Cut Off the $3 Billion Subsidy to Israel - Nothing Else Will Stop the Slaughter

Don't even waste time with a threat. Just cut the mooching murderers off.

Greg Kocher aqt the Herald:

More than 50 people protested Israel's bombing of Gaza during a downtown Lexington demonstration late Friday afternoon, "Two, four, six, eight, stop the killing! Stop the hate!" they chanted.

"Honk for peace" one sign read, and several motorists did just that.

 Ismael Shalash, 32, of Lexington, who is of Palestinian heritage, said, "We feel it is our job as a community to come together here, to unify together."

Notice they are not demanding a Palestinian homeland, which they should have been. They are not threatening to drive the Jews into the sea. They are asking for peace, and an end to hate.

There is a strong Jewish pro-peace contingent in Lexington.  I am deeply disappointed but not surprised they apparently did not join the protest.

This Is What a Continuing War Crime Looks Like

It looks like this.

I cut no slack for Palestinians.  I am as anti-Palestinian as you are going to find among American liberals.

But this is not the Israel I grew up admiring.

This is not the Israel of the '70s Peace Movement.

This is not the Israel of the Camp David Accords.

This is not the Israel of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. Fuck, this is not even the Israel of that old terrorist Menachem Begin.

I do not believe what I am reading. I know it is true, but I don't believe it.

It fucking breaks my heart.

More than Vladimir Putin (and don't think that Israel's ground invasion of Gaza beginning right after Putin's Ukrainian allies shot down a passenger jet is a coincidence), more than Darth Cheney and the U.S. warmongers, more than every terrorist on the planet put together, the greatest threat to peace today is the country that was - for a moment, long ago - a beacon of civilization in a barbarous world:

Israel.

AynRandy Gets Middle East Exactly Backwards

Really hard to figure out this one: is the Tribble-Toupeed One really that grossly ignorant of decades of Israeli occupation of the West Bank or is he so completely owned and occupied by AIPAC that he doesn't care about the damage he's doing?

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul will introduce a bill this week, calling for an end of U.S. aid to Palestine until it recognizes Israel’s right to exist, which could be seen as an attempt to drum up pro-Israel support prior to a possible 2016 bid.

“Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with an entity that does not believe it should exist and that has used terrorist tactics to seek its end,” the Republican senator said in a statement Monday.

The biggest - by several orders of magnitude - obstacle to Middle East peace is the categorical refusal of Israel's fanatically right-wing government to stop its slow-motion genocide of Palestinian Arabs.

For decades, American presidents and Secretaries of State have begged Israel to stop building Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, to stop building the apartheid wall, to stop undermining the Palestinian economy, to stop attacking and arresting and detaining without charges every random Palestinian who catches an Israeli soldier's eye.

The only way to force this Bully Israel to the table is to cancel all U.S. aid to Israel - all the billions of tax dollars in military aid - and transfer it to humanitarian aid to Palestinian Arabs.

Israel is not the plucky, secular, socialistic democracy of 1948 or even 1978. It's a nuclear-powered bully that's on a downhill path to self-destruction.

It'll take the whole Middle East and a big chunk of the U.S. with it if we don't stop it.

Palestinian Arabs aren't the enemy any more.  Israel is.

One War Criminal Down; Two to Go

If there were a hell for unindicted war criminals, Ariel Sharon would be there today anticipating the imminent arrival of Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger.

 

Juan Cole describes Sharon's crimes and concludes:

Violent, impulsive, rash, and greedy, Sharon helped turn Israel from the ideal of a democracy governed by the rule of law into instead an arbitrary colonial power. He created the endeavor of an Israel attempting to annex the West Bank; he created the problem of a Shiite crescent that ends on his doorstep. He committed war crimes. He pioneered elective wars for regime change, likely influencing George W. Bush. He was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths of innocents. Despite his late-career acceptance of the notion of a Palestinian state, he really just meant another colonially-dominated entity. He was willing to create a South-Africa style bantustan for the Palestinians, not a real state with sovereignty. Even then he wanted to keep 45% of the Palestinian West Bank for himself.

Sharon was one of the founders of the modern state of Israel. But unlike the latter, which has been a site of creativity and technological innovation, Sharon was peculiarly unimaginative. He thought that bullying people and using sadism and arbitrariness against them would convince them to comply. He probably helped doom the whole enterprise of Israel; the one he helped create, a site of the forever war and imperial domination, is intrinsically unstable.

Max Blumenthal has an even darker analysis:

Now that Sharon’s unilateral vision appears to have been consolidated, Israel’s government must perpetually manage an occupation it has no intention of ending. It has no clear strategy to achieve international legitimacy and no endgame. Its direct line to Washington has become a life-support system for the status quo. Like Sharon, who spent his last years in a comatose state without any hope of regaining consciousness, Israel is only buying time

Juan Cole asks if Sharon escaped indictment because he was white. Considering he shares that characteristic with Cheney and Kissinger, I'd answer yes. But it's not just their race - it's also their membership in the club of Western Military Empires on the Winning Side in WWII.

