Inside Israel's commando unit which raided Gaza flotilla

by Jane Corbin
BBC Panorama

Naval Commando 13 are training to tackle more flotillas heading to Gaza

Israel's elite commando unit which raided a Turkish aid flotilla sailing to Gaza in May has given Panorama exclusive access to its top secret operatives.

Some of the Israeli special forces took off their balaclavas to talk to me and show me the wounds they received the night nine people were killed and 50 were wounded on board the Turkish ship the MV Mavi Marmara.

"I saw a knife in my abdomen and pulled it out," Captain R said.

"The beating was continuous - and the cries of Allah Akbar."

Israeli footage shows Captain R, a member of Naval Commando 13 being beaten with bars by activists, stabbed and then thrown to the deck below.

Who started the violence that ended in death on the boat, has been fiercely contested.

The Mavi Marmara was one of six ships crewed by activists from a coalition of pro-Palestinian groups in international waters about 80 miles (130km) from the Israeli coast on 31 May.

I was given exclusive access to Naval Commando 13 as they trained on a boat similar in size and layout to the Mavi Marmara.

I went to sea with them in one of their small inflatable boats, known as "morenos", as they trained in preparation for future aid flotillas.

The Gaza flotilla was organised by The Free Gaza Movement, and a Turkish group called the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Aid (IHH).

There has been widespread international condemnation of the violence. Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Israel and cancelled joint military exercises. It wants an apology and an international investigation.

There were two opposing forces, one that wanted to kill us and the other more moderate trying to pull away those trying to escalate the situation and finish us off

Israel recently announced it would co-operate with a UN investigation in to the deaths, but is currently holding its own inquiry in which it has defended its commandos' actions.

The commandos insist their lives were in danger and they were under attack when they opened fire.

Turkish officials said autopsies carried out on the nine dead activists showed a total of 30 bullets had been found in their bodies, with one shot four times in the head.

Lieutenant A was one of the commandos in the boats that pulled up alongside the Mavi Marmara at 0430 after the flotilla ignored five Israeli navy warnings to turn back.

They said they were driven off by men with hoses and bars they had cut from the ship's railing earlier that night.

"They held metal rods and they were banging on the railings," Lieutenant A said, "they threw stones at us, metal and junk they had on the ship and several soldiers got hurt from that."

Sergeant Y was one of the commandos who abseiled from a helicopter on to the deck of the ship.

He said: "The activists tied the rope to the ship's antenna.

"It's very, very dangerous, we need to put our legs on the ground or else we just drop 15 or 20 metres." The commandos cut the first rope and abseiled out the other side of the helicopter.

I also spoke to Turkish activists in Istanbul.

After he was injured, Captain R and two other wounded commandos were taken below by Murat Akinan, a volunteer for the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Aid (IHH), to where the wounded and dead were.

"Understandably, some people were saying - we should do to them what they did to us," Murat Akinan told me.

"But I calmed them down saying according to our religious beliefs we should treat them and take them back."

Feared for life

Captain R said he feared for his life: "I realised there were two opposing forces, one that wanted to kill us and the other more moderate trying to pull away those trying to escalate the situation and finish us off."

The captain was then taken upstairs - afraid he had been taken hostage.

"My guard was hit by an Israeli stun gun and ran inside," said Captain R. "I saw I was alone and jumped off the ship and our boat picked me up."

Killed activist 'wanted to be a martyr'

Israeli commandos have boarded several ships looking for arms destined for Gaza, which is governed by the Palestinian group Hamas.

Hamas denies Israel's right to exist and militants have fired thousands of rockets against civilian targets in Israel in recent years.

Israel has implemented strict controls over what goes in and out of Gaza by sea and land.

It says the naval blockade is needed to stop weapons entering Gaza. But the Palestinians say it causes suffering and has cut off economic life, and the blockade has been widely criticised as a form of collective punishment.

But the IHH is not just known for its humanitarian work. Western authorities and Israel have accused it of links to terrorists, a charge the IHH strongly denies.

The IHH has defended its use of bars, chains and knives against the commandos.

"It went beyond passive resistance because the Israelis had been firing from the start," Bulent Yildirim, the head of the IHH said.

"Our people were defending themselves while being fired at."

The Israelis said it was not possible to abseil from a helicopter while shooting and that they only switched from non-lethal weapons to live fire when they were shot at by the activists.

Giora Eiland said the activists "came to kill or be killed"

"We have very clear evidence that in at least four cases the other side did use live fire," said retired major general Giora Eiland, who carried out the investigation into events on board the ship.

"In some they used Israeli weapons stolen from our soldiers - in at least one case they used their weapon because we found bullets and shells not used by Israeli forces."

