From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 13:43:08 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 13:43:08 +0200
Subject: [THS] The Atlantic Monthly: Is Israel Finished?
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509132645.04a4d130@spamarrest.com>


Half a step forward

By George S. Hishmeh, Special to Gulf News

Published: May 08, 2008, 00:09

http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/08/05/08/10211555.html

The May cover of The Atlantic magazine, a respected monthly, was daring.
The headline was unbelievable for an American publication: "Is Israel
Finished?" The star of David was larger than the characters on the cover
which was adorned by the four colours of the Palestinian flag - red, white,
black and green.

The author is Jeffrey Goldberg, who admits that he as "a young Zionist in
the late 1980's ... was drawn to the idea that Israel represented the most
sublime and encompassing expression of Jewishness," and so he moved
there and joined the Israeli army.

The article leads off with the rift between the discredited and beleaguered
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and a grieving novelist, David
Grossman, whose son was killed in the ill-considered Israeli war on Lebanon
in 2006. But the author says the rift in fact "mirrors the division confounding
Israel" especially whether it can "overcome its paralysis to make the hard
choice necessary for its survival ....."

In other words, can Israel, unlike Olmert, support a settlement along the
lines favoured by Grossman and two like-minded authors, Amos Oz and A.
B. Yehoshua, who all have been "longtime advocates of territorial
compromise with the Palestinians, in part for reasons of morality, and in
part because they want to protect their country's Jewish majority"?

What is eye-catching about the article is that this topic could not have been
discussed so boldly and openly at any previous time since Israel's
occupation of the Palestinian territories more than 40 years ago. Grossman
is now quoted as saying that he is ready to support Olmert "if he believed
that the prime minister was truly serious about taking the necessary steps
toward reconciliation with the Palestinians" including Hamas. Goldberg fears
that "the possibility of a two-state solution is swiftly fading" and is not
impressed by what he calls the "farce" of the Annapolis peace conference
that the Bush administration sponsored late last year.

The morass that the American Jewish community finds itself in nowadays
has, for example, contributed to the recent founding of more dovish leaders
and groups such as J Street Project and the outspokenness of others
including the Israeli Policy Forum (IPF).

Alon Ben-Meir writes in IPF Focus that "at the heart of this (Israeli)
conundrum is the occupation of Palestinian and Syrian lands, a wound that
if left unattended will produce a tragedy of a scale we have not yet
witnessed". The university professor advises that Israel "must ultimately free
itself from the albatross around its neck and relinquish these occupied
territories".

But this half a step forward does not necessarily mean that all is well and
the influential American Jewish community has become more open-minded.
Take the case of Debbie Almontaser, the Yemeni-American who was forced
to step down last August as the founding principal of the Khalil Gibran
School, New York City's first public school dedicated to the study of Arabic
language and culture. Her resignation was precipitated by the "New
McCarthyism and right-wing media attacks", as Democracy Now, a popular
liberal radio programme, put it after she was painted as an educator with a
militant Islamic agenda, some calling it "madrassa".

Lawsuit

The issue was touched off when Almontaser innocently responded to a
reporter from The New York Post to explain the word "intifada," Arabic for
"uprising" or "shaking off" which was on a T-shirt that a young girl, who
was not in the school, wore. Her failure to condemn the slogan, which the
Palestinians use to describe their uprisings against Israeli occupation,
precipitated an outcry for her ouster. She has now filed a lawsuit claiming
the Education Department has violated her right to free speech.

Coincidentally, the upcoming conference of the Middle East Studies
Association, scheduled to be held in November in Washington, DC will have
a panel to examine "Conflict, Diversity and Inclusion in Education."

A participant in the panel will submit an original attempt that explores "the
formative history of political Zionism" between 1897-1947 through poster
art. The paper, which include drafts of 12 lessons for high school students,
has been prepared by Dan Walsh of Georgetown University and will focus
on, among other subjects, the definition of "anti-Semitism" which is
currently problematic in the American lexicon.

Walsh, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, and who probably has
the world's largest collection of Palestinian posters, some 3,000 now
available on an impressive slide show has successfully used it as "an entree
point for a deeper, more nuanced discussion of contemporary Middle East
politics and history". He hopes to visit the Central Zionist Archives in Tel Aviv
in order to form "a researchable core of material on the subject" in order to
serve the goal of making contemporary Middle East Studies more accessible
and comprehensible.

George Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at
ghishmeh at gulfnews.com.





http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/israel

May 2008 Atlantic Monthly

The rift between a beleaguered prime minister and a grieving novelist
mirrors the division confounding Israel. Can the two men overcome the
differences that separate them? Can Israel overcome its paralysis to make
the hard choice necessary for its survival as a Jewish democracy?

by Jeffrey Goldberg

Unforgiven

Israel

Also see: Video: "Ideals and Ideologies?
Israel at Sixty"



Jeffrey Goldberg reflects on Israel's formative visions and current dilemmas.

Flashbacks: Prophesying Palestine

Jeffrey Goldberg looks back at a mixed bag of Atlantic predictions from the
1920s and '30s about prospects for a Jewish homeland.

In early August of 2006, four weeks after the Lebanese Shiite group
Hezbollah, which has as its goal the physical elimination of Israel (and the
ancillary ambition of murdering, whenever practicable, Jews elsewhere in
the world), killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two more in a cross-
border raid, Israel found itself in an exceedingly disagreeable position. The
Hezbollah attack had prompted an immediate, and intermittently
unrestrained, Israeli military response, which included thousands of
bombing runs over Lebanon. The prime minister, the untried Ehud Olmert,
a former mayor of Jerusalem who had taken office eight months earlier,
promised to obliterate Hezbollah. In the past, Israel had destroyed far
greater enemies?the Syrian air force, the Egyptian army, the Arab
Legion?so it was assumed that Israel would make short work of Hezbollah,
a force consisting of, at most, a few thousand fighters in possession of
12,000 short-range rockets. But within days of Israel?s initial attack, it
seemed obvious that the Olmert mission was in peril. The Israeli
bombardment of Lebanon, which had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of
Hezbollah members and innocent civilians, could not stop Hezbollah?s
rockets from falling on northern Israel. These rocket attacks had killed
dozens of Israelis?Arab Israelis included?and had made the Galilee largely
uninhabitable. Thousands of Israelis became refugees in their own country,
fleeing south in search of shelter.

On August 9, Olmert?s cabinet authorized a full-scale ground invasion.
Israeli troops were already operating inside Lebanon, but in relatively
modest numbers. The generals believed that an armored sweep across
southern Lebanon could at least push Hezbollah?s rocket teams back to the
Litani River, well away from the Israeli border.

At the outset of the conflict, in July, Israelis had stood united with Olmert
against Hezbollah. Israel?s endless confrontation with the Palestinians is
shaded with ambiguities; many Israelis wish to see a Palestinian state come
into being in the West Bank and in Gaza, even as they doubt that such a
state would bring an end to terrorism. With Hezbollah, there are fewer
grays. Its sponsor, Iran, poses the most immediate threat to Israel?s
physical existence; many of its leaders are plainly anti-Semitic. Iran?s
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Holocaust denier who has called
Israel a ?filthy bacteria.? Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has said
in a speech, ?If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly,
despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we
would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.?

Because the Hezbollah attack was unprovoked, much of the world had
initially expressed sympathy for Israel. This took Israelis by surprise; it had
been more than 40 years since they generally received such consideration
from the international community. Even Sunni Arab leaders, who fear Shiite
radicalism more than they dislike the Jewish state, expressed irritation with
Hezbollah.

By early August, though, opinion was shifting, and the decision to launch a
ground invasion just when credible cease-fire proposals were proliferating
was controversial around the world, and even at home. This was at least
partly because Olmert, a lawyer and party functionary, and his defense
minister, a former union leader named Amir Peretz, seemed to be in over
their heads. Their actions convinced some Israelis?particularly those on the
left?that the decision to order a ground invasion revealed a kind of
unthinking aggressiveness.

On Thursday, August 10, the day after Olmert?s cabinet authorized the
invasion, Israel?s three most prominent writers, Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua,
and David Grossman, held a press conference to call for a cease-fire. This
was not an entirely marginal exercise. Writers in Israel play a role in the
moral and political life of their country that is unfamiliar to writers in the
United States. The three men were not reflexively biased against Olmert,
who, unlike his main political rival, the former Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, was something of a born-again leftist. Olmert had once been a
prince of the right-wing Likud Party. But, like his mentor and predecessor,
Ariel Sharon, Olmert had come to believe that a withdrawal from Palestinian
territory was in the urgent best interest of Israel.

Olmert?s main consideration was not moral but demographic: within the
next several years, the number of Arabs under Israeli control?there are
now more than 1.3 million Arab citizens of Israel (there are 5.4 million
Jews), and an additional 3.4 million or more Arabs who live in the West
Bank and Gaza?will be greater than the number of Jews. The Israeli
demographer Sergio DellaPergola estimates that by 2020, Jews will make up
just 47 percent of the people who live between the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean Sea.

Political parties of the left and the center see the ?demographic threat? to
Israel?s Jewish majority as an existential menace nearly on a par with that
posed by Iran and its nuclear program. The demographic trend has raised
fears that Israel will become a state like pre-Mandela South Africa, in which
the minority ruled the majority. But if the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza
were given the vote, then Israel, a country whose fundamental purpose has
been to serve as a refuge for persecuted Jews, and to allow those Jews to
have the novel experience of being part of a majority, would disappear, to
be replaced by an Arab-dominated ?binational? state. Yet Israel has not
found a way to escape the West Bank.

Unlike Olmert, the three writers had been longtime advocates of territorial
compromise with the Palestinians, in part for reasons of morality, and in
part because they want to protect their country?s Jewish majority. In the
days of near-hallucinatory ecstasy that followed Israel?s lopsided victory in
the Six-Day War of 1967?in which Israel took possession of Gaza and the
West Bank?Oz was one of the first Israelis to warn about the moral and
strategic consequences of military occupation, and in the late 1970s he was
a founder of the left-wing group Peace Now, which advocates Israeli
withdrawal from the West Bank. Yehoshua, who has been called the ?Israeli
Faulkner? by Harold Bloom, has repeatedly urged the United States to pull
its ambassador as a ?symbolic? way to protest the expansion of settlements
in the West Bank.

Grossman?s fiction, much of it haunted by the Holocaust, concerns the
durability of grief; his most accomplished novel to date, See Under: Love
(1986), is a complicated weaving of fantasy and reality that recalls the work
of Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez. Grossman has been preoccupied with the
ubiquity of death in the lives of Israelis and Palestinians for many years.
Nearly a decade ago, he told an interviewer that Israeli couples ?have three
children so if one of them dies, there will be two left.? Grossman made his
name internationally with a book of nonfiction prophecy, The Yellow Wind,
which he wrote (originally for an Israeli newsmagazine) in early 1987. The
Yellow Wind was an expos? of the occupation and its demoralizing effects
on Palestinians, and on the Israelis who enforced it. The book presaged the
first intifada, or uprising, which began in December of that year.

Though all three authors were advocates of compromise and believed that
Israel?s settlement enterprise in the West Bank was a catastrophe, none was
a pacifist, all were patriots, and all supported the initial retaliation against
Hezbollah. ?It would have been immoral not to respond,? Yehoshua told me
later, but after the Lebanese government promised to rein in Hezbollah,
?we had to say ?Enough.?? Grossman did much of the speaking at the press
conference that day. His main contention was that Israel had overreached
in the pursuit of self-defense. ?The argument that an Israeli presence on
the Litani would prevent the firing of missiles on Israel is an illusion,? he
said. ?Even the argument that we mustn?t give Hezbollah a sense of security
has been irrelevant for a long time. Hezbollah wishes to see us sink deeper
into the Lebanese swamp.?

Grossman saw in Olmert?s invasion what he called an emblematic, and
regrettable, Israeli response to terrorist threats, of a piece with Israel?s
typical response to dangers posed by Hamas in Gaza. ?Now we must look 

not to the familiar, instinctive reaction of the Israeli way of fighting?that is,
what doesn?t work with force will work with much more force,? he said.
?Force, in this case, will fan the flames of hatred for Israel in the region and
the entire world, and may even, heaven forbid, create the situation that will
bring upon us the next war and push the Middle East to an all-out, regional
war.?

Olmert and Grossman

THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE NOVELIST: Ehud Olmert (left) and David
Grossman



Grossman closed the press conference without mentioning his personal
interest in the war: his 20-year-old son, Uri, was a tank commander then
fighting in Lebanon. To do so would have been unseemly, and un-Israeli,
he told me later. ?The cause was to stop the war for the sake of the entire
country.?

Grossman is 54, but he is trim and his face is unlined. He is reflective and
self-contained, somewhat owlish, but not without humor. We met on a cold
day in Jerusalem, at Mishkenot Sha?ananim, an artists? colony situated
across the Valley of Hinnom from Mount Zion.

