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What the U.S. Elite Really Thinks About Israel | Sabbah Report | http://ow.ly/JYox 21:40:28

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3 December 2009

In his December 1 speech at West Point announcing the deployment of 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama attempted to justify a major escalation of a deeply unpopular war on the basis of lies and distortions. That he had to resort to such falsifications reflects both the reactionary character of his policy and the fact that it is being imposed in violation of the popular will.

To justify the escalation, Obama recycled the Bush administration’s myths about the “war on terror.” He cynically presented the US as an altruistic power, forced into a global war for democracy by the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

As he sought to frame US imperialist policy within the template of the “war on terror,” however, his speech descended into utter incoherence.

Obama’s account of the US’ recent wars contradicted his own assertion that Washington was single-mindedly pursuing Al Qaeda. In 2001, he said, the US attacked Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda—though most of the September 11 hijackers were, in fact, from Saudi Arabia, the US’ major Arab ally in the Middle East.

The US invasion was legitimate, he argued, because Afghanistan was Al Qaeda’s base of operations and the Taliban regime harbored and protected the terrorist group.

Obama brushed over the failure of the US invasion to dismantle Al Qaeda by saying that “after escaping across the border into Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, Al Qaeda’s leadership established a safe haven there.”

Thus, from 2002 to 2009, the US pursued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan supposedly directed against Al Qaeda, while the latter was based in another country altogether—Pakistan, a long-standing US ally.

Obama even suggested that Al Qaeda enjoys the protection of sections of the Pakistani state, declaring, “[T]here have been those in Pakistan who have argued that the struggle against extremism is not their fight, and that Pakistan is better off doing little, or seeking accommodation with those who use violence.”

This account raises an obvious and unexplained double standard. If the security of the American people required the US to invade Afghanistan and remove an Al Qaeda-friendly regime there, why shouldn’t the same apply to the government of Pakistan?

Instead, Obama hailed Pakistan as an ally in the struggle against “violent extremism” and called for a US-Pakistan partnership based on “mutual trust.”

This only demonstrates the fraudulent character of the official rationale for the war, which Obama and the rest of the US political establishment know to be a tissue of lies.

Then there is the question of the Afghan government in whose defense the US is supposedly waging war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. While initially praising the regime of President Hamid Karzai as a “legitimate government,” Obama went on to acknowledge that it suffers from “corruption, the drug trade, an underdeveloped economy, and insufficient security forces.”

In a display of utter cynicism, he claimed that Karzai’s recent reelection, universally recognized as the outcome of fraud and ballot-stuffing, had nevertheless produced a legitimate government. “Although it was marred by fraud,” Obama said, “that election produced a government that is consistent with Afghanistan’s laws and Constitution.”

Obama’s attempts to give noble-sounding reasons for deploying 30,000 more US troops were as sinister as they were self-contradictory. In Orwellian style, he told the Afghan people, who have already suffered US occupation for eight years, “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

He contrasted the US’ allegedly benevolent attitude towards Afghanistan with the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979-1989. In fact, the US has manipulated Afghan politics for 30 years.

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Jeff Gates
Criminal State
Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:55 EDT