He said that the Israeli commandos' use of live ammunition was justified but admitted they "made mistakes" in intelligence and planning.

"These people came to kill and be killed," he said.

"And under the circumstances in a very complex area like a ship, the results - the deaths - are surprisingly low."

Giora Eiland said the IHH succeeded in its mission to draw the world's attention to the Gaza blockade.

"Unfortunately they managed to achieve exactly what they wanted, a provocation, to be able to show the Israelis caused the nine deaths," said Giora Eiland, "so Israel is seen as using excessive force and is guilty for everything."

Naval Commando 13 is continuing its training for more flotillas - expected this autumn.

The battle of the Mediterranean is not over yet.

Jane Corbin

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Is Hassan Nasrallah a Mossad Agent?

 

by Khaled Abu Toameh

 

Sometime in the early 1980s, a large group of Palestinian school girls in the West Bank, who wanted to avoid exams, claimed that they had been "poisoned" by Israeli authorities. The girls said that Israel had put poison in the tanks that supply drinking water to their school. One after the other, the teenage girls started "fainting" in the school yard, especially as photographers and TV crews showed up.

 

The girls were all released from the hospital after medical tests refuted their claim. But at the end of the day the girls and their families had good reason to be happy. The exams were postponed indefinitely and Israeli "occupation" was once again blamed for perpetrating a "new crime" against Palestinians.

 

Last week, we heard Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah accuse Israel of standing behind the assassination five years ago of Lebanon's Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri.

 

Nasrallah has even expressed his willingness to hand over the evidence he has against Israel to the Lebanese authorities, and the international court that was formed to investigate the assassination of Hariri. So far, however, the only proof he has in his hands are pictures of Israeli reconnaissance planes hovering over Beirut and other parts of Lebanon many years before the assassination.

 

Nasrallah, who has been in hiding since he instigated the 2006 war that wrought massive destruction and disaster on his fellow citizens, is doing exactly what the school girls in the West Bank: When you experience stress, and you wish to avoid a hard test, you rush to blame Israel and Jews for the miseries of your people.

 

By accusing Israel of poisoning their drinking water, the school girls managed to force their teachers to call off the exams. The hoax was uncovered only when someone noticed that none of the teachers working in the same school had fallen ill after drinking from the same water tanks.

 

Nasrallah is under pressure because the international court, according to confirmed reports, is about to hold his fundamentalist organization responsible for the Hariri assassination. These reports have prompted Nasrallah to shoot in all directions to distract attention from the court's expected ruling.

 

Nasrallah and Hizbullah are now waging a propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting the court by depicting its members as Mossad and Zionist agents. Moreover, Nasrallah is now telling his supporters that Hizbullah is the victim of an Israeli-American-Arab conspiracy to eliminate it. His argument is that Israel and the Americans, aided by some Arab governments and anti-Hizbullah parties, are trying to destroy Hizbullah through the courts after failing to wipe it off the map during the 2006 war.

 

But Nasrallah's "evidence," allegedly linking Israel to the assassination, appears so far to have convinced only a small number of Arabs and Muslims. Many newspaper editors, political analysts and columnists throughout the Arab world have been quick to scoff at Nasrallah's charges, saying that he has failed to fulfill his promise to provide clear-cut evidence regarding Israel's alleged involvement in the assassination.

 

Yet the biggest question remains: Why did the Hizbullah chief wait five years before coming out with the charges against Israel? If the man had all this "evidence" that incriminates Israel in his safe box all these years, how come he waited until now?

 

One would expect Nasrallah to make these charges in public immediately after the assassination. Why is he accusing Israel only now that the court is about to hold Hizbullah responsible for the Hariri assassination?

 

Nasrallah's supporters claim he had refrained from blaming Israel because the "political climate was inappropriate all those years."

 

In any case, the Lebanese security authorities are strongly advised to question Nasrallah on suspicion he may be an Israeli spy. Otherwise, how does one explain the fact that the man knew all these years that Israel had killed the Lebanese prime minister and never said a word?

 

Hasn't it occurred to anyone in Lebanon that Nasrallah might be on the payroll of Mossad? Nasrallah should be detained immediately and accused of "covering up" for Israel's alleged role in the assassination of Hariri. Or perhaps the Lebanese authorities should wait until the court publishes its findings and take the brave step of arresting Nasrallah on charges of assassinating Hariri.

 

When will the Lebanese people wake up and realize that Hizbullah is destroying their country the same way the PLO did in the 1970's and 1980's? Like the PLO back then, Hizbullah has created a state-within-a-state in Lebanon - a move that is threatening to re-ignite civil war

 

 

Khaled Abu Toameh

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Historical Fiction - Israel is not a colonialist state.

by Dore Gold

 

The argument that Israel is a colonialist entity is often marshaled to undermine the Jewish state's legitimacy. The theme has certainly permeated Western academia, almost uncritically. For decades, it has been employed against Israel in one international forum after another. In 1973, the U.N. General Assembly gave initial momentum to this idea when it condemned the "unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, South African racism, Zionism, and Israeli imperialism."

