Assuming - it's a big assumption, given the viewpoint and record of some speakers - that they do not call for violence or murder, then they are of course entitled to their view, and to express it. But at SOAS? SOAS is an academic institution which is supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, not to the advocacy of hate politics.

To be fair to SOAS, this doesn't seem to be a SOAS sponsored conference so much as a conference held at SOAS. Nonetheless, it remains grotesquely offensive - not least to some SOAS academics, one of whom has let me know about this with some concern.

The authorities at SOAS presumably know what is going on in their premises. The meeting is hardly secret. Are we to assume from this that they are happy to allow advocates of the murder of Israelis to grace their institution?

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Norm has by far the best Arafat story I have ever heard.

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Yasser Arafat is lying on his death bed wearing a Newcastle shirt, Spurs shorts and Lazio socks. His last wish was to be buried in the Gazza strip.

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Jonah Goldberg on the imminent death of Arafat:

He's a bad man who's been terrible for his people and if there's any justice, when he dies he will receive 72 virgins who look exactly like him.

(I thought about adding the word 'hopefully' before 'imminent' above. In most circumstances I think it foul to hope for someone's death. But there are people who are so vile, and whose influence has been so thoroughly malevolent, that they make it perfectly appropriate to think such thoughts.)

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I've been reading a biography of Yasser Arafat. I wonder if it's really necessary, however. This picture explains a lot:

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Vile piece by the BBC's Barbara Plett (whose salary I pay) on the journey to France of Yasser Arafat:

Yet when the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry... without warning...Despite his obvious failings - his use of corruption, his ambivalence towards violence, his autocratic way of ruling - no one could accuse him of cowardice.

Don't you just love the 'ambivalence towards violence'? Arafat is responsible for the deaths of more people than Fred West, Dennis Nielsen and Peter Sutcliffe combined. I wonder if Ms Plett will shed a tear for them when they are ill.

This is what passes for objective BBC journalism today.

(via Norm.)

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Harry has some thoughtful ruminations on the Left and Israel. Well worth a read.

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Michael Ledeen puts the 'Israeli agent' story in perspective. So far there's too little to go on.

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Melanie Phillips has a devastating post on the Bishops' recent epistle on the Middle East. As she puts it:

It is not just that these church leaders are against the Iraq war. It is not just that they talk about the reprehensible abuse of Iraqi prisoners by coalition forces as if this was a policy that expressed the innate values of the west rather than an abuse which has caused widespread shock and disgust and been apologised for and stopped. It is what they say about Israel which is so revealing, so disgusting and so intensely distressing.

For on this issue, they spectacularly depart from the principles of even- handedness which they commend ( their suggestion that Britain was ever an ‘honest broker’ in the Middle East is itself a gross distortion of history, given that it was Britain which betrayed its promises to the Jews under the Palestine Mandate, did its best to thwart the creation of the Jewish national home which it had solemnly undertaken to bring about and then turned a blind eye to mass Arab illegal immigration to Palestine while denying access to Jews fleeing the Holocaust; but let that pass). They expressly come at this solely from the perspective of Arab and Muslim opinion. There is no mention of the rights of Israel or the Jews as the principal victims of annihilatory aggression and prejudice. Instead, there is this:

‘Within the wider Christian community we also have theological work to do to counter those interpretations of the Scriptures from outside the mainstream of the tradition which appear to have become increasingly influential in fostering an uncritical and one-sided approach to the future of the Holy Land’.

This is an astonishingly revealing and disturbing paragraph. For in their coded attack on Christian Zionists —the one group which tells the truth about the Middle East and recognises that Israel is the historic and present victim of annhilatory terror, not its perpetrator —these Archbishops have sided with those in the church who promote instead an agenda of malevolent lies towards Israel and the Jews. Anyone who reads the venomously distorted, ahistorical diatribes about the Middle East put out by Christian Aid and other Christian charities or those Palestinian thinkers like Naim Ateek who are so lionised by the church hierarchy, or reads the remarks made about ‘Nazi’ or ‘apartheid’ Israel, and the resurgent claim within the church that the Jews are ‘excluded’ from God’s love and therefore their claim to the Promised Land, can see there is indeed an ‘uncritical and one-sided approach to the future of the Holy Land’ inside the church — but it belongs to the opposite camp, one that the Archbishops have now implicitly endorsed.

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Clear-sighted piece by Oliver Kamm on a disgraceful Channel 4 film about Rachel Corrie, an American member of the ISM who died after putting herself in front of a bulldozer in Gaza.

As Oliver puts it:

Rachel Corrie has since become an icon for her cause. The most effective way to maintain her in that state of grace is to refrain from examining what she stood for. The programme’s euphemism that the ISM “performs direct actions in Gaza against Israeli occupation” accomplished this evasion nicely.