Grossman told me that after the press conference, he went home to work
on his latest novel, which he had begun in May of 2003, when Uri, the
second of his three children, was about to be called up for army service.
Grossman?s oldest boy, Yonatan, had already completed three years in the
army.

?I thought about writing a novel about an Israeli soldier, a tank
commander, who goes to a big military operation,? he said. ?His mother has
a kind of premonition that he?s going to be killed, and she will do everything
she can in order to prevent that from happening. So she escapes. She will
not be at home when the army comes to announce the death of her son.
She understands that bad news takes two people, one to deliver and one to
receive, and she will not be there to receive. She starts a walk across Israel,
a 500-kilometer walk, and she tells the story of her son?s life, from the
smallest details to the largest things, to someone who is very significant to
her. She believes that this will protect her son.?

Grossman himself took a similar journey while writing the book, spending
weeks crossing Israel on foot, and he visited with army officers whose duty
it is to inform families of the deaths of their children.

At 2:40 a.m. on Sunday, August 13, three days after the press conference,
Grossman?s doorbell rang. There were officers at the door. Uri had been
killed in action in Lebanon, in the village of Hirbat Kasif, when a Hezbollah
missile struck his tank. He was one of 24 soldiers to die on the first day of
the ground offensive. Five hours later, David and his wife, Michal, woke up
Uri?s sister, Ruti, who was then 13. As she cried, she asked, ?But we will still
go on living, right??

Yehoshua, who is close to the family, told me that the Grossmans had taken
to turning off their outside light at night, to make it more difficult for a
messenger to find the house. But on that particular night, Michal had
turned their outside light on. She later worried, she said, that in so doing
she had ?invited the terrible news.?

Among the mourners to visit the next day were Oz and Yehoshua. ?Maybe
he was trying to prevent Uri?s death by writing down his most terrible
fears,? Yehoshua told me. ?It?s a terrible tragedy that it didn?t work.?

Grossman recalled the visit of Oz and Yehoshua the day after Uri?s death.

?When Uri fell, the morning after, they came to the shivah??the period of
visitation and mourning that follows a Jewish burial??and I told them I
won?t be able to save this novel. I think it was Amos who said, ?The novel
will save you.? The day after the shivah, I went back and started to work
again.? I asked Grossman whether the novel has changed. ?The writer
changed, not the story. I knew how the story was going to end. I don?t
want to say it.? There is more sadness in the book now, he said, ?sadness
for the fate of the young man, for the future of Israel, but I must say that
the small number of people who have read it say they find it comforting.?

The novel is being published this spring. It could have a seismic effect on
Israelis, who have, in their 60th year of independence, grown tired of losing
their sons to war.

The death of Uri has made his father, a man obviously vulnerable to
existential worry, preternaturally aware of the insecurity around him. The
60th anniversary of Israel?s birth?it gained independence on May 15,
1948?is meant to be a celebration, but Grossman sees darkness ahead.
?Our army is big, we have this atom bomb, but the inner feeling is of
absolute fragility, that all the time we are at the edge of the abyss.?

Israelis have violently contradictory feelings about their future. Their
country is, by almost any measure, an astonishing success. It has a large,
sophisticated, and growing economy (its gross domestic product last year
was $150 billion); the finest universities and medical centers in the Middle
East; and a main city, Tel Aviv, that is a center of art, fashion, cuisine, and
high culture spread along a beautiful Mediterranean beach. Israel has
shown itself, with notable exceptions, to be adept at self-defense, and
capable (albeit imperfectly) of protecting civil liberties during wartime. It
has become a worldwide center of Jewish learning and self-expression; its
strength has straightened the spines of Jews around the world; and, most
consequentially, it has absorbed and enfranchised millions of previously
impoverished and dispossessed Jews. Zionism may actually be the most
successful national liberation movement of the 20th century.

Yet 60 years of independence have not provided Israel with legitimacy in its
own region. Two of its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, have signed peace
treaties with Israel, but it is still a small Jewish island in a great sea of Islam,
a religion that seems today more allergic than ever to the idea of Jewish
independence. Iran poses the most ruthless threat to Israel?s existence?no
other member of the United Nations has so insistently, and in such baroque
terms, threatened the destruction of another member state.

The internal threats to Israel?s existence are severe as well. Israel?s greatest
military victory, in 1967, led to a squalid and seemingly endless occupation,
and to the birth of a mystical, antidemocratic, and revanchist strain of
Zionism, made manifest in the settlements of the West Bank. These
settlements have undermined Israel?s international legitimacy and
demoralized moderate Palestinians. The settlers exist far outside the Israeli
political consensus, and their presence will likely help incite a third intifada.
Yet the country seems unable to confront the settlements.

Israel?s people are among the world?s most patriotic?in a recent survey, 94
percent of Jewish Israelis said they are willing to fight for their country (by
contrast, 63 percent of Americans are willing to fight for theirs), but 44
percent of Israelis said they would be ready to leave their country if they
could find a better standard of living abroad. There are already up to
40,000 Israelis in Silicon Valley (and more than a half million across the
U.S.), and the emigration of Israel?s most talented citizens is a constant
worry of Israeli leaders. ?Jews know that they can land on their feet in any
corner of the world,? Ehud Barak, the defense minister and former prime
minister, told me. ?The real test for us is to make Israel such an attractive
place?cutting-edge in science, education, culture, quality of life?that even
American Jewish young people want to come here. If we cannot do this,
even those who were born here will consciously decide to go to other
places. This is a real problem.?

Olmert and Grossman

UNSETTLED: Israeli citizens protest the dismantling of settlements in 2005

There are other, more disturbing issues, ones that many Israelis don?t care
to address. Uri Grossman?s death provoked in me all sorts of questions
about Israel, its purpose, its mistakes and enemies: How can Israel survive
the next 60 years in a part of the world that gives rise to groups like
Hamas? How can Israel flourish if its army cannot defeat small bands of
rocketeers? Does the concentration of so many Jews in a claustrophobically
small space in the world?s most volatile region actually undermine the
Jewish people?s ability to survive, an ability that was called into question
little more than 60 years ago, when 33 percent of the world?s Jews were
murdered? I do not think it is merely a symptom of Jewish hypochondria to
ask such questions.

Some of the questions forming in my mind were too indecent to ask a
grieving father like David Grossman. But I asked him whether he believed
that Zionism has succeeded in its mission. I framed the question
impersonally, though I had been struck by what to me was an inescapable
truth: if Uri Grossman had been born to Jews in America, rather than to
Jews in Israel, in 2006 he most likely would have been a student at Harvard
or Michigan or Stanford, rather than a commander in the Armored Corps of
the Israel Defense Forces. The underlying premise of the creation of the
state of Israel?its main mission?was to provide a refuge for the Jewish
people in their historic homeland. One of the many contradictions Israel
faces in its seventh decade of independence is this: it is a country that is
safe for Judaism, but not for Jews.

As a young Zionist in the late 1980s, I was drawn to the idea that Israel
represented the most sublime and encompassing expression of Jewishness,
so I moved there and joined its army. This decision was unfathomable to
many of my new Israeli comrades. One of my commanders asked me, ?Why
would a person leave America to die in Israel?? Then he asked if we could
switch places?he would move to New York and marry a doctor?s daughter,
and I would die chasing Palestinians through the casbah of Nablus. I was
dreaming Leon Uris dreams, but he was having visions out of Goodbye,
Columbus.

I didn?t die, obviously, but his argument bothered me, and still does. The
founders of Zionism believed that a state for the Jews would cure?or at
least make irrelevant?the ancient European disease of Jew hatred. Remove
the Jew from his insalubrious and constricted life in anti-Semitic Russia and
give him a plow in Palestine, and he would become a ?normal? person,
deserving, among other things, the respect of Christians. The first Zionists
had no sense that Muslims would object to the entry of thousands of Jewish
socialists?women wearing pants included?into tribal, conservative
Palestine. In his utopian novel, Altneuland?Old-New Land??the founder of
political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, imagined an Israel much like Vienna, a
society of opera-going, German-speaking Jews who had shed their ?pale,
weak, timid? natures. Herzl did not imagine a Palestine free of Arabs,
though he imagined the Arabs overjoyed by the gifts of science and
hygiene brought by the Jews. The principal Arab protagonist, Reschid Bey,
says: ?The Jews have enriched us. Why should we be angry with them?
They dwell among us like brothers. Why should we not love them??

From Atlantic Unbound:

"The Kingdom of the Spirit"

(November 1961)
"It is impossible to understand the history of the Jewish people and their
struggle for existence ... unless we bear in mind the unique idea which
their history embodies." By David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion, Israel?s first prime minister, was not unaware of Arab
hostility to the goals of Zionism. In a 1934 meeting with the Arab leader
Musa Alami, Ben-Gurion said that Zionism would ?bring a blessing to the
Arabs of Palestine, and they have no good cause to oppose us.? Alami
responded, ?I would prefer that the country remain impoverished and
barren for another hundred years, until we ourselves are able to develop it
on our own.? But Ben-Gurion believed that numbers would bring the cure.
He said in 1933, ?In the course of four to five years we must bring in a
quarter of a million Jews and the Arab question will be solved.?

Arab opposition did not die; it hardened. This opposition has, of course,
gotten the Palestinians nothing; theirs is perhaps the least successful
national liberation movement of the 20th century. But failure has not
diminished the desire of many Muslims to see the end of Israel, and the
ultimate success of the Zionist idea depends not only on Israel?s ability to
keep its citizens alive but on its ability to end talk of its impermanence.

?I think that this fear, this idea that Israel will not exist anymore?I cannot
even utter specific, clear words because it?s really frightening?this idea or
fear hovers above us all the time,? Grossman told me. ?It is so present,
even though we suppress it almost violently. Whenever it infiltrates the
consciousness, it?s almost paralyzing. You can see if you look at the
numbers?how few we are, how many they are, how hostile this region is,
how we have never been accepted into this region.?

He continued: ?If you see the tendencies of fanaticism, the way in which at
every crossroads both sides almost always choose the more violent
approach, if you see the fact that other religions, parts of the West, never
really accept the idea of Israel 
 It means something deep about us (and
even more about everyone else), about Judaism and the state that we are
still in, after 60 years of sovereignty?we have not accomplished statehood,
the realization that this is a legitimate state. And we have a lack of
confidence in our own existence. We also don?t really believe in our own
existence. We have the formal symptoms of a normal state, but we still do
not believe we are a state. Throughout history we were regarded, and we
regarded ourselves, as a larger-than-life story, since the time of the Bible.
We?re a story that other nations read and borrow. But if you are a story,
you can end.?

Of course, America is sui generis in its acceptance of Jews, having brought
them to the absolute center of its national life. This means that their story
will come to an end not because of the actions of Iran, or of the
Palestinians, but because they choose to end it, by assimilating completely.

I acknowledged to Grossman that, at a time of maximum distress, the late
1930s, America refused to admit thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing from
Nazi terror (if Israel had been created in 1939, not 1948, hundreds of
thousands, if not millions, of Jews could have been saved). But the
Diaspora, and the American diaspora experience in particular, no longer
represents a danger to physical Jewish existence. Grossman steered the
conversation away from issues of mere physical security. Israel still gives a
Jew the best chance of feeling at home in the world, he said.

?Maybe if you live in other places, you are integrated, you feel assimilated. I
wouldn?t like to live in any other place. With all the difficulty and criticism I
have, it is still for me, as a Jewish person, the highest spiritual challenge
and endeavor to see this country become a better place.?

Uri Grossman?s death became a national trauma amid the larger national
trauma of the Lebanon misadventure. Grossman remained silent about the
war, and about politics, from his son?s death, in August, until that
November, when he addressed 100,000 Israelis at a memorial service for
Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister assassinated in 1995 by an extremist
supporter of the settlements. Olmert was on the stage as well; Grossman
refused to shake hands with the prime minister, but he directed his words
at him.

?The death of young people is a horrible, shattering waste,? he said. ?But
no less dreadful is the sense that for many years, the state of Israel has
been squandering not only the lives of its children but also the miracle it
experienced?the great and rare opportunity bestowed upon it by history,
the opportunity to create an enlightened, decent, democratic state that
would conduct itself according to Jewish and universal values. A state that
would be a national home and a refuge, but not only a refuge; rather, a
place that would also give new meaning to Jewish existence.?

He went on to criticize the country?s leaders, saying that they could not
?help a nation adrift in such a complicated state of affairs.?

?Mr. Prime Minister, I am not saying these things out of anger or
vengefulness. I have waited long enough so that I would not be responding
from a fleeting impulse. You cannot dismiss my words tonight by saying
that a man should not be judged at his time of grief. Of course I am in
grief. But more than anger, what I feel is pain. This country pains me, and
what you and your friends are doing to it. Believe me, your success is
important to me, because the future of us all depends on your ability to get
up and do something.?