That association of Israel with colonialist regimes set the stage in 1975 for the most insidious resolution ever adopted in the General Assembly against Israel, which stated that Zionism was a form of racism. It helped cement the Afro-Asian bloc behind both the resolution and the movement to delegitimize Israel. Even when, in 1991, the General Assembly finally overturned the resolution, comparisons between Zionism and colonialism persisted, arguably becoming even more strident.

Speaking in Johannesburg in 2008, Azmi Bishara, a former member of the Knesset, explained another way that accusing Israel of being a colonialist entity has real political utility. Bishara, who today does not miss an opportunity to question Israel's legitimacy before audiences abroad, explained that two points had to be established to show that Israel was an apartheid state: first, that Israel practiced racial separation; and second, that it was a product of colonialism.

Of course, anyone who visits the emergency rooms in Israeli hospitals, or the classrooms at any Israeli university, or the voting booths on election day, to say nothing of the Knesset itself, would see both Jewish and Arab doctors, patients, professors, students, voters, and parliamentarians mixing together in a way that utterly disproves the charge of apartheid. That leaves Bishara with mainly the claim of colonialism to make his case.

Unlike the charge of racial separation, the tag "colonialist" cannot be refuted simply by looking around modern Israel. It is a historical charge about how Israel came to exist: In effect, it amounts to the claim that Israel was established as an outpost of another distant power imposing itself on the territory and its native inhabitants. But the fact is that while modern Israel succeeded the 1922 British Mandate for Palestine, it was created by neither the British nor any other occupying power.

The Jews were already asserting their right to self-determination well before the British and the French dismantled the Ottoman Empire. For example, the Jewish people had already re-established their majority in Jerusalem by 1863. Decades later, Britain and the rest of the League of Nations considered Jewish rights in Palestine beyond their power to bestow because those rights were already there to be accepted. Thus the League of Nations gave recognition to "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine." In other words, it recognized a pre-existing right. It called for "reconstituting" the Jewish people's national home. And the rights recognized by the League of Nations in 1922 were preserved by its successor organization, the United Nations, which in Article 80 of its charter acknowledged all rights of states and peoples that existed before 1945.

The accusation that Israel has colonialist roots because of its connection to the British Mandate is ironic, since most of the Arab states owe their origins to the entry and domination of the European powers. Prior to World War I, the Arab states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan did not exist, but were only districts of the Ottoman Empire, under different names. They became states as a result of European intervention, with the British putting the Hashemite family in power in two of these countries.

Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states, meanwhile, emerged from treaties that their leaders signed with Britain. By means of those treaties, the British recognized the legitimacy of local Arab families to rule what became states like Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. A similar British treaty with the al-Saud family in 1915 set the stage for the eventual emergence of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

Moreover, during Israel's War of Independence, Arab armies benefited directly from European arms and training—and even manpower. The Arab Legion initially fought in Jerusalem with British officers, while the skies of the Egyptian Sinai were protected from the Israeli Air Force by the Royal Air Force. Indeed, Israeli and British aircraft clashed in 1949.

William Roger Louis, one of the foremost historians of British imperial strategy, uncovered an extremely revealing document from the British foreign office that puts into perspective Israel's relationship with the European colonial powers at its birth. In his 1984 book, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951, he describes a meeting on July 21, 1949 of senior British officials at the end of Israel's War of Independence. Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East Office, said, "We were in a position to control the Arab governments but not Israel." He then expressed fear that "the Israelis might drag the Arab States into a neutral bloc and even attempt to turn us out of Egypt." The original Foreign Office document also expressed concern that the British would lose their airbases in Iraq. In 1956, Israel briefly made common cause with Britain and France against Nasser's Egypt, but this could not alter the fact that, for the imperial powers, Israel was an obstacle, not an outpost.

Nevertheless, in recent years, the effort to portray Israel as a colonial entity has expanded. For many Palestinian spokesmen, in particular, it became important to deny the historical ties of the Jewish people to their land and to portray them as recent colonialist arrivals to the region—in contrast to the Palestinians, who were portrayed as the authentic native population.

This effort reached an audacious peak when Yasser Arafat denied that the Temple had ever existed in Jerusalem at the end of the July 2000 Camp David Summit with President Clinton. Many of his deputies—from Saeb Erekat to Mahmoud Abbas—have since picked up the same theme. Speaking on November 12, 2008, at a U.N. General Assembly "Dialogue of Religions and Cultures," the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, addressed the historical connections of Islam and Christianity to Jerusalem, but noticeably did not say a single word about Judaism's ties to the Holy City.

