Today's Stories

January 16-18, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to the Chief

Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Geo. W. Bush, a Concise Biography

January 15, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Powerhouses Invested Alongside Madoff

Karl Grossman
Obama and the Military - Industrial - Scientific Complex

M. Shahid Alam
Gaza's Shattered Mirror

Jules Rabin
Gaza Besieged, Gaza Mauled

Alan Farago
The Nail-Gun Bailout

Ron Jacobs
The State of Black America: From Oscar Grant to Barack Obama

Timothy Seidel
Just Violence in Gaza? The Calculus of Proportionality

George Ochenski
Why No Montana Wilderness?

Todd Chretien
Taking a Stand for Justice in Oakland

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Marijuana Prohibition Acid Test

Website of the Day
Uranium Watch

January 14, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
Killing Children With Impunity

Kathy Kelly
Cease Fire, Cease Siege

Franklin Lamb
A Second Front? Hezbollah Militants Chafe as Gaza Burns

Mike Whitney
The Big Contraction: Why the Stimulus Alone Won't Work

Paul Craig Roberts
The Humiliation of America

Glen Ford
Sullying Dr. King's Legacy: the Congressional Black Caucus and Israel

Aditya Chakrabortty
The End of Property Porn

Dave Lindorff
Fattening the Rats: Feeding at the Bailout Trough

Jonathan Cook
Israel Bars Arab Parties From Elections

David Swanson
Conyers Explains Why He Didn't Push Impeachment

Martha Rosenberg
Fragile: Handle with Risperdal

Website of the Day
Report of a Red Cross Worker in Gaza

January 13, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Is Israel Using Experimental Weapons in Gaza?

Michael Neumann
Hamas and Gaza: Slave Revolts and Passionate Evasions

Coleen Rowley /
William John Cox
No Victors in the War on Dissent

Robert Sandels
Cuba and the Obama Administration: Subversion Through Trade?

Saul Landau
The Changeling: an Obama Nightmare

David Swanson
What to Ask Eric Holder

Wajahat Ali
Waltzing with War Crimes

Sam Bahour
No Other Option? A View From the West Bank

Stanley Heller
Why It's Useless to Lobby Congress on Gaza

Robert Jensen
Beyond Grief and Rage

Robin Mittenthal
Eating Away at the Land That Feeds Us

Website of the Day
The 50 Most Loathsome People in America

January 12, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Blood-Stained Monster Enters Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Our Collapsing Economy

Mike Whitney
Israel's Moral and Political Insanity

Ewa Jasiewicz
Oh, Quiet Night: Only Six Homes Were Bombed

Bill Quigley
A Day in Gaza

Dave Lindorff
From Vietnam to Gaza

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Blowback From a Tragic Error: a Message to Barack Obama

Jonathan Cook
Israel Ponders the Third Stage

Andy Worthington
Seven Years of Guantánamo

Kara N. Tina
Oakland on Fire

Brenda Norrell
Palestinians and American Indians: Russell Means Breaks the Silence on Obama

Nour Kharma
A Plea From a Teen in Gaza: "Will I Die, Too?"

Website of the Day
The Villages Group: an Antiwar Alliance in Sderot

January 9/11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Israel's Onslaught on Gaza: Criminal, for Sure; But Also Stupid

Kathy Kelly
Tunnel Vision: Report from Arish, Egypt

Bill Quigley
Report From Rafah: Doctors Stopped at the Border

George Ciccariello-Maher
Oakland's Not for Burning?

Elaine C. Hagopian
Gaza: History Matters

Mike Roselle
Drowning in a Toxic River: What Can be Done to Save Appalachia?

Steve Hendricks
The Torturer-Elect?

Gary Leupp
Revisiting the Tale of Samson

Jonathan Cook
Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

Karim Makdisi
The Ceasefire Plan: the UN Finally Acts, But Does It Mean Anything?

