I have chanted “In our thousands, in our millions…We are all Palestinians!” at various demos in the UK, and at that time I meant it. You feel close to the millions of people displaced, oppressed and denied their rights and humanity because of simply being Palestinian and you want to speak out for them. But… I am not Palestinian.

It is the sentimentality and flowery language around the Pro Palestine stance – the constant: “we want to help”, “we came to help”, “we can change things for you” and “we love Palestine like you do” – that has started to bother me since I first went to Lebanon to volunteer in the Palestinian refugee camps in 2008.

I have been to the camps three times now and each time I am more and more amazed by the strength, spirit and kindness of the Palestinians. I also have had to check my own privilege and motivations. I have to stop myself from getting that 'I'm doing something for Palestine' attitude because ultimately it serves no one. I do think I am doing something for Palestine and her people – but it is the least I can do, and if I could do more I would. At no point should I think I deserve any kudos or pats on the back for it. At no point should I think I am making some huge difference and put myself at the center of their cause and their feelings.

At no point can I make it my struggle. The struggle is that of those that live it everyday, whether they are in Gaza, The West Bank, Beddawi Camp, or Sweden. I will never know what it is like to be Palestinian – to have over 63 years of being ignored, mistreated and maligned. I shouldn't try to speak for them, tell them what to think or make assumptions and generalisations about their lives.

In Beddawi Camp you speak to people with various stories and thoughts on their plight and their homeland. Each one moves you, each one makes you respect them more and wish Beddawi Camp didn't exist (even if you yourself are a little in love with it). Not all of these fit what we have come to expect – not everyone wants to go back to Palestine, some people are angry and others are just concerned for their futures… it is everything and it is complex. But for many, Palestine is a cause célèbre, and they don't question why they support it without really knowing the facts, history and what it means to be a Palestinian refugee.

Many Muslims see it as a religious struggle, keeping the Holy Land safe – and whilst that has its place, it is also insulting to the Palestinians that we only care because we have a stake in the land, and their plight in Lebanon often goes unnoticed because they are not in Jerusalem or Hebron. Many people I have spoken to did not even know there were refugee camps in Lebanon or what the refugees have been through in Lebanon's tumultuous political history.

That the Palestinians in Lebanon suffer from discrimination, are denied human rights and live insecure lives is something many people are unaware of. I have been told, each time that I have been to the camps that Palestinians in Lebanon are in a worse situation than those in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I would have to agree. In Beddawi they are 165km from the Palestinian border (as it clearly says at the entrance to the camp), but in reality that distance is so much greater.

Two of the most amazing men I have ever met were both arrested and then taken to Israel to be imprisoned. They both said they were grateful to the Israelis because they got to set foot on their homeland.

This summer I met an amazing woman who told us she was originally from Tel a Zaater. A camp that was besieged, and a horrendous massacre occurred, worse than that of Sabra and Chatila.

We met people from Nahr el Bared, and even visited the camp. It had been razed by the Lebanese army in 2007. Many of its residents left homeless, traumatised or worse.

These are situations no amount of attending demos, wearing kuffiyehs, or chanting 'Free, Free Palestine' will make you truly understand.

The Palestinians do not need outsiders to save them – they are strong and resilient and their mere existence is an act of resistance. They also don't need people telling them how to be Palestinian – and this tends to happen with many people who take on a cause of the marginalized. Palestinians have been excluded from issues related to their struggle and future and they have had to fight to be listened to.

Appropriating someone else's cause and telling them how they should feel is what the privileged do. I can get emotional and feel sad about the situation in the camps but I can come home to reliable electricity, clean streets and no threat of war with Israel or the Lebanese army invading my home. For the residents of Beddawi or Rashdieh Camp, that is not the case.

Palestinians in Lebanon can't own property, university is difficult to get into, they are barred from over 70 public sector jobs; they live in less than adequate housing, poverty is a huge issue – it adds up. They are also often blamed for the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli Invasion. Their presence is a problem and they are made to feel it. Palestine is important because it represents hope and not being non-persons, that can be discarded and mistreated.

