by James M. Wall

I was fed up with the ugliness of American political dialogue. I knew it was time to call George McGovern.

I found him on St. Thomas Island, where he was attending  the funeral of an old friend, Henry Kimmelman, his campaign finance director for McGovern’s 1972 presidential race.

We set aside a longer period to talk the next day when he would be back at his winter home in St. Augustine, Florida. He spends the rest of the year in Mitchell, South Dakota, across from the new George and Eleanor McGovern Library on the campus of Dakota Wesleyan.

McGovern abruptly left elective politics in 1980, shoved aside, with four other liberal Democratic US senators who lost their seats in the political tsunami powered by Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Jimmy Carter: Frank Church (Idaho), Gaylord Nelson (Wisconsin), Birch Bayh (Indiana), and John Culver (Iowa).

I first met McGovern when we campaigned together in Illinois for his 1972 Democratic nomination for president.  I was running a futile race for Congress, and a successful one as a McGovern delegate.

In the Miami nominating convention prolonged by a needless ABM (Anybody But McGovern) last minute effort to nominate Hubert Humphrey, McGovern finally won the nomination. The old guard does not like change, as Barack Obama almost found out in 2008.

McGovern lost the general election to Richard Nixon. Eighteen months later, Nixon, facing impeachment over the Watergate matter, resigned in disgrace.

Two months after the election, I interviewed McGovern at his home in Washington. In its January 31, 1973 issue, the Christian Century magazine published that interview, Politics and Morality: A Postelection Interview with George McGovern.

At the close of the interview, I asked McGovern what he would have done in Vietnam had he won the election. He answered:

I would have ordered an end to all military operations in Indochina within minutes after I was sworn in as President. Then I would have announced that our forces were being withdrawn systematically, on the condition that our prisoners would be released. I would also have terminated any further military aid to General Thieu. . . .

I think it is conceivable that, depending on what my relationship to Nixon would have been, the war might have been terminated even before the inauguration. I would have requested him to join me in an effort to bring the war to an end. It is possible that without an electoral mandate behind him he would have been in the mood to accept that.

With Nixon, and Gerald Ford as presidents, the war lasted three more years. American Republican politics have not been the same since.

Thirty-seven years after McGovern’s defeat, the most passionately supported Republican presidential candidate for 2012, is Sarah Palin.

This month it is impossible not to encounter Palin. She is on a book tour, delighting her right-wing followers. What sort of a president might she be?  She gave a hint of her foreign policy credentials in an interview with Barbara Walters.

Palin was asked about Israel’s 900 additional housing units now under construction in Gilo, a sprawling, ugly, massive Israeli settlement that butts up against the “little town of Bethlehem” where the Christ Child was born, in case former Governor Palin and her acolytes, have forgotten. Her response:

I disagree with the Obama administration on [the settlements]. I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow.

More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.

I did not want to ask McGovern about Palin. I knew it was no point in asking him that question. George McGovern does not speak harshly of anyone. Case in point: He says about Richard Nixon:

I bear no malice toward Richard Nixon. Indeed, he governed as a moderate liberal. His administration launched the Environmental Protection Agency, he supported civil rights, he established detente with the Soviet Union and opened the door to China, he invoked wage and price controls to stabilize the economy–just to name a few of his moderate liberal steps.

What we lost when George McGovern did not make it to the White House might best be understood when we realize that McGovern not only reads and respects the work of Israeli peace activist Avraham Burg, he agrees with Burg”s statement on the conditions for a just peace, which Burg wrote in the Israeli journal, Yediot Aharonot in 2004:

We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. . . We must remove all the settlements and draw an internationally recognized border between the Israeli national home and the Palestinian national home.

The man who should have been elected president in 1972, offers a stark contrast to the former governor of Alaska, who would like to be the Republican nominee in 2012.

When George McGovern accepted his party’s nomination in 1972, he presented the nation with a vision that says, regardless of its ambiguity, politics is the arena where we must shape hope into organized, positive, action..

I wanted to be reminded of that vision, because in Ramallah, President Abbas plans to resign, while in Tel Aviv, Bibi Netanyahu continues to insult and defy the president of the United States, the only world leader who supports him.

McGovern’s vision echoes the wisdom and eloquence of Reinhold Niebuhr, who once wrote,  ”man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

McGovern frequently quotes Niebuhr; he did, after all, spend a year in seminary before he shifted to Northwestern University’s graduate school, where he earned a Master’s degree in history.

Our current political dialogue, which McGovern is well prepared to critique, is conducted in such an environment of ignorance and anger, that it is hard not to sink into a dark funk over what comes next.

Of course, periods of darkness are not uncommon in the Middle East.

When Yasir Arafat was presiding over a newly formed Palestinian Authority initially created in Oslo, I traveled to Gaza in November, 1994, with an American church delegation.

We went first to meet with Arafat’s wife, the former Suha Tawil, a member of a politically active Palestinian family.

In the delegation was a United Methodist bishop from Ohio. Before we left, she offered a prayer in the Arafat home. After the prayer, Suha said to the bishop, “Please give that same prayer when you visit my husband in his office. Something needs to be done to lift the darkness over there.”

Which is why I wanted to talk with George McGovern.

I told him I had been watching the documentary film on his life, One Bright Shining Moment. I found it inspiring.  McGovern thought it was a good film, but he felt it makes him look “too radical”.

Perhaps it does, but it also reminded me of the summer of 1972, when, in spite of all, the future looked both bright and shining.

I told McGovern I have been reading his latest book, Abraham Lincoln, which reveals that the initial campaign speech Lincoln gives from the front porch of his store in Salem, Illinois, was the same speech he used throughout a losing campaign for the legislature.

The speech is included, word for word, in John Ford’s film, Young Mr. Lincoln. I had always assumed it was the work of a script writer. McGovern’s research discovered the speech belongs to Lincoln.

I have also been reading McGovern’s superb defense of  American liberalism, The Essential America, in which he describes his lifelong focus on bringing  America’s policies closer to those of our founding ideals; ending the hunger of our world’s poor; and bringing peace to the troubled Middle Eastern region.

We talked on the phone about these three areas.  McGovern, now 87, is not slowing down.  He still writes books and newspaper columns, and he still travels the country to give speeches, primarily on world hunger. He is also in demand on these trips for his political opinions.

On one recent trip for a speaking engagement in San Diego, Robert Sheer, longtime Los Angeles Times political writer, interviewed him for a television segment. You may see and hear the contemporary McGovern in that interview, by clicking here.

After we concluded our telephone conversation, I went back to reread McGovern’s 1972 convention speech, “Come Home America”. He gave that speech on an early July morning, using words that remind us that the world’s problems today are essentially the same as they were then.

Read these closing lines and let them break you out of darkness. We need to be alert and ready. There is work to be done.

Together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.

From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America.

From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.

From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick — come home, America.

Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream.

Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.

Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world, and let us be joyful in that homecoming, for this “is your land, this land is my land — from California to New York island, from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters — this land was made for you and me.”

May God grant each one of us the wisdom to cherish this good land and to meet the great challenge that beckons us home.

Do words like these matter in a time of Palin and Israel’s settlements?  Yes they do, as the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, once wrote:

I want to sing. I want a language that I can lean on and that can lean on me, that asks me to bear witness and that I can ask to bear witness, to what power there is in us to overcome this cosmic isolation…I’m screaming at a moment when screams can go nowhere. And it strikes me that language must force itself into a battle in which the voices are not equal.

The picture of George McGovern at the top of the page was taken by Keith Robert Wessel at the 2005 dedication of the George and Eleanor McGovern Library in Mitchell, South Dakota.

by James M. Wall

Last Update, Monday, November 16

The Palestinian Election Commission has informed President Mahmoud Abbas it would be unable to carry out the January 24 election. The Commission recommended the election be postponed.

The election had been ordered earlier by President Abbas.

At a press conference in Ramallah, Elections Commission Chairman Dr. Hanna Nasser, said:

We have faced obstacles in the Gaza Strip and in Jerusalem. We’ve sat with all the political factions and the picture has become clear after these meetings: Elections are impossible to hold.

The Commission is independent of Mr. Abbas’ government. It was initially created by former PA leader Yasir Arafat. After its reappointment by President Abbas, the Commission directed the 2006 legislative elections.

Dr. Nasser is president emeritus of Birzeit University, a school founded by his aunt. He holds a PhD in physics from Purdue University, in the US.

Abbas has already announced that in any future presidential election, he would not be a candidate for reelection. Why should he?  Abbas knows the reality of American politics.

Philip Weiss offers an answer in his Mondoweiss blog, which covers “American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective”:

When people ask why Obama has capitulated to the prime minister of a tiny state– Bibi Netanyahu– various theories are offered about Health care first, or the economy, or Afghanistan, or oil.

Few say directly: Netanyahu feels invulnerable because of the Israel lobby in the US . . .you cannot be plain about this matter without addressing the idea of Jewish influence. Israelis are often more plain about this.

Anshel Pfeffer wrote in Haaretz the other day, “the most significant joint endeavor of America’s Jews [is] six decades of unswerving support for the Israeli government of the day.” I.e., a hammerlock on U.S. policy.