© Nathan Paresh

The lead-up to the first U.S.-Iran talks in three decades saw a replay of the same modus operandi that induced the U.S. and its allies to invade Iraq in March 2003. Then as now, the invasion of Iran is consistent with a regime change agenda for Greater Israel described in a 1996 strategy document prepared by Jewish-Americans for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
As with Iraq, the threat of weapons of mass destruction is again marketed as a causa belli. As with Iraq, the claim is disputed by weapons inspectors and intelligence analysts. The Iraqi program had been shut down a dozen years before the invasion. In Iran, there is no evidence that uranium is being enriched beyond the low levels required for energy and medical purposes.
Reports of a “secret” processing plant failed to note that Iran suspended uranium enrichment from 2003 until 2005. Seeing no change in the political climate except more sanctions and more Israeli threats to bomb its nuclear sites, Iran began building and equipping a new facility.
As with Iraq, there is no direct threat to the U.S. As with Iraq, mainstream U.S. media focused not on Israel – the only nation in the region known to have nuclear weapons – but on Iran. Enrichment is relatively easy compared to the steps required to design, build and reliably deliver a nuclear warhead. Activity around each of those steps can be readily detected.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged that even if Iran were attacked, that does nothing to alter Iran’s nuclear prospects – except provoke them to develop the very weapons that the evidence suggests are not now being produced. Is this a calculated move to exert pressure on Tehran? Or to provoke them? Or is this a move by Washington to buy time from an “ally” that threatens an attack – with disastrous effects on U.S. interests and those of its genuine allies?
To catalyze a climate of insecurity among Jews, pro-Israelis periodically claim that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proposes to “wipe Israel off the map.” A correct translation confirms that what he urged is that “this occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time.” Akin to the widely sought demise of the oppressive Soviet regime, that proposal enjoys the support of many moderate, secular and non-Zionist Jews who have long recognized the threat that Jewish extremists pose to the broader Jewish community.
No one can explain why Iran, even if nuclear armed, would attack Israel with its vast nuclear arsenal estimated at 200-400 warheads, including several nuclear-armed submarines. In mid-July, Israeli warships deployed to the Red Sea to rehearse attacks on Iran. As in the lead-up to war with Iraq, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is again beating the war drums. This is the same adviser who, four days after 9-11, advised G.W. Bush to invade Iraq.
Citing Iran’s “covert” facility, Wolfowitz claims it is “clear that Iran’s rulers are pursuing nuclear weapons….Time is running out.” Without a hint of irony, he argues that Iran (not Israel) “is a crucial test of whether the path to a nuclear-free world is a realistic one or simply a dangerous pipe dream.” In calling for “crippling sanctions,” Howard Berman, Jewish chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, expressed similar concerns as did Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, senior Republican on the Committee and also Jewish.
If pro-Israelis cannot induce a war with Iran, the ensuing stability will enable people to identify who fixed the intelligence that deceived the U.S. to invade Iraq. Only one nation possesses the means, motive, opportunity and stable nation state intelligence to mount a covert operation over the lengthy period required to pre-stage, staff, orchestrate and successfully cover-up such an act.
The evidence points to the same network of government insiders and media proponents now hyping Iran. Who benefitted from war with Iraq? Who benefits from war with Iran? Not the U.S. or its allies unless, despite the evidence, Israel is viewed as an ally – rather than an enemy within.
Can the U.S. Muster a Breakthrough Strategy?
Like Afghanistan, Iran does not have a military solution. Nor does Iraq. Geopolitically, the greatest casualty of war in the region was the United States – its credibility tattered, its military overextended and its finances devastated by a debt-financed war that Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz projects could reach $3,000 billion. Compare that with the speedy exit and a $50 billion outlay that Wolfowitz assured policy-makers could be recovered from sales of Iraqi oil.
Those who induced that invasion persuaded Americans to commit economic and geopolitical hari-kari. No external force could have defeated the sole remaining super power. Instead the U.S. was deceived – by a purported ally – to defeat itself by an ill-advised reaction to the provocation of a mass murder on U.S. soil.
The only sensible and sustainable solution is one that serves unmet needs in the region while also restoring the credibility of the U.S. as a proponent of informed choice and free enterprise. While making transparent the common source of the deceit that induced the U.S. to war, policy-makers can also lay the foundation to preclude such duplicity in the future. That requires consultation among the U.S., its true allies and those nations in the region most affected by this treachery.
Only a design solution can counter today’s systemic sources of conflict, including the extremism fueled by extremes in education, opportunity, wealth and income. As with the fixed intelligence that induced the U.S. to war in Iraq, those sources of conflict are obscured by a compliant and complicit media with an undisclosed pro-Israeli bias.
A transnational network of think tanks could expose in real time how facts are displaced by what “the mark” can be deceived to believe. With the media dominance of pro-Israelis in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany and other Western allies, that task must include the capacity to show how this deceit operates in plain sight yet, to date, with impunity. Absent such transparency, systems of governance reliant on informed consent will continue to be manipulated to their detriment by those who hide behind the very freedoms that such systems are meant to protect.
Running parallel with that transparency initiative must be an education program that deploys the best available technology to close the gaps in learning that sustain extremes in opportunity. Only a truly international effort can succeed in that essential task. Only trans-cultural education can preempt the mental manipulation that induced war in Iraq and now pursues war with Iran as proponents of The Clash of Civilizations gradually transform that concept into a reality.
What we now see emerging is yet another example of how wars are induced in the Information Age. Why would anyone expect modern warfare to be waged in any other way? As the common source of this duplicity becomes transparent, the solution will become apparent.
Lasting peace requires a Marshall Plan able to accelerate the transition to the Knowledge Society. This systemic challenge cannot be addressed absent a systemic strategy. The restoration of friendly and cooperative relations must include the practical steps required to heal this widening divide with education at the core.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/196830-Will-Israel-Ensure-that-History-Repeats-Itself-

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Global Research, October 12, 2009

Mickey Huff, Webster Tarpley, Danny Schechter, Gail Davidson, Katherine Hughes on The Global Research News Hour

- 2009-10-16

Special Donation Drive for Victims of Typhoon Ketsana

Please support the relief efforts

- 2009-10-15

Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth

- by Michel Chossudovsky – 2009-10-11

When fiction becomes truth and truth becomes fiction. When a global military agenda is heralded as a humanitarian endeavor.