Many people we met were refugees not once, but two or three times over. Palestinians kicked out of Iraq and made to move to Lebanon, those fleeing from Nahr el Bared and still unable to return to their homes there.

Palestine is the idea of somewhere safe because as refugees their lives are characterised by insecurity.

But us non-Palestinians focus on the idea more than the people. The situation of people in Gaza and the West Bank is dire, but it often gets romanticised whilst the refugees of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq are ignored. There needs to be more focus on the refugees in Lebanon, people need to know what they have been through, what Lebanon has been through. I know many people travel to the West Bank to volunteer or be activists – far less choose Lebanon.

Palestinian experiences of the conflict are not all the same – their struggle is coloured differently. The Dome of the Rock may be a key symbol of the conflict, but so is Handala holding the key.

And what is the point of my little ramble? It is mostly a reminder to myself and those of us who are part of the pro Palestine movement – don't become self congratulatory creeps; remember who you are chanting for. It is also a request to everyone who supports the Palestinians – please learn more about the refugees of Lebanon. To not know their experiences is to know nothing about Palestine.

More about the author: Sumi Khan has an MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development, with a focus on women in the Palestinian conflict. She has volunteered with Unipal for three summer programmes as a teacher, and then as a coordinator. Unipal is a registered British Charity that has sent 600 volunteers to teach English in the refugee camps of West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon since 1972. It aims to promote cultural and educational exchange with Palestinian refugees. The charity is entirely volunteer led; more information can be found on their website: www.unipal.org.uk.

The bungled assault on the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the flotilla, shows once again that Israel is addicted to using military force yet unable to do so effectively. One would think that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would improve over time from all the practice. Instead, it has become the gang that cannot shoot straight.

The IDF last scored a clear-cut victory in the Six Day War in 1967; the record since then is a litany of unsuccessful campaigns. The War of Attrition (1969-70) was at best a draw, and Israel fell victim to one of the great surprise attacks in military history in the October War of 1973. In 1982, the IDF invaded Lebanon and ended up in a protracted and bloody fight with Hezbollah. Eighteen years later, Israel conceded defeat and pulled out of the Lebanese quagmire. Israel tried to quell the First Intifada by force in the late 1980s, with Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin telling his troops to break the bones of the Palestinian demonstrators. But that strategy failed and Israel was forced to join the Oslo Peace Process instead, which was another failed endeavor.

The IDF has not become more competent in recent years. By almost all accounts—including the Israeli government’s own commission of inquiry—it performed abysmally in the 2006 Lebanon war. The IDF then launched a new campaign against the people of Gaza in December 2008, in part to “restore Israel’s deterrence” but also to weaken or topple Hamas. Although the mighty IDF was free to pummel Gaza at will, Hamas survived and Israel was widely condemned for the destruction and killing it wrought on Gaza’s civilian population. Indeed, the Goldstone Report, written under UN auspices, accused Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. Earlier this year, the Mossad murdered a Hamas leader in Dubai, but the assassins were seen on multiple security cameras and were found to have used forged passports from Australia and a handful of European countries. The result was an embarrassing diplomatic row, with Australia, Ireland, and Britain each expelling an Israeli diplomat.

Given this history, it is not surprising that the IDF mishandled the operation against the Gaza flotilla, despite having weeks to plan it. The assault forces that landed on the Mavi Marmara were unprepared for serious resistance and responded by shooting nine activists, some at point-blank range. None of the activists had their own guns. The bloody operation was condemned around the world—except in the United States, of course. Even within Israel, the IDF was roundly criticized for this latest failure.

These ill-conceived operations have harmful consequences for Israel. Failures leave adversaries intact and make Israeli leaders worry that their deterrent reputation is being undermined. To rectify that, the IDF is turned loose again, but the result is usually another misadventure, which gives Israel new incentives to do it again, and so on. This spiral logic, coupled with Israel’s intoxication with military force, helps explain why the Israeli press routinely carries articles predicting where Israel’s next war will be.