In a similar vein, Arafat used to tell Western audiences that the Palestinians are descendents of the Jebusites, with ancient roots in the land. But in Palestinian society, one establishes one's status by claiming to be a relative latecomer, whose ancestors were from the Arabian families that accompanied the Second Caliph Umar bin al-Khatttab when he conquered and colonized Byzantine Palestine in the seventh century. Even at that time, the Jews were still a plurality—and, perhaps along with the Samaritans, a majority—in the land, six hundred years after the Romans destroyed their ancient Temple and the Second Jewish Commonwealth. This emerges from Professor Moshe Gil's monumental 800-page A History of Palestine: 634-1099.

Ascertaining the truth has never been the objective of those trying to paint Israel with a colonialist brush. They have been determined simply to conclude that the Jews came as an alien force to Palestine, to advance European interests, rather than see them as a people recovering their historical homeland, where they had deep, indigenous roots.

 

Dore Gold is an Israeli statesman who has served in various diplomatic positions under several Israeli governments. He is the current President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Israel’s Gaza Policy Boosts Hamas’s Popularity? Doesn’t Look Like It

 

by Evelyn Gordon

 

Radical leftists worldwide enthusiastically support Hamas, which has the cardinal virtue of being virulently anti-Israel. It's a pity they never asked Gaza Strip residents, who actually have to live under Hamas rule. But one of Israel's leading pro-Palestinian journalists, Amira Hass of Haaretz, gave these residents a voice this week:

"I wish these pictures reached leftists abroad," my friend said to herself Tuesday as she watched Hamas police use rifle butts and clubs to beat her friends — activists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Although my friend has never been a fan of the Fatah government in the West Bank, she is outraged by the romanticization of Hamas rule by foreign activists.

Ironically, the PFLP agrees with Hamas about most key issues: "opposition to the Oslo Accords, glorification of the armed struggle and opposition to direct negotiations with Israel." The protest wasn't over anything political, but over the chronic power outages — more than eight hours a day, every day, for months — caused by the Hamas and Fatah governments' ongoing spat over who should pay for Gaza's power plant's fuel after the European Union stopped footing the bill last November. Since both sides refuse to pay, the amount of fuel entering the Strip has steadily declined; in the first week of August, it amounted to only 23 percent of what is needed to run the plant at full capacity.

Hamas initially tried to prevent the protest — though under Palestinian law, demonstrations don't need a license. When that failed, "hundreds of police with clubs and rifles" dispersed the demonstrators "very violently." Many demonstrators were wounded and needed medical attention; others "were detained for some time."

Most likely, overseas leftists won't see these pictures, since Hamas kept photojournalists from taking any. But Hass's word pictures are vivid enough.

The punch line, however, is her own commentary. Hass cannot be suspected of pro-Israel sympathies; she lived for years in both Gaza and Ramallah, and her tireless media crusade for the Palestinian cause has won her numerous journalism awards overseas. But after noting that Hamas routinely suppresses unauthorized gatherings — even a party organized by the Khan Yunis refugee committee for students who passed their matriculation exams — she concluded:

[T]he shamelessly brutal suppression of the [PFLP] protest shows just how scared the Gaza government is. … If Hamas felt it still had public support, it wouldn't need to suppress any activity that it didn't initiate or finds unflattering.

Of course, it's not just radical leftists who won't like that conclusion; it's the entire Western foreign-policy and media establishment — which unanimously asserts that Hamas's popularity is steadily increasing, thanks to Israel's blockade of Gaza. Granted, the Palestinians' own polling data refute that idea, as I noted here in June, but why let facts interfere with a good anti-Israel theory?

Which is why Hass's unarguable point — that popular governments don't need to suppress demonstrations — will doubtless also be universally ignored. And that's an even greater pity, because a little more attention to facts would greatly improve Western policy in the Middle East.

 

Evelyn Gordon

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Wonderful Graphic Example of Ridiculous Media Bias

 

by Barry Rubin

Ok, it is al-Jazira television but the story is nonetheless revealing. It is about the Gaza airport and how Gazans are mining it for building stones, destroying the runways in the process. The reporter, with no hint of actually reporting, seethes with anger and hatred as she blames Israel for everything, never mentioning the virtually non-stop war Hamas has conducted against Israel.

But the good bit is this: the reporter says that Israel has bombed the airport for 10 years, reducing the buildings to rubble. Yet you can see at the beginning of the video that the runways are in superb condition, with no dents or potholes, and the attractive buildings right behind her are in perfect shape. Clearly, there would be nothing to keep the airport from having functioned, presuming the regime governing the Gaza Strip wasn't firing rockets and mortars at Israel or sending terrorist squads to attack Israel for years.