Taliban influence in N Afghanistan to cripple NATO mission

- by Abdul Haleem – 2009-10-11

If we want Policy instead of Speeches

Vers La Verité Speech in Paris

- by Cynthia McKinney – 2009-10-11

Obama’s Prize Named For The Inventor of Dynamite

Will It Encourage Him To Become More “Transformational” Or Not?

- by Danny Schechter – 2009-10-11

Get Off Obama’s Back: Second Thoughts From Michael Moore

- by Michael Moore – 2009-10-11

Britain to train Pakistan’s Frontier Corps troops in Baluchistan

- by Jeremy Page – 2009-10-11

Afghanistan: Top Troop Request Exceeds 60,000

Commander Prefers 40,000 for Afghanistan, but His Report Gives Obama 3 Options

- by Peter Spiegel, Yochi Dreazen – 2009-10-11

U.S. ‘Personality Assassination’ of a Palestinian Ally

- by Nicola Nasser – 2009-10-10

US Economy: More Unemployment. Slowdown in the Pace of Job Losses

- by Bob Chapman – 2009-10-10

British Prime Minister: Afghan army training to be centre of NATO efforts

- 2009-10-10

After Nobel nod, Obama convenes Afghan war council

- by Stephen Collinson – 2009-10-10

Lawsuit to Attempt to Stop Swine Flu Vaccinations

- by Richard C. Cook – 2009-10-10

Massive expansions of US-NATO “counterinsurgency” in Afghanistan

McChrystal demands bloodshed

- by Larry Chin – 2009-10-09

US, Georgia to hold security talks

- 2009-10-09

VIDEO: “NATO’s attack on Serbia the ultimate crime against peace”

- 2009-10-09

US lawmakers pass 680-billion-dollar defense budget bill

- 2009-10-09

U.S. to establish effective missile defense system in Europe

- 2009-10-09

Sweatshop Conditions in US Cities

- by Stephen Lendman – 2009-10-09

Top U.S. commander in Afghanistan wants 40,000 more troops as minimum

- 2009-10-09

VIDEO: Torture accusations against the Bush Administration

- 2009-10-09

Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?

- by David Ray Griffin – 2009-10-09

US completing massive ‘bunker buster’ bomb

To be used against Iran?

- 2009-10-08

Collapse of the Greenback? Will the Dollar get an “Arab Oil Shock”?

- by F. William Engdahl – 2009-10-08

Obama’s Test: Democracy or Chaos in Latin America

- by Ramzy Baroud – 2009-10-08

Georgia to enter NATO?

- 2009-10-08

Greater Albania: Threat of A New US-NATO sponsored Conflict In Europe

- by Rick Rozoff – 2009-10-08

The Public Relations Machine for the Vaccine Complex

the role of the CDC

- by Richard Gale, Gary Null – 2009-10-08

Justice For Iraq

Legal Case Filed Against Four US Presidents And Four UK Prime Ministers For War Crimes

- by The Brussells Tribunal – 2009-10-08

A Media Failure Compounds The Financial Failure

The Press Is Still Missing The Story Of Fraud and Economic Decline Ahead

- by Danny Schechter – 2009-10-08

Obama’s Regulation of Credit Default Swaps

- by Washington’s Blog – 2009-10-08

Failed Economic Policies and Rising Unemployment in the United States of America

- by Bob Chapman – 2009-10-08

Big Brother FBI

Data-Mining Programs Resurrect "Total Information Awareness"

- by Tom Burghardt – 2009-10-08

Debt Moratorium in Iceland

- by Webster G. Tarpley – 2009-10-08

U.S to deploy Patriot missiles in Poland

- 2009-10-08

The Gaza War’s Effect on Women

- by Stephen Lendman – 2009-10-07

How the Feds Imprison the Innocent

- by Paul Craig Roberts – 2009-10-06

Humanitarian Disaster in the Philippines. In the Cruel Aftermath of Tropical Storm Ketsana