Israel’s recent debacles have also damaged its international reputation. Respondents to a 2010 worldwide opinion poll done for the BBC said that Israel, Iran, and Pakistan had the most negative influence in the world; even North Korea ranked better. More worrying for Israel is that its once close strategic relationship with Turkey has been badly damaged by the 2008-09 Gaza war and especially by the assault on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship filled with Turkish nationals. But surely the most troubling development for Israel is the growing chorus of voices in the United States who say that Israel’s behavior is threatening American interests around the world, to include endangering its soldiers. If that sentiment grows, it could seriously harm Israel’s relationship with the United States.

Life as an Apartheid State

The flotilla tragedy highlights another way in which Israel is in deep trouble. Israel’s response makes it obvious that its leaders are not interested in allowing the Palestinians to have a viable state in Gaza and the West Bank, but instead are bent on creating a “Greater Israel” in which the Palestinians are confined to a handful of impoverished enclaves.

Israel insists that its blockade is solely intended to keep weapons out of Gaza. Hardly anyone would criticize Israel if this were true, but it is not. The real aim of the blockade is to punish the people of Gaza for supporting Hamas and resisting Israel’s efforts to maintain Gaza as a giant open-air prison. Of course, there was much evidence that this was the case before the debacle on the Mavi Marmara. When the blockade began in 2006, Dov Weisglass, a close aide to Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, said, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” And the Gaza onslaught 18 months ago was designed to punish the Gazans, not enforce a weapons embargo. The ships in the flotilla were transporting humanitarian aid, not weapons for Hamas, and Israel’s willingness to use deadly force to prevent a humanitarian aid convoy from reaching Gaza makes it abundantly clear that Israel wants to humiliate and subdue the Palestinians, not live side-by-side with them in separate states.

Collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza is unlikely to end anytime soon. Israel’s leaders have shown little interest in lifting the blockade or negotiating sincerely. The sad truth is that Israel has been brutalizing the Palestinians for so long that it is almost impossible to break the habit. It is hardly surprising that Jimmy Carter said last year, “the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than human beings.” They are, and they will be for the foreseeable future.

Consequently, there is not going to be a two-state solution. Instead, Gaza and the West Bank will become part of a Greater Israel, which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Israelis and their American supporters invariably bristle at this comparison, but that is their future if they create a Greater Israel while denying full political rights to an Arab population that will soon outnumber the Jewish population in the entirety of the land. In fact, two former Israeli prime ministers—Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak—have made this very point. Olmert went so far as to argue, “as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

He’s right, because Israel will not be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state. Like racist South Africa, it will eventually evolve into a democratic bi-national state whose politics will be dominated by the more numerous Palestinians. But that process will take many years, and during that time, Israel will continue to oppress the Palestinians. Its actions will be seen and condemned by growing numbers of people and more and more governments around the world. Israel is unwittingly destroying its own future as a Jewish state, and doing so with tacit U.S. support.

America’s Albatross

The combination of Israel’s strategic incompetence and its gradual transformation into an apartheid state creates significant problems for the United States. There is growing recognition in both countries that their interests are diverging; indeed this perspective is even garnering attention inside the American Jewish community. Jewish Week, for example, recently published an article entitled “The Gaza Blockade: What Do You Do When U.S. and Israeli Interests Aren’t in Synch?” Leaders in both countries are now saying that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is undermining U.S. security. Vice President Biden and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of Central Command, both made this point recently, and the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, told the Knesset in June, “Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden.”

It is easy to see why. Because the United States gives Israel so much support and U.S. politicians routinely laud the “special relationship” in the most lavish terms, people around the globe naturally associate the United States with Israel’s actions. Unfortunately, this makes huge numbers of people in the Arab and Islamic world furious with the United States for supporting Israel’s cruel treatment of the Palestinians. That anger in turn helps fuel terrorism against America. Remember that the 9/11 Commission Report, which describes Khalid Sheik Muhammad as the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks,” concludes that his “animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” Osama bin Laden’s hostility toward the United States was fuelled in part by this same concern.

