israel
The doomsday weapon
By Gideon Levy

Every few weeks you have to sow fear, every few months you need to make threats, and once every year or two you have to have another little war. Blind cooperation between the defense establishment and the media holds the promise of another round of fighting. In that way, it's possible to escape some of the blame from the Goldstone report and wallow in the conditions we love best: being the victim, feeling threatened and uniting in the face of the great external danger allegedly in the offing.

The Israel Defense Forces will be above it all and cleanse itself of a series of suspicions and failures. This can also translate into huge budgets, glorified importance and influence for both the generals and the military commentators. It also creates good television ratings and sells sensationalist newspapers and advanced weapon systems. What's better than that for us?

The most recent cry of alarm: NASA in Palestine, Israel's Rafael Advanced Defense Systems in Gaza. Hamas launches an Iranian rocket - it must be Iranian - 60 kilometers. The head of Military Intelligence reported on it, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke immediately about missile systems, and the media immediately broke into its favorite war dance. "Three million citizens within range," "Confrontation in December," "Are you within range?" "Outskirts of Tel Aviv in danger," "Doomsday weapons" - frightening headlines accompanied by no less scary maps. "This is a new dimension confronting the IDF. It's not a simple matter. It's really a different story altogether. We should remember that there will be many casualties on the home front," roared the national baritone - the military commentator on television.

So again we are dealing with the grotesque - a strip of land under siege wallowing in its distress and ruins, with a pitiful paramilitary organization whose weapons arsenal would be an embarrassment to an IDF basic training camp. And it already proved its inadequacy in the last war. But the militants are portrayed to us as a superpower. That's how they create the scenario for the next war. That's how they empower not just the enemy, but first and foremost the IDF, which can beat the enemy.

The warmongering military commentators say war will come early, maybe even next month. The furious predictions of the commentators will again be a self-fulfilling prophesy. As with the horrible earlier incarnations, we can soon expect a series of "incidents" that are "heating up the front" - bombing a tunnel or shelling a weapons lab. A few helpless peasants who dare approach the security fence, rusty plows in hand, will be killed after being depicted as terrorists laying explosives, and the Palestinians will fire hollow Qassams in response, sowing fear in the Negev and creating pressure on the government to "do something."

"The top brass are not asking if there will be another military confrontation with Hamas, but when," according to the cliche about the next war. But of course the only important question is not asked: "Why?" rather than whether or when. This is the question that reverberates.

It would be funny if it were not so depressing. Even satire would not be as ridiculous as this constantly recurring reality. No lessons are learned. A thousand commissions of inquiry will not spare us this march of folly. Gaza is locked up and quiet, relatively speaking. True, it will not remain calm if the siege is not lifted and its residents are not allowed to enjoy humane living conditions. Those who want another criminal and unnecessary war in December are invited to join the celebration of insanity that is overcoming us, orchestrated by the barons of war - the generals and commentators.

Those who want to try to stop this vicious cycle are welcome to think of an alternative: the immediate lifting of the siege, the rehabilitation of Gaza, the release of Gilad Shalit at the stated price, an effort to bring Hamas into the peace process and an attempt to reach a long-term agreement with it. It's possible. It has never been tried, but there's a catch. What will the generals and commentators do if, God forbid, the calm in the south continues?

Israel's Right To Exist?

By Alan Hart

November 03, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- -- On Monday 12 October, Prime Minister Netanyahu opened the Knesset’s winter session by blasting the Goldstone Report that accuses Israel of committing war crimes and vowing that he would never allow Israelis be tried for them. But that was not his main message. It was an appeal, delivered I thought with a measure of desperation, to the “Palestinian leadership”, presumably the leadership of “President” Abbas and his Fatah cronies, leaders who are regarded by very many if not most Palestinians as American-and-Israeli stooges at best and traitors at worst.

Netanyahu again called on this leadership to agree to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, saying this was, and remains, the key to peace. And he went on and on and on about it.

“For 62 years the Palestinians have been saying ‘No’ to the Jewish state. I am once again calling upon our Palestinian neighbours – say ‘Yes’ to the Jewish state. Without recognition of the Israel as the state of the Jews we shall not be able to attain peace… Such recognition is a step which requires courage and the Palestinian leadership should tell its people the truth – that without this recognition there can be no peace… There is no alternative to Palestinian leaders showing courage by recognising the Jewish state. This has been and remains the true key to peace.”

As Ha’aretz noted in its report, Netanyahu’s demand for Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state is for him “a way on ensuring recognition of Israel’s right to exist as opposed to merely recognising Israel” (my emphasis). This, as Ha’aretz added, is the recognition which Netanyahu and many other Israelis see as the real core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In the name of pragmatism, willingness to “merely to recognise” Israel – meaning to accept and live in peace with an Israel inside its pre-June ‘67 borders – has long been the formal Palestinian and all-Arab position. Why does it stop short of recognising Israel’s “right to exist”, and why, really, does it matter so much to Zionism that Palestinians recognise this right?

The answer is in the following.

According to history as written by the winner, Zionism, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This is propaganda nonsense.

• In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.
• Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal – meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council.
• The truth is that the General Assembly’s partition proposal never went to the Security Council for consideration. Why not? Because the U.S. knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force given the extent of Arab and other Muslim opposition to it; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.
• So the partition plan was vitiated (became invalid) and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine – after Britain had made a mess of it and walked away, effectively surrendering to Zionist terrorism – was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the U.S. was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence – actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

The truth of the time was that the Zionist state, which came into being mainly as a consequence of pre-planned ethnic cleansing, had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist UNLESS … Unless it was recognised and legitimized by those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during the creation of the Zionist state. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved.

And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not and cannot take from the Palestinians by force.

No wonder Prime Minister Netanyahu is more than a little concerned on this account.

Israel’s leaders have always known the truth summarised above. It’s time for the rest of the world to know it.

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews: The False Messiah (Zionism, the Real Enemy of the Jews). He blogs on www.alanhart.net