- by Michel Chossudovsky – 2009-10-06

Restoring a Viable System of Bank Credit

Bernanke Rolls Snake-eyes

- by Mike Whitney – 2009-10-06

The Permanent Destruction of Jobs in America

- by Washington’s Blog – 2009-10-06

Obama Efforts to Placate Right Wing Backfire

- by Sherwood Ross – 2009-10-06

Investigate and prosecute Bush officials and lawyers

National Lawyers Guild and other human rights groups issue open letter to Eric Holder

- by Marjorie Cohn – 2009-10-06

The Demise of the Dollar

- by Robert Fisk – 2009-10-06

The Afghan quagmire

- by Rahimullah Yusufzai – 2009-10-06

Missile Defense: U.S. military presence in Georgia

- 2009-10-06

The IMF to Play Role of Global Central Bank?

The Dollar Needs to be Devalued by Half?

- by Ellen Brown – 2009-10-05

Taliban Fighters Attack Outposts, U.S. Troops Killed in Battle

- by Joshua Partlow – 2009-10-05

Albright Deployed Snake, Missile Pins Against Putin, Hussein

- by Katya Kazakina – 2009-10-05

Israel’s largest defense company opens office in Azerbaijan

- by Rashad Suleymanov – 2009-10-05

The bear market rally will soon be over

There is only one place to be and that is in gold and silver related assets.

- by Bob Chapman – 2009-10-05

Surge in Unemployment in the US: No Economic Recovery in Sight

- by Shamus Cooke – 2009-10-05

Ineffectiveness and Dangers of Flu Shots

- by Stephen Lendman – 2009-10-05

Jailed farmers go on hunger strike in Honduras

- 2009-10-05

Afghanistan: Taleban storm Nato outpost

About 400 coalition troops this year — the majority of them American

- 2009-10-05

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Joel Beinin
Middle East Report Online
Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:40 UTC