The ISM is not a peace organisation. It declares: “We recognise the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle.” Though it protests that “the ISM does not support or condone any acts of terrorism, because terrorism is not legitimate armed struggle”, the amplification is disingenuous. The organisation does not define suicide bombers as terrorists: it refers to them instead as “martyrs”, and unmistakably regards them as heroic, if misguided, figures. As one ISM activist asks rhetorically on the group’s website: “Is there a proud people anywhere that might not be driven to such measures to defend themselves?” (Yes, of course there is — among innumerable examples, the opposition to apartheid, or Kurdish resistance to Saddam.)

Only twice in the programme was suicide terrorism mentioned. Once was by the Corrie family recalling their concern for Rachel’s safety. Yet no discussion of the Palestinians’ plight makes sense without understanding Israel’s urgent task of protecting its citizens from terrorism. The programme declared: “The Israeli Army strictly controls who comes in and who comes out of Gaza.” The notion that there might be some reasonable explanation for that policy — stopping the bombers from getting through — was left unstated.

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Norman Geras has, as ever, a thoroughly sensible post about the report by the Glasgow Media Group which purports to find a bias in TV coverage of the Middle East in favour of Israel (and no, they're not having a joke).

Geras cites a summary of the report by Roy Greenslade:

The research reveals that television viewers are largely unaware of the origins of the conflict and are therefore confused by what they are told and see in nightly reports. There are substantial gaps in their knowledge, with few showing any awareness of the 1967 occupation let alone the 1948 founding of the Israeli state on Palestinian lands. Many viewers told the researchers they saw the conflict as a border dispute between two countries.

One viewer said: "The impression I got [from news] was that the Palestinians had lived around about that area and now they were trying to come back and get some more land for themselves. I didn't realise they had been driven out of places in wars previously."
.....
One 20-year-old interviewee said he thought the conflict was about Palestinian rather than Israeli aggression. He had no idea that the Israelis were occupying Arab-owned land.

As Geras puts it:

Now, if there are gaps in the knowledge of the viewers, which - so the implication is - the news channels are failing to fill in, thereby producing misunderstandings, then well and good; or ill and bad. But note the gaps as specified here: the 1967 occupation; Israel founded on Palestinian lands; Palestinians driven out of places 'in wars previously'. Are we to suppose that the same viewers afflicted by these informational gaps all have an excellent knowledge of various circumstances not mentioned here: the establishment of the State of Israel on the basis of a UN resolution; this in the aftermath of the genocide against the Jews of Europe; the immediate declaration of war on Israel by the surrounding Arab nations, and their continuing hostility after that? I'm disinclined to believe that knowledge-gapped viewers somehow only have gaps in their knowledge that disfavour the Palestinian case, but are thoroughly on top of all the facts which might be placed on the other side of the balance.

We read, also, that more than 800 people were interviewed for this study, which brought together 'academics, journalists and members of the public'.

This is where it starts to get surreal. Greenslade cites approvingly, with a straight face, that

[a]mong the journalists were high-profile broadcasters such as George Alagiah and Brian Hanrahan from the BBC and Lindsey Hilsum from Channel 4 News.

Hilsum says: "We do face a continual problem in providing history and context because, given the length of our reports, we have to decide whether to include another fact to do with the contemporaneous event or put in some history. And, to be honest, one can't go back to 1948 every time.

"But the study does make valid points, especially over the use of the word 'retaliation' when the Israelis assassinate someone, because it's usually the case that Palestinian suicide bombers are retaliating too. I am now more careful about this".

Two BBC journalists and Lindsey Hilsum, who is rivalled only by Orla Guerin in the 'avoid listening to at all costs' stakes!

Geras continues:

Note that statement: 'Palestinian suicide bombers are retaliating too'. They are 'retaliating' against people on buses, and in discos and restaurants, against children and infants. The concept of retaliation Hilsum employs only has meaning if you take the relevant acts as being between communities, and do not distinguish the individual actors and their victims. Just think about this: after some coalition soldiers have been killed in Iraq, the US army opens fire, deliberately and with intent, on people shopping in a market or on groups of Iraqi children on their way out of school. Can you imagine Lindsey Hilsum or any other journalist participant in the study being willing to speak about that as a retaliation? Because I can't. Rightly not. It would be a crime: a war crime, and a crime against humanity. But the mobilization of journalistic bias doesn't work in that direction, where it does, strangely, work over suicide murders.

I wonder, finally, if there's any screening in these media bias studies for bias in the starting assumptions of those carrying them out.

The answer, of course, is no. As I pointed out in a piece (in The Guardian!) a couple of years ago, the GMG is a well known bunch of hard-left activists prusuing a repellent political agenda:

Still more insidious is the more hidden bias of the BBC. Most of it is subtle, and all the more dangerous for that. Take the use of the word terrorist. Both the Department of State and the UK Government along with the rest of the EU, classify Hamas and Islamic Jihad as "terrorist organisations". Even Palestinians have used the term "terror" to describe attacks on Israeli civilians: on the BBC World Service on 4 December 2001, Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Authority Security Service, referred to the attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa as "terror attacks"; on Newsnight the same day, Nabil Abourdeneh, an advisor to Yasser Arafat, referred to Palestinian militants as "terrorist groups".