Popular anger toward the United States also threatens the rulers of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, key U.S. allies who are frequently seen as America’s lackeys. The collapse of any of these regimes would be a big blow to the U.S. position in the region; however, Washington’s unyielding support for Israel makes these governments weaker, not stronger. More importantly, the rupture in Israel’s relationship with Turkey will surely damage America’s otherwise close relationship with Turkey, a NATO member and a key U.S. ally in Europe and the Middle East.

Finally, there is the danger that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, which could have terrible consequences for the United States. The last thing America needs is another war with an Islamic country, especially one that could easily interfere in its ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why the Pentagon opposes striking Iran, whether with Israeli or U.S. forces. But Netanyahu might do it anyway if he thinks it would be good for Israel, even if it were bad for the United States.

Dark Days Ahead for the Lobby

Israel’s troubled trajectory is also causing major headaches for its American supporters. First, there is the matter of choosing between Israel and the United States. This is sometimes referred to as the issue of dual loyalty, but that term is a misnomer. Americans are allowed to have dual citizenship—and in effect, dual loyalty—and this is no problem as long as the interests of the other country are in synch with America’s interests. For decades, Israel’s supporters have striven to shape public discourse in the United States so that most Americans believe the two countries’ interests are identical. That situation is changing, however. Not only is there now open talk about clashing interests, but knowledgeable people are openly asking whether Israel’s actions are detrimental to U.S. security.

The lobby has been scrambling to discredit this new discourse, either by reasserting the standard argument that Israel’s interests are synonymous with America’s or by claiming that Israel—to quote a recent statement by Mortimer Zuckerman, a key figure in the lobby—“has been an ally that has paid dividends exceeding its costs.” A more sophisticated approach, which is reflected in an AIPAC-sponsored letter that 337 congresspersons sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March, acknowledges that there will be differences between the two countries, but argues that “such differences are best resolved quietly, in trust and confidence.” In other words, keep the differences behind closed doors and away from the American public. It is too late, however, to quell the public debate about whether Israel’s actions are damaging U.S. interests. In fact, it is likely to grow louder and more contentious with time.

This changing discourse creates a daunting problem for Israel’s supporters, because they will have to side either with Israel or the United States when the two countries’ interests clash. Thus far, most of the key individuals and institutions in the lobby have sided with Israel when there was a dispute. For example, President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu have had two big public fights over settlements. Both times the lobby sided with Netanyahu and helped him thwart Obama. It seems clear that individuals like Abraham Foxman, who heads the Anti-Defamation League, and organizations like AIPAC are primarily concerned about Israel’s interests, not America’s.

This situation is very dangerous for the lobby. The real problem is not dual loyalty but choosing between the two loyalties and ultimately putting the interests of Israel ahead of those of America. The lobby’s unstinting commitment to defending Israel, which sometimes means shortchanging U.S. interests, is likely to become more apparent to more Americans in the future, and that could lead to a wicked backlash against Israel’s supporters as well as Israel.

The lobby faces yet another challenge: defending an apartheid state in the liberal West is not going to be easy. Once it is widely recognized that the two-state solution is dead and Israel has become like white-ruled South Africa—and that day is not far off—support for Israel inside the American Jewish community is likely to diminish significantly. The main reason is that apartheid is a despicable political system that is fundamentally at odds with basic American values as well as core Jewish values. For sure there will be some Jews who will defend Israel no matter what kind of political system it has. But their numbers will shrink over time, in large part because survey data shows that younger American Jews feel less attachment to Israel than their elders, which makes them less inclined to defend Israel blindly.

The bottom line is that Israel will not be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state over the long term because it will not be able to depend on the American Jewish community to defend such a reprehensible political order.

Assisted Suicide

Israel is facing a bleak future, yet there is no reason to think that it will change course anytime soon. The political center of gravity in Israel has shifted sharply to the right and there is no sizable pro-peace political party or movement. Moreover, it remains firmly committed to the belief that what cannot be solved by force can be solved with greater force, and many Israelis view the Palestinians with contempt if not hatred. Neither the Palestinians nor any of Israel’s immediate neighbors are powerful enough to deter it, and the lobby will remain influential enough over the next decade to protect Israel from meaningful U.S. pressure.

