Silencing Israel's Critics

Helen Thomas and The Political Cleansing Of America

By JAMES ABOUREZK
April 25, 2011
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

You remember Helen Thomas?  She was the senior White House Correspondent who always opened Presidential press conferences and closed them by saying the magic words:  “Thank you Mr. President.”  Her Wikipedia entry cites her professional accomplishments:

“Helen Thomas (born August 4, 1920) is an American author and former news service reporter, member of the White House Press Corps and opinion columnist.[1] She worked for the United Press International (UPI) for 57 years, first as a correspondent, and later as White House bureau chief. She was a columnist for Hearst Newspapers from 2000 to 2010, writing on national affairs and the White House. She covered every President of the United Statesfrom the last years of the Eisenhower administration until the second year of the Obama administration. She was the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member and president of the White House Correspondents' Association, and the first female member of the Gridiron Club. She has written six books; her latest, with co-author Craig Crawford, is Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do (2009).”

Helen was cashiered from her position as a Hearst columnist after she answered a question by a Rabbi with a video camera who asked her to talk about Israel.  She answered—honestly—that the Israelis should get the hell out of Palestine.  The Rabbi’s follow up question was, “Where should they go?” 

“Back where they came from,” she answered, citing Germany, Poland, and elsewhere. 

Now, we all know that those countries that were so murderous and cruel to European Jews are not what they were in the 1940s.  But, judging from the reaction of the media, and from Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, one would have thought that she was sending Israeli Jews back to the 1940s.  It was a media firestorm that engulfed her, sending a message to anyone else who might stray from the official party line on Israel.

Helen was promptly fired by Hearst news, and her speaking agent, Nine Speakers,Inc. dropped her as a client.  A scheduled commencement speech at a Bethesda, Maryland high school was canceled, and the White House Correspondents’ Association issued a statement calling her remarks “indefensible.

Her alma mater, Wayne State University, called her remarks, “Wholly inappropriate.”

President Obama called her remarks "offensive" and "out of line".  She had questioned Obama about American support for Israel and at one press conference that focused on Iran’s potential for creating nuclear weapons, she asked President Obama about Israel's "secret" nuclear weapons, and why the White House did not condemn the Israeli attacks on the aid flotilla.

Wikipedia also wrote that a group of Holocaust survivors and relatives criticized the Arab American National Museum of Dearborn, Michigan for its plans to place a statue of Helen Thomas in its museum, saying that it would be immoral to honor her and that "American values are at stake."

After a later speech, the Anti-Defamation League called for journalism schools and organizations to rescind any honors given to Thomas. The organization said that Thomas had "clearly, unequivocally revealed herself as a vulgar anti-Semite" in the speech.   Soon after, Wayne State University in Detroit discontinued the Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity in Media Award, which it had been granting for more than ten years, citing what it called her anti-semitic remarks.

Helen was tough on all of the U.S. presidents who held press conferences, but, unlike the cowering reporters who sat with her in the White House press room, she refused to allow either the Presidents or their press secretaries to slither out of answering her questions.  Which, one supposes, is why Ari Fleischer led the charge to have Helen ostracized.  It was Helen who refused to believe Fleischer’s lies about the Iraq War during press conference after press conference.

The latest outrage came from an unexpected source—the group organizing an anti-AIPAC meeting in Washington, D.C.  Helen was first invited to speak to the group, which was preparing a counter-conference during the annual AIPAC funfest in Washington.  AIPAC, which is perhaps the most powerful lobby operating in the nation’s capitol brings together their nationwide membership in an annual D.C. meeting to have Presidents, presidential candidates, and special friends of Israel who are in the Government grovel before that fountain of political money—AIPAC.  It is an organization that is not a PAC as we think of money givers to politicians.  It is one that can command contributions—or prevent them—for candidates who promise to vote for taxpayers’ money as aid to Israel, as well as to protect Israel from criticism for its many crimes during its occupation of the Palestinians.

Helen was first invited to the anti-AIPAC meeting, then was ceremoniously “disinvited” on grounds, she was told, that she would be a “distraction.”  First of all, it is difficult to imagine how someone with similar views, such as Helen Thomas’s, would distract anyone from the presumed message of the anti-AIPAC group which would, we imagine, recite the political evils of AIPAC. 