But not the BBC. When its correspondents refer to Hamas and Islamic Jihad they call them not "terrorists", but "militants", "hard liners" and "radicals". Bombings of Israeli civilians are referred to as "attacks" or "suicide bombings". When suicide bombers killed 26 Israeli civilians in attacks on Jerusalem and Haifa, the word "terror" was used by the BBC only when describing Israel"s response in attempting to root out the source of the murder inflicted on its citizens.

...Newsnight"s coverage of the UN report into Jenin was typical. The BBC had faithfully reported the Palestinian claims of a massacre as fact, so how would they deal with an inquiry which confirmed that there was no massacre? Easy: change the attack. The opening film by David Sells signed off with this impartial thought, which summed up the tone of his report: "What happened in Jenin was no massacre; but it was appalling in its own right".

According to the Glasgow Media Group, however, broadcasters "assume the Israeli perspective", citing in evidence the BBC"s failure to explain the term "occupied territories". Leave aside the fact that the Glasgow Media Group, which purports to be apolitical and thus objective, is primarily comprised of hard-left ideologues who have been pushing their views since they were closely involved in Tony Benn"s campaign for the Labour Party deputy leadership two decades ago. Their claims are simply bunkum. The very phrases used by the BBC, "occupied Palestinian land" or "occupied Palestinian territories" prove the opposite point, suggesting that Palestinian territory was aggressively conquered by Israel. In 1948 the West Bank was conquered by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt. They were only taken by Israel during the 1967 war, which attempted to destroy her.

One should not be surprised by the BBC"s bias, which simply reflects the left-liberal mindset of most of its staff. The left likes nothing more than pinning victim status wherever it can. Thus where first the Black Panthers and then the IRA were freedom fighters, so now it is the Palestinian terrorist groups who are fighting against oppression. Even better, Israel is backed by the USA; two villains for the price of one.

So blinkered are they in their world view that they cannot see that it is not hopelessness - many bombers are wealthy and educated - which pushes terrorists into mass murder, but hatred. As the historian Robert Wistrich shows in "Muslim Anti-Semitism : A Clear and Present Danger", the Arab press is suffused with anti-semitism on a par with Goebbels" propaganda and early Christian blood-libels. But we hear none of this. Instead, we are fed a diet only of rampaging, barbaric Israelis.

All light does not shine on one side of the conflict, all darkness on the other. The truth is only ever simple for simple minds.

(11)

Brilliant speech by Alan Dershowitz on Israel and anti-Semitism. Read the whole thing.

(via Melanie Phillips.)

(23)

These are the tunnels which don't exist.

(5)

Why Blame Israel? The facts behind the headlines

Icon Books £12.99

Reporting, comment and analysis of the Middle East are bedevilled by ignorance. Much of that ignorance is wilful, when facts are ignored and minds closed to reality. In recent years, for instance, it has become the received wisdom that the terrorism to which Israel is now regularly subject is a product of its own behaviour towards the Palestinians. Israel, in other words, only has itself to blame.

Neil Lochery’s superb ‘Why Blame Israel’ is a useful antidote to this grotesque distortion of reality. Lochery has no religious affiliations with Israel, but as Director of the Centre for Israeli Studies at University College, London, is well placed to describe the reality of Israel’s situation. Although he apportions blame where appropriate, his purpose is not to convict but to explain, and to deal with the many untruths which bedevil reports of the Middle East conflict. Take the most basic issue: Israel’s strength and size. There are some reporters who give the impression that Israel is a giant nation, forcing its strength on its tiny, defenceless neighbours. Yet its population is a mere six and a half million – roughly the size of Scotland – and it is surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs who will be placated only when it and its inhabitants are wiped out. Geographically, it is so small that one can stand at one end and see the other side – surrounded by vast Arab lands.

Lochery makes clear that mistakes have been made by all sides in the conflict, but that there are two fundamental problems which lie at the root of the current crisis. Israel is the only democracy in the world surrounded by countries bent on its destruction. The Arab and Palestinians’ refusal to recognise Israel’s right to exist meant that, from the start, Israel has had to focus overwhelmingly on its own security and defence. More recently, supposedly more moderate Palestinian leaders have not only refused to renounce the suicide bombing tactics of the likes of Hamas, they have, to varying degrees, given them the space in which to operate.

Lochery shows how, in much of the reporting of the conflict, basic facts are either ignored or deliberately misreported. Take the so-called massacre which, we were told, took place in Jenin in 2002. The Israelis had information about terrorist activity in the refugee camp. Their response was to take military action. It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to question whether or not they were right to do that. What is not legitimate is to portray what happened as a massacre, as many of the reporters, spoon fed lies by the terrorists’ supporters, then did. They then compounded the lie by implying that the Israelis had effectively destroyed the camp.