Remarkably, the lobby is helping Israel commit national suicide while also doing serious damage to American security interests. Voices challenging this tragic situation have grown slightly more numerous in recent years, but the majority of political commentators and virtually all U.S. politicians seem blissfully ignorant of where this is headed, or unwilling to risk their careers by speaking out.  
__________________________________________

John J. Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

The American Conservative welcomes letters to the editor.
Send letters to: letters@amconmag.com

Outraged by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's repeated denunciations of the May 31 Israeli raid, as well as his co-sponsorship with Brazil of an agreement with Iran designed to promote renewed negotiations with the West on Tehran's nuclear programme, some neo-conservatives are even demanding that the US try to expel Ankara from NATO as one among several suggested actions aimed at punishing Erdogan's AKP (Justice and Development Party) government.

“Turkey, as a member of NATO, is privy to intelligence information having to do with terrorism and with Iran,” noted the latest report by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a hard-line neo-conservative group that promotes US-Israeli military ties and has historically cultivated close ties to Turkey's military, as well.

“If Turkey finds its best friends to be Iran, Hamas, Syria and Brazil (look for Venezuela in the future) the security of that information (and Western technology in weapons in Turkey's arsenal) is suspect. The United States should seriously consider suspending military cooperation with Turkey as a prelude to removing it from the organisation,” suggested the group.

Its board of advisers includes many prominent champions of the 2003 Iraq invasion, including former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey, and former UN ambassador John Bolton.

'Ingrained hostility'

Neo-conservative publications, notably The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard and the National Review, have also been firing away at the AKP government since the raid.

“Turkey now represents a major element in the global panorama of radical Islam,” declared the Standard's Stephen Schwartz, while Daniel Pipes, the controversial director of the Likudist Middle East Forum (MEF), echoed JINSA's call for ousting Ankara from NATO and urged Washington to provide direct support for Turkey's opposition parties in an article published by the National Review Online.

The Journal has been running editorials and op-eds attacking Turkey on virtually a daily basis since the raid, accusing its government, among other things, of having “an ingrained hostility toward the Jewish state, remarkable sympathies for nearby radical regimes, and an attitude toward extremist groups like the IHH (the Islamist group that sponsored the flotilla's flagship, the Mavi Marmara) that borders on complicity”.

On Monday, it ran an op-ed by long-time hawk Victor Davis Hanson that labelled the IHH “a terrorist organisation with ties to al-Qaeda”, while an earlier op-ed, by Robert Pollock, its editorial features editor, called Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, “demagogues appealing to the worst elements in their own country and the broader Middle East”.

Meanwhile, in an op-ed published by The Forward, a Jewish weekly, Michael Rubin, a Perle protégé at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), accused Turkey of having “become a conduit for the smuggling of weapons to Israel's enemies”, notably Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Backtracking

The onslaught is ironic both because of the neo-conservatives' long cultivation of Turkey and their avowed support for promoting democratic governance – of which they have singled out Turkey for special praise – in the Muslim world.

Neo-conservatives were among the most important promoters of the military alliance between Israel and Turkey that began to take shape in the late 1980s and was consolidated by the mid-1990s.

In fact, Perle and another of his protégés, former undersecretary of defence for policy, Douglas Feith, worked as paid lobbyists for Turkey during that period, in major part to persuade the powerful “Israel Lobby” to promote Ankara's interests on Capitol Hill.

In 1996, the two men participated in a task force chaired by Perle that proposed to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he work with Turkey and Jordan to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power as part of an alliance designed to transform the strategic balance in the Middle East permanently in favour of Israel.

But the Turkey promoted by Perle and his fellow neo-cons in the 1980s and 1990s was one that was dominated by a secular business and political elite carefully monitored by an all-powerful military institution that mounted three coup d'etats between 1960 and 1980 and intervened a fourth time in 1997 to oust an Islamist-led government.

Disappointment

Despite its close links to both the US and Israel, however, the Turkish military badly disappointed the neo-cons in the run-up to Washington's invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Instead of insisting that the civilian government at the time grant US requests to use Turkish territory as a major launching pad into northern Iraq, the armed forces decided to defer to overwhelming parliamentary and public opposition to the invasion.