Grossman then pleaded with Olmert to speak directly to the Palestinian
people. He has argued that the flaw of the Oslo peace process of the 1990s
was that the negotiators never spoke about the shape of a final
agreement?including the shape of the future state of Palestine.

?Go to them over the head of Hamas,? Grossman said to Olmert. ?Go to the
moderates among them, the ones who, like me and you, oppose Hamas
and its ways. Go to the Palestinian people. Speak to their deep grief and
wounds, recognize their continued suffering. Your status will not be
diminished, nor will that of Israel in any future negotiations. But people?s
hearts will begin to open a little to one another, and this opening has huge
power.?

Grossman told me that the self-created trap for Olmert is that he knows
what needs to be done?leave the West Bank?but is powerless to do it. ?I
could give his speeches regarding peace,? Grossman said. ?But when will
he evacuate an outpost?? he asked, referring to newly built satellite
enclaves outside existing settlements. ?When will he speak to the hopes and
fears of the Palestinians? When will he do something to save us??

"David Grossman thinks that you haven?t done enough to remove outposts
and leave the West Bank,? I told Olmert when I visited him a few weeks
ago. The prime minister leaned back in his chair. His face took on a dark
cast. ?Listen,? he said with evident irritation. ?This is why I am prime
minister and he is a writer.?

Olmert sighed. ?I?ll tell you, I don?t like to argue with David since he lost his
son,? he said. ?I think there is an emotional part in the way he expresses
himself about me, which has nothing to do with my views or my actions.?

Olmert is a man of medium height and build, with a high forehead and
large features, who thrusts his jaw out when he speaks. He saw me in his
office at the government compound in Jerusalem. The compound is an
armed fortress, and the prime minister?s office is separated from the outside
world by several layers of unforgiving security. Since the murder of Rabin,
and especially since Israel began targeting Hamas leaders for assassination,
the prime minister of Israel has become one of the world?s most
comprehensively guarded men.

The office itself is unadorned and windowless, narrow?a submarine. On
the wall next to Olmert?s desk hang portraits of various prime ministers,
including Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin. Two of his recent
predecessors, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, are missing. Where
are they? I asked.

?I could answer,? Olmert said waspishly, ?but I prefer not to.?

Olmert is said to be capable of projecting kindness, and he has a talent for
sycophancy (his speech welcoming President Bush to Israel earlier this year
was particularly overripe). But he can be a haranguing, preemptively
defensive man. I recently watched Olmert address a small group of
American Jewish leaders, including some who, unlike the majority of
American Jews, are dubious about Olmert?s embrace of moderation, and his
willingness to negotiate the future of Jerusalem. ?I know everyone is very
sensitive and very curious about Jerusalem,? he said. ?Sometimes when I
hear people talking to me about Jerusalem, I say, ?Hey, excuse me, what
exactly did you build in Jerusalem, that you are preaching to me? Who built
more in Jerusalem and did more to protect the unity of the city of
Jerusalem than any of those who are wasting lots of energies and spending
a lot of money in order to try and overswarm my position??? (Olmert later
told me that unnamed American Jews are ?investing a lot of money trying
to overthrow the government in Israel.?)

In the course of our conversation, I told Olmert I thought it wasn?t entirely
fair to discount Grossman?s criticisms as being motivated by grief. The two
men have been acquaintances for many years, and it is true that Grossman
has refused to speak to Olmert since Uri?s death. But Grossman today is
critical of Olmert?s approach to matters concerning the West Bank, and he
has said that he would speak to Olmert, and even stand with him, if he
believed that the prime minister was truly serious about taking the
necessary steps toward reconciliation with the Palestinians.

The prime minister was doubtful. ?He doesn?t really separate the personal
from the political,? Olmert said. ?I have a lot of respect for David, but I
think he?s wrong. First of all, he?s wrong; second, I don?t like to argue with
him.? Of the three writers who aligned against him over Lebanon, he said,
?Amos Oz is the most realistic.?

When I told Oz that Olmert wouldn?t address Grossman?s critique, he said:
?I don?t think David Grossman is blinded by grief. Grief can be an eye-
opener. He?s a perfectly legitimate critic of the Olmert government.? Oz also
rejected Olmert?s effort to draft him to his team. ?I support the peace
process that began at Annapolis,? he said. ?I don?t necessarily support
Olmert on what he?s doing in Gaza,? referring to recent Israeli military
incursions.

Olmert is more unpopular in Israel than George W. Bush is in the United
States. His business dealings have repeatedly drawn the attention of the
country?s police and attorney general, and his reputation is that of an
inauthentic, calculating man whose skills lie mainly in the area of self-
advancement. The commission of inquiry appointed to investigate Israeli
mistakes in Lebanon was caustic in its criticism of his leadership, finding
that Olmert acted hastily and with arrogance in the rush to war. The report
was even more critical of army and defense ministry leaders. It
characterized the Lebanon invasion as heedless and jerry-rigged. The
commission?s findings were a reminder that, as the former Prime Minister
Ehud Barak once told me, Jews excel at many things but not necessarily at
self-rule. ?The last two experiments of Jews running a political state were
not great successes,? he said, referring to the Israel of King Solomon?s time,
which ultimately ended in the exile to Babylon, and to the Jewish
commonwealth of the Second Temple period, which was conquered by the
Romans, who scattered the Jews.

The purpose of my visit to Olmert?s office was not to plumb his resentment-
filled relationship with David Grossman but to discuss the meaning of
Israel?s existence. When I brought up the subject of existential threats, he
recoiled. ?When the leader of a nation of 75 million people with ballistic
missiles, with modern weapons, with a declared desire to possess a nuclear
capacity, threatens Israel with annihilation, can I ignore it? Can I say I
didn?t hear it? Of course I can?t.?

Olmert was more comfortable speaking about the Zionist idea and praising
Herzl?s prophetic powers: few men understood at the start of the last
century, as Herzl did, that Europe would soon turn against its Jews so
absolutely. And he spoke of the achievements of Jewish independence?the
ingathering of Jews, most especially?all of which were unassailably
remarkable.

Then I asked him to discuss the flaws in the execution of the Zionist
program. He responded indignantly: ?I don?t care about it. Of course, I
mean, I care about the flaws, I?m the prime minister. I have to improve
things, I have to amend things. But when I celebrate the 60th anniversary
of the state of Israel, what I have in mind are the enormous achievements.?
He went on to discuss the largely successful absorption of 1 million Russian
immigrants. ?Of course there are flaws,? he said. ?Who cares??

With Uri Grossman in mind, I asked Olmert about a flaw of personal
concern to me: Why is Israel less physically safe for Jews than America?

He answered: ?I?ll tell you something that you have to realize, and this is
the most important thing and this is the most significant thing. First of all,
no people are safe anywhere, okay? Let me tell you, Jews are not safer in
Israel than they are in other parts of the world, but there is only one place
that Jews can fight for their lives as Jews, and that is here. They can fight
as Americans, they can fight as Australians?but as individuals.? He banged
on his desk. ?Jews were persecuted, Jews were attacked, Jews were
suppressed, Jews were killed. But they could never defend themselves as
Jews.?

So the success of the American Jewish community doesn?t lessen the
necessity for the state of Israel? ?Never, never, no way,? he said. ?By the
way, Jews in Germany?and I don?t draw any comparison at all?Jews in
other parts of the world were very successful all their lives, and that didn?t
provide them with safety.?

The prime minister of Israel should be able to muster an argument for the
necessity of his country without forecasting a Holocaust in America. His was
a careless and cynical statement, one that supports the notion that he is not
Israel?s deepest thinker. And yet his record presents an obvious
contradiction. On one crucial issue, Olmert is credited by many of the most
doubting Israelis with sincerity and thoughtfulness: his newfound belief that
the dream of a Greater Israel?one that incorporates the West Bank, Gaza,
and the Golan Heights?is dead, replaced with the recognition that the land
must be split between a Jewish democratic state and an Arab state. This
sort of transformation is as rare in Israeli politics as it is in American politics.
?His willingness to express his new convictions and to speak about them
explicitly is both bold and calculated,? one of his foremost critics, the
Ha?aretz political columnist Ari Shavit, told me.

Olmert is not the only one to undergo this transformation; an entire
generation of Likud politicians, protected by the shade cast by the great
fighter and Likud apostate Ariel Sharon, has embraced the argument that
the occupation threatens Israel?s Jewish future.

I asked Olmert whether there was a moral dimension to his desire to exit
the West Bank, and I made reference to a song of his childhood, written by
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. The revisionists are
the ideological ancestors of the Likud Party. The song refers to the shtay
gadot, or two banks, of the Jordan River: ?The Jordan has two banks, and
both are ours.?

?I would have loved to have shtay gadot!? Olmert said. It was not, as I first
thought, an unconsidered outburst. He won?t call the dream of both banks
immoral or destructively utopian, because it is a dream that many Israelis
believe is just. ?If there had been a 10 percent or 15 percent minority which
is not Jewish there, then it would have been legitimate. But you don?t come
to a majority and say to them, ?Listen, we deprive you of your right to self-
determination and at the same time we won?t provide you with the natural
right of equality and equal votes.??

?At the end of the day, it was about demography,? he said. ?We couldn?t do
it.?

The new leftists?or new realists?find justification for their position in the
earliest history of Zionism. ?Go back to the Basle program of 1897, the first
Zionist Congress,? Israel?s ambassador in Washington, Sallai Meridor, told
me. Meridor and his brother Dan, who was a minister in the government of
Menachem Begin, abandoned their belief in untrammeled settlement
several years ago. ?Herzl asks Nordau??Max Nordau, the essayist and critic
who served as his deputy??to come up with one sentence of what Zionism
is to achieve. He wrote that Zionism is meant to create for the Jewish
people a homeland in the land of Israel, assured by international legitimacy.
One sentence, the whole story. It?s about Jewish people, about defining the
community of Jews as a nation, one in the family of nations. Second, it?s not
a state for all citizens, but for the Jewish people. Third, it?s in the land of
Israel, but not necessarily all the land of Israel. And it has to be secured by
international legitimacy.?

Israel?s flagging international legitimacy is one of Olmert?s preoccupations.
In an interview with Ha?aretz in November, he said, ?If the day comes when
the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African?style struggle
for equal voting rights [among Palestinians of the occupied territories],
then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.? He went on
to say, ?The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America,
will be the first to come out against us, because they will say they cannot
support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for
all its residents.?

As a young Knesset member of the Likud Party, Olmert was not nearly so
concerned about Israel?s international reputation. He voted against the
ratification of the Camp David Accords with Egypt, which had been
negotiated by the leader of his party, Menachem Begin. Today, he says
Begin was right. ?He was smarter than I was.? If he were alive today,
Olmert said, Begin would support an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.
?Menachem Begin understood by 1977 that we couldn?t incorporate Judea
and Samaria [the biblical names for the West Bank] into the state of Israel.
We can?t do it, and therefore he did not do it.?

What Olmert failed to mention was that Begin himself accelerated the
process of settling Israelis in the West Bank, and was in particular a zealous
supporter of Gush Emunim (the Bloc of the Faithful), the near-messianic
group that seeded the West Bank with Jewish settlements. Today, the
settlers are a small but influential political constituency (there are 200,000
settlers in the West Bank?a majority of whom moved there for economic,
rather than ideological, reasons?and another 200,000 in the eastern
suburbs of Jerusalem), and they have deployed an effective argument
against expulsion: Ariel Sharon?s forced removal of 8,000 settlers from the
Gaza Strip three years ago, undertaken unilaterally, resulted not in peace
but in a barrage of rocket attacks by Hamas on southern Israel, followed by
a continuing Israeli military response.

?I?m not saying ?I told you so,? but I told you so,? the settler leader Pinchas
Wallerstein said not long ago when I saw him at Migron, a settlement
outpost near Ramallah. Migron is ?illegal,? built without the approval of the
government, but even the illegal outposts?there are more than 100?are in
no danger of imminent evacuation. Olmert removed one, called Amona, in
February 2006; more than 200 people, including two Knesset members,
were hurt in the riot that accompanied the demolition, and Olmert appears
wary of a repeat performance.

Like Begin, Olmert once was a friend of the settlers. I asked him why the
country only recently awoke to the threat the settlements pose. He bristled.
?First of all, this is something that must be understood with humility and
compassion,? he said. ?In 1948, we achieved independence with a divided
Jerusalem, with the parts of Jerusalem that were the essential ingredients
of the collective Jewish memory and something that we yearned for, for
thousands of years, not in our hands. In 1967 came the fulfillment, finally,
of all the dreams of thousands of years by reaching the territories which are
more intimately linked to Jewish history than anything else, particularly
Jerusalem. So how can you wonder why we didn?t have the emotional
power to restrain ourselves from wanting to realize the fulfillment of our
dreams? It took us time to grasp the full complexity of the situation. But
how can you wonder, at the beginning, why we had this enthusiasm??