Rannie Amiri
Livni's Big Lie

Peter Morici
In the Jaws of a Depression

Peter Montague
Can Chemicals be Regulated?

Ralph Nader
Move Fast to Restore the Rule of Law

Andy Worthington
The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials

Nadia Hijab
A Music School Silenced in Gaza

Dan Bacher
Unholy Alliance: Nature Conservancy Backs Schwarzenegger's Big Ditch

Catherine Fenton
The American Peace Movement and Israel

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Caught Stealing

Valia Kaimaki
Why Greek Youths Took to the Streets

Richard Morse
Haiti's Gas Gang

David Yearsley
To Gotham City with Dexter Gordon

Charles R. Larson
The Horror, the Horror

Richard Rhames
Gaza and the Goon Squad Meet the Wizard

Stephen Martin
Meltdown Memo to Come?

Lorenzo Wolff
What They Sing About When They Sing About Love

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Beatty and Valentine

Website of the Weekend
Gaza Protest

January 8, 2009

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
Gaza Seen From Paris

Franklin Lamb
How Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents and Misapplies the Law

Paul Craig Roberts
The Difficulty of Being an Informed American

Kevin Alexander Gray
Give Burris His Seat

Chris Floyd
The Enduring Priorities in Obama's Time of Change

Ewa Jasiewicz
Riding on Fire in Gaza

Steve Conn
Sanjay Gupta and Obama

Harvey Wasserman
Kill the Nuclear Stimulus!

Wayne S. Smith
An Opening to Cuba?

Linda Mamoun
Re-settling Gaza: the Real Goal of the Israeli Invasion?

Adam Turl
Unions and Young Workers

Chris Papaleonardos
Mourning Maria Dimitriadi

Website of the Day
On the Wing

January 7, 2009

Saree Makdisi
What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?

Franklin Lamb
Bend Over Professor Dershowitz, It's Time for Your Check Up

William Blum
America's Other Glorious War

Belén Fernández
The Trauma Vortex: Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

Lawrence Davidson
What is New About Gaza?

Allan Nairn
Adm. Dennis Blair and the Church Killings in East Timor

Jonathan Cook
What is Israel's Objective?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Watching the War on BBC

Deepak Tripathi
Bush, as He Leaves

Cal Winslow
Now is the Hour to Defend Democracy in the Labor Movement!

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Students Planning Careers: Be Mindful

Dr. Hannah Safran
No More Recycled Military Solutions

Website of the Day
CNN: Israel Broke the Ceasefire First

January 6, 2009

Pam Martens
It's All One Big Lie

Victoria Buch
Real Estate War in Gaza: the History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

Neve Gordon
Israel's New War Ethic

Tami Sarfatti /
Yonatan Mendel
What Silence Says: Gaza is Still Waiting on Obama

Mike Whitney
The Gaza Bloodbath

Alan Farago
After the Fall

Gary Leupp
A Hamas Coup d'Etat in 2007?

Larry Everest
Silent Partner: the US-Backed War on Gaza

Ron Jacobs
The New Iraqi Sovereignty

David Macaray
Union-Busting is Alive and Well

Stephanie Basile
Where's Anna's Money?

Stacey Warde
An Uncle's Unrest

Website of the Day
Israeli Refusenik on Gaza

January 5, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Will There be a Recovery?

Sousan Hammad
Phoning Home to Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Flying While Brown

Mats Svensson
Longing in Gaza

Jen Marlowe
Abeer's Baby

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Gaza Phone Tag

Brian Cloughley
Israel is Immune From Criticism

Faheem Hussain
Gaza and India: a View From Pakistan

William Cook
Consider the Realities of Gaza

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Madness Among Us

Christopher Ketcham
The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club: a Rotten Washington Interlude

Steve Early
Who Rules SEIU?