A subsequent UN inquiry made perfectly clear that no massacre took place (as became obvious after the event to anyone who visited the site). But because it suits the agenda of some reporters to portray the Israelis as butchers who oppress the Palestinians, massacre it was, evidence or not. And the fact that, as an aerial picture of Jenin made clear afterwards, the Israeli action was confined to an area which, in relative terms, was smaller than a goalmouth compared with a football pitch, was barely mentioned. It didn’t fit the pre-ordained picture.

Lochery’s title – Why Blame Israel? - is slightly misleading. His focus is entirely on specific historic issues such as how Israel came into being, the wars it has had to fight to save itself, and the so-called peace process. All that is critical, and his dispassionate laying out of the facts is sorely needed. But to answer his question requires something rather different: a look at just why it is that so many are so unwilling to recognise these facts, and so willing to ascribe all blame in the Middle East to Israel. And that means looking at two inter-related themes: anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Israel is seen as the US’s staging post in the Middle East, and its culture of democracy and western thought is entirely alien to the Arab states; the two fuse with the now widespread anti-Americanism into a potent cocktail of hatred.

Beyond that lies the oldest hatred of all, that of the Jew. A full answer to the question ‘why blame Israel’ must, in the end, deal with anti-Semitism. Yes, there are political reasons to blame Israel. And yes, there are strategic reasons. There are indeed many valid reasons why Israel can be blamed for some of its problems. But, as Lochery’s analysis of the facts makes clear, they don’t add up to a convincing explanation of why it is that Israel is now so consistently maligned. That requires the addition of an extra factor: anti-Semitism.

(1)

Andrew Roberts elegantly takes apart the revolting spectacle of a group of FCO Arabists who can't stomach the thought that their world view no longer holds sway. (See also Melanie Phillips here.)

As Ian Mikardo pointed out, the twin axioms of HM Diplomatic Service are "homosexuality and antisemitism".

I only have one further thought: it wasn't a proper round robin letter. It needed Wynne Godley's signature for that status.

(15)

As David Carr puts it at Samizdata:

They need some stickers which say: "Warning: heading up Hamas can seriously damage your health"

Rot in hell, Rantisi; rot in hell.

(8)

A joyous apology in The Australian:

A story headlined 'Syria seeks our help to woo US' in Saturday's Weekend Australian misquoted National Party senator Sandy Macdonald. The quote stated: "Syria is a country that has been a bastard state for nearly 40 years" but should have read "Syria is a country that has been a Baathist state for nearly 40 years." The Australian regrets any embarrassment caused by the error.

Not quite sure what was wrong with the original quote.

(via Samizdata.)

(2)

As ever, Oliver Kamm cuts through some of the naueating hypocrisy, moral blindness and wilful ignorance about the state of terror in Israel with this coruscating post today on the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas murderer:

It’s a defensible position (though not one I hold) to argue that Israel’s security needs would best be advanced by eschewing retaliation against terrorist organisations. What is not permissible – what in fact is downright indecent when Israel’s civilians require reserves of courage merely to travel on a bus or eat in a restaurant for fear that that journey or that meal will be their last – is to dispute the urgency of those security needs. Yet here are two of the most facile remarks it’s possible to imagine concerning Israel’s assassination this morning of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin:

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw described the assassination as "unacceptable" and "unjustified''. Mr Straw said he did not think Israel would benefit from an attack on an old man in a wheelchair.

And the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said the killing was "very, very bad news" for the Middle East peace process.

What moral relevance the Foreign Secretary imagines inheres in being old and infirm is beyond my training in casuistry to identify. Does he suppose that, because Sheikh Yassin was not himself physically capable of killing Jews, Israel got the wrong man? I imagine he does not, for a couple of years ago – after some peculiarly inept remarks and a feeble non-apology on the same subject by Cherie Blair – he made a sharp distinction between those who carry out and those who order suicide-murders:

When young people go to their deaths, we can all feel a degree of compassion for those youngsters. They must be so misguided and depressed to do this…
But behind those people are some very evil terrorist leaders who do not put their own lives on the line when they are making sure that others' lives are ended.

The first sentence is of course dangerous nonsense. The distinctive characteristic of the suicide bomber’s actions is not that he voluntarily ‘goes to his death’ but that he takes a large number of other people – killed not quite indiscriminately, for the targets are carefully selected to comprise defenceless and often juvenile Jewish civilians – unwillingly to theirs. To call the suicide-murderer misguided doesn’t quite do justice to his act of unmitigated barbarism, while to attribute to him ‘depression’ – as opposed to, say, fanaticism and zealotry – is a speculative hypothesis proffered without the remotest empirical support.

But the second sentence is entirely accurate, as the Foreign Secretary later expanded upon while trying to extricate himself from his absurd initial pronouncement:

Suicide bombing is not remotely a spontaneous act by individuals. It is an action organised by some very evil terrorist leaders who have hatred for the state of Israel.

Read the whole thing.

I'd love to see a poll on what ordinary people think. I'd bet a fortune that if you discount Grauniad readers, BBC journalists and politicians for whom the phrase 'double standards' might have been invented, an overwhelming majority would support what Israel has done.