I noted that by late 1967, David Ben-Gurion, then an old man in retirement
on his desert kibbutz, was arguing that Israel should find a way out of the
occupied territories as soon as possible. Did Ben-Gurion lack Zionist fervor?

Olmert litigated the question instead of answering it: ?He certainly didn?t say
?Get rid of Jerusalem.??

What led to Olmert?s conversion regarding the settlements was not only the
realization?one that came to him over the course of three decades or
so?that the permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza might
undermine Israel?s security, but also a recognition that the Palestinians
themselves had changed.

?Listen, let?s face it, I don?t know what my position would have been had a
change not taken place on the other side as well. What the Palestinians
say?not all of them, of course?some of the declared, elected leadership of
the Palestinian people say, ?I want to live in peace with Israel and I
recognize Israel?s right to exist.? They didn?t say it 40 years ago, they didn?t
say it 30 years ago, 25 years ago.?

The Palestinians, however, are fighting a civil war. Gaza is under the control
of Hamas, which is the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. The
West Bank is under the control of the Palestinian Authority, headed by the
Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, who, over the past several months, has
been negotiating a framework agreement for peace with Israel. All sides
recognize that the Palestinian Authority would find it difficult to implement
an agreement, but Olmert?s goal is to negotiate the parameters of a final
settlement as a way, if nothing else, to strengthen the hands of Palestinian
moderates against Hamas.

Olmert and Grossman

UNRESOLVED: Palestinian workers approach a checkpoint to Jerusalem in
2007



The latest iteration of the never-ending Middle East peace process,
launched in Annapolis late last year by President Bush, is in many ways a
farce. Olmert?s ruling coalition is unstable, and he is deeply unpopular. Bush
shows no sustained interest in understanding the dispute. Condoleezza Rice
is ignored across the Middle East. And Abbas?s authority doesn?t radiate far
beyond Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital. The tragedy of this farce
is that this could be the last time a two-state solution is seen as a viable
option. It is a clich? for Middle East leaders to warn that time is running
out, but today it seems that the possibility of a two-state solution is swiftly
fading. Palestinian rejectionists and unbending Jewish settlement leaders
are in harmony on this point. ?It does not matter what the Jews do. We will
not let them have peace,? Ibrahim Mudeiris, the imam of the Ijlin Mosque
in Gaza, told me not long ago. We spoke after Friday prayers. The street
outside the mosque was crowded with angry young men who had been
excited by Mudeiris?s sermon, in which he identified Jews as ?the sons of
apes and pigs.?

?They can be nice to us or they can kill us, it doesn?t matter,? he said. ?If
we have a cease-fire with the Jews, it is only so that we can prepare
ourselves for the final battle.?

For Palestinian radicals, the closing of the settlements would be a terrible
blow. The smartest Palestinian strategists understand this. ?The longer they
stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an
apartheid state,? the former Palestinian Authority negotiator Michael Tarazi
told me a few years ago. ?The settlements mean that the egg is hopelessly
scrambled. Basically, it is already one state.?

The hard-core settlers are as intransigent, and as patient, as their
Palestinian counterparts. The mayor of Ariel, one of the West Bank?s largest
Jewish towns, told me that time is on the side of the settlers. Ariel, which
has a population of roughly 20,000, is southwest of Nablus, the largest Arab
city in the West Bank. ?We have to hold on for a few more years, at most,?
Ron Nachman, the mayor, said. ?Then the world will realize that the
solution lies with Jordan.? Nachman, along with many other West Bank
settler leaders, believes that the Palestinians of the West Bank should be
made Jordanian citizens. The Palestinians don?t generally seek this. Nor do
the Jordanians. But Nachman said that once the world realizes that Israel?s
presence in the West Bank is eternal, it will come to view the ?Jordanian
option? as a plausible solution. ?Trust me, no one is throwing us out of
Ariel,? he said.

For many of the settlers, and certainly for their spiritual leaders, the state of
Israel?s democracy is of minimal concern. A couple of years ago, I visited
the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem, which has graduated many of the
settlement movement?s leaders, to speak to its rabbis about the balance
between democracy and Judaism.

In early March, the yeshiva was attacked by a Palestinian gunman who
killed eight students, mainly teenagers, in a library. When I had visited
Mercaz HaRav, Rabbi David Samson, a teacher at the yeshiva and one of
the leading proponents of its philosophy, had foretold the attack: ?We are
of course a target of terror. The enemies of the Jewish people know the
importance of this yeshiva. We send forth the pioneers to build the state.?
In the course of a lengthy discussion, Samson explained the yeshiva?s
position on democracy. ?Democracy is not a value for us. Justice is a value,
and fairness, but not democracy. In the Book of Exodus, it says that the
Jews shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. It does not talk about
democracy.? The Arabs who live in biblical Israel, he said, can either choose
?to get along with us, to live peacefully, or to leave.? He said the Arabs
would have the status of ?protected foreigners? in Israel; they would have
local autonomy, but have no say in the governance of Israel.

What if the world rejects this? ?The world has always rejected the Jews. But
God always provides.? God will punish the Jews, he said, if they divide the
Holy Land. ?A Palestinian state would be an abomination.?

A Palestinian state, of course, might not come to pass. Ziad Abu Zayyad, a
former minister in the Palestinian Authority government, is a veteran peace
negotiator and one of the few Palestinian leaders who still view a two-state
solution as conceivable. ?There are only two or three years left,? he said. ?If
this doesn?t work, then everyone will be arguing for a one-state solution.?

The one-state solution?the dissolution of Israel and the merging of the
Jewish and Arab populations?is neither practicable nor, from the Israeli
perspective, desirable. (In the 1940s, many Jewish thinkers endorsed the
idea of binationalism, but the idea was rejected by the Arabs.) In any case,
the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish state would, of course, demand the
agreement of Israel?s Jews, who, for manifold reasons, would not want to
live in a state dominated by Arabs. ?I?ll make a prediction that Israel will not
commit suicide,? Yehezkel Dror, the head of the Jewish People Policy
Planning Institute and a political scientist at Hebrew University, told me.

David Grossman, like most of Israel?s leftists, sees binationalism as
simultaneously utopian and dismissive of Jewish feelings. ?You know,
binationalism doesn?t work in so many places in the world,? he said. ?You
see it in Belgium now. And they expect, with this really hateful combination
of Jews and Arabs, that it will succeed here? It?s so wrong. Part of the cure
for the historical distortions of both peoples is that they need a place of
their own with defined borders. We have to heal separately. I?m a little
suspicious of these people who would experiment on us with binationalism.?

Reality, he said, has made a Jewish state necessary. ?Since the world has
failed to defend Jewish existence, there is a need for a place for the Jews to
implement their culture and their values and their language and their
history, a place in which to recover.?

But what if Israel?s neighbors never give its Jews a chance to recover from
history?

Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process, eight years ago, many of
Grossman?s allies on the left have abandoned the idea that Arabs will
reconcile themselves to a Jewish state in their midst. Benny Morris, a
historian who has done much work to uncover evidence of Jewish sin, as
well as Arab sin, in the birth of Israel, recently wrote: ?The situation
[Jewish] Israelis live in, and even more so, most likely face, is antediluvian,
revolutionary and possibly apocalyptic.? When I spoke to Morris in
Jerusalem, he described Israel as an ?amazing success story? and, in
virtually the same sentence, called it ?the most dangerous place in the
world for Jews as Jews, as a collective of 5 million people who are in danger
of extinction in the short term from an Iranian nuclear bomb and in the
long term by being overwhelmed by Arabs.?

Grossman, despite his existential fears, has not given up on the idea of
compromise. In The Yellow Wind, he tells of the time he found himself
trapped at Bethlehem University, as a Palestinian demonstration raged
around him.

I write the following in my green notebook: Now, the truth. Are you afraid?
Yes. And if something happens to you here, if they hurt you, do you think it
will cause you to revise your opinions? To begin to surrender to hate? And if
they were to hurt your child?

I set down the answer for the record and as personal testimony, and it is all
written there, in the green notebook.

His private answer is now public; since Uri?s death, he has not cast aside his
opposition to occupation and settlement, or his belief in reconciliation.

But this does not necessarily suggest that he would make a sophisticated
negotiator, or a sound strategist. Grossman believes that Israel must
negotiate with Hamas, an organization that pays obeisance to Iran, that
bases its charter in part on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that has
shown itself to be more interested in destroying Israel than in building a
state of its own.

Of course, any such talks would necessarily grant legitimacy to Hamas and
undermine the more moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank who
remain Israel?s best, and perhaps only, hope for a more tranquil future.

The West Bank leadership cannot be buttressed merely with rhetoric, or
with ineffectual negotiations meant to erect only the scaffolding of an
agreement. The Camp David negotiations in 2000 collapsed mainly because
the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, was unable to strike a final deal with
Israel. But during the seven years of the Oslo peace process, which was
meant to negotiate a Palestinian state into existence, the number of Jewish
settlers in the West Bank nearly doubled. It is difficult to blame Palestinians
for their cynicism about Israeli intentions regarding the West Bank. Only by
closing outposts and dismantling settlements can Israeli leaders help the
Palestinian moderates, and themselves. When I asked Olmert why he
argues for an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territory but allows the
expansion of existing settlements and the continued existence of illegal
outposts, he barked, ?I dismantled Amona!? Amona is the outpost that
came down in February 2006. ?That was the most traumatic event, even
more than the disengagement from Gaza. It was very violent.?

Not one outpost has been dismantled since Amona was closed, and none
seems slated for impending disappearance. This is the core of Grossman?s
criticism of Olmert. The prime minister, in his view, is a skilled rhetorician
but a political coward, one who speaks the language of reconciliation but
whose actions in Lebanon, and in Gaza, suggest something else.

There is a split on the left; some of Grossman?s allies believe that he is, in
fact, too hard on the prime minister. ?Olmert is paralyzed because the
people are paralyzed,? A. B. Yehoshua said. ?The whole country is
paralyzed.?

And tired. Benny Morris noted recently that, just as the West is tired of the
hundred-year war in the Middle East, so too are Israelis. Morris?s analysis
contained an echo of a statement made by Olmert three years ago, when
he was still vice premier under Sharon. ?We are tired of fighting,? he told
the Israel Policy Forum, a liberal pro-Israel group, in New York. ?We are
tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of
defeating our enemies. We want that we will be able to live in an entirely
different environment of relations with our enemies.?

Olmert?s shift to the left did not occur in a vacuum. His wife, Aliza, has been
a sympathizer of Peace Now, and his children have been left-wing activists.
One daughter, Dana, is a prominent gay-rights advocate in Tel Aviv, and
has associated herself with groups opposed to her father?s policies. During
the 2006 Israeli incursions into Gaza, she took part in a demonstration that
denounced the army chief of staff as a ?child-killer.? One of Olmert?s sons
has refused to serve his army-reserve duty in the occupied territories, and
another son managed to avoid the draft altogether. Olmert?s family is not
entirely unusual; the secular left, which once provided a disproportionate
number of officers and commandos to the army, no longer does so; sons of
the settlements now account for more than 25 percent of the Israeli officer
corps. Which makes the left-wing Grossman family?s contribution to the
national defense more striking.

I asked Olmert whether he would still like to reconcile with Grossman.
?Look, I have responsibilities to attend to,? he said. ?I met with every one of
the bereaved families who was ready to meet with me. He was
demonstrating against me rather than sitting with me. Which is perfectly
legitimate, but I sit with many of the families. I think most of them came
here and sat with me, something you don?t find in any other country in the
world. If you would know how many hours I spent with the families of the
fallen soldiers!?

Olmert blustered on for a while, comparing himself to Rudy Giuliani,
stressing his commitment to peace and security, mocking his former Likud
colleagues, and praising himself for the care he provides the families of the
dead. He neglected to mention something I learned only later. For almost
two years, he has repeatedly sent emissaries to Grossman, hoping for a
reconciliation. These emissaries included his daughter Dana and a former
speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, both sent to persuade Grossman to
see him. Dana Olmert?s visit backfired; Grossman asked her to place herself
in his shoes: Would she reconcile with her father, if she were Grossman?
No, she said, according to people familiar with the conversation.

Burg?s message was unequivocal. Olmert is trying to save Israel by
compromising with the Palestinians, and he is in dire need of help. The
prime minister has permanently alienated the country?s right wing. The
Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva announced shortly after the fatal attack that Olmert
would not be welcome to pay a condolence call. ?We cannot receive a
prime minister who advocates against the spirit of the Torah and accept
that Israel withdraws from a part of the Land of Israel,? a yeshiva official,
Rabbi Haim Steiner, said.

Burg told me: ?I believe that any person who wants to influence society
cannot allow himself to be in a situation where you won?t talk to the prime
minister.? But Grossman has so far rejected Burg?s pleas.

Burg?s visit was motivated not only by politics, he said. He is concerned
about Olmert?s emotional well-being.