What should be clear is that the world cannot afford these double standards, either for Israel or for Syria. If we are to emerge from the jungle, we must have a rule of law in international affairs as well as domestically. Impunity for war criminals only encourages war crimes.

Repugs' Favorite Nation Now Has Free Abortion

Now we'll get to see if U.S. conservatives hate women having reproductive rights more than they love Palestinians being tortured, murdered and occupied right off their own land.

Think Progress:

Beginning in 2014, Israel may cover the cost of elective abortions for women in between the ages of 20 and 33. Health officials in the country recommended the new policy on Monday, and indicated they eventually intend to expand it to offer abortion funding to women of all ages. It now heads to country’s Health Ministry for approval.

In Israel, a health committee determines which treatments will be funded through government dollars by approving some medical services for inclusion in a state-subsidized “heath basket,” and sends their recommendations to the entire Health Ministry for official approval. Before the proposed update to this basket, women under the age of 20 or over the age of 40 could receive subsidized abortion services for personal reasons — but women in between those age groups could only get abortion funding if they were suffering a medical emergency, or if their pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.

If the policy is updated in line with the new recommendations, an additional 6,300 women may be eligible to seek state funding for abortion care.

In a press conference on Monday, the committee members explained that the rule change is necessary because not every women can afford the reproductive care she needs without state assistance. “It was brought to our attention that there is a large group of women between 20 and 40 who for various reasons — financial or reasons of secrecy — do not terminate pregnancies,” Prof. Jonathan Halevy, who heads the panel that makes the final recommendations for the health basket, explained.

Halevy indicated that the committee is waiting for more funding to be able to expand the health basket to include elective abortions for all age groups. State-subsidized contraceptives are not currently available because of limited funds; the committee was allowed to use the equivalent of $86 million USD to expand the services offered in the basket.

snipy at wonkette nails it :

You can tell it is propagandatastic because of how they call it a fancy soothing name like a “health basket” when really they should call it a big basket of blood and murder and murder and blood. Oh Israel, you are our little lost lamb, our prodigal son. Come back to the soothing arms of a particularly idiotic and rapacious wing of the American GOP, and they will teach you nonsense words like “pre-born” and “snowflake baby” and how to unthinkingly use Holocaust metaphors and you will dump out that satanic health basket and move forward, proudly with no social safety net whatsoever, just like God intended.

Meanwhile, here in Dominionist America:

Over the past three years, state legislatures enacted a staggering 205 restrictions on reproductive rights, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute. That figure, spurred by record-breaking numbers of restrictions each year since 2011, already exceeds the number of restrictions that were enacted during the entire previous decade. Between 2001 and 2010, states passed just 189 abortion restrictions.

Sure as fuck if this happened today, the guy would never get out of solitary confinement.

I’m not too big on the idea of hero, but there is something about the person persecuted for making others’ lives better that gets to me. One of the greats passed away yesterday. Dr. Kenneth Edelin, absurdly convicted in 1975 of manslaughter for conducting an entirely legal abortion, has died. In Boston, an all-white jury convicted this black doctor on such flimsy grounds that his conviction was soon overturned. He continued in his advocacy for reproductive rights and especially for the poor. A great man.

Israel's Anti-Jewish Racism

Any other nation pursuing the policies and actions that are commonplace in Israel would be labeled a rogue state.

And a state that attacks and rejects its own citizens is committing national suicide.

The refusal of Israel's equivalent of the Red Cross to accept blood from an Ethiopian Jewish lawmaker sparked demands on Wednesday for a review of guidelines seen as deeply discriminatory.

The rejection of the blood from Pnina Tamano-Shata by an official of Magen David Adom came at a donor drive outside parliament and was caught on video footage which was widely aired by Israeli television channels.

"Under health ministry directives, we are unable to accept blood from donors of Ethiopian Jewish origin," the health official is heard to say as he spurns the donation.

SNIP 

But critics say the blanket ban has no medical basis and masks persistent racism among other Israeli Jews towards the black Ethiopian minority.

Tamano-Shata is a member of parliament for the centrist Yesh Atid party, part of Israel's governing coalition.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rang her to express his "admiration" for her offer to give blood and to promise a review of the ministry guidelines.

Tamano-Shata herself hit out at an "affront to an entire community on the basis of the colour of their skin".

"I'm 32, I arrived in Israel at the age of three, did my military service and have two children. There's no reason to treat me in this way," she told Channel 10 television.