It is not as though this is new information in this country.  (Think Jimmy Carter, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer). It is information the US Main Stream Media carefully avoids mentioning.

On a visit to the US this past summer, Former Israeli Knesset speaker Avraham Burg was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now (definitely not part of the MSM). He was quite blunt about the Lobby’s influence.

Weiss reminds his readers that at a public event at the New York Public Library during that visit:

Burg described “two structures” built by Jews, one being Israel, the other “the semi-autonomous American Jewry, which was not here 150 years ago– powerful influence, access to the corridors of power, impact on the culture, and civilization… plus the infrastructure of the community of solidarity and fraternity and support system and education etc.”

While readers and viewers of the MSM continue to live in blissful ignorance of the realities of the situation facing Palestinians, President Abbas discovered that the hope he had placed in President Obama has been washed away by Obama’s capitulation to the Lobby and Bibi.

When his term expires in January, 2010, Abbas could resign as president, leaving the office empty. Or he could remain in office until elections are held at some indefinite point in the future.

Should Abbas resign, the Palestinian Authority’s constitution calls for the office of the president to be assumed by Dr. Aziz Ad-Dweik, who earned a PhD from the University of  Pennsylvainia in regional sciences, a mixture of urban studies, sociology and economics.

Rest assured, Dr. Dweik also follows the reality of US politics very closely. Who is this man who is next-in-line to run the Palestinian Authority?

According to the right wing web site Campus Watch, which “monitors” Middle Eastern studies program on US campus for any hint of anti-Israel perfidy, Dwiek came to the US to pursue his doctorate in 1985 with a “scholarship from the American government”. In those days, Israel was promoting (and funding) Hamas as an alternative to Yasir Arafat’s PLO.

After returning home from Pennsylvania, Dweik found that the PLO had replaced Hamas and had become Israel’s new favorite political ally. He spent four months in an Israeli prison and a year as a deportee on the southern Lebanese border before he made it back to Gaza.

Dweik is currently the parliamentarian from the Hamas-affiliated Change and Reform Party.He was elected speaker of the PLC after the Palestinian elections in January 2006. Counting heavily on a Fatah victory, the US and Israel had urged Hamas and Fatah to hold the elections, which were monitored by international officials, led by former President Carter.

When Hamas won a legislative majority in the elections, (no surprise to close observers of Palestinian politics) the result was repudiated by both the US and Israel.

During a press conference reported by The Palestinian Information Center website, Dweik said he was prepared to assume the presidency, should Abbas resign.

Future elections would be impossible without the backing of both Hamas and Fatah, the two political parties that last competed in the 2006 elections. Dweik was active on the reconciliation front this week, endorsing an Egyptian plan to bring the two parties together. He expresses more optimism than exists in the Fatah camp.

In an interview with Al-Jazeera Arabic, Dweik said:

Hamas leaders had secured Egyptian guarantees that they would take into account Hamas’ reservations on the [reconciliatiion] issue, and would list them on the sidelines of the reconciliation paper, which would be signed by both parties.

He assured Al-Jazeera that political activity ensuring the end of Palestinian division was ongoing.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians’ future remains under the absolute control of Israel’s military occupation. That occupation is supported financially and politically by the US and  the Israel Lobby.  It is this control that keeps President Abbas and the government he leads,deep  in the darkness of their political Purgatory.

Searching for some way out of this Purgatory, the Palestinian Institute for Politics and Strategic Studies held a brainstorming session Tuesday to discuss the logistics involved in Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s plan to establish a Palestinian state in two years. The Fayyad plan, which he prefers to call a “program”, was released on August 25 this year.

Nabil Qassis, Principal of Birzeit University, who convened the session, described the plan as “serious agenda,” and a “turning point in the way the [Palestinian Authority] PA thinks.” No longer, he said, is the “occupation a pretext for failure.”

Attending the conference were Palestinian professionals, politicians, community officials and members of  of the Palestinian parliament. No one attended from Gaza, which remains in an indefinite lock down by the Israeli army.

Participants discussed both the possibilities and drawbacks of Fayyad’s plan, which he calls, “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State.”

One participant, Deputy Secretary General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Abd Ar-Rahim Mallouh described the plan as the tosssing of a “big stone in the quiet political puddle”.

He saw the plan as a way to bridge the political gap in Palestinian politics. But he also noted its major drawback: There cannot be an independent Palestinian state that is under Israeli occupation. “A Palestinian state must reach an agreement with Israel” in order to lay aside the paradox, he said.

Mustafa Barghouthi, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, described the plan as essentially “national duty” in its aims to realize Palestinian freedoms, the right of return and the right to Jerusalem.

“We should be aware that statehood is not dependent on the occupation’s will; we have to adopt the same means of peaceful resistance as in the first Palestinian Intifada.

Barghouthi adds that with the plan, Palestinians must “breach our commitment to the Oslo division of the Palestinian territories into A, B, and C zones.” (Separate areas that retained Israeli control over the territories with limited or no Palestinian involvement).

“We must build foundations in all zones, and start free trade internationally,” Barghouthi said.

The author of the Fayyad Plan drew attention this week from Helen Cobban, a veteran Middle East Correspondent, formerly with the Christian Science Monitor. She has launched a new blog, ‘“Fair Policy, Fair Discussion” for the Washington-based Council for the National Interest Foundation, for which she serves as director.

Cobban is currently traveling to the region with an NIF delegation, which conducted an off the record discussion with Fayyad, whom Cobban described as “very pro American”. The group also met with Ziad Abu Amr, a political independent who was foreign minister in the PA’s short-lived national unity government in 2007.

Cobban describes Amr as “a close confidante” of President Abbas”. Both Fayyad and Amr were “extremely gloomy” and both expressed a strong sense of how they feel “the whole of the PA’s very pro-American leadership now feels deeply betrayed by the Obama administration.”

Abu Amr underscored that feeling of betrayal, telling the group:

Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] has been playing completely by the book. The PA has been killing Palestinians to prove that he is prepared to serve Israel’s security interests. What did he get in return? Only a continuation of setttlements, home demolitions, land expropriations… If this continues, he will not and should not continue in office.

Cobban writes that in the group’s discussion with Abu Amr, he concluded:

Abu Mazen feels betrayed and fooled by the Americans… There is no way the Palestinians can do any more than they have done… If Abu Mazen resigns under circumstances of crisis, then no one could replace him– or, would want to…

The problem is, the Americans have abandoned the Road Map. What Hillary Clinton said about the Israeli government having made “unprecedented concessions” was against the Road Map, against Annapolis, and against Oslo.

Political leaders in both Gaza and the West Bank are struggling to find a way out of the Political Purgatory into which their own past conduct, but more importantly their betrayal by the United States. has plunged them.  Only the president of the United States retains the power to release them from that Purgatory.  It is past time for him to act.

President Abbas’ picture is a Getty image. Hanna Nasser’s picture is from the AFP’s Abbas Momani. Aziz Dweik’s picture is from The Palestinian Information Center.

by James M. Wall

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu came to Washington this week still glowing from the praise he received from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Secretary Clinton told a joint press conference in Jerusalem, on October 31, “What the prime minister has offered in specifics on restraints on a policy of settlements … is unprecedented.”

That moment of pro-Israel flag-waving by the US Secretary of State came after two earlier blows to the political standing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

First, there was Bibi’s defiant refusal to accept a US minimal request  to freeze settlement building. Then came that humiliating US-Israel pressure forcing Abbas to withhold support for the Goldstone Report. The Palestinian public was outraged; Abbas scrambled back, belatedly endorsing the Report.

That was followed by Clinton’s public praise for Bibi’s defiance of the President of the United States. This was too much for Abbas, who announced last week that he would not run for another term on the Fatah ticket for president of the Palestinian Authority.

Abdullah Iskandar, wrote in Dar Al Hayat, an Arab newspaper published in London:

When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced he would not run for a new term . . . he justified his decision by focusing on his frustration with the stance by the US and the Arabs on the Israeli settlement issue. . . .

[H]is justification reveals the depth of the predicament that the peace process is now in, along with the plan to establish a Palestinian state. It also reveals the depth of the predicament of Palestinian political action. . . .

Most likely, the Palestinian president is honest when it comes to this announcement. He is known for staying away from responsibility when he sees himself as unable to deliver. He said this, implicitly, in his meetings with Central Committee members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Central Committee of Fatah.

We can infer that the current situation prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state, which he set as a goal, due to Israeli policies and US policy stances.

Abbas’ dream of creating and leading an independent secure Palestinian state, side by side with a secure Israeli state, cannot be a possibility without strong US backing.

Bibi Netanyahu has demonstrated no authentic interest in “two states, living side by side in peace”. His goal is the continuation of a secure Israel next door to a collection of weak Palestinian bantustans.

Netanyahu traveled to Washington this week to speak to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, leaders of the American Jewish community which is such a significant political base for Netanyahu.