© Unknown

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the oldest such festival in the United States, was founded in rebellion against received wisdom. Since 1980, the festival has promoted independent Jewish films that contest the conventional Hollywood depiction of Jewish life, particularly its lachrymose over-concentration on Jewish victimhood, and regularly presented "alternatives to the often uncritical view of life and politics in Israel available in the established American Jewish community." The festival’s audience, mostly Jewish, has reacted positively to this policy, even in 2005, when the organizers decided to show Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, the theme of which is suicide bombing.
Critical Israeli Jewish auteurs have also been welcome. In 2008, the Israeli director Shai Carmeli Pollak came to San Francisco to present his film, Bil’in Habibti (Bil’in, My Love), which records the non-violent struggle of Palestinians, supportive Israelis and internationals to stop construction of Israel’s separation barrier in a West Bank village. The festival has previously screened two films by Simone Bitton, a Moroccan-born, dual Israeli-French citizen. The first, Mahmoud Darwich: The Land as Language (1998), is an appreciative biopic about the late Palestinian poet laureate. The second, Wall (2005), is an unflattering examination of the separation barrier.
Bitton’s current work, Rachel (Ciné-Sud Promotion, 2008), is not yet in distribution. It has appeared only at film festivals, in Berlin, Paris, New York, Sarajevo, Toronto and elsewhere. In the fall of 2009 it will play at the Haifa Film Festival in Israel. On July 25 and August 4, it was shown at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
The festival’s board of directors surely knew that showing Rachel — which investigates the violent death of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year old American peace activist, at the hands of the Israeli army — would discomfit some Jewish viewers. But they were likely unprepared for the strident, even hysterical, objections of the official organizations of the Bay Area Jewish community. In light of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s history, it is difficult to imagine that these organizations were exercised primarily by the content of the film. Indeed, they saved their strongest language for the "virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic" co-sponsors of the screening, Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and the decision of the festival organizers to invite Rachel’s mother, Cindy Corrie, whom they dubbed an "Israel basher," to take part in a question-and-answer session after the lights went up.
But generic anger at "Israel bashing" is an unsatisfying explanation for the Jewish organizations’ ire, since Jewish Voice for Peace had previously co-sponsored films at the festival and Carmeli Pollak and other Jewish filmmakers had criticized Israel’s occupation policies in much sharper terms than anything anyone in the Corrie family has said on the record. Perhaps the problem was that the festival organizers brought non-Jews — AFSC and Cindy Corrie — under the community tent to witness something of which many members of the community are ashamed.
Forensic Investigation
The death of Rachel Corrie brought a raft of journalistic inquests, all ostensibly concerned to sift through the competing claims of her fellow activists in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who say she was murdered, and the Israeli state, which prefers to call her untimely end a "regrettable accident." Some of the media accounts were skeptical of the army’s internal inquiry, others less so. Many reporters seemed more eager to grill the ISM activists who were present than the soldiers, in lockstep with the Israeli army’s own counterattack: "We are dealing with a group of protesters who are acting very irresponsibly, putting everyone in danger — the Palestinians, themselves and our forces — by intentionally placing themselves in a combat zone." And the army, despite Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s reported promise to President George W. Bush of a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation, was hardly open to outside scrutiny. Human Rights Watch, which included a section on Corrie in a June 2005 report on faulty Israeli military inquiries, was unable to pronounce a verdict upon how she died, but did conclude that "the impartiality and professionalism of the Israeli investigation into Corrie’s death are highly questionable." In any event, the following facts are not in serious dispute.
On March 16, 2003, Corrie, a senior at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza. The mammoth Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, custom-fitted with armor by Israel, was leveling the ground and demolishing Palestinian homes in the city of Rafah along the Philadelphi axis — the road that runs along the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Many homes and buildings had already been destroyed to create an open space in preparation for constructing a wall on the border. Corrie was working with the ISM, an organization dedicated to non-violent, direct action in solidarity with the Palestinian people under military occupation. She was killed as she stood, unarmed, in front of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist, Samir Nasrallah, in an attempt to prevent the bulldozer from razing it.
Rachel is a deeply moving portrayal of Rachel Corrie the person and ISM volunteer. And though no firm conclusion is asserted, the film is also the most thorough, credible and transparent investigation yet conducted into exactly how she died and who was responsible. As Bitton has written, on a Facebook page dedicated to Rachel, it "does some of what a court should have done" in putting the Israeli state’s narrative of Corrie’s death under the microscope.