“I think for whatever reason they did not play the strong leadership role on that issue that we would have expected,” complained then deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz, a long-time Perle friend and colleague who, despite his lavish praise of Turkey as a model Muslim democracy, headed repeated efforts by the George W. Bush administration to persuade Turkey's national security council – where the military's voice was dominant – to effectively overrule its parliament.

Erdogan, who became prime minister just a week before the invasion and whose political and economic reforms have been widely praised in the West, at first sought good relations with Israel. As late as 2007, he arranged for Shimon Peres to become the first Israeli president to address the Turkish parliament.

By then, however, many neo-cons had become concerned about Erdogan's efforts to weaken the military's power, his warm reception of a top Hamas leader in 2005, criticism of Israel's military campaign against Hezbollah in 2006, and rapprochement with Syria.

When the military not so subtly threatened to intervene against Erdogan and the AKP in 2007, some neo-cons, notably Perle, suggested that the US should not try to discourage it. Others, including The Standard's Schwartz and Pipes, encouraged it as the lesser of two evils, even as The Journal defended the AKP as “more democratic than the secularists”.

Since Erdogan's furious denunciation of Israel, and Peres personally, at the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) after Israel's Cast Lead operation in Gaza in January 2009, however, neo-cons of virtually all stripes – including those, like The Journal'seditorial writers, who have praised the AKP as a democratising force – have turned against Ankara. And the flotilla incident, combined with Erdogan's perceived defence of Iran's nuclear programme, has raised their animus to new heights.

“A combination of Islamist rule, resentment at exclusion from Europe, and a neo-Ottomanist ideology that envisions Turkey as a great power in the Middle East have made Turkey a state that is often plainly hostile not only to Israel but to American aims and interests,” wrote Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, in a Journal op-ed on Monday.

Click here to read Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: AlJazeera

Haaretz Editorial

The government's efforts to avoid a thorough and credible investigation of the flotilla affair seem more and more like a farce. The conclusions of an ostensible probe are intended to justify retroactively the decision to blockade Gaza, to forcibly stop the Turkish aid flotilla in international waters and to use deadly force on the deck of the Mavi Marmara.

To make the costume seem credible, the Prime Minister's Bureau asked a retired Supreme Court justice, Yaakov Tirkel, to chair the committee. Alongside him will sit foreign observers in order to legitimize the conclusions in international public opinion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even pledged to testify before the committee, together with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, other ministers and the chief of staff, so “the truth will come out.”

The truth that Netanyahu wishes to bring out involves the identity of the flotilla's organizers, its sources of funding and the knives and rods that were brought aboard. He does not intend to probe the decision-making process that preceded the takeover of the ship and the shortcomings that were uncovered. As far as Netanyahu is concerned, it will be enough for television channels to broadcast footage of dark-suited jurists, and politicians addressing them, to present the semblance of an “examination.”

But Netanyahu's panel will have no powers, not even those of a government probe, and its proposed chairman does not believe in such a panel. In an interview to Army Radio, Tirkel said there is no choice but to establish a state committee of inquiry. He opposed bringing in foreign observers and made clear that he is not a devotee of drawing conclusions about individuals and dismissing those responsible for failures. When a Haaretz reporter confronted Tirkel about these remarks, the former justice evaded the question saying, “I don't remember what I said.”

The disagreements that erupted at the week's end between Netanyahu and his deputy, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon, over the question of whether Ya'alon was updated in time about the action underscored the suspicion of serious faults in the decision-making process with regard to the flotilla. Instead of being part of the whitewash, Tirkel, whose dodging of his earlier statements does him no honor, should return his mandate to the prime minister and demand that Netanyahu establish a government committee of inquiry with real powers. The public, as Netanyahu said, has a right to know the truth.

Source: Haaretz

More on Democracy Now

Nuff Said.

As it retreats into greater indifference toward global opinion, Israel has come to rely on cynical appeals to American technophiles and evangelical Christians. Spencer Ackerman on Netanyahu’s last allies.