SNIP 

Top Magen David Adom officials later agreed they could take Tamano-Shata's blood, but only to freeze it, not to put it into the national blood bank, the Ynet news website reported.

Where are the liberals who founded Israel and led a strong pro-peace party for decades?

Here's why there's no internal opposition on the left to Israel's right-wing colonialism, despite Israel being safer and more secure than it has ever been.

If You've Sunk to Arresting Toddlers, You've Lost the Moral High Ground

If you're arresting four-year-olds, you have a problem that can't be solved by arrested four-year-olds.

From Firedoglake:

- Authorities in Israel issued an arrest warrant for Muhammad al-Majid, a Palestinian…who is 4 years old.

Meanwhile, both U.S. political parties have their Israeli handlers keeping close tabs.


Israel is no longer our son of a bitch. We're Israel's bitch.

The Only Democracy in the Middle East is Dead, and Israel Killed It

There's a lot of disagreement about whether Max Blumenthal's new book Goliath libels Israel, and I'm in no position to judge who is right.

But I know this: the Israel of the Occupation, and the Settlements, and the Abuse of Palestinians is not a friend of the United States, not a dependable ally, and not by any definition a democracy.

And Israelis know it, because they are desperately spreading self-refuting propaganda.



Max Blumenthal at The Nation:

In the post-Oslo era, as the strategy that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle refers to as “peace without peace” captured the Israeli consensus, human rights activists ratcheted up grassroots efforts to challenge the occupation of Palestine and Israel’s prevailing structure of ethno-religious discrimination. Popularly known as BDS, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israeli institutions involved in occupation has generated shock waves in international pro-Israel circles and within the top levels of Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus. The government-linked Reut Institute has designated BDS as a key national security threat and produced a blueprint for sabotaging Palestine solidarity networks around the world.

While paranoia mounts inside Israeli policy circles about the rising tide of nonviolent global resistance, Netanyahu has grown obsessed with Israel’s withering image in the West. Under his guidance, the term “delegitimization” has become a household word signifying BDS and nearly everything done in the name of exposing Israel’s violations of international law. And thanks to Netanyahu’s instigation, Barack Obama has become the first American president to explicitly pledge to battle the pressure campaign.

Groping for a convenient solution to its public relations problems, the Israeli government has turned to hasbara. The literal meaning of this Hebrew word is “explanation,” but when put into practice, most informed observers recognize it as propaganda. The more the State of Israel relies on force to manage the occupation, the more it feels compelled to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encounter hasbara, the more likely they are to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation and repression that define its treatment of the Palestinians.

From Ramallah to Boston, With a Plea for Freedom

In the three decades since I visited Israel and Egypt, I have evolved from an Israel partisan who looked down on Arabs to a Palestine partisan who despises Israel's anti-Arab policy. And that is entirely the fault of the Israeli government's abusive, murderous and unconscionable apartheid of Palestinians and the successive U.S. governments that enable it.

And still I am amazed that hope survives the hate.

Digby:

From the "hate us for our freedom" files

In case you missed it:

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- With the Boston Marathon bombings on their mind, hundreds of Palestinian and international runners participated Sunday in what was billed as the first Palestinian marathon.

The Right to Movement Palestine Marathon kicked off in front of the Church of the Nativity in the biblical city of Bethlehem in the West Bank.

Before it began, Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, asked runners to bow their heads in silence for one minute in remembrance of the Boston Marathon victims.

“As we stand here at the Nativity Square, we should bow in silence for one minute for the victims who died in the terrorist act last week in the Boston Marathon,” he said.

He went on to say that he wanted freedom. Which means, I guess, that he hates America. Or something.

So Much for the Middle East's First "Democracy"

Anyone who visited the Middle East in the 1980s, as I did, could not help but notice the stark contrast. in Israel, a thriving modern democracy trying to work with the Palestinians; in surrounding nations, kleptocratic dictators suppressing impoverished majorities.

But that's not the Israel President Obama will visit on Wednesday.

From the Washington Monthly:

Israel’s Transportation Ministry announced the creation of “Palestinians only” bus lines from central Israel to the West Bank. Ministry spokespeople told Ynet that the decision is meant to alleviate “congestion felt on bus lines used by Jews in the same areas.” But while Palestinians won’t be forced to ride these lines, several bus drivers told Ynet that those “who choose to travel on the so-called “mixed” lines, will be asked to leave them.”

“’We are not allowed to refuse service and we will not order anyone to get off the bus, but from what we were told, starting next week, there will be checks at the checkpoint, and Palestinians will be asked to board their own buses,’” according to one bus driver.

And this:

“Israel’s segregated bus lines have touched a nerve.”

Yes, Israelis have turned into world-class racist assholes.

Israel doesn't have to worry about the Arabs pushing them into the sea any more. It's destroying itself more effectively than its enemies ever could.

The Holy Land?