In his address Monday afternoon, he reminded the Assembly of the importance of the US-Israel alliance, starting with this rousing version of the creation of the state:

In 1948, some 600,000 Jews, their backs against the sea, fended off the assault of much larger enemies sworn to our destruction. We were aided by many of our fellow American Jews. You gave money, arms, and most important, tremendous moral support. You helped Israel absorb waves of immigrants, you spearheaded the historic struggle to free Soviet Jewry and you have tirelessly worked to strengthen the American-Israeli alliance which is a cornerstone of Israel’s security.

Were there any gestures in the speech toward his Palestinian neighbors?  Of course not, this was a man on a victory lap who had just won the Big Settlements Race, going away. The Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon reported:

Mr. Netanyahu didn’t offer any new commitment about Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — which the Palestinians have demanded be fully stopped as a precondition for peace talks — or list any specific terms for holding new negotiations.

An important part of Netanyahu’s American political base is lodged in the US Congress.

The Prime Minister was reminded of just how strong that base is when last week, by a margin of 344-36, the US House of Representatives voted to protect Israel from the Goldstone UN Report which had concluded that Israel may have committed war crimes in its recent invasion of Gaza.

After four years of nothing but broken promises from the US and Israel, why would Palestinian president Abbas run for another term of office?

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, told the New York Times’ Ethan Bronner, that [President Abbas] realizes “he came all this way with the peace process in order to create a Palestinian state, but he sees no state coming, So he really doesn’t think there is a need to be president or to have an Authority.”

Without a unified Palestinian government, there is no two state solution. Israel’s long pretense of wanting a “partner for peace” is over. The hope vested in President Obama has been dashed against an iron wall of Israeli intransigence.

Don’t expect the New York Times or the Washington Post to notice, but the truth behind Bibi’s victory lap is out there, and it is a dark truth.

Tony Karon wrote in the National, that Obama’s “quiescence on Israel is far more devastating politically, both to Mr Abbas and to US interests in the wider Middle East, than Mr Bush’s war in Iraq.”

That is because Mr Obama had very publicly raised expectations that the US would finally balance Israel’s security concerns against the pursuit of justice for the Palestinians.

Mr Obama was seen as the Palestinians’ last hope of redress for their suffering. By refusing to hold Mr Netanyahu’s feet to the fire, Mr Obama has dashed that hope. .

London’s Financial Times was equally blunt:

. . . If Mr Netanyahu believes that he has achieved a victory by refusing to halt the settlements, he is wrong. It is more like a project of national suicide.. . .

Veteran Israeli peace activist, Avi Avenery, who has known, and worked with, President Abbas for decades, is confident that Abbas means it when he says he will give up the presidency.

If Israel thinks a few ‘political crumbs’ tossed his way will persuade Abbas to change his mind, they do not know this man.

Abbas’ self-respect will not allow him to go back, unless Obama awards him a serious political achievement. From Abbas’ point of view, the announcement of his retirement is the doomsday weapon.

Ali Jarbawi, the Palestinian Authority’s Minister of Planning and Administrative Development, and a former professor at Bir Zeit University, provided a final note of political realism for Western political powers. He posed two questions to the New York Times‘ Bronner:

“Why do we need anybody to take [Abbas'] place if the whole process is failing? If the authority is going to go on forever, who needs it?”

Do Israel and the US really understand that Abbas’ departure will signal the final act in the Two State Drama?  They do not. Instead they will do what empires always do, look for a new Palestinian leader who will join them in their dance of deception. Will they find such a leader? Probably. Will that leader be a true “peace partner”? Of course not.

The only peaceful alternative is the single state solution.

Ali Abunimah, editor of the Electronic Intafada, and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse, has long argued for a single state solution.

In his current essay Abunimah, offers a democratic alternative to the present stalemate:

[W]ith the total collapse of the Obama Administration’s peace efforts, and relentless Israeli colonization of the occupied West Bank, the reality is dawning rapidly that the two-state solution is no more than a slogan that has no chance of being implemented or altering the reality of a de facto binational state in Palestine/Israel.

This places an obligation on all who care about the future of Palestine/Israel to seriously consider the democratic alternatives. I have long argued that the systems in post-apartheid South Africa (a unitary democratic state), and Northern Ireland (consociational democracy) — offer hopeful, real-life models.

American tax payers take note: this would be a cheaper and more moral alternative.

The picture above, of Mahmoud Abbas, is by Rina Castelnuovo of The New York Times. It was taken at the Arafat Memorial, in Ramallah, November 11, at a rally on the 5th Anniversary of the death of Yasir Arafat.

by James M. Wall

Tuesday was a dark day. The US House of Representatives passed Resolution 867, 344-36.   HR 867 is an AIPAC-driven bill which is a litmus test for hard-core Zionist supporters.

Ha’aretz had the story Wednesday morning.

The resolution is co-sponsored by the two senior members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.).

The resolution calls on the President and the Secretary of State:

. . . to continue to strongly and unequivocally oppose any endorsement of the `Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ in multilateral fora, including through leading opposition to any United Nations General Assembly resolution and through vetoing, if necessary, any United Nations Security Council resolution that endorses the contents of this report, seeks to act upon the recommendations contained in this report, or calls on any other international body to take further action regarding this report.

Chairman Berman has been in the Congress since 1982. He became chair of Foreign Affairs in 2008.  When he became chairman, Rep. Berman told the Jewish publication, Forward, “Even before I was a Democrat, I was a Zionist.”

Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, who was elected to her House seat from the Miami area in 1989, was the first Cuban American and the first Hispanic woman elected to the Congress.

The language of the resolution describes the report of the UN Human Rights Council, headed by South African jurist Richard Goldstone, as “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.”

Looking for a sign of hope in this dark moment in congressional history?  Here’s one:

Congressman Brian Baird (D-Washington) was one of the 36 House members who voted against the resolution. Baird is one of the few members of the House who has actually visited Gaza, which he did on a recent fact-finding trip following the Gaza invasion.

On his Web site, he asks his colleagues a series of questions:

Why are we bringing this resolution to the floor without ever giving former South African Constitutional Court Justice Richard Goldstone a hearing to explain his findings? Have those who will vote on H.Res. 867 actually read the resolution? Have they read the Goldstone report?

Are they aware that Justice Goldstone has issued a paragraph by paragraph response to H.Res. 867, available (click here) on my web site, pointing out that many of its assertions are factually inaccurate or deeply misleading? . . .

What will it say about this Congress and our country if we so readily seek to block “any further consideration” of a human rights investigation produced by one of the most respected jurists in the world today, a man who led the investigations of abuses in South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Kosovo and worked to identify and prosecute Nazi war criminals as a member of the Panel of the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina?

Rarely has an AIPAC-supported resolution in support of Israel been so openly denounced by a member of the House.

Philip Weiss has posted the names of the 36 no voters. This list is an honor roll of wisdom and courage of those House members who refused to be blindly led by AIPAC down a path that is harmful both to Israel and to people of Gaza. (For a complete list of the votes by states, click here.)

There are no corresponding signs of hope emanating from the White House. Is there a connection here?

This is a White House with a domestic agenda (starting with health care) which will go nowhere without strong Congressional support.

Obama was elected on a promise of change.  What he has discovered is that the Congress remains in the iron grip of a a congressional majority that is not interested in change.

While George Bush is no longer in the White House, his conservative policies remain, because a congressional majority pays greater homage to the insurance industry and AIPAC, than it does to universal health care and human rights.

President Obama began his engagement with Bibi Netanyahu after a dramatic election victory which should have allowed him to break the control Israel maintained over American policy.

Instead, Obama looked over his shoulder at the Congress, a more formidable opponent than any Israeli prime minister.

He saw the Israeli-dominated US Congress, which he needed on his side to make any progress in either health care or peace making. Instead of confronting Bibi with demands that would have reversed Bush policies, he asked Bibi, politely, to please “freeze” settlement construction.

Bibi agreed, with the usual Israeli caveat that he would continue “natural growth” construction. This was an insult to President Obama and to the Palestinian people who had looked to the new American leader to break the oppression of occupation.

Obama took the insult and then dispatched his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to persuade Netanyahu to reconsider the freeze request as a gesture Obama could use to persuade Israel’s Arab neighbors to take diplomatic steps that would “bolster Israel’s confidence in its security”.

Bibi took a signal from AIPAC and refused even that polite request. Obama’s plan to exert leadership in the region, had failed.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton retreated to a meeting of Arab leaders in Marrakesh, Morocco, where, the New York Times reported, she began “setting the stage for a new phase of Middle East diplomacy, with a more modest goal. She is trying to get the parties talking at any level to avoid a dangerous vacuum until a Plan B emerges.”

Clinton arrived in Morocco and ran into a firestorm caused by what has to be described as ill-chosen praise for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “reasonable compromise” in which the Israeli leader “has proposed a moratorium on new housing units in the West Bank, but would allow building or finishing about 3,000 more units and would exclude East Jerusalem from any building limits.”

Praising Netanyahu to Arab leaders for being “reasonable” with Israel’s settlement projects, was hardly a Clintonian diplomatic high point.

Tony Karon, writing for Time, renders this harsh judgment on the Obama-Clinton duo’s latest Middle East misadventure:

The Obama Administration’s bid to relaunch an Israeli-Palestinian peace process is falling apart faster than you can say settlement freeze — in no small part because President Obama began his effort by saying “settlement freeze.” . . . .