(10)

From the Indie's letters page:

Sir: Whilst I would not condone the murder of Jenny Tonge MP, I understand why people out there might want to kill her.

MICHAEL METLISS
London NW3

(3)

Like Norman Geras, I've avoided the odious Jenny Tongue affair because others (such as Oliver Kamm) have pretty much said it all.

Norman Geras' own post makes a very interesting point:

Try using Tonge's words about something else, not merely atrocious, as suicide bombings are, but generally recognized to be so without any known inclination towards apologia.

Try this:

Many many people criticise, many many people say it is just another form of brutality, but I can understand... I think if I had to live in that situation, and I say this advisedly, I might just consider harming my children myself.

Or this:

Many many people criticise, many many people say it is just another form of brutality, but I can understand... I think if I had to live in that situation, and I say this advisedly, I might just consider physically attacking some asylum seekers (shooting a few liberals; etc.) myself.

(3)

Who cares about Israeli children? So what if they're murdered? They're only yids.

Now tell me if you can take any other message from the UN members' reaction to Israel's draft resolutuion.

(8)

Jack Straw was brilliant this morning when dealing with John Humphrys. You can listen to him here (click on the link at 8.10). He made Humphrys seem very, very small.

After what was a pretty awful start as Foreign Secretary, Straw has really grown into the job. He's a commanding figure now. And the fact that he's right, too, helps.

(5)

Brilliant demolition by Melanie Phillips of Gerald Kaufman's asinine piece in the Spectator, Why Not Invade Israel?

(7)

David Pryce-Jones' masterly fisking of Fisk has been linked to almost everywhere, but just in case you've missed it...

Make yourself a cup of coffee, take the phone off the hook, ignore the e mails and ENJOY!

UPDATE: Oops, I forgot to point out, as David Gillies does below, that despite his fisking, he gets the meaning of the word wrong - it is, of course, analysing a piece sentence by sentence and pointing out the factual and logical flaws.

(7)

The Israeli Cabinet faced, for sure, a terrible dilemma when it voted yesterday by 12 votes to 11 to try to arrange a deal with Hezbollah for the release of prisoners in exchange for the return of a kidnapped businessman. That, of course, is one of the evils of terrorism.

But their decision - forced through, in effect, as a Cabinet vote of confidence in Ariel Sharon - is a terrible mistake, with potentially - I would say almost certainly - catastrophic consequences.

The one thing that should be clear by now is that negotiations with terrorists backfire. If and when they stop behaving like terrorists then negotiations become possible. Indeed, that's the very point: if you negotiate with them whilst they remain terrorists then not only is there no incentive to behave like decent human beings, there is a positive incentive to carry on as terrorists.

That is precisely the trap into which the Israeli Cabinet have fallen. By attempting to deal with Hesbollah, they might well succeed in the return of one individual (although the latest news suggests even that is not going to happen), but they also guarantee that there will be an escalation in terror. That's the way it works, and that's the fundamental mistake of negotiating with them. It shows that terror works.

You might have thought that the Israelis, of all people, would have been aware of this, as the front line in the global war on terror. It only goes to show the grotesque pressures under which they live.

(7)

My friend Rich Miniter, whose best selling expose of President Clinton's culpability in allowing bin Laden to remain a free agent is a must-read, has sent me a fascinating e mail.

Rich appeared on Lebanese TV to promote his book. As he points out, all one hears now is that the "Arab street" is implacably opposed to Israel and to America's liberation of Iraq.

Here's Rich's summary of the discussion:

In a panel discussion on Lebanese TV, the head of the Lebanese parliament kept attacking Israel's "illegal occupation." So I asked him how he felt about Syria's illegal occupation of his own country. He said that the Lebanese liked having their Syrian brothers protecting them.

I told him that he sounded like a Syrian puppet. He was outraged and denied it and, as he had for the past hour, called me a "Zionist puppet".

So I asked that , just to show he wasn't a Syrian puppet, would he say one negative sentence--just one--about Syria? He wouldn't do it.

Afterwards, I began wondering why I even bothered to appear on Lebanese television and if I had just advertised myself for a fatwa. While I was wondering, I received the e-mail below.

Subject: thank you

dear sir ,

i am very happy at the moment as i am listenning to your interview with lebanese broadcast network television "lbc" , thnak you for your support , we are a lovely people , but all the persons in the governement and in the parlement , and in politics are dummies to the syrian regime , we , lebanese people like the united state civilisation , we use internet , we watch everything related to usa , we have no problem with jewish , we want peace with israels , we want u to get ridd of the islamics terrrorism , they are giving a bad image on the leabnese people ,we are not arabs , we are more close to the west ,than to the east , we are oppened , thank you sir for your support , we finally find someone who can share our vision , and can talk publically , because there is no liberty of act , or of opinion in lebanon.

thank you once again , and may god help u to liberate us.

sincerely yours

xxxx xxxxxx
lebanese citizen
student of computer science

Yes, it's only one e mail (I've kept the broken English and typos, and blocked out the writer's name and e mail address). Yes, one e mail is hardly representative. And yes, one shouldn't read too much into that one e mail.