?The prime minister suffers the casualties of war,? Burg said. ?He doesn?t
sleep at night. He knows what Uri Grossman represents.?


The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/israel.



From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 13:46:37 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 13:46:37 +0200
Subject: [THS] Johann Hari: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509134438.04acb728@spamarrest.com>


Independent.co.uk

Johann Hari: The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics

Thursday, 8 May 2008

http://www.independent.co.uk:80/opinion/commentators/johann-
hari/johann-hari-the-loathsome-smearing-of-israels-critics-822751.html]

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to
describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate
and silence ? and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-
appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews,
rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider
process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the
Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the
Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-
Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-
lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week,
I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped
from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their
reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of
the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered.
Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media
monitoring groups ? including Honest Reporting and Camera ? said I an
anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh,
while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in
North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in
calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like
this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, "Honest
Reporting" claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews "poisoning
the wells." If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she
was detained ? in labour ? by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the
West Bank, "Honest Reporting" will say you didn't explain "the real cause":
the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David Landau,
calls the behaviour of these groups "nascent McCarthyism". Those
responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the
right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the
most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the
Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The
Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing:
"Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such
movement is not always voluntary ... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in
many respects to some massive urban renewal." If a prominent American
figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to
the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a
group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission
statement: "Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and
security." Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David
Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them "Jews For Genocide", and
said they "encourage" the "killers" of Jews. Where does this come from?
She says the Palestinians are an "artificial" people who can be collectively
punished because they are "a terrorist population". She believes that while
"individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to
Holocaust denial as a national project". Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as
a model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their
standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies.
Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter's decision to speak to the elected Hamas
government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz poll last month
found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it
more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an
Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and
secure Palestine alongside it ? so last year he wrote a book called Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major
human rights reports. There is nothing there you can't read in the
mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter's comparison of life on the West
Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West
Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by
roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli
human rights group B'tselem says this "bears striking similarities to the
racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has
widely called "a racist". Several universities have even refused to let the ex-
President speak to their students.

These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political
scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw
ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He
made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan
Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers
arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors
who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be
scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that
moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded
the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan
Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters'
hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz
campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university.
He even claimed that Finkelstein's mother ? who made it through Maidenek
and two slave-labour camps ? had collaborated with the Nazis. The
campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for
speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming
more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal
Jews ? the majority ? are now setting up rivals to the hard-right
organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of
demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it
prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because
it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages
diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said
to Joe McCarthy himself: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of
decency, sir, at long last? H ave you left no sense of decency?"

j.hari at independent.co.uk



From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 13:57:51 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 13:57:51 +0200
Subject: [THS] Trip of a lifetime: How LSD rocked the world
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509135738.03e60630@spamarrest.com>

Trip of a lifetime: How LSD rocked the world

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/trip-of-a-
lifetime-how-lsd-rocked-the-world-818714.html

It's the psychedelic drug that inspired Hendrix and The Beatles - and
shaped the music, art and literature of a generation. As the world bids
farewell to the bicycling Swiss chemist who created LSD, John Walsh
explores his mind-altering legacy

1 May 2008

It was known as acid, blotter acid, window pane, dots, tickets and mellow
yellow. It was sold on the street in capsules and tablets but most often in
liquid form, usually absorbed on to a piece of blotting paper divided into
several squares: one drop, or "dot", per square. Lysergic acid diethylamide,
or C20H25N30 to give it its snappy chemical formula, derived from lysergic
acid, and it introduced you to a world of cosmic harmony and all-embracing
love, or a black schizoid hell of paranoia and screaming demons.

The letters LSD once denoted English money in pre-decimalisation days:
librae, solidi, denarii, the Latin forms of pounds, shillings and pence. From
the mid-1960s, however, the letters had only one meaning: they stood for
the most powerful mood-altering drug in the world.

Those who experienced the 12-hour "trip" it engendered would report back
with all the fervour and awe of travellers returned from mystic lands,
desperate to relay the sights and sounds of their wild adventures, but
frustrated by the impossibility of making their listeners see or understand
their experiences. Sometimes, they'd been on a physical journey (usually no
further than the garden or local shops); but mentally, the trip had taken
them into a new realm of consciousness that was a) hard to evoke and b)
very boring to listen to. They talked about the blinding sensory
enhancement, and the synaesthesia of hearing colours and smelling the
stars. They saw profound truths in cracks in the pavement and cosmic
harmonies in a match flame. They tended to mention God, several times.
The man who invented the stuff had a lot to answer for. He was a Swiss
chemist called Albert Hoffman, and he died on Tuesday morning.

The fact that he reached the age of 102 seems a tribute to the efficacy of
his invention. But its importance to the 20th century isn't as a therapeutic
medical treatment. It may have altered some lives for the better, but its real
importance is cultural. For LSD gave the Sixties a brand-new concept to
embrace and apply to every area of life, especially the arts: psychedelia.
The word was spelt wrongly ? it should, strictly, be psychodelia ? but its
meaning was clear. It meant the making-visible of the soul: opening up
your inner, half-glimpsed metaphysical self for inspection while in a state of
profound relaxation and pleasure.

The English writer Aldous Huxley had, of course, been there years before,
when he experimented with mescaline in the early 1950s. His 1954 book,
The Doors of Perception (the title is taken from William Blake ? "If the doors
of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite") argued that altered-state-inducing drugs were good for you, if you
were sufficiently clever.

"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few
timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal
obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and
notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by the
Mind at Large ? this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and
especially to the intellectual," he said. But LSD was, by 1968, becoming
available to all, and seemed, for a time, a thing that could change the
world.

In theory, the entire young "counterculture" of the West, the same young
people who listened to rock'n'roll, smoked dope, rejected the values of their
straight, bourgeois parents and demonstrated against the Vietnam War,
could all drop acid, discover their transcendent inner being, forsake their
redundant ego and refuse to cooperate with the ordinary forms of society.
They could, in the immortal phrase of Timothy Leary, LSD's greatest fan
and most articulate zealot, "Turn on, tune in and drop out."

They could share with each other soul-perceptions that were denied to the
straights, the military-industrial complex, the politicians and judges.... It
didn't happen. But, for a few years, it felt as if the doors of perception
might budge an inch.

The first acid trip was on 16 April 1943. It was an accident. Dr Hoffman had
been conducting experiments with LSD-25, which he had synthesised from
lysergic acid in 1938 and was trying to make again, having a "presentiment"
that it could possess "properties other than those established in the first
investigations". The doctor got some of the stuff on his fingers. In the
afternoon he felt dizzy, couldn't work, went home to bed and wrote later
that he entered a dream-like state. Behind his closed eyes, he saw streams
of "fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play
of colours" for a whole two hours.

Three days later, with a Dr Jekyll-like foreboding, he put himself through a
guinea-pig experiment. He took 250mg (a colossal dose by blotting-paper
standards) and went for a bicycle ride. Wherever he looked, the landscape
became distorted as if seen through a funfair mirror. Though he was
moving fast he felt completely stationary, as though the fields were whizzing
by him.

Back home, he experienced the world's first bad trip. He became convinced
that he was possessed by a demon, that his neighbour was a witch and
that his furniture was trying to kill him. The doctor was summoned, found
nothing wrong beyond a dilation of the pupils, and packed him off to bed.
Hoffman's panic subsided and he started to enjoy the visions and exploding
colours, the shifting kaleidoscope of shapes breaking up and folding into
themselves. Every noise from the street became a visual event.

He woke next day full of beans, refreshed, reborn. His breakfast tasted
delicious. In the garden, looking at birds and smelling the flowers, he
described his senses as "vibrating in a condition of highest sensitivity, which
persisted for the entire day".

"Bicycle Day", 19 April, was later commemorated by acid enthusiasts
because it was the first conscious "trip" and it had had ? just about ? a
happy ending. But the doors to perception are, for some truth-seekers,
booby-trapped and dangerous. When LSD was co-opted by medical staff
for recreational use, two decades after Hoffman's bike ride, users learnt the
hard way how impossible it was to control the wild ride once it had started.

At Oxford in the early 1970s, we were frankly intimidated by the drug's
reputation. We all wanted to try it, but were too chicken. The word in the
quad was: if you had any secret hang-ups, mental instabilities, phobias,
sexual inadequacies or social insecurities (the kind that surface in dreams,)
you were wise of steer clear of acid. We knew when one of us was going to
try it. "Tonight," I'd hear during dinner in hall, "Roger's tripping for the first
time. But he'll have Will and Ollie with him, so he'll be OK."

I've always remembered Roger's first trip (so, I'll bet, has he). We all knew
he'd be fine because he was so perfect: cool, handsome, easy-going, a hit
with the girls, a dead ringer, with his corkscrewy curls, for Marc Bolan of T.
Rex. And he was rich; he owned a Morgan, which he casually parked in the
back quad. We knew Roger would survive the experience and bang on
about it, like he banged on about his Bang and Olufsen state-of-the-art hi-
fi. And anyway, Will and Olly would look after him.

The evening started well. The three students took a tab each, drank some
wine and waited for results. An hour later, they were happily tripping on
the college lawn, listening to the grass grow and hearing their voices
transforming into harp notes. They went to Olly's room, smoked, listened to
Tubular Bells in a haze of bliss. Then Roger went the gents. This proved a
mistake.

After using the facilities, he washed his hands, dried them and looked in the
mirror. Something caught his eye. He looked closer. Just below his cherubic
lower lip, there was a spot. It's wasn't huge or septic, but it was
unquestionably a skin eruption, a blemish. As he watched, it grew bigger
and bigger until it took on the size and texture of a Brussels sprout. Roger
was transfixed. He looked on in horror, as the distended spot grew
wobblingly larger, and began to pull his features into its green heart. His
nose disappeared, his cheeks and eyes began to twist down, his Marc Bolan
curls hung uselessly over his aghast, imploding face.

Roger, you see, was indeed a near-perfect human being but he was as vain
as a canary. And discovering a spot on his immaculate physiognomy played
straight into his worst insecurity: that he might secretly be unattractive. He
ended up imagining his whole head was a great blob of pus; and sat
screaming with paranoia for two hours as his friends dosed him with orange
juice (vitamin C is the only known cure for bad trips). Other occupants of
his staircase, alerted by the noise, called in to discover a scenario straight
from the locked unit of Bedlam hospital, circa 1880.

During the Cold War, both the British and the US governments were keen
to exploit LSD's unique qualities, for "social engineering". They were
convinced it would be useful as a "truth drug" during interrogations ? a
rather prosaic understanding of the kind of visionary truth revealed by
communing with one's soul.

In 1953 and 1954, scientists working for MI6 drugged servicemen with LSD
without telling them what to expect; the scientists told them they were
looking for a cure for the common cold. One soldier, aged 19, reported that
he saw "walls melting, cracks appearing in people's faces... eyes would run
down cheeks, Salvador Dali-type faces... a flower would turn into a slug."
Not surprisingly, the experiment failed; MI6 reported that LSD was of little
practical use as a mind-control drug. It took 50 years for the human
guinea-pigs to be compensated for what they'd been put through.

If LSD was no use in war, what was it good for? At first, the scientific
community thought it could be a wonder drug to use in psychoanalysis,
because it would help patients unblock repressed subconscious thoughts
they couldn't unblock by other therapies; more than 2,000 research papers
were written about the compound's possible applications.

At Harvard University in the early 1960s, the psychologists Timothy Leary
and Richard Alpert set out to show that it could be used as a path to
spiritual enlightenment, a catalyst to religious experience, a tool for
accessing the divine; they preached their gospel all over America. As time
went by, they seemed less and less like scientists, and progressively more
like visionaries; Leary came on like a hippie, a guru, a slightly creepy uncle
to the teenage students he was seeking to "turn on". By 1966, just as LSD
was becoming established as the ultimate recreational drug, the US
government lost patience with the mystical bullet, and banned it.

From that moment, it took off as symbol of the enlightenment that cops,
governments and teachers didn't want you to experience. It was a holy
drug that wasn't allowed near your tongue, no matter how much you
craved communion with the cosmos. Instead of rebelling (that would come
later) the counter-culture embraced the whole idea of LSD, and celebrated
its effects in music, art, film, books, clothing, dance routines and in the
floaty patterns of light-shows on walls.

Becoming stoned, murmuring "Wow, the colours, man..." while weaving
across a roomful of acidheads listening to Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of
Dawn ? that was the UK version of psychedelia, the diluted legacy of Albert
Hoffman's great discovery. Not that he regretted its chequered history. His
book about the drug that turned the world inside out was titled LSD: My
Problem Child.

The acid effect: LSD's influence on...