Asking the Arab states to accept Israel’s offer to simply slow down construction in the West Bank and its refusal to stop building and demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem — after President Obama publicly and repeatedly demanded it — has battered the Administration’s credibility in Arab capitals.

With the Palestinian January elections looming, this was not a good time for the US to deliver twin blows to Abbas’ public image before and after he met with Secretary of State Clinton in Abu Dhabi, just before her meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

The first blow came from what Politico’s Lauren Rozen described as the “US flip-flop on the settlements freeze issue”. That blow was coupled with the public humiliation Abbas suffered after he initially blocked further consideration by the UN Human Rights Council of the Goldstone Report.

By not standing in support of the Goldstone Report with Hamas and the Gazans who had suffered great losses in life and property, Abbas was immediately subjected to swift and angry reaction from his own Palestinian public.

This reaction forced him to reverse the Goldstone decision and endorse its further consideration.

Rozen quotes one Middle East authority (unnamed), who told her that “There is no strong, capable person navigating this ship. It all seems unprofessional, a policy drifting in different directions, thus projecting weakness to a savvy and cynical region that studies and looks for signs of strength and weakness. Very dangerous and full of implications for Iran and Af-Pak policy.”

This is a harsh indictment, which most likely comes from a “Middle East authority” who is unfriendly to both Obama and Clinton. But the point is undeniable that “signs of strength and weakness” are watched closely in the region.

The Obama-Clinton team has been no help in recent weeks to a battered President Abbas. Praising Bibi for his settlement rigidity, while giving Abbas bad advice on Goldstone, is no way to run a tough-minded foreign policy.

Picture above is by Abdeljalil Bounhar, of the Associated Press.

by James M. Wall

I have now watched Bill Moyers’ PBS interview with Judge Richard Goldstone for the third time.

I’m keeping the tape. It is historic.

During the sixty minutes of that interview, we hear more rational discussion of the Goldstone Report than we have heard from all the other Main Stream commercial major networks combined.

Moyers has a way of inviting his viewers to join him in a safe environment. Then he exposes them to some of the more progressive thinkers on the public scene. Sometimes he even talks to a judge like Richard Goldstone.

If your local PBS station carries Moyers on a regular basis, double your pledge.  If it doesn’t, send your money to a more worthy cause.

Moyers, 75,  is the most sensitive interviewer currently working on television.  He is a son of  what was once the segregated south, an Oklahoma-born, Texas-raised, seminary trained, southerner, a journalist who knows how to ask tough questions in a gentle manner.

I think of Bill as a sabra, “a thorny plant with a thick hide that conceals a sweet, soft interior”.

As Moyers talked with Goldstone on his Bill Moyers Journal (October 23), he channeled a young southern journalist throwing tough questions at a US federal judge after a particularly contentious civil rights trial.

Some progressive bloggers have worried that Bill was too much the “devil’s advocate”, making too convincing a case for Israel.

Far from it, Moyers was not advocating anything. He was giving Goldstone a platform no Main Stream journalist has provided for this dignified, articulate South African jurist.

Moyers was flashing back to his early days in the segregated American south, when a federal judge would explain to an unbelieving white public that it could not legally hold African Americans in a state of segregated bondage.

Sadly, in 2009, no network, other than PBS, has given the public a serious in depth look at the Goldstone Report.

That includes those MSNBC paragons of progressive virtue–Matthews, Olberman, and Maddow–who have  completely avoided any references to Goldstone while they wage all out war against Fox News, the insurance industry, Rush Limbaugh, and wayward members of Congress.

Moyers began his interview with Goldstone with what he called “a few basics”:

BILL MOYERS: Personally, do you have any doubt about Israel’s right to self-defense?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Absolutely not. And our approach to our mission and in our report the right of Israel to defend its citizens is taken as a given.

MOYERS: So the report in no way challenges Israel’s right to self-defense?

GOLDSTONE: Not at all. What we look at is how that right was used. We don’t question the right.

MOYERS: Do you consider Hamas an enemy of Israel?

GOLDSTONE: Well, anybody who’s firing many thousands of rockets and mortars into a country is, I think, in anybody’s book, an enemy.

MOYERS: Were those rocket attacks on Israel a threat to the civilians of Israel, to the population of Israel?

GOLDSTONE: Absolutely.

After that opening, Moyers hit Judge Goldstone with every criticism the Zionist Hard Right has made since the Judge started his investigation.

You can bet your last Confederate dollar that Judge Goldstone enjoyed every minute of that interview. These two men are pros. They had themselves a report to examine that dealt with Israel’s 21 day assault on Gaza, an assault Israel said was provoked by Hamas’ rocket attacks on Southern Israel.

The Judge quietly explained that his UN panel had concluded that both Israel and Hamas may be guilty of war crimes. He called on both Israel and Hamas to conduct their own internal investigations.

He was not taking sides, not this Israel-loving Zionist.  He was just reporting what his investigation discovered.

He is not new to this topic. A native of South Africa, Goldstone served as a judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, from July 1994 to October 2003, where he addressed the change from a white-controlled apartheid government into a black majority democracy.

He was the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), established by the UN Security Council in 1993. When the Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in late 1994, he became its chief prosecutor.

Whenever there were possible war crimes to examine after a conflict,  Judge Goldstone was the go-to guy.

Moyers asked Goldstone why he accepted such a difficult assignment.

JUDGE GOLDSTONE: It was a question of conscience really. I’ve been involved in investigating very serious violations in my own country, South Africa, and I was castigated by many in the white community for doing that. I investigated serious war crimes in the Balkans and the Serbs hated me, hated me for that.

And I was under serious death threats, both in South Africa and . . .  the Balkans. . . . I went into Rwanda, and many people hated me for doing that. . . .

I’ve been involved in this business for the last fifteen years or so, and it seemed to me that being Jewish was no reason to treat Israel exceptionally, and to say because I’m Jewish, it’s all right for me to investigate everybody else, but not Israel.

The interview and the full text are available  here.

Here are selected highlights:

BILL MOYERS: Your report, as you know, basically accuses Israel of waging war on the entire population of Gaza.

JUDGE GOLDSTONE: That’s correct.

MOYERS: There are allegations in here, some very tough allegations, of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed civilians who pose no threat, of shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them, of shooting two teenagers who’d been ordered off a tractor that they were driving, apparently carrying wounded civilians to a hospital, of homes, hundreds, maybe thousands of homes destroyed, left in rubble, of hospitals bombed.

There are some questions about one or two of your examples here, but it’s a damning indictment of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, right?

GOLDSTONE: Well, it is outrageous, and there should have been an outrage. You know, the response has not been to deal with the substance of those allegations. I’ve really seen or read no detailed response in respect of the incidents on which we report. . . . .

MOYERS: What did you see with your own eyes when you went there?

GOLDSTONE: I saw the destruction of the only flour-producing factory in Gaza. I saw fields plowed up by Israeli tank bulldozers. I saw chicken farms, for egg production, completely destroyed. Tens of thousands of chickens killed. I met with families who lost their loved ones in homes in which they were seeking shelter from the Israeli ground forces.

I had to have the very emotional and difficult interviews with fathers whose little daughters were killed, whose family were killed. One family, over 21 members, killed by Israeli mortars. So, it was a very difficult investigation, which will give me nightmares for the rest of my life. . . .

MOYERS: What makes those acts war crimes, as you say?

GOLDSTONE: Well, humanitarian law, really fundamentally is what’s known as the “principle of distinction.” It requires all people involved, commanders, troops, all people involved in making war, it requires them to distinguish between civilians and combatants.

. . And then there’s a question of proportionality. One can, in war, target a military target. And there can be what’s euphemistically referred to as ‘collateral damage,’ but the ‘collateral damage’ must be proportionate to the military aim.

If you can take out a munitions factory in an urban area with a loss of 100 lives, or you can use a bomb twice as large and take out the same factory and kill 2000 people, the latter would be a war crime, the former wouldn’t. . . .

MOYERS: Did you find war crimes by Hamas? . . .

GOLDSTONE: We found that the firing of many thousands of rockets and mortars at a civilian population to constitute a very serious war crime.  And we said, possibly crimes against humanity.

MOYERS: But Hamas is not a party to the Geneva Convention, right?

GOLDSTONE: Well it can’t be, because it’s not a state party. . . [Hamas] is bound by customary international law and by international human rights law, and that makes it equally a war crime to do what it’s been doing.

MOYERS: Yet critics say that by focusing more on the actions of the Israelis and, then on the Palestinians, you are, in essence making it clear whom you think is the more responsible party here.

GOLDSTONE: I suppose that’s fair comment, Bill. I think it’s difficult to deal equally with a state party, with a sophisticated army, with the sort of army Israel has, with an air force and a navy, and the most sophisticated weapons that are not only in the arsenal of Israel, but manufactured and exported by Israel, on the one hand, with Hamas using really improvised, imprecise armaments.

So it’s difficult to equate their power. But that having been said, one has to look at the actions of each. And one has to judge the criminality, or the alleged criminality, of each. . . .