The Rude Pundit:

Away in a Manger, 2012:

A mere 42 miles separates the Gaza town of Beit Lahiya from Bethlehem, the city where Christian legend says that a virgin, led by a star, gave birth to the child of God in a place fit for animals. Two thousand years, 42 miles. The family up there was photographed yesterday, just 12 days before the supposed birthday of the Muslim prophet Jesus.

Beit Lahiya suffers mightily whenever there are periods of bombardment from Israel because Hamas was elected to run it. In 2009, the city was wrecked. In this most recent offensive, 8 days of steady bombing, "Suhail Hamada Mohman and his 10-year-old son, who were both killed instantly at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012 in Beit Lahiya while distributing water to their neighbors," among other casualties.

There's no point here other than that this exists, people being forced to go about their lives in a nativity of rubble.

How Israel Broke Our Hearts

I am of "Exodus" generation: we who read Leon Uris' book as teenagers in the '70s and fell like a ton of bricks for the heroic story of Israel's founding. We loved and defended Uris' Israel unconditionally, which is why the Socialist Utopia's recent sharp right turn to savage and brutal colonialism cuts so deeply.

From the Herald:

Most of the people who gathered in protest at the Robert F. Stephens Courthouse Plaza in downtown Lexington on Tuesday had not even been born 64 years ago, when Israel became an independent state.

Still, they said they long for the return of the land to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were forced to leave or flee in the wake of the declaration.

The rally, attended by more than 50 people, was one of many held throughout the world Tuesday, which has become known as Nakba Day, or "Catastrophe Day," for Palestinian supporters.

I still have very little sympathy for the hard-liners demanding full "right of return," but I do know that today, Israel's brutal Occupation is handing Palestinians the moral high ground.

Eric Alterman at The Nation:

Those in the market for conspiracy theories might be pleased by the mainstream media reaction to Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism. Not only has the book been widely attacked but so too have its author’s motives for writing it. Beinart’s book is essentially a call for American Jews to challenge the professional Jewish establishment that has failed to stand up for the liberal values of the community it professes to represent and acts instead as an apologist for Israel’s rightward, anti-democratic drift toward permanent occupation. With an impressive uniformity of opinion, Beinart’s reviewers have by and large ignored the details of his critique. Jewish liberals, centrists, neocons and far-right chauvinists all apparently agree that Beinart has written the wrong book. Instead of focusing his attention on the shortcomings of Israeli and American Jewish institutions, he should be complaining about Palestinian rejectionism and suicide-bombing (as might be expected of former protégés of Marty Peretz), as it is obviously their behavior, rather than any action that Israel may have been forced to take in self-defense, that lies at the root of the conflict.

Even were one to grant the substance of the anti-Beinart attacks, one would still be left with Lenin’s age-old question: What is to be done? Where are the alternatives to an all-out effort — risks and all — to end the occupation? While some of the reviewers profess distaste for the policies of the Israeli government, none propose a solution that involves anything much more than Palestinian surrender. And since that is not going to happen — indeed the political weakness of Palestinian “moderates” is often cited as yet another roadblock to a sustainable peace agreement—then what we are left with is the passive acceptance of Israel’s slow-motion destruction of its democracy coupled with an apparently endless (and brutal) military occupation.

As is always the case when Israel is criticized, discussion in that country has been far more open and self-confident in its press than in our own. Writing in the invaluable +972 webzine, Mairav Zonszein observes, “Beinart’s writing does not shed new light on the situation, but the fact that he is making such waves reflects just how hard it is for American Jews to figure out their identity vis-à-vis Israel—and how, after 64 years trying to figure it out, it continues to be the mainstay of American Jewish discourse.” Her colleague Noam Sheizaf writes, “The panic with which the ‘Crisis of Zionism’ was met had nothing to do with the book’s not-so-new political message…but rather from the thought that Beinart does represent something real, that the Jewish establishment is indeed failing, not in terms of political effectiveness, but on a much deeper level that has to do with the moral values and the self-perception of the people it claims to represent.”

SNIP

American Jews could play a useful role in aiding our Israeli cousins to see that they are destroying what was noble and admirable in the creation of a democratic and egalitarian Jewish homeland over fears that are in some significant respects (albeit not entirely) driven by psychological rather than real-world factors. But as the ferocious reaction to Beinart’s book, coupled with the nonreaction to the PRIME project, demonstrates, the opposite is unfortunately going to be the case. As Sheizaf observes, the project of “Jewish establishment and members of the Jewish media—the manufacturers of ideology” is to do whatever is necessary “to relieve the pain of their community by blurring the existence of a problem. It is an ungrateful task, which will last as long as the occupation does.”