Is she lying consciously or is she so delusional that she can stand in front of buildings and claim they are destroyed, that she can see a runway in perfect shape and describe it as devastated by a decade of bombing. What is the psychology--or mendacity--involved here?

Note the reporter cites the number of years Israel has allegedly bombed the airport as ten, going back to 2000. What happened in 2000? The Palestinian Authority leadership rejected peace and an independent Palestinian state at both the Camp David talks and the Clinton plan, launching instead a massive war of terrorism against Israel that went on for five years. Then, after a short interim period, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip by force and used it as a platform to attack Israel, openly proclaiming that its jihad warriors would wipe Israel off the map and kill the Jews.

Might this have something to do with Gaza's problems?

The specifics of the false claims made on the airport remind me of one of the great scenes of the 1982 war in Lebanon, when an American reporter stood in front of a building, saying it had been destroyed by Israel a few hours earlier when a large tree was growing out of the rubble directly behind him. Most likely, the building had been destroyed in the Lebanese civil war some years earlier.

One of the points that prove media silliness on these issues is that nobody notices this kind of extreme contradiction (dozens of examples can be provided) and no self-criticism, soul-searching or policy changes develop as a result.

 

 

Barry Rubin
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Western media take a pass on Palestinian repression

 

by Jonathan Tobin

 

Critics of Israel are fond of saying that a disproportionate focus on Israel's failings is justified because of American support for the Jewish state. After all, they argue, no matter what goes on elsewhere, Israel's activities, for good or ill, are in some measure the result of American generosity. But the same can also be said for the Palestinian Authority, whose government and armed forces are far more heavily subsidized by American taxpayers than those of Israel. But there remains little interest on the part of the media in exposing Palestinian misdeeds, besides which Israel's foibles appear quite insignificant.

This unfortunate fact has been once again illustrated by the lack of interest on the part of the Western media in reporting the story of the PA's imprisonment of seven Palestinian academics last week. Over at the Hudson Institute's website, the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh writes that Palestinian journalists did their best to interest their Western colleagues in the fate of these academics. Of course, Palestinian writers didn't dare report this themselves, knowing all too well the fate of those who cross the PA security services. But unsurprisingly, of all the hundreds of Western reporters and correspondents stationed in Israel, Abu Toameh says only one chose to go with the story. Some blamed their editors back in the United States or Europe, who considered the topic "insignificant." Others admitted that "they were concerned about their personal safety should they report a news item that was likely to anger the Western-funded PA security forces in the West Bank."

Abu Toameh says that one Palestinian journalist then pitched a story about a Palestinian academic being denied the right to visit Israel and found that every journalist who had turned down the lead about the seven imprisoned scholars were quite eager to jump on the story that allegedly put the Jewish state in a bad light.

As Abu Toameh notes, the Western reluctance to report anything that shines a light on Palestinian corruption or tyranny isn't new. The same "see no evil, hear no evil, report no evil" motto characterized Western coverage of Yasir Arafat's reign of terror at the Palestinian Authority. That the object of their crimes is at times — as the arrest of the academics proved to be — part of Fatah's civil war against the Islamist thugs of Hamas doesn't make the Western media's refusal to tell the truth about the Palestinian Authority any more defensible. Under the rule of Mahmoud Abbas, the thugs of the PA continue to run roughshod over their own people and to intimidate journalists on America's dime.

 

Jonathan Tobin

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Right under the UN's noses

 

by  Arnold/Frimet Roth

 

An uncommonly plain-spoken report from Associated Press says what Israelis have known for some time, and which is going to continue to be un-noticed and not acted upon by people outside of Israel until it's too late:

 

... Hezbollah is moving fighters and weapons into the villages of south Lebanon, building up a secret network of arms warehouses, bunkers and command posts in preparation for war. The Israeli military has begun releasing detailed information about what it calls Hezbollah's new border deployment, four years after a cross-border raid by its guerrillas triggered a 34-day war... Hezbollah, which is armed by Iran and Syria and is more powerful than the Lebanese military, stayed out of the Aug. 3 fight. But its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, threatened that he would intervene next time. He has also said that if war breaks out again his forces will fire rockets into Tel Aviv. Neither side has signaled that another war is imminent, but the Israelis' unusual openness about what they claim to know of Hezbollah's preparations seems to have two goals: to show the reach of their intelligence, and to stake their claim that if another war breaks out and many civilians die, it will be because Hezbollah placed its armaments and fighters in their midst. 

Israel's military says Hezbollah has changed strategy since the last war, moving most of its fighters and weapons from wooded rural areas into villages. It says the aim is to avoid detection and use to civilians for cover if war erupts. The military says all of this exists under the nose of 12,000 international peacekeepers who, by their own count, conduct up to 340 patrols a day in south Lebanon but are hobbled by a hostile population and rules preventing them from searching private property.