MOYERS: Why do you think [Israel] bombed the infrastructure so thoroughly?

GOLDSTONE: We’ve found that the only logical reason is collective punishment against the people of Gaza for voting into power, Hamas, and a form of reprisal for the rocket attacks and mortar attacks on southern Israel.

MOYERS: So that would be the explanation for why, if they were interested only in stopping the bombing, they didn’t have to destroy the land.

GOLDSTONE: . . . .This was a political decision, I think, and not a military one. I think they were telling the people of Gaza that if you support Hamas, this is what we’re going to do to you.

Until now, Israel has refused to have anything to do with the Goldstone investigation and the Report. Will this hands-off attitude change?

Don’t count on it. Two of Israel’s best-known commentators, Uri Avnery and Aluf Benn, are not optimistic.

In his weekly column Avnery, long time Israeli peace activist, writer, and former Knesset member, identifies three options available to Israeli leaders:

*Conduct a real investigation;

*Ignore the demand and proceed as if nothing has happened;

*Conduct a sham inquiry.

It is easy to dismiss the first option: it has not the slightest chance of being adopted. Except for the usual suspects (including myself) who demanded an investigation long before anyone in Israel had heard of a judge called Goldstone, nobody supports it.

Among all the members of our political, military and media establishments who are now suggesting an “inquiry”, there is no one – literally not one – who means by that a real investigation. The aim is to deceive the Goyim and get them to shut up. . . .

The second option is the one proposed by the army Chief of Staff and the Minister of Defense. In America it is called “stonewalling”. Meaning: To hell with it.

The army commanders object to any investigation and any inquiry whatsoever. They probably know why. After all, they know the facts. They know that a dark shadow lies over the very decision to go to war, over the planning of the operation, over the instructions given to the troops, and over many dozens of large and small acts committed during the operation.

In their opinion, even if their refusal has severe international repercussions, the consequences of any investigation, even a phony one, would be far worse. . . .

Option three?

The politicians who oppose (ever so quietly) the Chief of Staff’s position believe that it is impossible to withstand international pressure completely, and that some kind of an inquiry will have to be conducted.

Since not one of them intends to hold a real investigation, they propose to follow a tried and trusted Israeli method, which has worked wonderfully hundreds of times in the past: the method of sham.

A sham inquiry. Sham conclusions. Sham adherence to international law. Sham civilian control over the military.

Nothing simpler than that. An “inquiry committee” (but not a Commission of Investigation according to the law) will be set up, chaired by a suitably patriotic judge and composed of carefully chosen honorable citizens who are all “one of us”.

Testimonies will be heard behind closed doors (for considerations of security, of course). Army lawyers will prove that everything was perfectly legal, the National Whitewasher, Professor Asa Kasher, will laud the ethics of the Most Moral Army in the World.

Generals will speak about our inalienable right to self-defense. In the end, two or three junior officers or privates may be found guilty of “irregularities”.

Israel’s friends all over the world will break into an ecstatic chorus: What a lawful state! What a democracy! What morality! Western governments will declare that justice has been done and the case closed. The US veto will see to the rest.

So why don’t the army chiefs accept this proposal? Because they are afraid things might not proceed quite so smoothly. The international community will demand that at least part of the hearings be conducted in open court. There will be a demand for the presence of international observers.

And, most importantly: there will be no justifiable way to exclude the testimonies of the Gazans themselves. Things will get complicated. The world will not accept fabricated conclusions. In the end we will be in exactly the same situation. Better to stay put and brave it out, whatever the price.

Aluf Benn, an Ha’aretz columnist, has some direct questions for his government:

I want to know how and why it was decided to embark on Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip and to expand it into a ground offensive.

I want to know if the decisions were affected by the Israeli election campaign then underway and the change in U.S. presidents.

I want to know if the leaders who launched the operation correctly judged the political damage it would cause Israel and what they did to minimize it.

I want to know if those who gave orders to the Israel Defense Forces assumed that hundreds of Palestinian civilians would be killed, and how they tried to prevent this.

These questions should be at the center of an investigation into Operation Cast Lead. An investigation is necessary because of the political complexities that resulted from the operation, the serious harm to Palestinian civilians, the Goldstone report and its claims of war crimes, and the limits that will be imposed on the IDF’s freedom of operation in the future. . . .

The investigations by the army and Military Police are meant to examine soldiers’ behavior on the battlefield. They are no substitute for a comprehensive examination of the activities of the political leadership and senior command, who are responsible for an operation and its results.

It’s not the company or battalion commanders who need to be investigated, but former prime minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, former foreign minister Tzipi Livni, Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, and the heads of the intelligence chiefs and Foreign Ministry, who were party to the decisions.

It is also important to investigate Barak and Livni’s election campaign advisers to find out if and how the campaign affected the military and diplomatic efforts.

By James M. Wall

Looking for a sign that President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu are not always singing from the same page in the Middle East hymnal?

Start your search with the three-day J Street Conference, “Driving Change: Securing Peace”, which began Sunday night in Washington, DC.  More then 1200 are expected to attend.

Obama’s National Security Advisor, retired United States Marine Corps four-star general, James Jones, will be a featured speaker.

On October 15, General Jones delivered the keynote address for the fourth annual gala of the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), a Washington-based pro-Palestinian organization.

Jones told ATFP the Obama administration was committed “to establishing a Palestinian state and [determined] to move forward with peace talks”, not an earth-shattering promise.

In fact, it is current White House boiler plate.  It is not, however, what Jones says, but to whom and where he says it.

In stark contrast to Jones’ friendly outreach, Michael Oren, the American-educated Israeli ambassador to the US, rejected J Street’s invitation. Ha’aretz provides the official Israeli government reasoning:

In response to the question about J Street’s invitation to participate in its conference, the Embassy of Israel has been privately communicating its concerns over certain policies of the organization that may impair the interests of Israel,” the embassy said in a statement. . . [T]he embassy will send an observer to the conference and will follow its proceedings with interest.

Ambassador Oren will be, to put it boldly, a No-Show.

Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has chosen sides in the battle of DC pro-Israel lobbies. What about President Obama? Within a two week time span, President Obama’s NSA chief spoke to both ATFP and the J Street Conference.

Ambassador Oren was conspicuous by his absence from both events.

These visits by Jones to the enemy camp is a blow to the prestige of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has reason to worry about J Street’s emergence as the new kid on the pro-Israel DC lobbying front.

AIPAC has been an Israeli power base in Washington for 45 years.

So effectively has AIPAC taken control of the US Congress, that it is rare to find a Congressman or Senator who dares oppose an AIPAC-sponsored resolution favorable to Israel or any legislation not blessed by the reigning political party in Tel Aviv.

Now, with the appearance of the 18 month old J Street lobby, AIPAC’s dominance is threatened. J Street is still small, but it is young and determined to break AIPAC’s grip on American politics.

Since lobbying is a political game, J Street is also cautious. Already it has drawn fire from its own political left for yielding to pressure from political right bloggers, operating under AIPAC instructions.

The pressure led J Street to cancel a poetry session after Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb posted a video in which poet Josh Healey, a scheduled participant, talks about how, for his friends, “Anne Frank is Matthew Shepard” and “Guantanamo is Auschwitz.” For AIPAC, any parallel drawn to the Holocaust is verboten, even when applied to currrent human rights violations.

Healey’s response to J Street’s capitulation: “If you’re trying to be an alternative to AIPAC, don’t behave like AIPAC”.

Goldfarb’s campaign against J Street overreached when he tried to smear Conference participant, Helene Cobban, the former Christian Science Monitor foreign correspondent. Wrong target and wrong format.

Goldfarb assumed J Street would remove her from the Conference after he posted this blog quote, in which Cobban draws a parallel between Israel’s “security” walls inside the West Bank and Gaza, and German concentration camp prison walls:

Cobban is prone to her own Holocaust metaphors when talking about Israel. “When you see the Wall, especially the places where it goes anywhere near built-up Palestinian areas and is studded with looming concrete watch-towers, the overwhelming image that might come to your mind, as it does to mine, is that of the fence-and-watchtower system around a concentration camp.”

According to Tikun Olam blogger Richard Silverstein, the poetry segment of the Conference is on the “official” program, and thus under the control of J Street.

The bloggers’ panel, which will include both Cobban and Silverstein, is held in connection with the Conference, but is not part of the “official” program.

J Street’s leaders are, after all, Jewish in their orientation and they are trying to build for the future from a young Jewish constituency. They are well aware of the Zionist linguistic ground rules on all matters even remotely related to the Holocaust,  ground rules, of course, which were established decades ago.

Nor will Cobban’s Holocaust reference, quite appropriate in context, prevent the “bloggers panel” from enjoying a standing room response from conference attendees.

Eighteen months after its creation, J Street’s email list now exceeds 100,000. With that list and other fund raising efforts, J Street has raised more than $600,000 for congressional candidates who “share our values”,  as J Street Political Director Issac Luria told the Christian Century’s Amy Frykholm.

That total is still far less than the amount that pours annually into AIPAC’s budget. but Luria believes that J Street’s numbers will increase, thanks to the “new media” which has already “changed the political landscape:” The internet-driven Howard Dean presidential campaign, the liberal MoveOn organization, and the 2008 presidential campaigns.