But it does show that there are certainly some on the 'Arab street' who want to live in peace as much as their Israeli neighbours. If they were not ruled by their monstrous tryannies, how much greater the chances of peace would be.

(9)

Just spotted this rather good summary (posted by Jackie D of au current) of the reality of the UN resolutions on Israel. It's worth quoting in full:

The resolutions which Israel is often accused of violating -- 242, passed after the 1967 Six Day War, and 338, passed after the Yom Kippur/October War in 1973 -- fall under Chapter 6 of the UN Charter, which deals with ‘Pacific Settlement of Disputes.’ The Iraq resolutions fall under Chapter 7 and deal with ‘Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace and Acts of Aggression’.

The distinction is definitely and obviously not a matter of semantics, as a reading of them will show. It’s also worth noting that the UN Charter does not allow for such resolutions passed under Chapter 6 to be backed by coercive measures, whether or not these involve the use of armed force. The UN Charter does, however, permit the use of coercive measures, even those involving the use of armed force (Article 42), to back resolutions passed under Chapter 7.

Also, and most importantly of all, resolutions 242 and 338 that Israel is accused of defying do not regard Israel alone, but instead all the parties to the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War. The main parties to the War include Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, but also saw forces of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Libya and others involved in the fighting and supplying of forces. All the countries that were party to those wars are required to comply, and no nation is called on to act unilaterally. Agreements are to be reached between parties.

Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula under the timetable agreed to in the 1979 Peace signed with Egypt. In that agreement, Israel handed back over 75% of all land conquered in the 1967 war. Israel and Egypt both complied. In 1994 Jordan and Israel made peace with all territorial disputes settled. Israel and Jordan have complied.

The amusing element of these resolutions is that the only key player in the wars that hasn't complied with the resolution is Syria. The matter of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) is obviously more difficult. When Israel conquered that territory it was under the control of Jordan, but only Great Britain and Pakistan ever recognised the Jordanian annexation. There is not now, nor has there been for 55 years any country recognised on this piece of real estate. It wasn't until 1988 that King Hussein of Jordan ceded his claim on the Disputed Territories to the PLO. A final settlement has not been reached and neither Israel nor the PLO is in breach of these resolutions.

Further, a large part of why Israel isn't going to concern itself very much with the UN resolutions regarding itself is that the UN has rarely managed to treat Israel with any fairness or decency. The UN passed a general resolution stating that Zionism equates racism. The areas where the UN has taken control surrounding Israel are the most likely areas for attacks against Israeli civilians to be based from. In all of the wars of aggression launched against Israel, the UN and the rest of the world has spectacularly failed to aid or succor Israel. Can you blame Israel if after the Yom Kippur war, when Israel was nearly destroyed and the UN did nothing, Israel doesn't care much about what the UN has to say regarding Israel's post-war actions?

The idea that there is no 'heat' on Israel is quite laughable. The only side that doesn't face any heat is Syria, a nation that has supported and instigated a lot of the instability in the Israel/Arab conflict over the last 20 years. The UN has voted on this issue dozens of times, reaffirming a desire to see a final settlement. And, through either selective memory or sheer ignorance, many people have chosen to forget the world condemnation and limited sanctions on Israel by certain states in early to mid 2002.

...Israel is one of the most powerful and best trained armed forces in the world. Even the United States would have difficulty in besting them in an armed conflict. And diplomacy, and by extension war, is the art of the possible (all apologies to Andrew Lloyd Webber...the Tory bastard). I'd hate to think that one would really make the argument that simply because it is not possible to defeat every oppressor that we should not defeat the ones that we can."

(6)

Marvellous anecdote about Yasser Arafat by Norman Geras.

(2)

Here's what Aljazeera's readership thinks of things...

(1)

Good article in today's Sunday Times by Alan Dershowitz, on Democracy, freedom and rights – the Israel you don’t hear about:

In many parts of the world, the state of Israel is singled out unfairly for condemnation, divestiture, boycotts and other sanctions. A double standard of criticism is often directed at the Jewish state, while other states, with worse records, are spared comparable criticism.

This double standard amounts to international bigotry. When judged by a reasonable standard, Israel’s record, though far from perfect, is quite good.

Few countries in history, faced with comparable threats to their civilian population, have tried harder to comply with the rule of law. The Supreme Court of Israel is internationally recognised as among the best in the world. It actively intervenes, even during military battles, whenever persuasive claims are made that the Israeli military is failing to comply with the rule of law.

In recent cases, it has enjoined the use of civilian shields to protect Israeli troops from terrorist attacks; it has prohibited the transfer of relatives of terrorists from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip; it has proscribed shooting at Palestinian ambulances, even though ambulances are often used to hide terrorists and explosives; and it has prohibited the use of rough interrogation techniques sometimes called “torture lite” that are used by America against terrorists with important information.