Movies

The definitive acid movie is The Trip, scripted by none other than Jack
Nicholson, directed by Roger Corman and starring Easy Rider duo Peter
Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Because it's wholly in favour of the acid
experience (ad-man Fonda drops a tab and suffers nothing more than a
swirly, psychedelic hallucination on the beach), it was refused a certificate
by the censors. The LSD binge in Easy Rider, in which the boys celebrate
their arrival in New Orleans by tripping with two hookers, features some
v?rit? footage of Fonda enduring a real-life acid moment in a graveyard,
wailing about his dead mother. The clash of violence and rock'n'roll, and
the mingled identities of the lead characters in Performance, directed by
Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, is resolved when Mick Jagger and James
Fox get weirded-out together on acid, and seem to enter each other's
heads (shortly before a bullet enters Fox's.) Ten years later, in Altered
States, Ken Russell attacked the enlightening powers of acid when he
portrayed a psychedelically grooved-up William Hurt heading for perdition.
Three decades after The Trip, LSD became a transformative magic spell in
Irvine Welsh's 1998 film The Acid House (where a single tab makes a Hibs
hardnut swap personalities with a yuppie infant) and a terrible means of
torture in Dead Man's Shoes, as Paddy Considine feeds bad-trip acid tablets
to the horrible men who made his brother hang himself.

Music

The combination of flower power and hallucinogenic drugs in Haight-
Ashbury in 1967 was as potent as gunpowder and matches. Rockers who'd
tried the big blotting-paper experience strove to replicate it in performances
that were floaty, spacey, woozy and seemingly without beginning or end.
The result was called acid rock: it was supposed to suggest the album had
been recorded by a band in the grip of LSD, and was to be listened to by
fans similarly stimulated. Lyrics were often minimal, and the sound often
relied on randomly wacky special effects, complemented, during live shows,
by a light show of wiggly patterns playing against a wall.

The Grateful Dead, from San Francisco's Bay Area, were the key US acid
rock band; their leader, Jerry Garcia, a portly figure with a prodigious
beard, could spin out the solo on "Dark Star" for 25 minutes. Jefferson
Airplane also hailed from San Francisco and defined acid rock in 1967 with
their album, Surrealistic Pillow. It featured "White Rabbit," which sneakily
refers to the apparent drug consumption in Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland and ends on the line: "Remember what the Dormouse said:
Feed your head, Feed your head." Elsewhere The Doors drew their name
from Aldous Huxley's book, and their leader Jim Morrison sang "The End"
and "Riders on the Storm" in a blurry, reflective drone, like one intensely
drugged.

In the UK, 1967 was the year of The Beatles' masterpiece, Sergeant
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, whose early highlight was an
hallucinogenic vision of tangerine trees and marmalade skies called "Lucy in
the Sky with Diamonds". The capitalised letters seemed a dead giveaway,
but Paul McCartney always denied it was a song about LSD. He later
revealed that he'd tried the hallucinogenic, and is thought to be the person
who first introduced it to Bob Dylan. The pre-eminent UK acid band was
Pink Floyd in the days of Syd Barrett and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Their song titles took their cue from space travel ? "Astronomy Domine",
"Interstellar Overdrive" ? as did the Rolling Stones in their single burst of
psychedelia, "2000 Light Years From Home".

Literature

Because of the fundamental difficulty (pace Aldous Huxley) of evoking an
acid trip in any meaningful way, the literature of LSD is limited. Heroin,
cocaine, marijuana and alcohol may inform The Man with the Golden Arm,
Bright Lights, Big City, Junky and The Lost Weekend, but the acid trip has
proved elusive to prose. Perhaps the most notable literary "trip" was indeed
a genuine trip: the journey taken by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in
1964 in a psychedelically painted school bus called "Further". The
pranksters included Neal Cassady, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, Stewart Brand,
Carolyn Adams (the wife of Jerry Garcia) and two proto-hippies called Wavy
Gravy and The Cadaverous Cowboy. They rolled east to New York, giving
out tabs of acid to strangers, and were immortalised in Tom Wolfe's The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It was that kinda time ? when, in the words of
William Burroughs, "a tiny psychoactive molecule affected almost every
aspect of Western life".

Design

Swirling shapes, paisley patterns, surreally "fat" lettering, howlingly
discordant but vivid colours and lots of strobe effects were the characteristic
of acid art. The acid genre hardly lasted long enough to establish a niche in
art history, but it enjoyed a considerable vogue in the world of posters.
Between 1967 and 1972, there was hardly a "progressive" rock-gig poster
that did not feature distorted lettering and swirly colours. Much of it was the
work of Karl Ferris, a Hastings-born photographer who worked on the
Psychedelic Happening shows of the mid-1960s, and, through them, met
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Graham Nash, Eric Clapton, T Rex and Pink
Floyd. He brought his fish-eye lens and infrared colour film to several classic
LP covers, including the US versions of Hendrix's three albums, Donovan's A
Gift from a Flower to a Garden and The Hollies' Evolution.

Elsewhere, the market was dominated by Hipgnosis, a British art design
group made up of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, who were
responsible for the freaky early covers of Pink Floyd and Genesis. Other
artists influenced by psychedelia include Victor Moscoso and Alan Aldridge.




From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 14:02:42 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 14:02:42 +0200
Subject: [THS] !! The Challenge Of Modern Slavery
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509140235.0462f528@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19879.htm

The Challenge Of Modern Slavery

By Loretta Napoleoni

07/05/08 "ICH" -- - Slavery is in our refrigerators. From fruit to beef, from
sugar to coffee, slave labor brings food to our tables. ?Miguel,? a Mexican
slave freed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a US human-rights
organization, may have harvested the apples we eat at breakfast. Miguel
picked fruit under guard in the United States. He had traveled to el norte to
earn the money to pay for treatment for his six-year-old son who has
cancer; instead, his employer enslaved him.

The cocoa we drink while reading the newspaper or watching the morning
news shows may come from the Ivory Coast, which supplies half the world
market. Children and adolescents from even poorer neighboring countries,
such as Mali, trek all the way to the cocoa plantations to earn a subsistence
salary. Often, they end up working as slaves in remote farms. ?Nineteen-
year-old Drissa was one such young man. When he was freed in 2000, he
had just gone through a ?breaking-in? period as his master accustomed him
to enslavement. His back was laced with scars and wounds from being
whipped.?

Almost every product we consume has a hidden dark history, from slave
labor to piracy, from counterfeit to fraud, from theft to money laundering.
We know very little about these economic secrets because modern
consumers live inside the market matrix.

The first thought that comes to mind when we discover that our hot
chocolate comes directly from slave labor suggests that we boycott Ivory
Coast cocoa. But this decision would not help free thousands of young
slaves like Drissa. On the contrary, it could make their lives much worse and
harm honest farmers as well. ?Africa is like a body infested with parasites.
One has to be careful not to kill the body to get rid of the parasites,?
summarized Rico Carish. Millions of people depend for their sustenance on
this parasitic rogue economy. The alternative could impoverish them
further, if it does not put them at risk of death.

Often, western intervention, even when willing and well intentioned,
achieves very little. In the case of many African commodities, Western
companies have no direct contact with farmers. Trade occurs through local
intermediaries, middlemen, and shippers. The profits of slavery are
collected at the farm gate, a practice that effectively incorporates them in
the price of the product. Often the intermediaries do not even know or care
that slave labor is involved in the production of the goods they trade. This
explains why halting imports from the Ivory Coast will not end slavery but
force thousands of honest farmers and their families into poverty. To
eradicate the problem, one must attack the root causes, a task that only
local governments can accomplish. But good governance also proves a rare
commodity on the African continent.

Even more shocking is the discovery that in the twenty-first century, slavery
is booming on a global scale. According to the United Nations, slavery is
growing at an unprecedented rate. Figures put global slavery at 27 million
persons, a generation of modern slaves that, according to the International
Labor Organization, produces yearly profits of around $31 billion. Population
explosion and great migrations coupled with globalization have boosted the
slave trade. ?The increase in slavery is linked to globalization,? concurs
Kevin Bales, author of Ending Slavery: How We Will Free Today?s Slaves.
?But this is not about sweat-shop workers existing on misery wages. Slaves
are under the complete, violent control of another person; they are
economically exploited and get only enough food and shelter to stay alive.
For millions of victims, their experience differs little in hardship from that of
slaves hundreds of years ago.?

Slavery?s resurgence exerts a direct effect on its cost, which has now fallen
for decades. Bates calculated that, while over the past 3,000 years the
average price of a slave has ranged from $20,000 to $80,000 (adjusted to
current dollar value) now people can be bought and sold for a tenth of
these prices. After World War II, we witnessed a sudden surge in the
supply of slave labor, pushing prices down. Ironically, this phenomenon
began as a consequence of decolonization, which shifted slave ownership
from colonizers to countrymen. Today?s slaves are predominantly enslaved
by their national peers and not by foreign powers. Like other commodity
markets, slavery operates by the law of supply and demand, and today
supply proves plentiful among the millions living on a dollar to two dollars a
day.

Consumers remain blissfully ignorant of these facts. The market matrix, a
complex maze of smoke and mirrors, hides the exploitative nature of trade
and commerce. The shelves of Western supermarkets are stacked with
items produced by people in developing countries who earn a miniscule
fraction of their value. Consumers, if they ever chose to think about it,
might be shocked to learn who pockets most of the profits of their daily
grocery shopping.

Loretta Napoleoni: An expert on financing of terrorism, Loretta advises
several governments on counter-terrorism. She is senior partner of G Risk, a
London based risk agency. - She is a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins
University?s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in
Washington DC. and a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics..



From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 14:02:47 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 14:02:47 +0200
Subject: [THS] McCain: We must counter Iran's threat
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509140235.0462f900@spamarrest.com>

Presstitute and war pimp alert::

Israel: Iran could have nukes by '09:

With Iran racing forward with its nuclear program, Israel now believes the
Islamic Republic will master centrifuge technology and be able to begin
enriching uranium on a military scale this year, The Jerusalem Post has
learned.
http://tinyurl.com/56roqo

===

McCain: We must counter Iran's threat:

'Iran obviously is on the path toward acquiring nuclear weapons' - an
allegation that has been refuted by the UN nuclear watchdog and US
intelligence agencies. "At the end of the day we cannot allow Iran to have a
nuclear weapon," he continued.
http://tinyurl.com/5q8xsd

===

Iran nuke power plant 'ready in months':

'The Russians, who are setting up the plant, have said they have all they
need,' he said. 'It is only a matter of time.'
http://tinyurl.com/3jzrmf

===

ElBaradei: 'Good progress' in Iran talks:

"To verify Iran's past and present activities, we have made good progress,"
the UN nuclear watchdog chief said Wednesday in a joint conference with
European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=54679&sectionid=351020104

===

Manufacturing Consent For An Attack On Iran::

Iran seeking to keep Afghanistan unstable:

US official: Iran is seeking to keep Afghanistan weak and unstable,
delivering arms to the Taliban whilst ostensibly supporting Kabul's
government, a senior US state department official said in Paris Tuesday.
http://tinyurl.com/5pvqf2

===

Iran a potential threat in Latin America: US:

Isolated Iran sees Latin America as a place to push back US influence, from
which it could maintain a 'terrorist threat' against the United States in the
event of a conflict, a senior US official warned on Wednesday.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=111392

===



From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 14:02:51 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 14:02:51 +0200
Subject: [THS] U.K. Home Office statement why Cannabis should be reclassified
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509140235.0462fcd8@spamarrest.com>


Home Office statement why Cannabis should be reclassified

7 May 2008

Cannabis should be reclassified

In a statement to Parliament, the Home Secretary said she believed problems
related to cannabis use are serious enough that it should be reclassified
into Class B.

The decision reflects the fact that skunk, a much stronger version of the
drug, now dominates the UK's cannabis market.

Skunk swept other, less potent, forms of cannabis off the market, and now
accounts for 81% of cannabis available on our streets, compared to just 30%
in 2002.

Targeting the young

It's a drug that targets young people. The average age at which users first
try skunk is 13, and young people may 'binge' on skunk in the same way as
alcohol, trying to achieve the maximum effect.

If they do, the independent Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs found
that this can seriously impact their mental health.

If approved by Parliament, reclassification would take effect from early
2009.
Key facts

The change would mean:

* more robust enforcement against cannabis supply and possession - those
repeatedly caught with the drug will not just receive cannabis warnings
* a new strategic and targeted approach to tackling cannabis farms and the
organised criminals who run them
* the introduction of additional aggravating sentencing factors for those
caught supplying cannabis near further and higher educational
establishments, mental health institutions and prisons
* possible changes to legislation and powers used to curtail the sale and
promotion of cannabis paraphernalia

Stronger enforcement of the law

The Home Secretary has asked the Association of Chief Police Officers to
propose stronger enforcement measures for policing cannabis.

These rules should make it clear that penalties for adults must be more
strict, and that officers should not be prevented from arresting people for
breaking the cannabis laws, even if it is their first offence.
Home Secretary's statement

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said, 'Cannabis is and always has been illegal.
It now dominates the illegal drugs market in the UK and is stronger than
ever before.