AIPAC and its Washington allies are fighting back.

James Besser, Washington Correspondent for the Jewish Week, describes how the conservative Weekly Standard reacted when 160 members of Congress agreed to serve on J Street’s “host committee” for the event’s gala dinner.

Those 160 members came “under intense pressure to withdraw”.  The Standard reported that 10 already have, “including Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, both New York Democrats.”

When AIPAC favorite Schumer withdraws from anything, the flock usually follows. Expect more than 10 to blame poor staff work and take their names off the risky gala program.

AIPAC has ruled the Washington lobby roost since its founding in 1964. Prior to the founding, its precursor organization was laying the groundwork as a threatening and effective attack dog.

According to UCLA scholar Steven Spiegel’s The Other Israel- Arab Conflict:

The tension between the Eisenhower administration and Israeli supporters were so acute that there were rumors (unfounded as it turned out) that the administration would investigate the American Zionist Council. Therefore, an independent lobbying group was formed within the auspices of the American Zionist Committee.

AIPAC’s precursor organization also followed the lobby maxim: Develop friendly contacts within the government.

In Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Episionage Scandal (IRMEP), Grant F. Smith uncovered this fascinating historical item in the transcript of the “US Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation into the Activities of Agents of Foreign Principals in the United States:”

Fred Scriber, a friendly US Underseretary of Treasury, confidentially recommended dring a 1959 meeting with key Zionist organizations operating in the US that they needed to restructure themselves in order to avoid problems with the Eisenhower Administration, the IRS, and the US Department of Justice.

AIPAC was a 1964 organizational spin off from the American Zionist Council, after  Senator William J. Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, convened hearings on the use of Israeli funds by the American Zionist Council.  in US politics,.

But before Senator Fulbright, there was President John F. Kennedy.

Jeff Gates writes in the Iranian website, Payvand, that in June, 1963,  President Kennedy wrote a series of angry letters to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, demanding what Israel now demands of Iran: International inspections of its nuclear facilities.

The key difference between the current US demand that Iran reveal any nuclear weapons development, was that in 1963

Kennedy knew for certain that Israel, while portraying itself a friend and ally, repeatedly lied to Kennedy about its nuclear weapons development at the Dimona reactor in the Negev Desert.

Best estimates point to sometime between 1962 and 1964 when Israel produced its first weapon in what is now [in 2009] a vast nuclear arsenal estimated at 200-400 warheads. Kennedy’s letter to Ben-Gurion was anything but friendly.

Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy were members of a dying presidential breed: They not only resisted Israeli pressure, they did so aggressively.

Under Lyndon Johnson, the executive branch turned dramatically in favor of Israel. Harsh demands of Israeli leaders disappeared. The Dimona reactor in the Negev Desert, by unofficial agreement, became a permanent secret which remains secret to this day, even as the US demands transparency from Iran.

A pattern was set. When Israel attacked the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, killing 34 Americans, the Johnson administration refused to prosecute the guilty parties and made no effort to seek justice for the victims.

AIPAC was created as a domestic non-profit agency, which was separated from foreign funding of US political campaigns. The assignment handed to AIPAC was to build a private donor base in the US and a public donor base in the US Congress.

AIPAC was born during the Cold War. Israel was sold to the American public as a militant outpost against the Soviet Union. It was an easy sell, even to politicians who had not yet been treated to an all expenses trip to Tel Aviv.

The founder of AIPAC was Isaiah L. “Si” Kenan who served as AIPAC ’s executive director and editor of the newsletter, the Near East Report, until his retirement in 1974.

According to Grant Smith, Kenen initially persuaded Congress to provide $15 million to Israel, despite “robust” State Department opposition.

That State Department “robust” opposition soon faded. By 1973, Kenan claimed he had boosted US aid to Israel to $1 billion a year. At the time of his death in 1988, US aid to Israel exceeded $3 billion a year, the highest amount of US aid given to any country. That same figure has been supplemented annually by loans forgiven, and special needs as requested.

The American tax-paying public–at least those who rely on the MSM (Main Stream Media) for information on money and politics–has remained surprisingly indifferent to the impact of AIPAC’s influence on US foreign policy.

That same public has also remained blissfully ignorant about J Street, an emerging voice of a competing “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby. That veil of ignorance could be lifted, if ever so briefly, during this week’s J Street national meeting in Washington.

#####First Update Monday########

This just in from Helen Cobban’s blog:

Our decidedly “off-Broadway” blogger’s panel took place at noon today, tucked into something slightly larger than a broom closet in the bowels of J Street’s conference hotel. There were about ten of us on the panel and three additional panelists participating remotely, via the craziest kind of phone/Skype connections.

Audience people (who also included some really cool people like Australian-Jewish blogger Antony Lowenstein) were literally pasted to the walls and would have hung from rafters had there been rafters.

At one point J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami put in a small cameo appearance at the back of the audience. I believe he was not there when blogging superstars like Phil Weiss and Max Blumenthal were deciding whether to give J Street one thumb’s-up, one and a half, or two.

Anyway, bottom line, the panel was an independent activity. J Street did not endorse the views expressed there, and we weren’t obliged to line up like clockwork behind all of J Street’s positions, either. But all in all, huge kudos to J Street for embracing the idea of a free-speech forum like this.

*****Second Update Tuesday*****

In his welcoming address to the conference, Jeremy Ben Ami made it quite clear that J Street focuses on “a love of Israel and concern for its future”.  Here is a sample:

“. . . .Substantively, of course, we’re here because we care so deeply about changing the course of events in the Middle East. Because we know the path we are on – of endless conflict, failure to compromise, terror and bloodshed – leads only to hopelessness and despair.

We rally tonight around this simple premise: that the security and very future of the Jewish, democratic homeland in Israel is at risk without an end to the conflict and to the occupation of the Palestinian people.

The work begun in the generations before ours to build a nation in the image of our people to be the home of our people will only be complete when Israel has defined borders, a Palestinian state has been established next door and the rest of the region and the world recognizes Israel and accepts its existence.

Our presence here in such numbers and with such energy demonstrates the powerful base of political support ready to back active pursuit and achievement of comprehensive, regional peace in the Middle East – as an urgent priority not a distant, almost meaningless, aspiration.

We do not want the United States to simply be a passive facilitator of fruitless negotiation. No – as President Obama has said, we have had enough talking about talking. We want action and we want resolution. We want the United States and the international community actively at the table – and we want this conflict to end.

As I hope has been clear in the early stages of the conversation tonight – while this movement is welcoming to all who seek peace, justice and an end to the conflict – it is rooted in a love of Israel and concern for its future. . . .”

by James M. Wall

On October 23, 2003, exactly six years ago this week, Professor Tony Judt published an essay in the New York Review of Books entitled, Israel: The Alternative.

The essay was the culmination of a journey he began as a teen-ager on an Israeli Kibbutz during the Six Day War.

Judt was born in London in 1948. His parents were secular Jews. His mother’s parents were immigrants from Russia; his Belgian-born father came from a long line of Lithuanian rabbis. By the time he reached the age of 24, Judt had earned a PhD in history from Cambridge University.

Earlier, the young scholar had followed a pattern that came naturally to a secular Jewish teenager in the 1960s.. At age 15, according to his biography in Wikipedia, he “helped promote the migration of British Jews to Israel.”

At 18, he worked for a year on Kibbutz Machanaim in Israel. During and after the 1967 Six Day War, Judt,worked as a driver and translator for the Israeli Defense Forces. When the war ended, Judt began to have doubts about the Zionist project.

“I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country through work,” Judt has said. He began to realize that this “idealistic fantasy” was “remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country and were suffering in refugee camps to make this fantasy possible.”

On September 11, 2001, Judt was a professor at New York University, where, in addition to his academic achievements, he had become known as a “combative writer and reviewer”.

In an article on Judt, the London Guardian writes, “his early opposition to the Iraq war threw him out of alignment with his usual [liberal] allies, who were still rallying around the president following the terrorist attacks.”

Judt had more to say. Seven months into the Iraq war, he wrote Israel: The Alternative. It begins:

The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed.

Mahmoud Abbas was undermined by the President of the Palestinian Authority and humiliated by the Prime Minister of Israel. His successor awaits a similar fate.

Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the “road map.”

The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: “It’s all Arafat’s fault.” Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber.

Palestinian Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?

The essay was stunning in its audacity. It attacked two American sacred cows: the patriotic zeal behind the Iraq war, and Israel’s absolute right to exist as a Jewish state. Judt was saying the unsayable: The Iraq war was a tragic mistake, and the “two state solution” was dead.

This was 2003, when few Americans dared to voice either of these opinions. The essay was so removed from the conventional wisdom promoted by Main Stream Media, that it was quickly shoved into a corner reserved for eccentric professorial nonsense.

But the Israel Lobby noticed. Tony Judt immediately became a prime target for the Lobby, a man who had spoken a truth that would undermine Israel’s carefully constructed narrative designed to protect “inconvenient truths”.

Judt had written what many thought, but few dared express.