The Israeli army, though it sometimes overreacts to terrorist attacks, trains its soldiers to minimise civilian casualties and sometimes disciplines those who violate the rules. Because Palestinian terrorists deliberately hide among civilians and build their bomb factories in populated areas, Israel is forced to make difficult logistical decisions, balancing the need to prevent terrorist attacks with the requirement to minimise civilian casualties. Sometimes it strikes the balance improperly, and when it does, it should be criticised.

...Israel is a tiny nation, with few resources and little natural wealth that has had to devote an enormous percentage of its gross national product to defending itself. Yet it has not only created a good life for its Jewish citizens, but also helped its Arab citizens live better lives — as measured by income, health, longevity and other accepted criteria — than the Arabs of any neighbouring countries. A poll of the Palestinian residents of Umm el-Fahm conducted by the Arab-Israeli weekly paper Kul Al-Arab in 2000 showed a striking 83% opposed to including their city in a Palestinian state. They wanted to remain under democratic rule.

Opponents of Israel tend to emphasise the disparity between Israeli Arabs and Jews, while hardly mentioning how much better Israeli Arabs fare than their counterparts in the Arab states. Newspapers in America and Europe routinely cite that Israeli Arabs have the lowest average family income of any ethnic group in Israel, as well as the highest infant mortality rate (as do minority groups in most countries).

Few point out that Arab families tend to be much larger or that women are discouraged from working, facts that contribute to, but do not justify, the discrepancies. Even the critical group Sikkuy, which monitors civic equality among Jews and Palestinians, acknowledges that there have been good faith efforts by the Israeli government to improve Arab infrastructure and education.

I believe that much more can be done to reduce the disparity between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, as well as between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. The recent Or commission appointed by the Israeli government was right to criticise Israeli actions and inactions in this regard. But more must also be done to reduce the disparity between white and black Americans, or non-Romany and Romany central Europeans.

Israel’s healthcare system also dwarfs that of its neighbours, to the benefit of all its citizens. Israel has national health insurance, which guarantees healthcare to all. Access to such care has helped to raise the life expectancy of Israeli Arabs to well above that of their Arab neighbours. Life expectancy is somewhat lower for Israeli Palestinians than for Israeli Jews, 77 years for women and 74 for men rather than 80 and 76 respectively; but well above Syria which is only in the upper 60s for both.

The Israeli economy also creates health benefits beyond its borders. Israel has become a world leader in biotechnology, with Israeli companies leading the way in elements of cancer and autoimmune disease research. There are now more than 160 biotech companies in Israel, with hundreds of millions of private dollars invested, providing thousands of jobs and hundreds of healthimproving products, 80% of which are solely for export.

With close ties to Israel’s flourishing research universities and educational system, as well as support from the government, Israeli biotech has become industryleading, providing advances in research on Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis. Now, tragically, it has become the world leader in the medical treatment of injuries caused by terrorism. Research dollars from Israeli companies and the Israeli government are saving lives both in Israel and abroad. Even aside from the medicine, Israeli research on many subjects — ranging from computer technology to archeology — is among the most respected in the world.

The point that is often ignored is that Israel has become through hard work, ingenuity and, most of all, dedication to freedom and the rule of law, a flourishing and diverse democracy with a bustling economy, a vibrant and critical media, a creative artistic culture and a commitment to equality based on gender, sexual orientation and race.

Other countries in the region, which have more natural resources and comparable amounts of foreign aid, have failed to translate these assets into benefits to their people. Moreover, the relatively strong Israeli economy contributes materially to the wellbeing of all Israelis — and the gap between Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis will surely close further if peace is achieved.

(8)

Here's the latest poll in Iraq, this time from Gallup in Baghdad.

It's had, of course, almost no coverage here. No doubt the findings are rather inconvenient, as they don't exactly fit in with the 'Iraq turning into Vietnam' thesis:

67% say Iraq will be better off five years from now than it was before liberation; only 8% say they expect to be worse off.

47% say the country is worse off now than before liberation; 33% say it's better off.

62% say ousting Saddam Hussein from power was worth the attendant hardships.

Half say the coalition authorities are doing a better job than a month ago; only 14% say they're doing a worse job.

(2)

This WSJ piece, by the former head of Romanian intelligence, makes clear precisely what Arafat is about.

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

...KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naïve enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.

Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to be walking in his footsteps.

...In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he charmed President Carter. Arafat, he urged, would transform his brutal PLO into a law-abiding government-in-exile if only the U.S. would establish official relations. The meeting was a great success for us. Carter hailed Ceausescu, dictator of the most repressive police state in Eastern Europe, as a "great national and international leader" who had "taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community."

...On Oct. 23, 1998, President Clinton concluded his public remarks to Arafat by thanking him for "decades and decades and decades of tireless representation of the longing of the Palestinian people to be free, self-sufficient, and at home." The current administration sees through Arafat's charade but will not publicly support his expulsion. Meanwhile, the aging terrorist has consolidated his control over the Palestinian Authority and marshaled his young followers for more suicide attacks.