'There is accumulating evidence, reflected in the Advisory Council on the
Misuse of Drugs report (new window), showing that the use of stronger
cannabis may increase the harm to mental health.

'I make no apology for erring on the side of caution and upgrading its
classification. There is a compelling case to act now rather than risk the
health of future generations.

?The enforcement response must reflect the danger that the drug poses to
individuals, and, in turn, to communities. Those who are repeatedly caught
with cannabis must face tough punishment, and that is why I have asked the
Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to propose more robust
enforcement measures to reflect re-classification.

'It is also important that the organised criminals behind the growing threat
of cannabis farms feel the full force of the law, and that we use every
opportunity and means to disrupt their activities so that the UK becomes a
high risk place for them to operate.

'I also want to see more action against the trade in cannabis paraphernalia
and will work with ACPO to look at how existing legislation and powers can
be used by the police, local authorities and other partners to curtail the
sale and promotion of these items.'
Protecting young people

Health Secretary Alan Johnson said, 'We are determined to ensure that young
people in particular are well aware of all the risks. Our multi-media
'FRANK' campaign (new window) will ensure that this is the case.'

Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families Ed Balls said,
'Cannabis use by young people has been falling over recent years but remains
a persistent problem.

'The reclassification sends the right message to young people about the
risks from cannabis use ? this is especially important given its increased
strength and the heightened risk to young people.'

Source:
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news/cannabis-reclassified



From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 14:02:52 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 14:02:52 +0200
Subject: [THS] ACLU: At last: Top-down torture testimony
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509140235.041c4ac0@spamarrest.com>

Subject: At last: Top-down torture testimony
Organization: ACLU 

*************************************************
From the Desk of Caroline Fredrickson
Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office 

Send your questions about the U.S. government 
and torture to Judiciary Committee members:
http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=B-ZiEPVUdJXSZ0NG-zj25g..
*************************************************

Dear ACLU Supporter,

Thanks to you, we took a major step forward yesterday in our
efforts to hold the Bush torture team accountable. We've been
vocal in our demands urging Congress to act -- and we're finally
getting results.

John Yoo, author of the infamous Bush "torture memo," and 
former Attorney General John Ashcroft both agreed to testify at 
an upcoming hearing. And in a bold "we mean business" move,
at a packed, standing-room only hearing, a House Judiciary
subcommittee gave Judiciary Chairman John Conyers the power 
to issue a subpoena to David Addington, Vice President Cheney's 
Chief of Staff. 

Now, just hours ago, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers used
that authority and issued Mr. Addington a subpoena, compelling
him to testify on June 26, at 10am.

These events are important steps to get at the truth, but tough
questions must be asked of Bush administration officials. Let Congress
know which questions you want answered when the Bush torture team
finally appears. Go to:

http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=Wz7pcNhfwzkALn4Q6yWerA..

Investigations into high-ranking administration involvement in
waterboarding and other forms of torture should have happened years
ago.

But now, in the face of revelations that the highest officials in the 
Bush White House reviewed and approved specific CIA torture 
techniques for specific detainees, there is no way that Congress 
can avoid acting.

Our task now is to make sure this critical hearing featuring 
top-ranking members of the Bush torture team takes place. And 
we have to make sure that the toughest, most essential questions 
are asked and answered.

Help get at the truth about torture. Submit your questions now:
http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=h3IOceYhnAn4WKLhwws4Rg..

Torture is un-American and it's a federal crime. No matter how 
long it takes, we're going to get to the bottom of who 
authorized it, condoned it, and let it happen in our name.

Sincerely,

Caroline Fredrickson, Director
ACLU Washington Legislative Office

? ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10004



From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 14:42:58 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 14:42:58 +0200
Subject: [THS] Melting glaciers release toxic chemical cocktail
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509144039.0402fb60@spamarrest.com>

http://environment.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn13848&print=true

Melting glaciers release toxic chemical cocktail


Decades after most countries stopped spraying DDT, frozen stores of the
insecticide are now trickling out of melting Antarctic glaciers. The change
means Ad?lie penguins have recently been exposed to the chemical,
according to a new study.

The trace levels found will not harm the birds, but the presence of the
chemical could be an indication that other frozen pollutants will be released
because of climate change, says Heidi Geisz, a marine biologist at Virginia
Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester in the US. She led a team that
sampled DDT levels in the penguins.

She worries that glaciers could release an alphabet soup of chemical
pollutants into the ocean, including PCBs and PBDEs ? industrial chemicals
that have been linked to health problems in humans.

"DDT is not the only chemical that these birds are ingesting and it is
certainly not the worst," Geisz says.

Trickle-down pollution

Chemists first synthesised DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) in 1874,
but the chemical wasn't used an insecticide until the 1940s. DDT spraying
slashed malaria rates in many countries, but the chemical's environmental
toll was starting to cause concern.

Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, brought these concerns to the
general public, and described, amongst other things, how birds of prey
exposed to high levels of DDT lay thin, easily cracked eggs.

In 1972, the US banned the pesticide, and the UK followed suit in 1984.
Some countries still use DDT to fight mosquito-borne diseases such as
malaria and dengue, but worldwide usage has plummeted ? from 40,000
tonnes per year in 1980 to 1,000 tonnes per year now.

DDT latches onto small airborne particles then migrates toward the poles.
Geisz, who has worked in Antarctica since 1999, sought to gauge long-term
changes in pollutants found in the continent's seabirds.

Fresh source

A 1964 survey found modest amounts of the pesticide in Ad?lie penguins,
and Geisz's team expected to see even less four decades later. Instead, her
team found DDT levels unchanged in birds that live near the continent's
western peninsula.

As DDT crawls up the food chain, from plankton to krill to penguins, it
breaks down into a sister molecule called DDE. The more DDE in an animal,
the longer the chemical has been around, Geisz says. But her team
recorded low levels of DDE in the birds, suggesting a fresh source.

Geisz couldn't figure out where the DDT came from until she looked back at
glacial records. In the 1950s and 60s, Antarctic glaciers swelled, potentially
locking in chemicals like DDT.

However, average winter temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have
warmed 6 ?C the past 30 years, and glaciers now melt faster than they
grow. A recent study noted elevated levels of DDT in glacial runoff.

As the continent's western ice sheet melts, the DDT drips back into the
ecosystem at a rate of 1 to 4 kg per year, her team estimates.

Arctic decline

Derek Muir, a researcher at Environment Canada in Burlington, Ontario,
says Arctic glaciers ought to store even more of the pesticide, but Arctic
animals seem to be shedding the pesticide.

"The declines in DDT in seals and seabirds in the Canadian Arctic and in
polar bears in eastern Greenland suggest it is not having a large impact,"
he says.

Even so, researchers ought to look more closely for evidence that melting
glaciers are pumping chemicals like DDT into the Arctic, Muir says.

To make that case stronger for Antarctica, Geisz plans to track the flow of
other pollutants from glaciers to birds.

Journal reference: Environmental Science & Technology (DOI:
10.1021/es702919n)

Climate Change ? Want to know more about global warming ? the science,
impacts and political debate? Visit our continually updated special report.

Endangered species ? Learn more about the conservation battle in our
comprehensive special report.
Related Articles

    * Rachel Carson: A demure activist
    * http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg19426101.900
    * 30 June 2007
    * Banned insecticide lingers on for years if bugs in the soil are poisoned
    * http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg17723810.700
    * 08 February 2003
    * DDT finally linked to human health problems
    * http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn1012
    * 13 July 2001
    * Experts clash over persistence of pesticide
    * http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg15821333.000
    * 09 May 1998

Weblinks

    * Heidi Geisz, Virginia Institute of Marine Science
    * http://www.vims.edu/bio/students/geisz_hn.html
    * Derek Muir, Environment Canada
    * http://www.nwri.ca/staff/derekmuir-e.html
    * DDT, Wikipedia
    * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT





From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 14:50:50 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 14:50:50 +0200
Subject: [THS] Jimmy Carter: Gaza: A Human Rights Crime
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509144827.040127d8@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19885.htm

A Human Rights Crime

The world must stop standing idle while the people of Gaza are treated with
such cruelty

By Jimmy Carter

08/05/08 "The Guardian" -- - -- -- The world is witnessing a terrible human
rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being
imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world. An entire population
is being brutally punished.

This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated
dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates
representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority
parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and
fair by all international observers.

Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity
government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas
alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who
lived in the West Bank have been imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional
10 who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.

Regardless of one's choice in the partisan struggle between Fatah and
Hamas within occupied Palestine, we must remember that economic
sanctions and restrictions on the supply of water, food, electricity and fuel
are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about
one million of whom are refugees.

Israeli bombs and missiles periodically strike the area, causing high
casualties among both militants and innocent women and children. Prior to
the highly publicised killing of a woman and her four children last week, this
pattern had been illustrated by a report from B'Tselem, the leading Israeli
human rights organisation, which stated that 106 Palestinians were killed
between February 27 and March 3. Fifty-four of them were civilians, and 25
were under 18 years of age.

On a recent trip through the Middle East, I attempted to gain a better
understanding of the crisis. One of my visits was to Sderot, a community of
about 20,000 in southern Israel that is frequently struck by rockets fired
from nearby Gaza. I condemned these attacks as abominable acts of
terrorism, since most of the 13 victims during the past seven years have
been non-combatants.

Subsequently, I met with leaders of Hamas - a delegation from Gaza and
the top officials in Damascus. I made the same condemnation to them, and
urged that they declare a unilateral ceasefire or orchestrate with Israel a
mutual agreement to terminate all military action in and around Gaza for an
extended period.

They responded that such action by them in the past had not been
reciprocated, and they reminded me that Hamas had previously insisted on
a ceasefire throughout Palestine, including Gaza and the West Bank, which
Israel had refused. Hamas then made a public proposal of a mutual
ceasefire restricted to Gaza, which the Israelis also rejected.

There are fervent arguments heard on both sides concerning blame for a
lack of peace in the Holy Land. Israel has occupied and colonised the
Palestinian West Bank, which is approximately a quarter the size of the
nation of Israel as recognised by the international community. Some Israeli
religious factions claim a right to the land on both sides of the Jordan river,
others that their 205 settlements of some 500,000 people are necessary for
"security".

All Arab nations have agreed to recognise Israel fully if it will comply with
key United Nations resolutions. Hamas has agreed to accept any negotiated
peace settlement between the president of the Palestinian Authority,
Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, provided it is
approved in a referendum of the Palestinian people.

This holds promise of progress, but despite the brief fanfare and positive
statements at the peace conference last November in Annapolis, the
process has gone backwards. Nine thousand new Israeli housing units have
been announced in Palestine; the number of roadblocks within the West
Bank has increased; and the stranglehold on Gaza has been tightened.

It is one thing for other leaders to defer to the US in the crucial peace
negotiations, but the world must not stand idle while innocent people are
treated cruelly. It is time for strong voices in Europe, the US, Israel and
elsewhere to speak out and condemn the human rights tragedy that has
befallen the Palestinian people.

? Jimmy Carter, a former president of the United States, is founder of The
Carter Center project-syndicate.org



From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 14:52:29 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 14:52:29 +0200
Subject: [THS] Robert Fisk: Lebanon Descends Into Chaos
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509145131.04010160@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19883.htm

Lebanon Descends Into Chaos

Rival Leaders Order General Strike

By Robert Fisk:

08/05/08 "The Independent" -- - Burning tyres on the airport road, flights
suspended, demands from the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt that Hizbollah
moves secret cameras from runway 1-7 and end the militia's equally secret
underground communications equipment. Across Corniche Mazraa, crowds
of shrieking Sunni and Shia Muslims hurl abuse and stones at each other. A
soldier comes up to my car at the crossroads. "Turn round," he shouts.
"They're shooting."

Lebanon seems to feed on crisis, need crisis, breathe crisis, like a wounded
man needs blood. The man who should be the president is head of the
army and the man who believes he leads the resistance ? Sayed Hassan
Nasrallah of the Hizbollah ? accuses Mr Jumblatt of doing Israel's work while
Mr Jumblatt claims the head of Beirut airport security, Colonel Wafic
Chucair, works for the Hizbollah and should be fired.

Yesterday, in case you hadn't guessed, was a "general strike" by opponents
of the Lebanese government with all the usual chaos. Mr Nasrallah is to
hold a press conference today and then we'll all find out if this latest crisis is
the greatest crisis since the last great crisis. Yes, a good cup of cynicism is
necessary to wash down the rhetoric and threats of the past few days. At its
most serious is the incendiary language in which Lebanon's politicians now
address each other, the kind of menacing words that could easily touch an
assassin's heart.

Indeed, the start of this latest drama might be traced to the murder of two
Phalangist officials in the Bekaa town of Zahle a few weeks ago. The
murderer has been named, is linked to the pro-Syrian opposition and is still
at large.

