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Facebook's Helping Hand for Hate
Andre Oboloer says Facebook aids the spread of hate by refusing to remove Holocaust denial groups.
Posted at 05:44 PM
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Netanyahu's 'Nazi Language'?
Incendiary headlines and a cynical op-ed contort the "Judenrein" term. See HonestReporting's latest communique: Netanyahu's 'Nazi Language'?
Posted at 02:26 PM
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Journalism Union Expels Israeli Chapter
The International Federation of Journalists expelled its Israeli chapter.
Relations between the union and Israeli journalists nosedived during the Second War in Lebanon when the IFJ condemned the IDF for attacking Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV network. The Israeli chapter responded to the IFJ by temporarily suspending its membership and withholding dues.
The Israeli chapter (a.k.a. National Federation of Israeli Journalists) was further angered by the IFJ's response to the Gaza war. The Jerusalem Post explains:
In January, the International Federation began issuing a series of letters condemning Israel for refusing to allow journalists to enter Gaza to cover Operation Cast Lead. The International Federation also published a report [pdf format] criticizing Israel's actions in Gaza and urging International Federation members and affiliated organizations to speak out against Israel's treatment of foreign journalists during the war.
According to Shibi, the International Federation report about Gaza was compiled without any Israeli input.
"No one called us to hear what we had to say," he said. Israeli journalists had things to say about the balance of rights of journalists to cover the war and the pressures coming from the army and the state, but the report was compiled without consulting a single Israeli source, he said.
The biggest irony is that the Israeli chapter is the only one in the Mideast with any real press freedom and due process.
Posted at 11:25 AM
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A 'Judenrein' West Bank?
Benjamin Netanyahu raised eyebrows in the media when he told German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier that the West Bank must not become "Judenrein."
Reuters called it "an especially tainted term," used in "jaw-dropper defiance." But even more over-the-top was its headline's overdramatic exclamation point:
Judenrein! Israel adopts Nazi term to back settlers
And Peter Beaumont of The Observer wrote a whole op-ed slamming the Prime Minister:
The evocation of Judenrein by Netanyahu and by other commentators is the most cynical of ploys in a negotiation that his government feels that is going against it. Under pressure from Obama to freeze settlement building completely – including the construction that Israel likes to label as "natural growth" – it is being forced into ever more extreme language to defend the continued existence of the settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories in language, like that used with Steinmeier, to embarrass and cajole.
UK wonk Robin Shepherd responded to Beaumont:
Beaumont’s argument is straightforward. International law, he says, condemns the settlements as illegal. It is because they are settlers, not because they are Jewish settlers that they have no right to be there. Beaumont is also astute enough to refer to the fact that Jews lived in the West Bank for thousands of years, apart from the period between 1948 and 1967 when Jordanian control ensured that the land was free of Jews. He might also have referred to the Jews of Hebron who were expelled from their homes following a vicious anti-Semitic pogrom perpetrated by Palestinians in 1929 in which 63 Jews were killed.
But this would take him too close to the core issue that his piece ignores. For it is precisely the hatred of Jews qua Jews that has always lain at the heart of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim opposition to the existence of any Jewish state, whatever its borders, and regardless of who does or does not live in the West Bank. It was this hatred that led Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the leading Palestinian political figure of the 1930s, to join up with the Nazis in World War II.
Judenrein? The Prime Minister was telling it like it is.
Posted at 01:59 PM
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Anonymous Sources on Resettling Refugees
Yesterday, the Christian Science Monitor reported that the US will resettle 1,350 Palestinian refugees forced to flee Iraq. Curiously, the headline spins this as "risking Israel's ire." The source for that idea is an anonymous source (which also gets my goat). The Monitor writes:
The US reluctance to accept Palestinians is because it "doesn't want the refugee program to become an issue in its relationship with Israel," says a diplomat in the region, who requested anonymity because he is not cleared to talk to the press. But these Palestinians, he says, will be processed as refugees from Iraq.
What makes this noteworthy is that this is taking place through hrough the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and not the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
Natan Sharansky lays out the difference:
Instead of working to relieve the refugees' misery, the United Nations has dedicated an entire agency, UNRWA, to perpetuating it. For the rest of the world's refugees, the U.N. works tirelessly to improve their conditions, to relocate them, and to help them rebuild their lives as quickly as possible. With the Palestinians, the U.N. does exactly the opposite, granting refugee status to the great-grandchildren of people displaced in 1948, doing nothing to dismantle the camps, and acting as facilitators for the terrorists' goal of grinding an entire civilian population under their thumb. Nowhere on earth do terrorists get so much help from the Free World.