 

Reading the text of the infamous - but unanimous - UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of 2006, purportedly ending the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, feels now like the most cynical of bad jokes.

And as Israelis are only too aware, the threat in the south is no less active.

The IDF fired on two suspects Monday (says YNet) as they were busy planting an explosive device near the security fence intended to keep jihadists in place on the Gazan side and away from Israeli civilians and settlements. A soldier sustained shrapnel injuries when an already-planted explosive hidden near the fence went off. Israeli fire resulted in the death of one of the Gazan-Palestinian-Arab terrorists who, according to Haaretz, was Basem Da'ama (YNet has his name as Bassem Dragma.) This was an Islamic Jihad terrorist who took part in an exchange of fire during March 2010 that led to the deaths of IDF soldiers Eliraz Peretz and Ilan Sviatkovsky.

 

 

Arnold/Frimet Roth

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

True Academic Freedom In Israel

by Dan Illouz

Israeli academic institutions seem to be problematic for reasons that sound too similar to those that plague other Western universities. Note this week's firing of Dr. Ran Baratz.

Im Tirtzu recently published a detailed report revealing the troubling academic reality in Israel today. According to the report, students in all of the major universities in Israel have complained of a heavily political academia where opinions which do not follow the post-Zionist or anti-Zionist narrative are often rejected and sometimes even penalized.

After the publication of the report, published at the request of the Knesset’s Education Committee, those academic bodies who were investigated responded with ad hominem attacks and claims which fly in face of the reality on university campuses in Israel. Haifa University said that “Im Tirtzu is an organization which uses McCarthyism to threaten freedom of speech.” The spokesperson of Hebrew University told reporters that: “Hebrew University maintains full freedom of expression.”

Im Tirtzu has never demanded that only its opinions are allowed to be expressed. Rather, we, at Im Tirtzu, demand that all opinions be accepted in the academic discourse. We oppose thought policing of any kind. Our complaints are not about the exposure of students to post-Zionist scholarship, but rather on the lack of exposure to the Zionist opinions. A truly free academic environment should be a marketplace of opinions.

Here are some examples of events which Im Tirtzu is trying to combat:

Rachel Avraham, a student at Ben Gurion University, published two critical academic exposes on the content of a lecture given by Ben Gurion University's Dr. Oren Yiftachel, entitled "Selected Topics in the Geography of the Middle East". After publishing these exposes, Rachel Avraham was summoned by the head of the Geography department, Prof. Avi Rubin, “to discuss the possible ramifications” of her “defamatory” exposes. An email communication between the two was then started. Rachel Avraham felt threatened by the tone and nature of these emails. Fearing she would be discriminated against for having disagreed with her professor, she hired a lawyer to deal with further communications with the university. Defending Rachel Avraham’s right to disagree with her professor is not an affront to Dr. Oren Tiftachel’s right to free speech. It is not McCarthyism. It is nothing other than the defence of free speech.

In November 2009, Professor Nira Hativa, who was responsible for the computerized feedback provided by students to their professors, wrote that “there are a lot of students that complain and report that they feel significantly hurt by the presentation of facts from a perspective which is contrary to their views but that they are worried to express opposing views because they feel such an expression might reflect badly on their marks or other things which professors have control over.”Professor Hativa continued and wrote: “I was exposed to many complaints from students of professors who express extreme leftist positions in their lectures and attack the State of Israel, the Israel Defence Forces, the Zionist movement and other, even worse, things”.

A PhD student at Hebrew University testified that he was once told that “anything “right of Meretz” was best not spoken aloud or it would have a serious detrimental impact on my career in Israeli academia”.

By now, one can clearly see that Zionist students have many reasons to fear publicly stating their opinions. Our full report contains countless other examples. On the other hand, there are also a lot of incentives for students to continue their research toeing the line to the post-Zionist narrative. For example:

Ms. Tal Nitzan received a distinction from the Israeli Council for Sociology for her paper that claimed that IDF soldiers do not rape Palestinian women because they are racist.

Furthermore, some courses require their students go on field activities with extreme leftist organizations such as Machsom Watch and Yesh Din, two organizations which spend much of their time attacking and criticizing the IDF. Some courses even offered students to get paid to work for these organizations in addition to the credits they would received for the course.

A truly free academic environment is one in which all students feel free to express their ideas and where students are exposed a multiplicity of ideas. Unfortunately, many in the academic world feel that freedom of speech simply means that they are allowed to do whatever they want in their classroom, including intimidating students who disagree with them.

