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April 27, 2002
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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April 26, 2002
The Jewish Left
and Palestine
Bleats of Dissent
By Michael Neumann
When Jewish voices of conscience speak out on
Israel, there is an astonishing gap between the problem described
and the response proposed. The Jewish left and its allies begin
with the most ringing denunciations. These trail off into the
most timid of recommendations.
Many critics of Israel consider it a
pariah state.(*) Many think it racist. Many think it guilty
of brutal atrocities against the Palestinian people, and display
an almost prurient interest in those atrocities. Many mainstream
sources outside the US--the BBC, The Guardian, the CBC-- carry
harrowing reports of Israeli excesses, and have done so for
quite a while. We hear that Israeli officers, when they attack
Palestinian refugee camps, study the German assault on the Warsaw
Ghetto. We hear horror after horror. Jewish and Israeli activists
do not hesitate to draw parallels with Nazi Germany. (see Norman Finkelstein.)
Sounds really terrible, doesn't it? What
should we do about it? Very little, it seems, and so it has
seemed for years.
In 1988, the Jewish Committee on the
Middle East released a statement which explicity declared that
"...Israel itself has become a pariah state within [t]he
world community." The statement is still proudly posted
on their web site. It attributed to Israel "a racialist
ideology". It claimed that "Events taking place today
are all too reminiscent of the pogroms from which our own forefathers
fled two and three generations ago". (http://www.middleeast.org/archives/jcome1.htm)
These are people who perceive some really
serious outrages-- war crimes, human rights violations, a violent
racial crusade. These are people whose self-produced documentary
is called, "We Dare to Speak--Voices of American Jews."
What do they recommend? "The unprecedented amounts of economic
aid should be cut back over the next two to three years to
much small[er] levels. Furthermore, the considerable military
and intelligence assistance should also be radically reduced."
Do you read what I read? Doesn't that
say that economic and military aid to this pariah state should
be continued? Hmm. So is that how we're supposed to respond
to a state which conducts "killings, beatings, curfews,
expulsions and house arrests -- all against unarmed Palestinians
living in areas Israel has occupied for 20 years"? Seems
like the vicious Jewish pariah retains privileges which many
virtuous states could only dream of. But this statement was
good enough for Noam Chomsky, so I guess it should be good enough
for me.
Well, have things changed since 1988?
Sure, they've grown much worse. So, let's see, how has the response
evolved?
It hasn't. On one prominent dissident
site, Not In My Name, is run by a Jewish organization anxious
above all, it seems, not to be tainted by Israeli crimes. It
recommends "A suspension of all US military aid to Israel
until Israel ends its occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza
Strip, and East Jerusalem." ( "Common
Ground"). So I guess economic aid will continue.
More on this suspension of military aid later.
Then there's the ad taken in the New
York Times on March 17, 2002, by Jewish
Voices Against the Occupation. It calls for the U.S.
Government:
to suspend military aid to Israel, which
is used to maintain the occupation, until Israel withdraws completely
from the occupied territories; -to reduce economic aid to Israel
by the amount spent on maintaining the settlements until all
are evacuated...
OK, still some economic aid, and the
military aid will come right back when Israel gets out of the
occupied territories: in other words, it gets truckloads of
new toys, automatically, any time it cares to withdraw. It's
all like that: no one, so far as I can see, asks for more.
So we have a country denounced for the
most serious human rights violations, whose leader is accused
of war crimes, a pariah state, whose doings are almost unbearable
simply to watch on TV, much less suffer. Everyone seems to agree
that such a state deserves economic aid. Military aid is merely
suspended: as soon as Israel leaves the scene of the crime,
we are to make sure it has lost none of its killing abilities.
Forget for a moment whether this response
is proportionate to the crimes it is supposed to address. Let's
just ask what the reponse is supposed to achieve. That's hardly
worth asking about the economic aid, since it will continue,
albeit at a reduced level. What then about this bold, soberly
considered demand to suspend military aid?
It turns out, at least according to Andrew
Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington,
that Israel could fight for "two years" before needing
US help. In other words, even instant cessation of all military
aid would do nothing whatsoever to prevent the Israelis from
doing anything whatever they liked to the Palestinians. Israel
is estimated to possess between 200 and 500 nuclear warheads,
with cruise missles that have hit targets 950 miles away. Does
this sound like a country that will feel pressure from a "suspension"
of military aid? Even if the cupboard were bare, it could sell
a few of those warheads and buy just about anything it liked.
Jewish activists know this. Left-wingers
know this. They also understand what is normally done to contain
a pariah state.
Normally, all aid is cut off. There is
an arms and trade embargo. All transfers of funds are frozen.
Foreign bank accounts are seized. Air links and most diplomatic
ties are cut. Cultural and scientific exchanges are terminated.
To make all this stick, the pariah state must be surrounded
by obviously superior military forces. There is a crash program
to bolster its neighbors' defense capabilities; a US-led coalition
sends many thousands of troops; naval forces are deployed; intelligence
and counterintelligence efforts accelerated. Such a state is
quietly given to undertand that, should it ever use nuclear
weapons, it can expect retaliation in kind. This of course would
be a very moderate response, nothing like what happened to Serbia
or Iraq. But simply to contain Israel--not to attack it--would
require an initiative orders of magnitude greater than the buildup
to the Gulf War.
In short, all these people who weep for
the Palestinians, all these activists who put their bodies on
the line, all the eminent figures and eloquent writers who condemn
Israel's vile actions--none of these people actually request,
let alone demand, any remotely serious action against Israel.
And there are only ugly explanations for this bizarre behaviour.
Are Jews still better than Palestinians? Did the Nazi era confer
on them an unlimited licence to plunder and murder? Is being
Jewish so sacred, so wise, so humanitarian, so warm and cuddly
that a Jewish state couldn't "really" do much harm,
or deserve more than a good scolding? The possibilities are
as limited as they are depressing.
One thing is clear: when crimes of this
magnitude are committed by your people, in your name, bleating
does not absolve you of responsibility. You must at the very,
very least--even if you "do" nothing--advocate something
that will stop the crimes. By that standard, as far as I know,
not even Chomsky's hands are clean.
Certainly the world has more important
things to worry about than that Jews purge themselves of hypocrisy.
But for the sake of the Palestinians, I hope the Jewish left
can bring itself to do so.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
========================
* For example: 'Israel has turned into
a "pariah state" under prime minister Ariel Sharon
and his ways of dealing with terrorism are "unacceptable",
Jewish
senior Labour MP Gerald Kaufman has claimed.'
"What could Israel do to cease
being a pariah state, if its Washington masters permitted it?"
(C.G.
Estabrook, CounterPunch, December 5, 2001).
Uri Avnery:
'"Closure", "siege" and all the other devices
for the protection of the settlers are turning us into a pariah
state in the eyes of the world.'
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