Dave Lindorff
When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under Law is a Joke

Website of the Day
The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River Basin

January 2 - 4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Diary of 2008: an Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Graham Usher
Where Pakistan's Generals and the ISI Draw Their Lines

P. Sainath
The Economy is Worse Than It Appears

Belén Fernández
Pardon Our Dust: Israel's PR Campaign for Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Joanne Mariner
How to Close Guantánamo

Seth Sandronsky
Funding the Israeli Military: the US Pipeline

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

John Ross
The Year No One Can Remember

Norm Kent
The Heat on Duval Street: Why Head Shop Raids are Unfair and Unjust

Larry Portis
Syria and the Arab Barbie Doll--Before the Deluge

Richard Rhames
Is Conscience Dead?

Dee C. Lubell
We Come From the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

David Yearsley
A Gay German at the Courts of the Medici and Hanover, and of Course the BBC

Lorenzo Wolff
Joe Ely, the Fighting Rooster of Rock

Marc Catone
Looting Lennon's Legacy

Poets' Basement
Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Website of the Weekend
Earth in High Rez

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

Weekend Edition
January 16-18, 2009

An African-American in Gaza

The United Nations Equals Zero

By VIJAY PRASHAD

For C. M. Naim.

UN-Shmum ([Israeli slang] United Nations =Zero).

Israeli contempt for the United Nations begins in the 1940s and continues to this day. On March 29, 1955, the Israeli cabinet sat for six hours, debating whether to invade the Gaza Strip (then under Egyptian control) to curtail cross-border attacks. Prime Minister Moshe Sharett pointed out that the United Nations resolution 181 (1947) created Israel. David Ben-Gurion, who had recently returned to the Cabinet as Defense Minister, interrupted him, “No, no, no. Only the daring of the Jews created the state, and not any oom-shmoom resolution.” Most of Israel’s leadership (Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, Golda Meir, Yigal Allon, and even Abba Eban) accepted Ben-Gurion’s position; all this long before the 1975 UN General Assembly resolution which equated Zionism with racism. That simply provided more fodder for a well-established contempt for the United Nations within Israel’s ruling circles. When Likud won the elections in 1977, it made hay of the UN resolution on Zionism. Responding to the first invasion of Lebanon (1978), the UN created the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) through resolution 425. The Israeli government brushed this aside, invading the country once more in 1982, remaining south of the Litani River for the next eighteen years – in contempt of resolution 509 (1982) which demanded that Israeli forces “forthwith and unconditionally” withdraw. Prime Minister Menachem Begin told the Israeli press that the United Nations “cannot be objective” because “the majority of the UN General Assembly is definitely anti-Israel, and the majority of the members of the Security Council do not even maintain diplomatic relations with Israel.” The United Nations, oom-shmoom, does not matter.

The Forgotten Staff.

On July 25, 2006, the Israeli air force struck a UN observation post in Khiyam, Lebanon. The UN workers at the post called their Israeli contact number ten times over fourteen bombardments to tell them about the attack. This went on for six hours. The UN later recovered the bodies of four peacekeepers from UNTSO (United Nations Truce Supervision Organization). UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called the attack “apparently deliberate” which raised the goat of Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s Ambassador to the US, who said Annan was being “outrageous.” This was not the only incident. Two other UNIFIL personnel were killed in an IAF airstrike on Tyre on July 26, and a total of twelve other UN officials were wounded in other incidents, some having to do with attacks by Hezbollah. Israel’s investigation whitewashed the incident, even as it was admitted that the aircraft fired precision bombs at the UN post.

Between 2006 and the current assault on Gaza there have been other incidents of Israeli attack on UN personnel. On May 7, 2008, for instance, the Israeli military entered the town of New Abasan, east of Khan Yunis, in Gaza. They blasted their way into a house, killing Wafa Shaker el-Daghma, a thirty-three year old school teacher who worked with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Her three children (one, age two) were with her at the time. The doctrine of excessive force is so normal in the Israeli armed forces that this death brought hardly a rebuke. The UN made its noises, and the human rights groups complained about the violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (against collective punishment) – but Tel Aviv smirked. Oom-shmoom.