If anything, a precedent bypassing the UNRWA deserves Israeli applause. The UNRWA and Arab governments haven't helped any Palestinians. Lebanon -- for example -- restricts Palestinians from 70 categories of jobs, and (irony of ironies) tightly restricts the natural growth of UNRWA-run refugee camps.
Thanks to the UNHCR, and not the UNRWA, an estimated 350,000 people of Palestinian descent live as an integrated community in Chile, not in camps.
These 1,350 owe their good fortune to the fact that they happened to be stuck in Iraq when the US invaded. The other 1.3 million stuck in 58 UNRWA camps scattered throughout Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza aren't so lucky.
Posted at 05:17 PM
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Do the Palestinians Really Want a State?
A spate of arguments calls into question whether the Palestinians really want a state of their own.
I'm starting off with Robert Malley and Hussein Agha (you read that right),
Palestinians came to accept the two-state solution by the late 1980s, though that acceptance was always somewhat grudging. Statehood acquired the trappings of a national cause but it never truly matched national aspirations. For most, it appealed more to the head than to the heart; it was an arguably useful way of achieving greater goals but never the objective in and of itself. Unlike Zionism, for whom statehood was the central objective, the Palestinian fight was primarily about other matters. The absence of a state was not the cause of all their misfortune. Its creation would not be the full solution either. . . .
Today, the idea of Palestinian statehood is alive, but mainly outside of Palestine. Establishing a state has become a matter of utmost priority for Europeans, who see it as crucial to stabilizing the region and curbing the growth of extremism; for Americans, who hail it as a centerpiece in efforts to contain Iran as well as radical Islamists and to forge a coalition between so-called moderate Arab states and Israel; and even for a large number of Israelis who have come to believe it is the sole effective answer to the threat to Israel's existence posed by Arab demographics. Those might all be good reasons, though none is of particular relevance to Palestinians; and each only further alienates them from the vision of statehood, the purported object of their struggle.
Universal endorsement has its downside. The more the two-state solution looks like an American or Western, not to mention Israeli, interest, the less it appeals to Palestinians.
Israeli columnist Sever Plocker reacts:
The message conveyed in the article is greatly commensurate with the argument presented in the new book published by Benny Morris, the leading historian of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The book, titled One State, Two States (Yale University Press, 2009,) details the notion of “two states for two people” starting with the early stages of Zionism and until today. The conclusion is as follows: The Palestinians never adopted the notion of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state existing alongside Israel, regardless of its borders; similarly, the Palestinians have rejected the notion of a joint bi-national state . . . .
The article written by Agha and Malley, associated with the Left, and Morris’ book, on the Right, convey deep pessimism. The Palestinians will not agree to either divide or share the country. They continue to cling to the revolutionary dream of “national liberation,” and until this unrealistic liberation materializes, they prefer to exist as a national rather than political entity; one that has no obligations and is always seen as a victim, in its own eyes and in the eyes of the world.
Johns Hopkins professor Jakub Grygiel raised the same question in a very powerful essay earlier this year:
• The state is no longer the only way to organize and manage large groups. New technologies impart cohesion and strength to an increasingly larger number of dispersed individuals.
• The proliferation of weapons and dual-use technologies challenges the monopoly of violence of states by allowing individuals or small bands of people to present serious security and strategic challenges.
• The presence today of great powers, and especially of the American preponderance of power, with growing military capabilities to destroy other states, serves as a strong incentive to keep a low, stateless profile: To be stateless is to decrease one’s own footprint, to decrease one’s chance of being a target of retaliation, and thereby to increase one’s odds of survival.
• Many of the modern groups espouse radical ideas, tinted by religious and/or extremist views, making them less interested in the establishment of states. States require some sort of political compromise and, even if they are managed in an authoritarian or totalitarian style, they rarely can match the expectations of extremists who tend to become disappointed in political solutions.
The essay's worth reading in full. But I'll give the last word to The Atlantic's Robert Kaplan's response to Grygiel:
But the U.S. should also brace itself for an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that may never end, because the Palestinians may already have what they want.