Later in his essay, Judt wrote:

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law.

The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism. In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy.

Hence its present dilemma. Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.

Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy “Samaria,” “Judea,” and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy.

But logically it cannot be both. Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile.

In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.

Judt was prophetic. Six years later, the Iraq war is now generally understood to have been a tragic mistake. And with Israel’s steady “settlement” march across the Occupied Territories, the One State solution is emerging as the only viable and just alternative. (See Ali Abunimah’s One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse)

Six years later, Judt’s prophetic voice is no longer eccentric.

When Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago were targets of the Lobby, he wrote an op ed piece for the New York Times after Walt and Mearsheimer’s initial appearance on the media stage with their essay in the London Review of Books, an essay that was quickly expanded into a book, The Israel Lobby.

As they must have anticipated, the essay has run into a firestorm of vituperation and refutation. Critics have charged that their scholarship is shoddy and that their claims are, in the words of the columnist Christopher Hitchens, “slightly but unmistakably smelly.” The smell in question, of course, is that of anti-Semitism.

In a New York Times column, written in June of this year, Judt cut to the heart of the phony diplomatic game the US and Israel have been playing over “freezing” settlement growth.

He concluded his column:

President Obama faces a choice. He can play along with the Israelis, pretending to believe their promises of good intentions and the significance of the distinctions they offer him. Such a pretense would buy him time and favor with Congress.

But the Israelis would be playing him for a fool, and he would be seen as one in the Mideast and beyond. Alternatively, the president could break with two decades of American compliance, acknowledge publicly that the emperor is indeed naked, dismiss Mr. Netanyahu for the cynic he is and remind Israelis that all their settlements are hostage to American goodwill.

Judt can also be gentle. In a brief appearance in Charlie Rose’s “Green Room” in July of this year,  he spoke poignantly of his earlier years.

When Israeli author Amos Alon died on May 25 at age 82, Judt wrote:

It is for his writings on Zionism and Israel, and his lifelong engagement with the country and its dilemmas, that Amos Elon will be best remembered. In The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971) he offered a critical history of Zionism, its practitioners, and its heirs; an account that directly confronts the shortcomings of the Zionist project and its outcome.

Today such critical accounts are common currency in debates in Israel; in those days they were rare indeed. Amos Elon’s commitment to Israel, the country where he lived and worked for most of his life, was never in question.

On Monday night, October 19, an audience of more than 2000 waited expectantly for the appearance of Tony Judt, who was to deliver the annual Remarque Lecture, at New York University’s Skirball Center.

Philip Weiss described the emotional evening:

Tony Judt rolled on to the stage at NYU last night in a wheelchair, with a breathing tube strapped to his head and a blanket over his form, and began his lecture in a surprisingly strong voice by “shooting the elephant in the room”.

A year ago he was diagnosed with a form of amyotropic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative disease of the muscle, and it had progressed to the point that he was now paralyzed below the neck.

Some friends had urged him to make the subject of the Remarque Lecture the nature of his disease, so as to advance the health care debate, but he had concluded there was no point in show and tell.

The show was obvious: this is what the disease did to a body, left him quadriplegic “wearing facial Tupperware,” a machine breathing for him, making a rhythmic wheezing. The hope others had that he would give an uplifting lecture about what a body can do under these circumstances he must also disappoint: “I’m English, we don’t do uplifting.”

In his lecture, which lasted for 100 minutes, in spite of his physical limitations, Judt was still the articulate fighter.  Weiss’ report concludes:

I admire Judt no end. . . A man of great intellectual courage, he broke with the so-called liberals of the New Republic over Zionism, then took Walt and Mearsheimer’s side when it mattered in 2006, and joined Mearsheimer on stage at Cooper Union to explain to Shlomo Ben-Ami and Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk that just because anti-Semites agreed with something you said doesn’t mean you are wrong. . .

There was real grief in seeing a great man so reduced by an illness that he has approached with a stiff upper lip. . . . A huge community of leftleaning New Yorkers turned out because Judt has been so important, and this public act was one of leadership.

As he has done on other occasions, he pulled aside the curtains and the wings to show that the little world we are used to accepting is not necessarily the world of history. It is the world of recent “opinion.” . . .

It was in the end a thrilling spiritual message, forged by Judt’s own misery, and a challenge to our creativity, to break the chains of established opinion and tell a different story about history.

Picture above is from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

By James M. Wall

I read an online report on Gentleman’s Quarterly (GQ)’s latest issue, and discovered why Palestinians are losing faith in President Obama.

There at the top of a list of the 50 Most Powerful People in Washington, DC, was my old political colleague from Chicago, Rahm Emanuel.

I quickly scrolled the entire list of the MPPs in DC and discovered folks who are close to Obama, or who are engaged in running his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or who are advising the president on how to rescue the economy.

There are even some Republicans, in or out of office, who are dedicated to seeing Obama fail. There is even a media heavyweight, former Bill Clinton White House aide, George Stephanopoulos.

But there is no one who really knows and feels the Palestinian narrative.

And there, right up there at the top of the GQ list was ole Rahm, Chief of Staff to President Obama.  This is a man who knows how to wield power.  Don’t take my word for it, read GQ’s description of why Rahm is the Number One Most Powerful Man in Washington:

More, much more, than just the gatekeeper to the president. In addition to his five years as senior adviser in the Clinton White House, Rahm served six years in the House and, more importantly, engineered the Democratic takeover of Congress in ‘06. He knows procedure, he’s ruthlessly pragmatic about what is politically achievable, and he knows how and when to twist arms and call in the many favors he’s owed.

All of which has helped him wrangle fence-sitters when it came to ponying up for the stimulus package, negotiate with the Senate Finance Committee on health care, and keep the liberal and conservative elements of his own party in line. Obstruct the White House and at some point Rahm will come calling.

Says Senator Lindsey Graham, a man not known for agreeing with the administration: “The president is lucky to have him.”

Chris Matthews, MSNBC’s Rush Limbaugh of the Left, dissed the list, while reporting it to his national audience, as “just a fashion magazine”.

That did not bother me. I take GQ as seriously as I take all other voices from the Main Stream Media, all of whom are beholden in advance to someone or something else. Why not fashion?

Besides, Rahm is one of the classiest dressers in DC. Charming as all get out, if you can get by his fondness for salty language.

And now, there is Rahm, sitting down this week to use his political charm and muscle on members of Congress as they fight among themselves to write a final health care bill. Trust me, put your money on Rahm in that dog fight.

I have had my differences with Rahm, from the day he walked in my campaign office in 1983 and announced that he was there to raise money for Congressman Paul Simon’s primary race for the US Senate.

I was managing Simon’s campaign, and told this cocky young man I was not ready to hire a 24 year old kid I did not know. He said, check with Paul. I did, and the future Illinois senator told me, “Don’t worry about it;  his salary is covered.”

Veteran Illinois journalist Robert E. Hartley has just published his latest book, Paul Simon: The Political Journey of An Illinois Original, Southern Illinois Press. I am biased. I have known Bob since he covered politics from his base in Decatur, Illinois.  This is his seventh book.

It is a well documented work (he interviewed me at length).  It is also an example of how the Israel lobby was able to influence one of the most moral men ever to serve in both the US House and Senate.

It was in the Simon campaign that it became obvious to me that Rahm could raise money. He was also a dedicated Zionist whose presence in the campaign delighted the hearts of Simon’s dedicated Zionist supporters.

Rahm’s rolodex (not a watch; if you are under 50, a rolodex is “a rotating file device used to store business contact information”) played no small role in his fund-raising success, a success he repeated in Bill Clinton’s two campaigns, and in subsequent congressional campaigns for the Democratic National Committe.

A few years later, Rahm and I were volunteers in Bill Clinton’s first run for the White House.

Rahm knew I was not a dedicated Zionist, so each day at the staff meeting, he delighted in calling me Yasir, as in Arafat, for readers who may not remember.  For Rahm, linking me to the Palestinian leader was intended as an insult.  This is a man who uses humor as a weapon.

I have followed Rahm’s career since 1983 in both awe and dismay. He’s good, no doubt about it. And now he wields power in the White House.  In an earlier posting, I expressed the hope that Rahm would use his clout to reassure the Palestinian public and talk tough to the Israelis. So far, no such luck.

The Palestinians have the Cairo speech to hold on to, but I have bad news for them.  Bibi is eating Obama’s lunch. No one in that top 50, or the top 500 have any loyalty to the oppressed residents of the West Bank or Gaza. Official Washington has been drinking the AIPAC kool-aid for so long they don’t know what all the fuss is about.

Frankly, I doubt that any of them has ever witnessed the humiliation of a Palestinian at a check point or a witnessed the demolition of a Palestinian home, or walked along the Security Wall, on the Palestinian side. I also doubt if any has read Edward Said or ever heard of Rachel Corrie, whose family’s appeal for justice to the US Congress was ignored.

Have they read the Goldstone Report, a UN commissioned study of  possible war crimes committed by Israeli forces in Gaza? And yes, I know that the same report found fault with Hamas conduct in that period, which is about the only fact about Goldstone the MSM made sure reached Official Washington and the American public.