The current war takes the contempt to another level. The general violations against the civilian population are so great that the UN Special Reapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, pointed out that the Israeli regime has seriously violated international law through its action of collective punishment, its targeting of civilians and its disproportionate military response. This is a “humanitarian catastrophe,” said Falk on December 27. Things have got worse since then. On January 8, an Israeli tank fired at a UN convoy, killing one driver. The convoy’s route had been coordinated with the Israeli military to prevent this kind of attack. This came two days after Israeli armed forces shelled a UN school in the Jabaliya refugee camp. John Ging, the UNRWA head in Gaza, said, “If [the Israeli government] give us the clearance to move, it is wholly and totally unacceptable that their soldiers on the ground are firing on our aid workers.” The Red Cross also pulled out, finding it impossible to get to civilians in need (in the village of Zeitoun they found four children alive, crawling over dead bodies of civilians).

On January 14, the Israeli armed forces intensely bombed the UN compound in Gaza, injuring three and destroying emergency food and medical supplies. John Ging of UNRWA angrily told the press, “We had a first-hand experience today in this UN compound of what the poor people of Gaza have been living with on a daily basis for the last twenty days and nights.” The buildings in the compound caught on fire almost immediately after being hit, and the fire released a white smoke. “It looked like phosphorous,” said Ging. “It smelled like phosphorus and it burned like phosphorus.” The use of white phosphorus is not technically banned by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (1980) or the Chemical Weapons Convention (1997), but many still consider the use of this inflammatory weapon (like napalm) to be immoral. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak apologized to UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon, saying that the attack was a “grave mistake.” But hours later, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insinuated that Hamas had attacked from within the compound and that the strike was deliberate. Ging said that there were no militants inside the compound, and that UNRWA’s liaison with the Israeli army failed to respond to the several messages sent during the attack.

Palestine is not the only place where UN peace-keepers and civilian staff get killed. Each year, the UN reports on the loss of life of its personnel who bravely work in conflict zones. Scholars from the Center for Refugee and Disaster Studies (Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health) studied the UN records held by the UN Security Coordinator, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations as well as other humanitarian agencies, and found that more than two thirds of the workers were killed in acts of “intentional violence” (this was published in BMJ, July 2000). During the 1990s, most of the killings took place in Rwanda, Somalia, Burundi and Afghanistan – places where the “host government” no longer functions effectively, where extreme chaos means that the rule of law is no longer operational. The Israeli attacks are of a different order. Here we have a member of the UN, who armies are under civilian control, nevertheless quite flagrantly assaulting UN positions. It is not one incident or another, but a pattern of disregard for the UN and for its employees, whom Kofi Annan called “the forgotten staff.”

Bunche’s Peace Army.

On June 14, 1947, Ralph Bunche arrived in Palestine. Born into an African American family of great talents, Bunche went to UCLA and Harvard, did innovative research on French colonialism and African anti-colonialism. A job at Howard did not detain him, as he was quickly taken into the United Nations, where the Secretary General hastened to send him to help the Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) figure out what to do with the British (who governed the mandate), the Jews (whose numbers had begun to increase through migration from Europe and elsewhere) and the Palestinians (who had begun to be displaced from their ancestral homelands). Bunche was startled by the atmosphere of Jerusalem, “British are everywhere and they all carry guns. As you go thru the streets you’re constantly stopped by sentries and control centers and required to show your pass. Buildings are surrounded by barbed wire, pillboxes and road-blocks are abundant.” Bunche and UNSCOP had to navigate between the divergent opinions of the centrist Chaim Weizmann and the terrorists such as Menachem Begin, between the British and the Palestinians. Things were not easy. Two weeks into the work, Bunche wrote in his diary, “One thing seems sure, this problem can’t be solved on the basis of abstract justice, historical or otherwise. Reality is that both Arabs and Jews are here and intend to stay. Therefore, in any ‘solution’ some group, or at least its claim, is bound to get hurt. Danger in any arrangement is that a caste system will develop with backward Arabs as the lower caste.”