You could hear gunfire crackling across Beirut all morning. To top it all,
soaring price increases ? even of basic food ? is creating a little revolution in
the hearts of many Lebanese. Yesterday's strike was supposed to be
organised by the General Labour Confederation, which is objecting to the
government's new minimum wage offer of ?171 a month.

The darker side of all this, of course, involves Beirut airport. Mr Jumblatt's
claim that Hizbollah has installed cameras beside one of the runways
appears to be correct. Lebanese army officers have apparently noticed the
cameras which can monitor executive jets taking off and landing. However,
the apparatus may well have been installed because the Hizbollah believes
that runway 1-7 ? which starts a few metres above the Mediterranean ?
could be used for a small seaborne landing by Israeli troops. There is a
persistent rumour in Beirut that the Israelis were about to stage such an
operation against the Hizbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut on 28
April but that it was cancelled for equally mysterious reasons. Was this the
origin of the cameras and of Hizbollah's unpleasant suggestion that Mr
Jumblatt is doing Israel's work?

As usual, it was the sectarian content of the street violence which alarmed
the army ? a good many stones were chucked from high-rise buildings near
the Cola bridge in west Beirut, the exact location of Sunni-Shia fighting in
January last year. Even in the very centre of Beirut, piles of tyres were set
alight, giving the city a sombre curtain of black smoke that drifted out to
sea. So the capital of a country without a president ? and for most of the
time without a sitting parliament ? is set to lose yet more international
confidence.

What is it about Lebanon that creates these crises? Maybe at heart, it is the
same old problem: to be a modern state, Lebanon must abandon
confessionalism ? the system which provides a Maronite for the presidency,
a Sunni for the prime minister's seat, a Shia for the speaker of parliament,
and so on. But if Lebanon abandoned confessionalism, it would no longer
be Lebanon, because sectarianism is its identity; a fate which its children do
not deserve but whose country was created by French masters on the ruins
of the Ottoman empire. Ironically, the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad
Siniora now rules ? or tries to rule ? his nation from a building which was
once the Beirut cavalry stables of the Ottoman army.




From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 14:56:23 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 14:56:23 +0200
Subject: [THS] Neocons and the Truth: Bitter Enemies to the End
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509145407.0402fdf0@spamarrest.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19886.htm

Neocons and the Truth: Bitter Enemies to the End

By Glenn Greenwald

08/05/08 "Salon.com" -- - In a July, 2006 article in Rolling Stone ? entitled
?Iran: The Next War? ? the superb journalist James Bamford detailed the
shady activities of numerous neoconservatives inside and out of the U.S.
Government to plan an attack on Iran. Bamford focused on the role played
by Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute and National
Review, who created and began implementing an attack scheme in
coordination with the Pentagon?s then number-three official, Doug Feith,
and Feith?s deputy, Larry Franklin (subsequently convicted of felonies for
passing classified information to AIPAC).

A couple weeks after Bamford?s expos? was published, National Review
enlisted former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy and talk show host
Mark Levin jointly to author a defense of Ledeen and, more importantly, to
savage Bamford for writing what they claimed was a pack of lies. The
McCarthy/Levin article was entitled ?Rolling Smear,? sub-headlined ?James
Bamford writes a fiction about our Michael Ledeen,? and accused Bamford
of being ?the latest in a growing crowd of hacks to smear our friend Michael
Ledeen.?

McCarthy and Levin specifically attacked Bamford?s disclosure that Ledeen
?had arranged a covert meeting in Rome with a group of Iranians [and
Feith?s team] to discuss their clandestine help? in attacking Iran. Said
McCarthy and Levin:

    Bamford, to the contrary, wants to turn the meeting into a nefarious plot
by Ledeen and the neocons to push the nation into war with Iran. Yet,
anyone even vaguely familiar with Michael?s work knows that he has
opposed military action against Iran ? notwithstanding that he was years
ahead of most experts in accurately portraying Iran?s role as the terror
master at the center of the jihadist network.

So Bamford?s claim was ?embarrassing? because ?anyone even vaguely
familiar with Michael?s work knows that he has opposed military action
against Iran.? Got that?

Here?s Ledeen yesterday, writing in National Review?s Corner (h/t sysporg):

    Time to Attack Iranian Terror Camps? [Michael Ledeen]

    So says John Bolton, and he?s right. As you know, I have been proposing
this for years. I always thought it was only a matter of time before we were
compelled to take this action, which is a legitimate form of self-defense. And
while we?re at it, we should do the same thing to the Syrian camps as well.
It isn?t ?sending a message,? it?s acting to protect our guys by fighting back
in the proxy war the mullahs have been waging since 1979. Faster, please?


More amazingly, a mere two weeks before McCarthy and Levin wrote that
?anyone even vaguely familiar with Michael?s work knows that he has
opposed military action against Iran,? Ledeen himself wrote at The Corner
that ?I would insist that my soldiers have the right of ?hot pursuit? into Iran
and Syria, and I would order my armed forces to attack the terrorist
training camps in those countries.?

In late 2006, I wrote about virtually identical deceit from this same group,
that time with regard to Iraq. On National Review in December of 2006,
Ledeen ? just as the Beltway establishment was finally turning against the
war in Iraq and in the wake of a lengthy Vanity Fair article identifying the
neocons who were to blame ? claimed: ?I opposed the military invasion of
Iraq before it took place.?

In fact, Ledeen, throughout 2002 and 2003, had repeatedly and explicitly
urged the invasion of Iraq in countless venues, including: The Wall St.
Journal?s Op-Ed Page (?If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as
liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support?); in an interview
with David Horowitz?s Front Page (?Question #2: Okay, well if we are all so
certain about the dire need to invade Iraq, then when do we do so?
Ledeen: Yesterday.?); on MSNBC?s Hardball with Chris Matthews (?if
President Bush is to be faulted for anything in this so far, it?s that he?s taken
much too long to get on with it, much too long?); and in National Review
(calling for ?the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam
Hussein and the rest of the terror masters?).

That war-cheerleading neoconservatives of this strain are completely
unbound by the truth is not news. Obviously, the war they unleashed in
Iraq is the most compelling proof of that. But sometimes when the lying is
so blatant, one can?t help but note it.

The same is true for the complete lack of accountability. Ledeen is a so-
called ?Freedom Scholar? at the revered and widely-cited American
Enterprise Institute and a Contributing Editor at National Review. An intense
email campaign over his Iraq comments to AEI and National Review?s Editor
Rich Lowry demanding a retraction or some comment from them on
Ledeen?s blatant falsehoods over his Iraq stance was simply ignored, as will
be this episode concerning the article by McCarthy and Levin smearing
Bamford due to Ledeen?s alleged opposition to attacking Iran.

This isn?t just a matter of documenting guilt with regard to what happened
with Iraq. The Washington Post?s David Ignatius today became just the
latest establishment spokesman to warn (or celebrate) that ?judging from
recent statements by administration officials, there is also a small, but
growing, chance of conflict with Iran.?

The neoconservative war-lovers behind this effort have not changed, nor
have their tactics. They realize, as many of them acknowledge, that they
will have four more years in power if John McCain is elected. But they also
realize that he may not be, and that their last hope for their long-desired
attack on Iran lies in convincing the current administration to provoke one
before its tenure ends. As much as one wishes it weren?t true, as much as
the fixation on petty election issues might obscure it, the truly depraved
extremist group that brought us the invasion of Iraq still exerts substantial
influence and is quite busy trying to exert it.

UPDATE: It isn?t just the American neocons, but also the Israelis, who are
escalating the ?Attack Iran? campaign. The Jerusalem Post yesterday
?reported? that ?with Iran racing forward with its nuclear program, Israel
now believes the Islamic Republic will master centrifuge technology and be
able to begin enriching uranium on a military scale this year? (h/t quick
strategy) and:

    The new assessment moves up Israel?s forecasts on Teheran?s nuclear
program by almost a full year ? from 2009 to the end of 2008. According to
the new timeline, Iran could have a nuclear weapon by the middle of next
year.

According to several commenters, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. was
on Fox News this morning making the same fear-mongering claim.

The principal tactic Israel-centric neocons have repeatedly used with Bush
to induce him to attack Iran has been to tell him that history will judge him
based on whether he permits Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. From The
Weekly Standard?s Irwin Stelzer, writing about a 2007 White House
luncheon with Bush, historian Andrew Roberts, and a group of necons:

    The closing note was a more serious one. Roberts said that history would
judge the president on whether he had prevented the nuclearization of the
Middle East. If Iran gets the bomb, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other
countries will follow. ?That is why I am so pleased to be sitting here rather
than in your chair, Mr. President.? There was no response, other than a
serious frown and a nod.

Norman Podhoretz, when telling the President to bomb Iran, used the same
tactic:

    ?I urged Bush to take action against the Iranian nuclear facilities and
explained why I thought there was no alternative,? said Podhoretz, 77, in
an interview with The Sunday Times. . . .

    He also told Bush: ?You have the awesome responsibility to prevent
another holocaust. You?re the only one with the guts to do it.? . . . .
    ?The president has said several times that he will be in the historical dock
if he allows Iran to get the bomb. He believes that if we wait for threats to
fully materialise, we?ll have waited too long ? something I agree with
100%,? Podhoretz said.

And now, magically up pops these new reports from Israel warning that the
deadline to stop Iran?s nuclear bomb is the end of the year ? right before
George Bush leaves office. Bush has less than eight months left to fulfill his
history-mandated mission ?to prevent another holocaust? by attacking Iran,
or else ?be in the historical dock if he allows Iran to get the bomb.? They?re
as transparent as they are dishonest and bloodthirsty.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator
in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book ?How
Would a Patriot Act?,? a critique of the Bush administration?s use of
executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, ?A Tragic Legacy?,
examines the Bush legacy.

? Salon.com




From vignes at wanadoo.fr  Fri May  9 15:20:45 2008
From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster)
Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 15:20:45 +0200
Subject: [THS] White House Role in Sanctioning Torture
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20080509151903.04030080@spamarrest.com>

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/8/torture_team_british_attorney_phil
ippe_sands

?Torture Team?: British Attorney 
Philippe Sands on the White House Role in Sanctioning Torture

The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to hold a series of hearings
examining the Bush administration?s role in authorizing the illegal torture of
prisoners in US custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere. We speak to British
attorney and author, Philippe Sands, author of the new book Torture Team:
Rumsfeld?s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. On Tuesday, Sands
testified before the House Judiciary Sub-Committee on the Constitution, Civil
Rights and Civil Liberties. [includes rush transcript]

[video and audio at url above]

Guest:

Philippe Sands, British attorney and professor at University College London.
He is the author of the new book Torture Team: Rumsfeld?s Memo and the
Betrayal of American Values. His last book was Lawless World: America and
the Making and Breaking of Global Rules.

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    * The Green Light: Attorney Philippe Sands Follows the Bush
Administration Torture Trail (4/3/2008)

AMY GOODMAN: The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to hold a
series of hearings examining the Bush administration?s role in authorizing
the illegal torture of prisoners in US custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
On Tuesday, Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers subpoenaed Vice
President Dick Cheney?s chief of staff, David Addington, to testify at a
hearing scheduled for June 26th.

Three other former Bush administration officials have already agreed to
testify: former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Justice Department
attorney John Yoo and former Pentagon official Douglas Feith. Over the
past month, more evidence has emerged tying high-ranking Bush
administration officials to the use of torture.

In April, ABC News reported Vice President Cheney, former National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney
General John Ashcroft all discussed and approved how top al-Qaeda
suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.

President Bush has also confirmed he was aware of these meetings. In an
interview with ABC News, Bush said, ?We started to connect the dots, in
order to protect the American people. And yes, I?m aware our national
security team met on this issue. And I approved.?

Today, we?re joined by British attorney and author, Philippe Sands. He is
the author of the new book Torture Team: Rumsfeld?s Memo and the
Betrayal of American Values. On Tuesday, Philippe Sands testified before
the House Judiciary Sub-Committee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and
Civil Liberties.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

PHILIPPE SANDS: It?s great to be back, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It?s good to have you with us. Talk about the Conyers
subpoena of Vice President Dick Cheney?s chief of staff, David Addington.

PHILIPPE SANDS: Sure. Well, if you remember, we talked about a month
ago, after a piece I had written for Vanity Fair came out. That piece, I?m
told by Congressman Conyers, catalyzed his committee into focusing on the
role of the lawyers, and they began the process of setting up hearings.
Yesterday was the first hearing. They?ve issued letters of invitation to all of
the lawyers that I?ve written about and several other individuals. All, I
understand, have agreed to come voluntarily, with one exception, and
that?s Mr. Addington, who was the Vice President?s lawyer at the time, now
his chief of staff. He has indicated, however, in a letter of the 1st of May,
that if subpoenaed, he would attend, and it is likely that he will now attend
next month.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did you raise in your testimony before the
congression