So again, the alternative? Kiddushin 39b in the Babylonian Talmud tells us, “And wherever the potential for harm is ever present we do not rely on miracles.” Yet that is exactly what the American Jewish establishment and its media apologists do when it comes to the preservation of a Jewish and democratic Israel. And therein lies the true “crisis” of Zionism.

The neo-con wingnuts and freakazoids who foam at the mouth about "defending Israel" at all costs are Israel's true enemies; a true ally would demand it return to its founding values.

How a Modern Democracy Regresses to the Dark Ages

By empowering conservatives and freakazoids, of course.

This week, the Republican National Committee rejected 35 years of bipartisan U.S. diplomacy to declare itself in favor of genocide in the Middle East.

The Republican National Committee (RNC), at their winter meeting in New Orleans, unanimously adopted a resolution that appears to support a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"One-state solution" is neo-con for "eliminating all non-Jews from biblical Palestine and annexing the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights - and what the fuck, Jordan and southern Lebanon, too - into Greater Israel."

For more than 50 years, we liberals held up Israel as the epitome of the modern secular democracy. Israel's founders were secular socialists who despised the Orthodox freakazoid minority and worked hard to marginalize it.

That Orthodox freakazoid minority, by the way, vehemently opposed the establishment of the Nation of Israel 64 years ago, and loudly and repeatedly denied its very existence. Their objection was that according to their invisible sky wizard, only the return of the messiah could bring about the rebirth of Israel as a nation. Not even Palestinian terrorists were as shrill in their refusal to acknowledge Israel as were the Orthodox freakazoid minority.

That is the same Orthodox freakazoid minority which is now forcing its insanity on every aspect of Israeli society. Israel today is about half an inch away from being as fanatic and ridiculous a theocracy as Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Digby:

Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and contemplate how an advanced nation can suddenly take this regressive turn:

In the three months since the Israeli Health Ministry awarded a prize to a pediatrics professor for her book on hereditary diseases common to Jews, her experience at the awards ceremony has become a rallying cry.

The professor, Channa Maayan, knew that the acting health minister, who is ultra-Orthodox, and other religious people would be in attendance. So she wore a long-sleeve top and a long skirt. But that was hardly enough.

Not only did Dr. Maayan and her husband have to sit separately, as men and women were segregated at the event, but she was instructed that a male colleague would have to accept the award for her because women were not permitted on stage.

Though shocked that this was happening at a government ceremony, Dr. Maayan bit her tongue. But others have not, and her story is entering the pantheon of secular anger building as a battle rages in Israel for control of the public space between the strictly religious and everyone else.

At a time when there is no progress on the Palestinian dispute, Israelis are turning inward and discovering that an issue they had neglected — the place of the ultra-Orthodox Jews — has erupted into a crisis.

And it is centered on women.

“Just as secular nationalism and socialism posed challenges to the religious establishment a century ago, today the issue is feminism,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University. “This is an immense ideological and moral challenge that touches at the core of life, and just as it is affecting the Islamic world, it is the main issue that the rabbis are losing sleep over.”

The list of controversies grows weekly: Organizers of a conference last week on women’s health and Jewish law barred women from speaking from the podium, leading at least eight speakers to cancel; ultra-Orthodox men spit on an 8-year-old girl whom they deemed immodestly dressed; the chief rabbi of the air force resigned his post because the army declined to excuse ultra-Orthodox soldiers from attending events where female singers perform; protesters depicted the Jerusalem police commander as Hitler on posters because he instructed public bus lines with mixed-sex seating to drive through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods; vandals blacked out women’s faces on Jerusalem billboards.

Without wading into Israeli politics, let's just say that this is disturbing on any number of levels. But one thing is clear: fundamentalist religious influence always leads to the repression of women.

And there's nothing that says a Western democracy can't go backwards. It's the whole point of conservatism.

SNIP

Perhaps women, racial minorities and other "traditionally" second class citizens can be forgiven for being somewhat appalled at the idea that these people could be empowered even more than they already are. It's really not all that abstract to them.

SNIP

Devolution means regressing to traditional hierarchies. It's something those who were only recently second class citizens understand in their bones.

And of course that's just the way America's Xian freakazoid minority wants it. If the freakazoids can turn back the clock to the Dark Ages in a modern secular democracy like Israel, they can do it here, too.

The Consequences of Israel Addiction

And when America and Israel stand alone against the antagonism of every other nation on the planet, will that satisfy the Reichwing freakazoids' craving for suicidal exceptionalism?

Edward Teller at Firedoglake:

This was an historic day at the United Nations. The United Nations Educational Scientific Cultural Organization, one of the most important bodies on the planet, voted to give the Palestinian State full membership in the body. BBC:

This is the first UN agency the Palestinians have sought to join since submitting their bid for recognition to the Security Council in September.

The UN Security Council will vote next month on whether to grant the Palestinians full UN membership.