Without a more clear explanation, which was not provided to Helen when she was disinvited, we can only assume that the political cleansing operation started by Abe Foxman and his Anti-Defamation League, is ongoing, even using the platform erected by  the stated enemies of AIPAC.

The clear intent of Israel’s apologists is to make the Helen Thomases of the world disappear, along with their views opposing what Israel is doing to those under its occupation, as well as those neighbors, such as Lebanon, which has suffered mightily from Israel’s aggression.  The 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel resulted in the killing of some 30,000 Lebanese, primarily civilians, the wounding of thousands more, and destroying the homes of tens of thousands.

In such work, Helen is not alone.  The Israel Lobby continued to work on South African Judge Goldstone until their pressure forced him to recant a major part of what he had written earlier.  His UN-appointed committee wrote a report damaging to Israel, exposing and denouncing the criminal action of the slaughter of 1,200 Palestinian civilians during its invasion in 2008 and its indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip.  Hamas was also criticized, but ultimately endorsed the report.  Gaza is known as the world’s largest outdoor prison with its borders fenced and guarded by the Israeli military, its airspace controlled by the Israeli Air Force, and its sea approaches patrolled by the Israeli Navy.  “Shooting fish in a barrel,” is a phrase that comes to mind when one reads about what Israel did in Gaza.

My view is the major reason for the political cleansing of outspoken people such as Helen Thomas, Norman Finkelstein, Judge Goldstone and others is that the American taxpayer is footing the bill for Israel’s criminal activities, and Israel cannot afford to have this knowledge exposed to our public, to those who pay the taxes.

The question must be asked:  Can America afford to have knowledge of Israel’s actions silenced?  Can we afford to continue to ostracize people who speak out against America’s policy toward Israel barred from academia, and from public life?  It is a form of thought control that we never hesitate to rail against when anyone else does the same.

Our continuing endorsement of what Israel does in the Middle East, and the silencing of its critics makes life more dangerous and more expensive for all Americans. 

James Abourezk is a former U.S. Senator who practices law in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  He is the author of Advise and Dissent, a memoir of his life in South Dakota and in the U.S. Senate.  He can be reached atgeorgepatton45@gmail.com.

The Sin Of Silence

BY HELEN THOMAS
THURSDAY, APRIL 28 2011 10:27:56 AM
Courtesy Of "The Falls Church News-Press"

Hats off to Richard Forer, who courageously and truthfully examines an alternate viewpoint in his book, Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion - A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

Forer, who grew up in a secular, unaffiliated Jewish home, is the identical twin of a prominent member of an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism, and was himself a member of AIPAC, America's pro-Israel lobby. He knew where his allegiances used to lie - anything Israel did was justifiable in his mind.

During summer 2006, Forer visited the Middle East and underwent a profound spiritual transformation. He saw destroyed villages, displacement, land confiscation, imprisonment without trial, torture, and other inhuman treatment of the Palestinians, and knew he needed to share his truth.

So many Americans of Hebrew heritage cannot face the truth of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians in the land they conquered and now occupy. Forer emerged from the struggle to realize that he could have been wrong. It takes brave people who are willing to abandon long-held beliefs that the Israelis could do no wrong. Somehow their victimhood justified their ruthless behavior toward the Palestinians.

The trouble is the Israeli military have taken their revenge out on those who are only defending their land and rights. Revenge has been inflicted on the helpless and the innocent. The power of the Israeli government is one-sided because no American President has dared to speak out against their inhuman tyranny, except for former President Jimmy Carter. For this he has been demonized and called anti-Semitic by supporters of Israel.

Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, posted a book review of Carter's Palestine Peace Not Apartheid on the ADL website, shortly after it was published.

Forer meticulously discusses Foxman's review, saying "The review illustrates how unexamined fear and prejudice occlude natural intelligence. It also illustrates how insensitive to the suffering of others a man can become when faced with an issue that directly challenges his identity, even when that man has been an undeniable champion of human rights in other areas of his life."