UNSCOP played an important role in moving the British out of the equation, a fact that Ben Gurion disputed in later years. The British left in May 1948, and civil war greeted the creation of the state of Israel. The UN’s main person, Count Folke Bernadotte moved swiftly to negotiate a cease-fire. The UN Security Council passed a resolution to this effect. Ben Gurion and his cabinet averred. They wanted the military advantage. But Bernadotte was firm. The cease-fire came into effect on June 11, and Bunche and his team or UN irregulars created a rag-tag group of peace-keepers (they hastily painted their cars white, with UN written in large black letters – this has been the custom since). Bunche and Bernadotte pulled teeth to keep the cease-fire in operation. Bernadotte wrote a report on the situation, challenging the international community to see whether it “is willing to tolerate resort to armed force as the means for settlement of the Palestine issue.” Driving in Jerusalem on September 17, Count Bernadotte, the UN’s man in Palestine, was assassinated by members of the Stern Gang. Bernadotte’s assassination was authorized by the troika that ran the Stern Gang: Yitzhak Yernitsky, who was later known as Yitzhak Shamir, later prime minister of Israel, 1983-84; Nathan Friedman-Yellin, who was later known as Nathan Yellin-Mor, became a pacifist in his last years; Israel Sheib, who was later known as Israel Eldad, remained a committed right-wing nationalist, whose funeral in 1996 was attended by prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Yitzhak Shamir, and Knesset Speaker Dov Shilansky. The stick man was Yehoshua Cohen, who later became a close friend of Ben Gurion. Cohen is a celebrated figure in many quarters (he has his hagiography, The Prince of Jerusalem, published in 2006, written by Ofer Regev). Bunche took charge, and forced a cease-fire by early 1949. The next year, Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first person of African descent to be so honored.

In Oslo, in his talk, Bunche offered a vision for the United Nations, “In the final analysis, the acid test of a genuine will to peace is the willingness of disputing parties to expose their differences to the peaceful processes of the United Nations and to the bar of international public opinion which the United Nations reflects. It is only in this way that truth, reason, and justice may come to prevail over the shrill and blatant voice of propaganda; that a wholesome international morality can be cultivated.” This was a view disregarded by Tel Aviv, who, in 1967 involved itself in hostilities to Bunche’s distress. He worried then that “Israel’s great military success is bound to reinforce the traditional position of that country that the relations between Israel and her Arab neighbors should be left to direct negotiations and arrangements without any third party (i. e. the UN) intervention.” This was prescient, as we see after the entry of Likud into 3, Kaplan Street in Jerusalem.

In 1951, Bunche gave a lecture at the National War College entitled “Review and Appraisal of Israeli-Arab Relations.” It is a conscientious lecture, with Bunche’s emotions leaking in only once: “The real victims of this whole conflict -- and they have been successively at each stage more victimized -- have been the Arabs of Palestine. They are the ones who have suffered. The Jews have not greatly suffered as a result of the conflict. In fact, they are better off today than they were before it began. The peoples of the surrounding Arab states have not suffered from the conflict. It has all been taken out of the hides of the Arabs of Palestine.” And it continues to be so. A thousand dead does not arose the vocal cords of the new president, the first person of African descent to this job, whose commitment to Israel’s security over all else once more undermines any UN resolution.

On January 15, 2009, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon met with Israel’s Foreign Minister, and aspirant to the Prime Minister’s office, Tzipi Livni. Ban Ki-Moon almost begged Israel to abide by the milquetoast UN resolution 1860, drafted by the United Kingdom and passed by the Security Council 14-0 (with the U. S. abstaining). Livni disregarded his plea. “In Israel, we are doing our own assessment on a daily basis,” she said, “and we will decide when to stop based on this assessment.” Oom-shmoom

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu 

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