Widespread applause greeted the result of Monday’s vote in the chamber – of 173 countries taking part, 107 were in favour, 14 voted against and 52 abstained.

The New York Times:

The step will cost the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization one-quarter of its yearly budget — the 22 percent contributed by the United States (about $70 million) plus another 3 percent contributed by Israel.

Unless that shortfall is made up by other nations, Unesco will have to begin closing offices and laying off staff.

Cheers filled the hall at Unesco’s headquarters here after the vote, with one delegate shouting “Long live Palestine!” in French. The Palestinian foreign minister, Riad al-Malki, praised the organization, saying that “this vote will help erase a tiny part of the injustice done to the Palestinian people” and will help protect world heritage sites in Israeli-occupied territory.

In a long speech that was met with applause, Mr. Malki said that “this membership will be the best step toward peace and stability,” insisting that the Palestinian request for membership in Unesco was “linked in no way to our request to join the United Nations.”

The Obama administration, which values its membership in Unesco, tried unsuccessfully to keep the vote from taking place, while Irina Bokova, the American-supported director-general of the organization, traveled to Washington to meet with congressional leaders and ask them to alter the law.

Legislation dating from 1990 and 1994 mandates a complete cutoff of American financing to any United Nations agency that accepts the Palestinians as a full member. State Department lawyers judged that there was no leeway in the legislation, and no possibility of a waiver, so the United States contribution for 2011 and future years will not be paid.

Addressing Unesco’s general conference after the vote, the American ambassador to the organization, David T. Killion, said that the United States “remains deeply committed to Unesco,” which he called a “vital organization.” But he repeatedly called the vote on Monday “premature” and said the United States would seek other means to support the agency, though he did not offer specifics.

Victoria Nuland, a spokeswoman for the State Department, said an expected November payment of $60 million to the agency would not be made.

David Dayen:

The fallout from the entry of Palestine into UNESCO continues. In addition to the US, bound by statute, removing their funds for UNESCO, Canada canceled its voluntary funding. The organization’s budget is probably close to 1/4 smaller than it was just a few days ago. And that can’t help but impact UNESCO’s work around the world.
What’s more, Israel has responded, not by targeting the member states that voted for Palestine’s entry, but by thumbing their nose at Palestine:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for the accelerated construction of some 2,000 housing units in areas in the West Bank and around Jerusalem, an official statement said on Tuesday.

The statement came after Netanyahu called a special cabinet session to discuss the granting of full membership to the Palestinians by UNESCO, the U.N. cultural agency, a move opposed by Israel and the United States.

A senior government official said after the meeting that the cabinet had also decided to halt money transfers to the Palestinians Authority as a temporary measure until a final decision was made.

“You can’t demand from the Israeli public to continue to show restraint when the Palestinian leadership continues to slam the door in their face,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

I think he has that the other way around. The door is being slammed in the Palestinian’s face, and has been for over 60 years. Faced with no hope and continued statelessness, the Palestinian Authority embarked on the only leverage they had left. And the result has been more anger and provocation. These are vengeful actions that reflect a pattern of abuse. Juan Cole adds:

As for the fall-out for the United States, an informed reader wrote to remind me that if the Palestinians are welcomed into other UN bodies, the US could well lose substantial influence and have its interests adversely affected. He notes that the International Telecommunication Union allocates radio spectrum usage globally, “including the spectrum reserved for military and commercial use.” The World Health Organization is clearly important to the US for combating epidemics. The World Meteorological Organization is a matrix of information about weather that has agricultural and military implications. The World Intellectual Property Organization recognizes patents and copyrights worldwide.

These sorts of UN organizations, which are, whether Americans want to recognize it or not, important to the United States, could be forced to expel the US and cease sharing information with it if it does not pay its dues. Congress in the 1990s, under the influence of the Israel lobbies, passed a law forbidding the US government from giving money to bodies that recognize Palestine.

If Israel wants to go down the road of an apartheid state, and the attendant global outcry that is sure to follow, they’re doing a good job, and the US is cheering them as they follow that path.

Steve Benen:

For many on the right, I don’t think there’s much doubt that Israel is, in fact, America’s ally uber alles.

Consider a recent anecdote that flew largely under the radar. In September, Mitt Romney appeared on a right-wing radio show to discuss the Palestinian bid for United Nations statehood recognition. The Republican candidate said the United States should “reconsider our relationship” with any country that voted with Palestinians at the U.N.

In practical terms, that means Romney, who stands a reasonably good chance of getting elected president next year, would “reconsider” the United States’ relationship with a variety of longstanding U.S. allies — France, India, South Africa — because of their vote on a U.N. resolution recognizing Palestinians.

This did not cause a controversy — but Obama’s hug for the prime minister of Turkey generates complaints from conservatives.

America’s ally uber alles? Apparently so.