Forer isn't afraid to speak out in his book. Forer recounts the story of 10-year-old Palestinian Ahmed Musa, who asked after drawing a picture of two flags, one Israeli the other Palestinian, "Why can't we live together in peace?" His fellow students all cheered. "On July, 29, 2008, at a peaceful demonstration against the separation wall, Ahmed was playing with a camera. An Israeli border police officer shot him in the head. He died a few days later," Forer writes. The Israelis did indict the officer for negligent manslaughter. But only a small fraction of violence toward Palestinians is ever investigated. The Israeli record of brutality is overwhelming.

Forer comments, "The condemnation of Israel is not a product of anti-Semitism. Rather, the behavior that elicited the condemnation fans the flames of anti-Semitism worldwide. Israel has been maintaining an illegal occupation, replete with land seizure, collective punishment and settler-instigated and military-enabled violence for over forty years. Yet, it continues to deny that it has violated international humanitarian law. By persisting in 'acts of madness' Israel will alienate itself more and more from the global community."

People need to be informed so we can make good decisions regarding our involvement in the Middle East, and ultimately support the right governments. Forer offers a viewpoint that is not available in the mainstream.

I personally have experienced the backlash of publicly speak out against Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. The president of Wayne State University in Detroit took my name off of a scholarship fund because I denounced Israel's brutality against Palestinians. The Society of Professional Journalists, headed by an Israeli-born president, has retired a lifetime achievement award given in my name, because of my pro-Palestinian views. The White House Correspondents Association "firmly dissociated itself' from comments I made last May to a rabbi at the White House - these were my opinions, I wasn't asking anyone to endorse my statements. All of these organizations have bowed to pro-Israeli lobbyists such as Ari Fleischer, and Foxman, who have displayed incredible influence against our right to speak freely.

A rabbi who spoke at the Martin Luther King March on Washington said the greatest sin during the Nazi era was "silence." He had been in a German concentration camp.

I admire Forer's courage to not being silent. He openly shares his personal transformation, and encourages the reader to be willing to "assess one's beliefs with honesty and to follow wherever the facts lead." For all of that, we are witnessing great courage in the Middle East and North Africa these days. The truth cannot be silenced.

WikiRebels

The Documentary

By SVT Play
"Exclusive rough-cut of first in-depth documentary on WikiLeaks and the people behind it!

From summer 2010 until now, Swedish Television has been following the secretive media network WikiLeaks and its enigmatic Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange.

Reporters Jesper Huor and Bosse Lindquist have traveled to key countries where WikiLeaks operates, interviewing top members, such as Assange, new Spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson, as well as people like Daniel Domscheit-Berg who now is starting his own version - Openleaks.org!

Where is the secretive organization heading? Stronger than ever, or broken by the US? Who is Assange: champion of freedom, spy or rapist? What are his objectives? What are the consequences for the internet?"

'Our Lives Became Something We'd Never Dreamt'

The Former Israeli Soldiers Who Have Testified Against Army Abuses

Former Israeli soldiers who have testified against army abuses have for the first time given up their anonymity, to make their voices all the harder to ignore. Donald Macintyre gets an exclusive preview of a powerful new book

Sunday, 12 December 2010
Courtesy Of "The Independent"

• • NORMAL

QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM

Avichay Stolar is a researcher of Breaking the Silence. He says: 'Young soldiers learn from their officers, they imitate their friends in the unit, and they learn to act in a brutal and insensitive way'

•  IN PICTURES: SOLDIERS' TESTIMONIES

For anyone who has covered Israel, the West Bank and Gaza over the past few years, reading Occupation of the Territories, the new book from the Israeli ex-soldiers organisation Breaking the Silence, can be an eerily evocative experience.

A conscript from the Givati Brigade, for example, describes how troops in the company operating next to his inside Gaza during 2008 had talked about an event earlier in the day. After knocking on the door of a Palestinian house and receiving no immediate answer, they had placed a "fox" – military slang for explosives used to break through doors and walls – outside the front door. At that very moment, the woman of the house had reached the door to open it. 

"Her limbs were smeared on the wall and it wasn't on purpose," the soldier recalls. 