Simone Bitton focuses first on the last eight weeks of Corrie’s life, her reasons for going to Gaza, her relationships with several Palestinians, with whom she became quite close, and the work of the ISM in Rafah. The ISM was conceived in the spring and summer of 2001. During the first three weeks of the second intifada, which erupted following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in September 2000, the right-wing Israeli daily Ma’ariv reported that Israeli forces fired a million bullets at mostly unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. This hail of lead flew before any suicide bombings or other acts of terror inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel took place. (The last suicide bombing had been in 1996.) In the face of this imbalance of force, Ghassan Andoni, George Rishmawi, Huweida Arraf and others developed the idea that a non-violent international presence could protect Palestinians from the ravages of the Israeli military. In addition, they thought, international witnesses who communicated what they saw and experienced could enhance international awareness and media coverage of Israeli violence. The first ISM contingent arrived in Palestine in August 2001. Corrie was an enthusiastic participant, writing home, "Coming here is one of the best things I’ve ever done." The recitation of these words in the film is a gut-ripping moment, as those in the audience know that Rachel Corrie will soon die.
At Pains to Explain
Rachel devotes very careful attention to the circumstances of the protagonist’s death. Like a forensic detective, Bitton gathered pertinent oral testimonies, documents, photographs and video footage. Only the voices of those directly involved are heard: Corrie’s ISM colleagues and Palestinian friends and hosts in Rafah, ISM co-founder Andoni, the Israeli military police officer who investigated the case, the Tel Aviv coroner who examined the body, and Jonathan Pollak, a member of the Israeli group, Anarchists Against the Wall (and brother of filmmaker Shai Carmeli Pollak), who put up Corrie’s colleagues in his Tel Aviv home after she died. Rachel Corrie herself is heard as well, through a narrator’s readings of her e-mails home.
There are no abstract political proclamations. Conflicting testimonies are juxtaposed. It is notable that, of all the persons interviewed, Andoni is the only one who considers that he may bear some responsibility for Corrie’s death, since he trained her and sent her to Rafah. Simone Bitton proceeds like an attorney questioning witnesses, sans speeches to the jury or inferences from the testimony. This technique makes the film a powerful documentary record whose value goes far beyond Bitton’s obvious sympathy for Corrie and her questioning of the official story.
That story — "It is clear the death of Ms. Corrie was not caused as a result of a direct action by the bulldozer or by its running her over" — does not hold up well under Bitton’s lens. On camera, the Israeli military police officer who led the investigation expresses a twinge of doubt about his own conclusions. He admits that he did not visit the site of the Nasrallah home and relied primarily on the testimony of soldiers. Among the eyewitnesses he did not interview were the ISM volunteers who saw the bulldozer run over Corrie from a distance of as little as ten yards. They maintain that their comrade was quite purposely run over, not once, but twice. The official claim that the bulldozer driver did not see Corrie because she was behind a pile of dirt is definitively disproved by Israeli army video footage that shows her standing on top of the mound, wearing a highly visible reflective orange jacket, as the bulldozer approached.
In April 2003, Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine released an autopsy report that attributed Corrie’s death to "pressure on the chest (mechanical asphyxiation) with fractures of the ribs and vertebrae of the dorsal spinal column and scapulas, and tear wounds in the right lung with hemorrhaging of the pleural cavities." How could this finding — she was crushed — be squared with the military police’s seeming absolution of the bulldozer? As the coroner who performed the autopsy is at pains to explain to Bitton, it is possible that Corrie was killed by the weight of the dirt on her body as the bulldozer was passing over her. Since there was no indication that metal had touched her body, he could not conclude that the bulldozer itself killed her.
It is not only the Israeli officials whose conduct is suspect, the film goes on to show. The coroner acknowledges that the Corrie family had a right to be present at the autopsy; since they could not attend, it would have been proper for the US embassy in Tel Aviv to send a representative. Yet embassy officials, despite the request of the Corrie family that they witness the procedure, told the coroner that they were not interested in doing so. Therefore, he proceeded on his own.
The Corrie family has tried persistently to get the US government to mount its own inquiry. A resolution introduced by their congressman, Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA), directing the Department of Justice to open an investigation received 78 co-sponsors but died in committee. John McKay, the former US Attorney for western Washington and one of eight US attorneys fired by the Bush administration in 2006, told the Corries, "There will never be a US investigation into Rachel’s case." The US government remains loath to intercede despite its own position, recorded in a letter to the Corries from former State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson and never rescinded, that Israel’s investigation was inadequate.
Did the bulldozer driver, whose name is kept confidential by the Israeli army, intentionally kill Rachel Corrie? The film is agnostic on this point. According to Bitton, "The intentional crime my movie addresses is not Rachel Corrie’s death. It is the willful destruction of entire neighborhoods, carried out with the knowledge that people who stay in their homes or attempt to defend them will be killed in the process. One clearly sees where this leads us: Six years later, in the same spot, the same army kills hundreds of innocent victims in supposedly targeted bombings. Today the end result has been reached: All Palestinian civilians, as well as anyone seeking to give them assistance, are potential collateral victims; their lives are, strictly speaking, not worth anything anymore. Talking about war crimes or bringing up the Geneva Conventions makes you look naïve, archaic."
These words were written in early 2009, on the heels of Israel’s "all-out war" upon "Hamas and its kind" in Gaza, an operation that left well over 1,000 unarmed Palestinians dead, but they were applicable in 2003 as well. The Israeli army began destroying blocks of homes in Rafah, to cap the same cross-border supply tunnels that achieved such notoriety during the Gaza war, in 2001.
The Value of One Life?