This is fucking stupid. We've gone from George Washington's urging to avoid all foreign entanglements to betting our entire national future on a nation run by suicidal fanatics despised by 95 percent of the world.

The only rational path left to us is to get Bibi into a small room, throw the motherfucker up against the wall and say:

"Alright, asshole, now that we've proven we are the very last friend you have in the universe, this is what you're gonna do. You're gonna dismantle every settlement outside the 1967 border, you're gonna imprison every settler who so much as makes a face at the prospect, you're gonna lift the embargo on Gaza, and you're gonna sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act and submit to inspections.

"You're gonna do all that with a smile on your face or we're gonna cancel your unlimited line of credit on the U.S. Treasury and never give you another dime."

"Israel's biggest enemy has become itself"

I visited Israel decades ago, and remember as if was yesterday how moved I was by the flourishing democracy a massacred people had built.

Today, I look at Israel and see a once-successful friend crashing to the ground on the crack of overpowering violence, blind to the suicidal path it is on.

Stephen Robert at The Nation:

I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts where my parents headed our local synagogue, Hadassah and the United Jewish Appeal. My first trip abroad after university, in 1962, included a week-long visit to Israel, where I was awed by its accomplishments, as well as by its vulnerability. After the Six-Day War in 1967, I basked in the courage and military prowess of my fellow Jews. The eloquence of foreign minister Abba Eban, defending his beleaguered country at the United Nations, still fills me with pride. In the years since, I’ve been a contributor and fundraiser for the UJA-Federation of New York, a governor of the American Jewish Committee, which is dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, and a founding director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. I’ve made five additional visits to Israel since 1962, the last this summer as part of a humanitarian aid trip to East Jerusalem and the West Bank. As a Jew who has been an ardent supporter of Israel since its independence, it pains me to record what I saw there. But it is my love for Israel and for the Jewish people that drives me to speak out at this treacherous time.

What I witnessed in the West Bank—home to about 2.5 million Palestinians and 400,000 Israeli settlers—exceeded my worst expectations. While the world’s statesmen have dithered, Israel has created a system of apartheid on steroids, a horrifying prison with concrete walls as high as twenty-six feet, topped with body-ravaging coils of razor wire. Spaced along these walls are imposing guard towers that harbor bunkers from which trespassers can be shot by Israeli soldiers. From this physical segregation—one land for Israelis; another, unequal land for Palestinians—flows a torrent of misery, violence and human rights abuses. The West Bank suffers from acute shortages of water, housing, jobs and healthcare. Palestinian children are separated from their parents, denied access to hospitals and stoned and beaten by Jewish settlers. Human rights sanctioned by international law, including the right to health, the prohibition on transferring populations into occupied territories and equal treatment before the law are routinely violated.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, once said that Israel will be judged by how it treats the Arabs. This is a moral test Israel now resoundingly fails—a failure that threatens to undermine all of its accomplishments and, as is increasingly clear, its future.

SNIP

How can Jews, who have been persecuted for centuries, tolerate this inhumanity? Where is their moral compass? How can this situation be acceptable to Judaism’s spiritual and political leaders? I don’t have that answer; except to say that Israel’s biggest enemy has become itself.

* * *

The Arab Spring should make it abundantly clear that the Jewish state is on the wrong side of history. When, exactly, the tipping point will come is not predictable. But when that point arrives, it will bring tremendous risks for Israel, and for almost half the Jews in the world who reside there. That Israel has the upper hand now portends nothing about the future. A small state of 7 million holding 4 million neighbors in prison, without opportunity, sufficient medical care, food, water and equal justice is not a sustainable situation. When, eventually, stasis gives way to unimaginable change, it will be too late to alter course. Israel, “right or wrong,” a position taken by many, will lead to a catastrophe. It represents a suspension of critical thought; characteristic of many radical ideologies. Friends of Israel would serve it better to know the true facts and then drive Israel toward a moral and practical solution.

If we don't find a way to condemn Israel's apartheid while demanding real peace, we will let Israel drag us down with them into the cesspool of global opprobrium.

Liberals tell our allies the truth about their actions, and urge them to do what's right for other nations and their own.

Risking Their Lives for Liberal Values

You think liberals have a tough row to how in the United States? In militarized and reactionary Israel, peace activists are risking jail and death to stand literally beside Palestinians protesting border walls and checkpoints.

From the Nation:

Many of these communities have not seen extended, large-scale demonstrations against the occupation since the first intifada, which ended in the early 1990s. (The second intifada began in October 2000 with unarmed protests at Israeli checkpoints, but after dozens of Palestinians were killed by massive Israeli firepower, it gradually took the form of an armed struggle carried out by small cells of militants and aimed at Israeli soldiers, settlers and civilians. Israel, using all its military power, eventually crushed it, and the violence left thousands of casualties in both societies, deepening hostility between Israelis and Palestinians and handing the Israeli left a near-fatal blow.)