(1)

Al-Jazeera's Communications and Media Relations manager is called Jihad Ballout.

Thought I'd share that with you.

(3)

Whatever the merits of the Israeli Cabinet's decision to expel Yasser Arafat, the immediate cause is obvious. He is to blame, in large part, for the murder of 15 Israelis last week by Hamas. His consistent refusal to consider any action against the terrorists has given them carte blanche to attack at will, and has denied the Israelis even a modicum of confidence in him as a trustworthy partner. Indeed he has become a permanent obstacle to any fruitful negotiation. That is now clear to any objective observer - including, of course, Mahmoud Abbas, the former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, who was blocked by Arafat at every turn.

To understand the dynamics of the situation, however, one needs to look beyond Arafat. No one - certainly not the Israelis - believes that Arafat, even if he wanted to, could now fully remove Hamas from the picture. Hamas is, for the foreseeable future, a permanent presence. And it is Hamas, not Arafat, that is the root of the problem.

Most coverage of Hamas in the Western media betrays a quite astonishing misunderstanding of its role and its aims. The received wisdom is that, although its tactics may be repellent, Hamas is a group of freedom fighters battling against the Israelis for their rights - something akin to nationalist terrorist groups such as the IRA or ETA, which, however foul their methods, have an aim - national self-determination - that can be shared by perfectly decent, non-violent supporters.

It follows logically that any Israeli response to Hamas is reported as merely tit for tat and, in its own way, equally destructive to the chances of a negotiated settlement. Both sides are as bad as each other. Typical of this view was a piece in Wednesday's Guardian by Kevin Toolis, an acknowledged expert on the IRA: "The deaths of 3,500 people during Ireland's Troubles never changed the underlying conflict; they were just a crude calculus of conflict.

The Troubles stopped only when the political leadership on both sides negotiated a solution. In the coming months, the same worthless mortal calculus will be enacted again among the innocent in the Middle East; on buses in Jerusalem and on Palestinian streets. The blood will never stop until it is accepted that there can be no military solution to the conflict."

That view, however widely it may be propagated, is so warped that it can only raise suspicions about the agenda of those who peddle it. The comparison with the IRA is entirely specious. If the IRA had espoused not merely the separation of Northern Ireland from the UK but also the murder of every Unionist and every Anglican in Great Britain, the abolition of the United Kingdom and its replacement with a Catholic state, run by the IRA and dedicated to converting the rest of the world to Catholicism by force, then there might be some merit in the comparison.

Hamas is explicit about its aims. In August 1988 it published the Islamic Covenant, which makes clear its opposition to Israel's existence in any form. It states that "there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad (holy war)". Any Muslim who leaves "the circle of struggle with Zionism" is guilty of "high treason". It calls for the creation of an Islamic republic in Palestine to replace Israel. Muslims should "raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine".

In a statement released on May 19, after a wave of suicide murders in previous days, Hamas said: "These attacks will continue in all the territories of 1948 and 1967, and we will not stop attacking the Zionist Jewish people as long as any of them remain in our land." A Hamas member explained to an interviewer last month that: "The Jews have destroyed your Christianity just like they are trying to destroy our Islam. You should read the words of the Prophet. Join us. We do not just want to liberate Palestine. We want all countries to live under the Caliphate. The Islamic army once reached the walls of Vienna. It will happen again."

Talk of "negotiation" with Hamas is meaningless - as meaningless as the idea that you can negotiate with Osama bin Laden. You cannot negotiate with the man who intends only your murder and the destruction of your country and who is prepared to die - and kill you in the process - rather than settle for less. As bin Laden put it in an interview in 1999: "If the instigation of jihad against the Jews and the Americans … is considered a crime, then let history be a witness that I am a criminal."

The only possible response to both Hamas and al-Qa'eda is military - which, to be blunt, involves targeted assassinations. Bin Laden has only started to espouse the Palestinians' cause recently, as a useful further means of support. To the likes of bin Laden, they are an infidel rabble, and a putative Palestinian state is not fit to be considered alongside Islamic states such as Afghanistan under the Taliban and the Wahhabi Saudi Arabia.

Hamas is a very different type of organisation to al-Qa'eda. Much of its strength comes from its deep tentacles in Palestinian society. It spends much of its estimated £44 million annual budget on an extensive social services network, which includes schools, orphanages, mosques, health care clinics, soup kitchens and sports leagues. Since Arafat's corrupt Palestinian Authority fails to provide such basic services, Hamas's efforts in this area explain much of its popularity.

What both really have in common, however, is that there are still people who refuse to recognise the nature of their threat and who make fatuous - and dangerous - comments about a "negotiated settlement" with them. The real tragedy about Arafat is that the longer he has been in control, the less he has delivered for the Palestinians, and the more their support has transferred to Hamas. There was, as the Oslo Accords show, a possibility of negotiation with the PLO. Israel's response to the suicide bombers is, though, based on a simple truth: there can be no negotiation with Hamas.

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