Before the ships dubbed the Gaza Freedom Flotilla had their fateful encounter with the Israel Defence Forces early Monday morning, the main Israeli criticism of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, which sponsored the convoy, was that they were so unwilling to acknowledge Israeli suffering that they refused to deliver a package to the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. But hours after a murky nighttime operation in which Israeli commandos boarded a ship filled with humanitarian aid in international waters, killing at least 10 civilians and suffering wounds themselves, the boats had become “an armada of hate and violence” with “ties to Global Jihad, al Qa’eda and Hamas”, in the words of Israel’s deputy foreign minister.

If you were unaware that the activists on the humanitarian-aid flotilla were allied with al Qa’eda, you must not be on the press list of the American Israel Public Affairs Council (Aipac). “Interesting,” read the subject line of an e-mail from spokesman Josh Block,  who thought journalists should know: “Flotilla org tied to 2000 Al Qaeda Attack on LAX, weapons smuggling.”

Aipac’s desperate response to the raid indicated the depth of the disaster for Israel. As of this writing – early evening on Monday, May 31 – practically nothing is clear about the details of the IDF’s operation, and much of what has been reported will probably be revised as new facts accumulate. But the broad context is that Israeli soldiers engaged in an operation to stop a ship full of civilians carrying medical aid and construction equipment from breaking an Israeli-imposed blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. It was not the first time that Israeli actions have redounded to the benefit of Hamas: the flotilla attack was merely the latest instantiation of a pattern dating back to the imposition of the blockade after Hamas’s 2007 takeover of Gaza and the disastrous three-week war that began in December 2008. Despite that pattern, and given that the point of the flotilla itself was to provoke international outrage over the Gaza blockade, it’s worth asking why the Israeli government chose to take the bait.

More than a few Israeli commentators blasted the Netanyahu government for this public-relations catastrophe, but the line from Israel’s Foreign Ministry remained resolute: in an official statement it condemned the flotilla as a “violent provocation” and said its occupants “bear sole responsibility for the unfortunate consequences.”

If that’s the message coming from Israel, it’s worth asking who the audience is supposed to be. Under the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, a small and nasty leader buoyed by a right more powerful and opposed by a left more weak than at perhaps any earlier time in Israel’s history, foreign policy reflects and magnifies a yearning within Israel to enjoy the international benefits of peace without having to make any, except that which it imposes. But most of the world is reluctant to grant Israel the impunity that Netanyahu expects – with one very big and recently-emerging exception.

Continue reading here.

Source: The National

It is obvious that many of the American pundits and politicians live in a different world from rest of us. A world where Israelis are angels who only act when they are threatened, and even then try their best to preserve the lives of their enemies.

Just like the little boy who deserved being crushed by the tank (if that so happens), those on board the flotilla deserved every bit of what happened to them. And so goes the hasbara and the official Israeli narrative. Hear pundits and politicians parrot it all the way to their graves.

What we have to parrot is also simple:

1. We demand an international, neutral investigation.
2. Release ALL the videos (Israeli and those confiscated)

Greenwald, a voice of truth in the darkness of lies what is American media, captures the essence of the problem below. On the issue of Israel, even the progressives/liberals, who usually represent the dovish party, the party of truth and reconciliation, become the equivalents of neocons:

I can't express how many emails I've received over the last week, from self-identified Jewish readers (almost exclusively), along the lines of:  I'm a true progressive, agree with you on virtually every issue, but hate your views on Israel. When it comes to Israel, we see the same mindset from otherwise admirable Jewish progressives such as Anthony Weiner, Jerry Nadler, Eliot Spitzer, Alan Grayson, and (after a brief stint of deviation) Barney Frank.  On this one issue, they magically abandon their opposition to military attacks on civilians, their defense of weaker groups being bullied and occupied by far stronger factions, their belief that unilateral military attacks are unjustified, and suddenly find common cause with Charles Krauthammer, The Weekly Standard, and the Bush administration in justifying even the most heinous Israeli crimes of aggression.

Read also:

• Israel Derangement Syndrome by Andrew Sullivan