We at Im Tirtzu want to restore true academic freedom in Israel – an academic freedom in which all students will be able to express themselves, including Zionist students. It is painful to see that even in the State of Israel, Zionist students are victims of discrimination.

Im Tirtzu will not allow the stifling of academic freedom to become a reality in Israel. We believe that we can transform the dream that is the State of Israel into a more just, more modern, more democratic and more Jewish place. This latest report is just one step forward on that path.

Dan Illouz is Overseas Communications Coordinator for Im Tirtzu, the non affiliated proactive student organization.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

A man with a matchbox

 

by Smadar Peri

 

Op-ed: Nasrallah trying to buy time while persevering image of crazy regional thug

 

Nobody, even in Lebanon (with the exceptions of his cronies,) buys into the "proof" and "new evidence" presented by Nasrallah in his unconvincing conference last week in Beirut. We can bet that Nasrallah himself does not believe that Israel killed Lebanon's prime minister. Why in the world would Israel assassinate al-Hariri?

 

But what stops Nasrallah from having a little fun? As far as he's concerned, Israel can loudly declare that he showed himself to be an even greater liar, prattler, schemer, and swindler; he may have also looked anxious. However, he is not a fool. While moving from one hiding spot to another in the past four years, what's most important for Nasrallah now is to stay in the game and preserve the image of the crazy, threatening, and dangerous neighborhood thug.

 

If nobody wants to see a civil war in Lebanon, And Saudi Arabia's king bothered to travel all the way to Beirut in order to secure a lull between the frightened and the threatening – Nasrallah was not frightened. There, the Lebanese are shaking in their boots, fearing a military confrontation with Israel, but he threatens to fire missiles (which he indeed possesses) on Tel Aviv.

 

The most important thing for him is not to be blamed for the Hariri assassination. Such charge may shake up Nasrallah and his organization. First of all, the government would collapse, the wave of assassination will make a grand comeback, and Hezbollah fighters would have to take over Beirut.

 

Nasrallah's nightmare scenario also includes the worst option: Commandoes (guess where they would come from) embarking on a manhunt for the group's leadership (and thanks to all the agents and spies) and kicking it out of Lebanon. Nobody would shed a tear should such operation succeed.

 

 

Playing a slow game 

For the time being, Nasrallah is managing to get what he wants. In the wake of his grand media show, regardless of what people say about Nasrallah, Hariri probe Commissioner Daniel Bellemare has no choice but to issue an invitation: Anyone in possession of documents that had not been reviewed is invited to hand them over.

 

Nasrallah, who currently works in line with a plan aimed at buying time and scaring all parties involved with a ticking bomb, intends to slowly proceed with his game, making the lives of the people who are seeking his downfall miserable. He will of course hand over his videos and clips, and he also possesses a pile of documents that would put off the publication of the full report for long months.

 

Nasrallah intends to do everything that needs to be done in order to keep the investigators busy. In the next phase, honorable judge Bellemare will attempt to get Nasrallah to leave his hiding spot and testify. Yet the Hezbollah chief is in no rush. He will announce that as long as Israel's prime minister, defense minister, Mossad chief, and army chief are not summoned, he intends to stay in his hole. And if anyone wishes to force him out, they should turn to Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, who already announced he has no plans to touch top Hezbollah men and certainly no intention to detain Nasrallah.

 

So here we are, back at square one. The international prosecutor is hereby invited to try his luck. Even if he rules that Hezbollah and Syria assassinated Hariri, who will adopt the conclusions? Even Saad al-Hariri, who swore to pursue his father's killers, escaped to the family resort in Sardinia. Before leaving, he ordered his ministers and party members not to respond to Nasrallah's tricks.

 

So who keeps Lebanon intact these days? Maybe the president, maybe the security services, but certainly not the government, which may collapse if Nasrallah just says the word. As far as he's concerned, they can try to come and get him. He may be a liar and a prattler, but he's the one holding the matchbox.

 

 

Smadar Peri

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Why All Middle Eastern Politics Can't Be Reduced Merely to the Arab-Israeli Conflic

by Barry Rubin

I simply cannot comprehend why so many in the West refuse to see that Arabs can be revolutionaries. It is remarkable that so many who claim to be experts don’t incorporate the idea that Arabs, like other peoples, might dislike their existing societies or be motivated by ideologies claiming to be the blueprints for utopias.

After all, if Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Latin Americans think and behave this way, why aren’t Arabs going to act the same?

The two paragraphs above are written in response to yet another book, by a very experienced expert on the region, saying that al-Qaida is almost completely motivated by the Palestinian issue as well as a couple of articles claiming that the only reason why the United States or President Barack Obama isn't popular in the Middle East is due to Israel.