There is undoubtedly something disturbing about making a film focused on the life and death of one young American woman while Israel has killed thousands of non-combatant Palestinians since the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987. One justification is that both the Jewish and Muslim traditions affirm that the value of the life of every human being is equally boundless. Another is the testimony of the soldier who says, "We didn’t know they were foreigners; we thought they were Palestinians." Does this suggest that, if Rachel Corrie had been a Palestinian, it would have been routine to kill her? Might the world media have failed to notice her death, particularly since any investigation would have been perfunctory at best? Israel’s record in the Occupied Territories and the corporate media’s response to it indicate that this surmise is not unwarranted. Yet the response to Corrie’s death has not been overwhelming either.
Until Corrie’s death, the ISM did not imagine that the Israeli army might kill internationals. In fact, she was the first of several international victims. On April 11, 2003, another young ISM activist, Tom Hurndall, was shot in the head in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli sniper, Taysir al-Hayb. (Al-Hayb is a Bedouin with several family members serving in the Israeli military.) Hurndall went into a coma and died nine months later. In April 2005 an Israeli military court convicted al-Hayb of manslaughter and obstruction of justice; he was sentenced to eight years in prison. A year later, a British inquest jury determined that Hurndall was a victim of "unlawful killing." According to the Hurndall family lawyer, this legalism means "intentionally killed," or murdered.
On May 2, 2003, James Miller, a Welsh filmmaker, was shot dead by an Israeli soldier, Capt. Hib al-Hayb. The Israeli military police concluded that they could not determine that al-Hayb’s shot was responsible for Miller’s death. The captain was disciplined for violating the rules of engagement, however, and for changing his account of the incident. In April 2006, an inquest jury of a London coroner’s court returned a verdict of unlawful killing. In August 2007 the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that the British attorney general had written to his Israeli counterpart requesting a criminal investigation, on the basis that ballistic tests carried out in Israel "could only show that the bullet that killed James [Miller] did not come from the rifle barrels of the weapons that were examined." On the basis of their own ballistic analysis, the British believe the Israelis tested the wrong rifles or even switched the barrel of the offending weapon. Israel has not prosecuted Capt. al-Hayb.
There have been non-lethal shootings as well. On April 5, 2003, Israeli forces shot many rounds of machine gun fire at the face of Brian Avery, an American volunteer with the ISM in the West Bank town of Jenin. The shots broke his jaw and eye socket, and Avery sued for damages. The army refused to investigate the case, claiming that no soldiers had reported the incident. In February 2005 the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the army to reopen the case. Avery settled out of court for $150,000 in November 2008. Most recently, on March 13, 2009, 37-year old Tristan Anderson from Oakland, California suffered critical brain damage in the West Bank village of Ni’lin when Israeli forces shot him in the head with a new high-velocity tear gas canister which has been used since the December 2008 launch of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Anderson was demonstrating, along with villagers, Israelis and other internationals, against the separation barrier Israel is constructing that would effectively annex one quarter of Ni’lin’s land. A resident of Ni’lin was shot in the leg with live ammunition in the same demonstration. Anderson remains in critical condition, and his long-term prognosis is uncertain.
Rachel does not address these casualties or attempt to assess the long-term effect of the ISM’s interventions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since no form of resistance — non-violent or armed — was able to deter Israel’s slaughter of civilians in the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009, perhaps it is fair to say that the most substantial impact of the ISM’s work was on the volunteers themselves. The film briefly explores the variety of personal and political motives that brought Rachel Corrie and her colleagues to Palestine. Among them are untutored idealism and youthful naïveté (which they themselves acknowledge in retrospect). None of them were "experts" in the history of the conflict or fully understood the complexities of the Palestinian society into which they inserted themselves. But now they have learned a hard lesson: Anyone who gets in Israel’s way may be killed.
Crossing a Line
While Ghassan Andoni and some of the ISMers demonstrate some capacity for critical reflection about Rachel Corrie’s death, the official institutions of the Bay Area Jewish community were united in rejecting such reflection. The official Jewish institutions certainly were not ready to consider Jonathan Pollak’s climactic explanation for his willingness to host ISM volunteers in his home: "I could not live in this place without resisting, not merely verbally, but by action." Pollak, an Israeli Jew, has been injured several times by the Israeli army while demonstrating non-violently in Bil’in. A soldier shot him in the head with a tear gas canister in April 2005, causing two internal brain hemorrhages and a wound requiring 23 stitches. Since the Jewish institutions have not erupted in protest over equally provocative films in the past, perhaps their over-the-top reaction to the screening of Rachel was a form of circling the wagons after the widespread international condemnation of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.
The faceoff in the Bay Area Jewish community was initiated by an editorial in the Jewish weekly, J, which was particularly incensed that, since Simone Bitton was unavailable, Cindy Corrie would take questions after the screening. "Cindy Corrie’s appearance crosses a line," the J editors wrote. "The Jewish Film Festival is under no obligation to offer a microphone to Israel bashers." Suggesting that there are and ought to be "lines" marking the boundaries of "acceptable discourse" in the Jewish community, to use a term employed by the festival’s executive director Peter Stein at the screening, sounds suspiciously like the McCarthyite notion of "un-American activities." Why the elder Corrie was presumed to be an "Israel basher" the editors did not specify.