“In fact, the Israeli left never recovered from Rabin’s assassination” in 1995, says former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg. “Later, Ehud Barak came and presented his personal failure in Camp David [in 2000] as the failure of the entire way. When the head of the peace camp declared that there was no partner on the other side, it opened the door for unilateralism.” Burg, the son of one of Israel’s legendary religious leaders, was a prominent voice in the Israeli left during the 1980s and ’90s, a member of Peace Now and one of the leaders of the Labor Party; since his retirement from the Knesset in 2003, his criticism of liberal Zionism and its exclusively Jewish nature has deepened. Recently he called for Israeli Jews to explore alternative historical narratives and political models. “There was something unilateral in Zionism from the start, but it became the only way after Camp David,” says Burg. “We built the fence unilaterally, and we left Gaza unilaterally. Barak brought us back to the days of Golda Meir, who denied there is such a thing as a Palestinian people.” At the same time, the closures on the West Bank—introduced by Israel in the early 1990s and vastly tightened with the second intifada and construction of the separation wall a decade later—ended the daily direct contact, much of it commercial, that was common between Israeli and Palestinian civilians. Today most Israelis don’t travel to the West Bank except as part of their military service or on settler-only bypass roads, while a new generation of Palestinians knows Israelis only as soldiers in uniform or as settlers.

* * *

The joint struggle presents a new path for Israelis and Palestinians. While most Palestinians welcome any kind of support for their cause, not many Israelis choose to take this road; but for those who do, it changes their life. “The simple action of being there, behind walls and checkpoints, is subversive on its own,” says Adar Grayevsky, 28, an Israeli activist from Tel Aviv. “The whole idea of Israel is built on separation, and the notion that we can break that separation between us and the West Bank is powerful and new.”

“Without our partners we could not have had achievements like the international recognition of Bil’in as a place of Palestinian nonviolence, or the Supreme Court ruling that ordered the return of some of the village’s land,” says Dr. Rateb Abu Rahmah, brother of the imprisoned Abdallah Abu Rahmah. “The Israeli activists and international activists have been with us from the first day. There have been many Israeli activists who have been arrested and injured. We have seen that these are real partners with us against the wall and the settlements. We have Israelis who even stay with us in our houses because of the IDF night raids. Our struggle is a triangle with the Palestinians, the Israeli activists and the international activists. Without these support pillars, we would not succeed.”

“It takes a lot to go to these protests,” says Burg. “I see a real dedication, even sanctity, in those young people. In Bil’in you might actually get hurt, even killed. Back in the days of Peace Now, none of us thought we would end up in jail.”

Read the whole thing.

When Client States Attack

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money has a great piece on Cold War client states that provides some insight into the current insanity being practiced by both Israel and North Korea.

Still, in a few key cases client states still seem to wield inordinate influence over their patrons, or at least to resist their patron’s political will. US issues with Israel are familiar to all; in spite of the economic and military dependence of Israel on the US (a dependence which can be overstated, but that nonetheless exists), it’s remarkably difficult for the US to make Israel do what it wants Israel to do. Chinese relations with North Korea should be understood in the same terms. Rather than thinking of North Korea as an asset to China, or as a key cog in China’s grand plan to dominate the Pacific, I think it’s better to understand the China-North Korea axis as a troubled patron-client relationship in which the patron has only limited influence over the behavior of the client. China’s economic relationships with the United States, South Korea, and Japan are all more important than the relationship with North Korea, and North Korea is of limited military utility to the Chinese in any context other than a war on the peninsula. Moreover, North Korea is almost 100% dependent on China for energy and other key sectors. While it’s possible that the North Koreans ran the plan to sink Cheonan by Beijing, I find it extremely unlikely; rather, I suspect that Beijing was deeply displeased by the North Korean move, but has been left without good options for disciplining its client.

Read the whole thing.

Crossing the Line

The veterans at They Gave Us A Republic call our attention to Israel's use of white phosphorous in Gaza.

For the iron-stomached, Elmo has the horrific details of what white phosphorous does.

Still not sold on the fact that this is an atrocious act? Well, put your little brain in the grunt's boots who has to walk up on a mother with her three or four children cuddled in a torturous tangle. The Grunt- he has a wife and three kiddos (13,8 and 3) of his own. Do you know what the first thought that comes into his head is as he looks at their bodies, charred to the bone in spots, with faces frozen in demonic horror?

He pictures that being HIS family. Congratulations Mr. Grunt and thank you for serving! You win a mind-fuck for life!!!

There is not a good excuse for decimating a neighborhood with Willie Pete. And spare me the using it as concealment crap. Liars.

Hearts and minds, baby. Hearts and minds.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.