"And then her kids came and saw her. I heard it during dinner after the operation, someone said it was funny, and they cracked up from the situation that the kids saw their mother smeared on the wall..."

It was surely the same incident. You have to assume that the laughter alluded to by the conscript was a nervous reaction, a manifestation of delayed shock from the soldiers. They had, after all, had the presence of mind to cover Mrs al-Daghma's mutilated body with a carpet, and to keep the children confined to the bedroom for the five hours they had remained in the house. Samira said she had asked one of them, "Where is my mother?" but had not understood his reply in Hebrew. She explained how, when the soldiers finally left after nightfall, "There were still tanks outside our house... I tried to call my father on my mother's Jawwal [mobile phone] but there was no line. I lifted the carpet and saw a bit of my mother's clothes. She was not moving. I did not see her head."

The point of this is not just that the soldier's story is shocking, but that it is so apparently corroborated. Especially given that the conscript's short account – unlike many others in the book, some every bit as disquieting – is based on hearsay, it is powerfully suggestive of the testimonies' authenticity as a portrait of a 43-year-old occupation. These testimonies, checked and cross-checked, of young Israeli men and women struggling to come to terms, sometimes years after the event, with their military service in the West Bank and Gaza, add up to an unprecedented inside account, as the book's introduction puts it, of "the principles and consequences of Israeli policy in the [Palestinian] territories".

Breaking the Silence is a unique organisation. No other country – including those with recent and problematic military histories, such as the US and Britain – has anything comparable. Since it began in 2004, it has collected 700 testimonies from conscripts and reservists, spanning the decade since the beginning of the second intifada. In July last year, it made its greatest impact by publishing accounts from around 30 combat soldiers involved in the onslaught on Hamas-controlled Gaza only six months earlier, challenging the military's assertion that it had done "the utmost to avoid harming uninvolved civilians".

Breaking the Silence has since taken two more decisive steps. The Israeli military has long complained about the anonymity of its witnesses. In July, the IDF even questioned whether all the testimonies were genuine. Anonymity was understandable; the soldiers risked alienation and heavy criticism from their own communities as well as from the state itself, not to mention the possibility of proceedings brought by the military. Now, for the first time, 27 of those who had testified have allowed the Jerusalem-based photographer Quique Kierszenbaum to take their portraits, and use their names, along with summaries of why and what they testified.

The second step change, having in the past let the testimonies speak for themselves, is that Breaking the Silence has been emboldened by the sheer number of them to offer a broader analysis of what it believes they expose: in part that, while Israeli forces have indeed had to deal with "concrete threats in the past decade, including terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens", their operations, especially in the West Bank, extend beyond the solely defensive and "systematically" lead to the "de facto annexation" of occupied territory "through the dispossession of Palestinian residents".

In arguing that Israel exercises a measure of control over Palestinians that extends beyond its own security needs, the book (published in Hebrew on 21 December, with an English version to follow in the new year), takes four technical terms in frequent use by the Israeli military and tries to show in its introductions to the testimonies what Breaking the Silencesees as their real, as opposed to ostensible, meaning.

The first of these terms is "Prevention" [sikkul in Hebrew] which, it argues, has become a "code word" that allows almost every form of military action, offensive as well as defensive, to be classified as "prevention of terrorist activity". It says the principle, first enunciated by the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon of "searing it into the consciousness" of Palestinians that violence does not pay, translates into "intimidation... and indiscriminate punishment of the Palestinian population". The examples given include: sending a military truck into the village of Tubas at 3am in 2003 "with stun grenades and just throwing them in the street, for no reason, waking people up [to say] 'We are here. The IDF is here.'"; shooting ' a visibly unarmed man walking on a roof in Nablus in 2002 ("The company commander declared him a lookout, meaning that he understood there was no threat from the guy, and he gave the order to kill him"); and halting stone-throwing in Tekoa by using a "moving human shield" – a Palestinian man tied to the front of a vehicle – before driving round the village.