Posted at 11:06 AM
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Debunking the Domino Theory
The NY Times reprinted an amazing excerpt from Dennis Ross and David Makovsky's book debunking the idea that settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to resolving other regional conflicts too:
Since the origins of so many regional tensions and rivalries are not connected to the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is hard to see how resolving it would unlock other regional stalemates or sources of instability. Iran, for example, is not pursuing its nuclear ambitions because there is an Arab-Israeli conflict. Sectarian groups in Iraq would not suddenly put aside their internal struggles if the Palestinian issue were resolved. Like so many conflicts in the region, these struggles have their own dynamic.
In addition, as tragic as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has become, it has not spilled over to destabilize the Middle East. There have been two Palestinian Intifadas, or uprisings, including one that lasted from 2000 to 2005 and claimed the lives of 4,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis – but not a single Arab leader had been toppled or a single regime destabilized as a result. It has remained a local conflict, contained in a small geographical area. Yet the argument of linkage endures to this day, and with powerful promoters. Why does it persist? And why has it been accepted among top policymakers as if it is factually correct?
Yoram Ettinger recently pointed out that there's no end to how far the spurious linkage can be stretched:
The US Administration-devised linkage reinvents the Middle East, transforming a 100 year old (Arab-Israel) conflict into the alleged root cause of the 1,400 year old Middle East turbulence. Is there a logical linkage between a potential Iranian takeover of Bahrain and "apostate Saudi Arabia" on one hand, and the future of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria on the other hand?! Why not a linkage between an end to Iran's subversion of Iraq and an end to IDF counter-terrorism operations in Judea and Samaria?!
Or how about a stretched-linkage between the prevention of al-Qaeda takeover of Pakistan's nuclear capabilities and a total Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria?! And, what about the grand-linkage between an end to Sunni-Shiite rift, Sudan's civil war, Lebanon's internal rifts on one hand, and the repartitioning of Jerusalem on the other hand?!
Related reading: Mideast Dominoes: A Falling Theory
Posted at 04:22 PM
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Free Gaza's Deja Vu All Over Again
Lauren Booth wasn't the only Free Gaza activist stuck in Gaza after last August's boating jaunt.
Turns out that Booth's shipmate, Jenny Linnell, who volunteers for the International Solidarity Movement, is unable to leave via Israel or Egypt. The Herald Express explains:
Ms Linnell added: "The Egyptian officials at the border asked how we entered Gaza and we said we arrived on the Free Gaza Movement Boat.
"They told us 'so you already know why you're not being allowed out'.
"This would suggest we're being detained as a form of unofficial punishment for our humanitarian work in Gaza."
For security reasons, Israeli law prohibits foreign nationals who illegally enter Gaza to cross into Israel. Egypt hasn't explained its refusal to Linnell and never explained the delay in allowing Booth to leave in September.
As Yogi Berra would say, "It's like deja vu all over again."
Posted at 03:59 PM
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3 Lessons For Israel From Jacko, Lakers and Iran
Thanks to Michael Jackson and the Lakers (both local stories), plus Iran, the LA Times is setting personal bests in web site traffic to related articles and blogs, and attracting an amazing social media followers on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Some of the stats Jamie Gold shares from this internal memo are simply eye-popping.
There are are three important lessons to learn from this.
• Multi-media, real-time, interactive journalism is clearly what people want. A video of Jackson fans sharing their thoughts on the paper's YouTube channel has now drawn 632,00+ viewers and a whopping 4,000 comments. A half-million Jackson fans can't be wrong. This supply and demand will only grow.
• Smaller papers can only parlay their local stories into items of national interest, but if they already have the necessary Web 2.0 infrastructure and know what to do with it. While everyone's covering the national stories of Sarah Palin and Steve McNair, the Anchorage Daily News and the Nashville Tennessean are working with a home field advantage. Are they getting any benefit?
• Anyone who cares about Israel must be part of "the conversation" on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. This requires proactive expression. As Alex Margolin wrote in January:
Because of the "social" nature of today's Internet - where content is increasingly generated by users, not the sites themselves - quality content is not enough. It is also vital to maximize the quantity of people spreading Israel's message.
In other words, state agencies can do great work providing videos, images and information and activists can organize the material and create channels for public participation, but success in the media war will largely be determined by what the masses of supporters do with the information.
As you get active, don't forget to network with us on Facebook and Twitter.
Posted at 11:52 AM
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