In fact, al-Qaida, Hamas, Hizballah, Muslim Brotherhoods, and other Islamist groups, have  been overwhelmingly motivated by a desire to revolutionize the entire Muslim-majority world (and even the whole world) in line with its interpretation of Islam. Al-Qaida's original cause was to overthrow the Saudi royal family, followed by an effort to help Iraq against Western pressure. In al-Qaida documents before and after the September 11 attacks, the Palestinian issue was not mentioned more than about ten percent of the time and never highlighted.

In addition, radical Arab nationalists, including many intellectuals and several Arab regimes (Egypt, 1952-1970; Syria, 1949-present; Iraq, 1958-2003; Libya, 1973-present), have sought to unite the Arab world under their leadership, overthrow neighboring governments, and expel Western influence in line with their ambitions and ideology.

And a recent poll showing that Obama was unpopular, the United States seen as an enemy, and tremendous popular support for revolutionary Islamists was also attributed by its sponsor to this cause. For my analysis of this poll, see here.

Yet why should this be so? Something fishy is going on here.

A while ago when my wife and I edited a book of readings on anti-American terrorism in the region—which showed decisively how little Usama bin Ladin ever talked about Palestine—the (ironically positive) review in one of the main American newspapers said the book showed how September 11 was all about Israel.

About two years ago, a Swiss reporter interviewed a high-ranking official in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates and asked why the school system wasn’t better. Ah, explained the man, this was all due to Israel.

While the following are generalizations they are generally true. Arabic-speaking people live in terrible, unfree societies marked by massive injustice and poor prospects for improvement. Their lives are increasingly governed by restrictions based on religious interpretation, large-scale segregation by gender, a contrast of which they are well aware between the repression and stagnation of their own countries and the relative freedom and progress in other parts of the world.

They know there are high levels of violence and instability in their societies. There is ethnic and communal strife. There are wars over who will rule Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, and Algeria. There are political values everywhere else. There are contending ideologies, radical Arab nationalism and Islamism, promoting utopian expectations, while three worldviews that would bring more calm (traditional conservatism, liberalism, and nation-state patriotism) are far weaker than anywhere else in the world.

There is deep resentment of the West for past imperialism; its relative power and wealth; and cultural and religious differences.

All of these factors are systematically fed on a daily basis by mosques, schools, leaders, opposition politicians, media, and just about every other institution.

And yet we are to believe that this problem is entirely or almost entirely caused by Israel’s existence, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the situation of the Palestinians.

That’s it?

Why do people say this? One reason is ignorance. The conflict is all they know about the Middle East and this answer is what they are constantly told by most experts and some media.

Another reason is politics, as it is a talking point by those who for various reasons want to wipe Israel off the map or weaken it.

A third factor is a subtle West-centric view (with elements of the kind of psychic thing that causes racism): that only what the West does matters and that local peoples don’t have minds of their own. So since Israel is considered Western and the West has generally supported Israel, that is “real” while Arab societies don’t really exist, Arabs don’t really have political ideas, and so on. They are merely blackboards on which we, the West, writes its ideas and records its deeds.

This same mentality also arises from the human desire for easy answers. No, they say, we don’t have to battle terrorists and revolutionaries for decades, just give them the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (or perhaps all of Israel) and they will be happy, peaceful, and love us. Rejecting such a beautiful dream, such a “no-cost” solution isn’t easy.

There are also those who, motivated by their desire to change their own Western countries, want to persuade people that the existing capitalist democratic system is responsible for all the world’s ills and can repair them by literally a snapping of the fingers.

Then, too, it is a very reassuring answer for Westeners: They don't hate us. They don't want to kill us or kick out our countries from having a role in the region. They're just angry at the Jews and if we stop helping them then everything will be all right. We don't even had to make concessions in our own right, just force concessions on Israel that cost us nothing. What a simple solution!

Of course, a fifth reason is that this is what Arabs so often say. There is indeed an obsession with the Israel/Palestinian issue, though less so than is generally believed in the West. What one often sees is that there is a big debate within the Arabic-speaking world but when the spokesman is interviewed by a Western media outlet he attributes everything to Israel.

Part of this is indeed used by governments and movements to further the resentment, anger, and violence. For the regimes, it is also useful for distracting attention from their own rule and channeling revolutionary energies against someone else.

Note also how, in fact, the Israel issue does function, never as an end in itself. For the radical Arabs and regimes, it was a step toward Arab unity and the expulsion of Western influence. For the Islamists, destroying Israel is a step toward establishing a caliphate, Islamist rule in every country, and defeating the West.

In short, a victory over Israel and its destruction would trigger more radicalism. A two-state solution would trigger another round in attacking Israel and a struggle over who would control Palestine (Fatah, Hamas, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia) just as there is a battle over controlling every Arabic-speaking state.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.