The second term is "Separation" [hafradah], meaning the separation of Palestinians not only from Israelis but from other Palestinians (within the West Bank and between Gaza and the West Bank) and their own land by using checkpoints, separation barriers, Israeli-only roads used by West Bank settlers, and a strict permit regime enforcing "isolation" of many communities. While much of this "separation" – including loss of land – is permanent, in the past two years, post-intifada, some obstacles have eased. But Breaking the Silence insists the "paradigm" is unchanged. "It's obvious Israel relaxes its grip when things are easier," says the organisation's Mikhael Manekin. "But it always has the grip. It can relax or tighten it as it chooses."

There was the "separation" of Nablus in 2003 from the surrounding villages: "You have to understand the proportionality. A person between the ages of 16 and 35, who lives in Nablus has not left Nablus in the past four years, even to go to a village next to Nablus." Another example was the Qalqilya area in 2002: "Someone whose fig grove they uprooted came in tears, and he said to me: 'I worked for 30 years to buy the land, I worked this grove for 10 years, I waited 10 years for it to bear fruit, I enjoyed it for one year and they [the IDF] are uprooting it.'"

Next is "Fabric of life" [mirkam hayyim], the term used by the IDF to underline that it does its best to ensure as normal a life as possible for Palestinians – a proposition strongly contested in the book. It claims that Israel controls the passage of civilians and goods into Israel and within the West Bank, the opening of private businesses, transport of school-children, university students and medical cases. "[Property] can all be taken at the discretion of a regional commander or a soldier in the field... troops will burst into the house in the dead of night and arrest one of the inhabitants, only to release him later – all in order to practise arrest procedures."

Among the examples is the story of a Palestinian truck driver trying to bring milk containers into Hebron from Yatta during a curfew in 2002, who was detained, handcuffed and blindfolded on a hot summer morning. He had some 2,000 litres of milk – all of which spoiled as he sat all day, restrained. "When I look at it [now]," says a former soldier, "I feel embarrassed... Did it contribute to the security of the state? No."

Another example concerns illegal workers and their families trying to get into the Wadi Ara of northern Israel from the West Bank. One former soldier recalls "Pouring out the kids' bags and playing with their toys... They cried and were afraid." The adults cried, too? "Of course. One of the goals was always: I got him to cry in front of his kids, I got him to crap in his pants... from being beaten for the most part."

Finally, in examining the term "Law enforcement" [akhifat hak], the book highlights the dual legal regime in the West Bank, whereby Palestinians are subject to military rule and courts while Israeli settlers are answerable to civilian courts. At the same time, it argues, Israeli settlers are effectively allies of the military – and they have a common enemy.

The book's stark – and inevitably highly political – conclusion is contrary to the view that "Israel is withdrawing from the Palestinian Territories slowly and with the appropriate caution and security". The IDF soldiers quoted "describe an indefatigable attempt to tighten Israel's hold on the territories, as well as on the Palestinian population".

Not surprisingly perhaps, Manekin acknowledges that those who have – as he deliberately puts it – "come out of the closet", by allowing themselves to be named and photographed, are among the more activist of the 500 individuals who have testified to the organisation. It is no coincidence that this parallel project has happened at a time when Breaking the Silencehas decided to promote its own analysis of the past decade of occupation. Manekin says it wasn't easy to be photographed. "We didn't do this to be heroes," he says. "Really, the political significance is the only reason for doing it."

Donald Macintyre is The Independent's Jerusalem correspondent. For more from Breaking the Silence: shovrimshtika.org

A second-hand story, of course; one without names, dates or supporting detail. Except that it stirred a memory I had of reporting the death of a Palestinian UN schoolteacher east of Khan Younis. Wafer Shaker al-Daghma was killed when the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) commandeered her house during an incursion in May 2008. Her husband had been out at the time. When we came to the house five days later, another incursion was under way and we could hear, uncomfortably close, the gunfire from Israeli armoured military vehicles while Majdi al-Daghma described his wife's death at the age of 34. When she realised troops were nearby, she'd ordered ' the children, Samira, 13, Roba, four, and Qusay, two, into the bedroom, put on a headscarf and prepared to open the door. "Samira heard a loud explosion and there was a lot of smoke," he explained. "She looked for her mother but couldn't see her."