While J arrogated to itself the right to draw lines, the two leading Jewish charitable foundations in the Bay Area, Koret and Taube, pushed the panic button. The foundations attacked the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival for making "three egregious errors": First among them was "partnering with Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee, two virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic groups that support boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Both are closely associated with the International Solidarity Movement and other groups that aid and abet terror against the Jewish state. These groups cross the line for inclusion in the Jewish community." Second was "to present a film that lays blame for the accidental death of a civilian at the door of the State of Israel." And third was to "invite Cindy Corrie into our community. This bereaved mother cannot help but have a negative bias toward Israel. Why would a Jewish organization hand her a microphone and a soapbox from which to condemn Israel as Jewish audiences are expected to sit and listen politely? There is no possible counterbalance to an emotional, grieving mother."
The foundations’ rhetoric is tendentious, at best. Jewish Voice for Peace forthrightly supports selective divestment, targeting US companies that aid Israeli occupation policies, and its members have been active in the effort to induce Caterpillar to stop selling Israel the bulldozers that knock down Palestinian residences in violation of international law. The organization does go further than many Jewish anti-occupation groups in refusing to condemn more expansive boycott and divestment campaigns. Its website is articulate on the point that such endeavors, and criticism of Israel generally, are not perforce anti-Semitic or even "anti-Israel." Jewish Voice for Peace has, indeed, published a book-length refutation of that canard, Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives (2002). At the same time, the organization’s members insist on speaking out against the occupation as Jews, rather than merely as US citizens or defenders of human rights, precisely because (according to the website) "as Jews, we can make the distinction between real anti-Semitism and the cynical manipulation of that issue to shield Israel from legitimate criticism." The foundations’ attack on the venerable Quaker peace organization, AFSC, is similarly reliant on an untenable definition of "anti-Israel" that brooks no quibble with the Jewish state’s policies. And since two key staffers of AFSC’s Middle East program in San Francisco, including Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, are Jewish, the allegation of anti-Semitism is predicated upon the insipid idea that these Jews are "self-hating."
Is Cindy Corrie in the grip of "negative bias toward Israel" and its partisans in the United States? Judging by the YouTube video of her post-film discussion with Stein and the audience, no. Asked by Stein if she understood the vehement protests against her presence, she said she regarded them as part of a "very healthy discussion" within the Jewish community. She further remarked that members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), with whom she disagrees politically, "believe they’re doing good." Her comportment was consistent with the words of Rabbi Brian Walt, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America: "If I were in [the Corries'] situation, I would imagine that the temptation to hate those who killed my daughter would be hard to resist…. Despite their daughter’s tragic death, the Corries have never spoken in a hateful way toward Israel or Jews. On the contrary, they are deeply committed to peace and to the security of all people in the conflict, Israelis and Palestinians." Indeed, the 1,200 people (mostly Jews) in the Castro Theater on July 25 seemed generally appreciative of Corrie’s remarks.
Nonetheless, the film festival organizers clearly felt the pressure mobilized by the official Jewish organizations. Five days before the festival began, board president Shana Penn resigned with five months left on a two-year term, citing "healthy differences on how to approach sensitive issues." (She will remain on the board.) In the end, the organizers allowed Michael Harris of San Francisco Voice for Israel (affiliated with the ultras of Stand With Us) to speak briefly before what he called "the Rachel Corrie hagiography" played on screen. His remarks are also on YouTube. Where Cindy Corrie was conciliatory, Harris was pugilistic, saying that Rachel "intentionally put herself in harm’s way," enumerating the names of suicide bombing victims who were doing nothing "more risky than riding a bus, or going to buy a slice of pizza or a cup of coffee" and even averring (to loud boos) that these deaths explained why the bulldozer that killed Rachel was operating in Gaza.
It is difficult to imagine that Jewish Voice for Peace or Simone Bitton would be invited to counter the presentation of a speaker from San Francisco Voice for Israel, or AIPAC, or the Israeli consulate. So were the Bay Area Jewish organizations really upset about lack of balance? The leading figures at J and the Koret and Taube Foundations certainly know that there is sharp debate among Israelis about the occupation, home demolitions and the morality of army actions, so were they really concerned with protecting the security of Israel? A more convincing hypothesis is that their outcry is about power. The official institutions of the Jewish community are built on a foundation of money (lots of it) and draw their strength from the two main pillars of American Jewish identity — Holocaust commemoration and unquestioning "support for Israel." Taking away one of these pillars would be an institutional disaster.
Although the furor over Rachel in the San Francisco Jewish community is a tempest in a teapot compared to the daily catastrophes suffered by the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it does have some significance. It demonstrates as definitively as possible that the American Jewish community is deeply split on the question of Israel-Palestine. Public opinion polls suggest that the Koret and Taube Foundations represent the minority position in the community, certainly among Bay Area Jews. More and more American Jews find themselves attracted to the moral commitment that animates Rachel, and left cold by the tactics of pressure groups that spend so much money to shut down debate over Israel and its occupation policies. And that is why the pressure groups are beginning to fail.

Comment: Read also: Thou shalt not present the Truth! Documentary sparks uproar at Jewish film fest

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/191023-Rachel-Corrie-in-Palestine-and-in-San-Francisco

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