Which brings us to the news that Robert Wexler, will resign from his safe Florida Democratic seat in Congress, to become director of the Washington-based Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation (CMEPEC).

What, you may wonder, will this have to do with official Washington’s treatment of the Palestinians.  Not much, but it will play a role. State legislators in Wexler’s south Florida district are scrambling to replace him.  The next Congressman will also be a pro-Israel Democrat, thanks primarily to a heavy Jewish voting population in the district.

But will it be an AIPAC or a J Street winner?

Let me explain:

Wexler was one of Obama’s earliest supporters in Congress. Unlike Rahm, who waited to see who would win the Democratic nomination, Wexler, a self-described  ”fire-breathing liberal,” and defender of Israel, was all over the country during the Democratic primaries assuring Jewish audiences that they could trust Obama to look out for Israel.

You may recall Wexler as that fire breathing liberal who led the battle in DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting where Candidate Clinton failed in her effort to take 185 Florida delegates she had “won” in the Florida primary.

In a nationally televised committee meeting, Wexler said his own state had violated the party’s rules–”The Florida primary vote was not a ‘normal’ primary and cannot be treated as one”–so Clinton’s claim on the 185 delegates could not stand.

In the committee meeting, Wexler prevailed over Harold Ickes, Clinton’s delegate guru, who had tried to steal delegates from Jimmy Carter on behalf of Ted Kennedy at the 1980 Democratic Convention.. Ickes lost that one too.

Wexler is a formidable political figure. He is taking over as director of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation (CMEPEC), which was founded in 1989 by the very wealthy Zionist, Slim Fast Foods Chairman S. Daniel Abraham.

If CMEPEC is playing nice with J Street, this would be good news for the J Street branch of the Pro-Israel Washington community.

J Street has built a moderate reputation as an alternative lobby group against AIPAC. Wexler was an early recipient of J Street funds, back when it was not easy for members of Congress to take J Street money instead of remaining loyal to AIPAC.

On the scale of moderation, J Street is well to the left of AIPAC. Except, I am not encouraged when I see hard line pro-Zionists like Dennis Ross, US Special Middle East Coordinator; Uri Savir, former Chief Israeli negotiator for the Palestinian and Syrian tracks; Dore Gold, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, and few “safe” Palestinians on the current CMEPEC board .

The Americans on that list may be “moderates” but they still bleed Zionist red. And, by now we have learned just how little influence moderates have over the likes of Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman.

Wexler has his enemies in the pro-Israel DC community.  The right wing, pro-Israel blog, The Force of Reason, attacked Wexler’s move to the CMEPEC in less than temperate language, under the headline: Rep. Wexler (D-emented) Resigns to Be J Street Shill.

JTA [Jewish Telegraphic Agency] reports that [Wexler] resigned from Congress to head the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation, which is a J Street front. Not only is he endorsed by J Street, but he’s working for them now, too. . .

The Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation engineered the second Intifada by being one of the primary backers of Oslo, back in their heyday.

The Center’s former head, Stephen Cohen, was the sincere genius who made Assad and Arafat out to be peacemakers, rather than the Islamonazi savages they always were.

Wow, and it gets worse. So you have to admire Wexler for taking the side of the good guys on the DC Israel team. But even that news should not be welcome in Ramallah.

The moderates in Washington have Obama’s ear.  Rahm talks to them.  But what looks like moderation to the pro-Israel Washington doesn’t look very moderate to a people who have lived under an increasingly harsh military occupation since 1967.

Adam Horowitz, who writes on the pro-Palestinian Jewish blog, Mondoweiss, explains, under this headline:

Hope in Obama is ‘evaporating’ in the Middle East as the peace process goes nowhere.

Seems like everyone is losing faith in Obama nowadays, and the Middle East is no different. While Israelis never seemed to like him much, the rest of the region is beginning to grow weary, starting with Palestinians.

The AP is reporting on a leaked memo from Fatah’s Office of Mobilization and Organization that says, “All hopes placed in the new U.S. administration and President Obama have evaporated,” because the White House, “couldn’t withstand the pressure of the Zionist lobby.”

Although some think this might only be Abbas trying to rehab his nationalist bona fides, it would be hard to disagree with the gist of the memo.

The “nationalist bona fides”, of course, refers to the Palestinian president’s mistake in listening to the US and Israel and pulling back the Goldstone Report from the UN Human Rights Commission agenda. Abbas has since reversed that mistake. He asked that the Report be put back on the agenda. But the damage has been done.

Mark Lynch reports for Foreign Policy on the change of mood toward the peace process in the country of Jordan:

When I was last in Jordan about six months ago, I found a great deal of optimism over the appointment of George Mitchell and the high profile Obama gave to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. But now those hopes seem to have largely evaporated.

The launch of Israeli-Palestinian talks which they had expected by June continue to drift in limbo, while Obama’s failure to deliver on the settlement freeze has — just as so many predicted — eroded his credibility. How could the Americans have allowed Netanyahu to not only defy U.S. demands on settlements but to not even pay any significant price?

Again and again, from all sectors of Jordanian political society, I heard the same refrain: Obama’s heart is in the right place and we want him to succeed, but he’s just not getting it done.

Rahm Emanuel is Obama’s point man on bringing hope to the Palestinians. So far “he’s just not getting it done”.  Is there any wonder why the Palestinians and their supporters in the Arab states (and in the US) are losing faith in Obama?

Pro-Israel Jewish factions in Washington are fighting among themselves over whether AIPAC or J Street is Israel’s best friend in the US.

But where, o where, are the supporters of justice for the Palestinians? This much we know. They are not among the 50 most important people in Washington.

Unless, that is, Mister Number One himself, Rahm Emanuel, recognizes that it is in the best interests of the American people, Israelis and the Palestinian people, to stand up to the right wing rulers of Israel and say: “Enough, already.”

Picture above of Rahm Emanuel and David Alexrod is an AP Photo by Gerald Herbert.

By James M. Wall

Twenty years ago, October 9, 1989, East German citizens marched to a prayer service at Leipzig’s St. Nicholas (Lutheran) Church. In a ritual they had repeated many nights before, they marched  to the church holding lighted candles.

There were 70,000 marchers in the streets of Leipzig that night. Communist East German officials waited for the signal from Berlin and Moscow to disperse the crowd by force. The signal never came.  Two weeks later, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union began its total collapse.

The Leipzig Communist security chief wanted very much to subdue the rebellion.  His police force was well armed. Soldiers with machine guns stood on top of nearby buildings.

In a final scene from the East German movie, Nikolaikirche, the security chief stares out at the crowd, his defiance now gone, and says, “”We planned everything. We were prepared for everything, except for candles and prayers.”

I attended the premier showing of Nikolaikirche (St. Nicholas Church) at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival. Thirteen years later, Nikolaikirche remains for me one of strongest cinematic demonstrations I have ever seen of the power of peaceful, non violent protest against an occupying force.

I opened my Berlin Film Festival report by placing Leipzig in a religious context:

One could not visit Berlin in the 450th anniversary year of Martin Luther’s death without making a pilgrimage to Wittenberg, the city in which Luther began the Protestant Reformation.

His tomb lies in a place of honor in the Schlosskirche, where Luther posted his 95 defiant challenges to the pope’s authority. To reach Wittenberg from Berlin, one travels south on the autobahn past now-empty Soviet army barracks, passing at highway speed through areas where border crossings once delayed travelers for hours.

After an hour and a half on the autobahn, a smaller highway takes the pilgrim to the Elbe River, not far from the spot where American and Soviet troops met in the final days of World War II. One passes outmoded, nearly vacant chemical plants in what was once East Germany’s thriving industrial region. The more efficient factories in the western part of the country have replaced many of these plants.

At one operation near Wittenberg, the number of employees has been cut from 8,000 to 700. Wandering through Luther’s city and reflecting on the strife in Luther’s career, I saw similarities to more recent struggles in Germany that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

In Luther’s life, religion regularly interacted with politics. His initial success in reforming the church was possible in part because he cultivated the support of political leaders who protected him, and who eventually separated their states from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. . . .

Nikolaikirche, directed by Frank Beyer and based on a highly respected novel by East German author Erich Loest, records some decisive moments in “Die Wende”, the “turning” from communism to freedom. The movie re-creates events at Leipzig’s St. Nicholas (Lutheran) Church during the peaceful revolution of 1989.

Communist officials in Leipzig came very close to applying the “Chinese solution”–using massive force to put down public demonstrations. Those demonstrations began as prayer meetings across the city. . . .

Many if not most of those who prayed in the churches and then walked the streets with lighted candles to express opposition to communist policies were not committed Christians. But they found in the church a place where opposition to oppression could be voiced. The pastor at St. Nicholas acknowledged that the church was open to nonbelievers as well as believers.

On one occasion, the pews were filled with government officials and university students who had been sent to foil the demonstration. But the pastor shrewdly “reserved” the balconies for the demonstrators.

On the night of October 9, 1989, more than 70,000 citizens mobilized in the streets of Leipzig. Before the march, the St. Nicholas pastor admonished the demonstrators to be nonviolent: “Put down your rocks.”

Meanwhile, security officials waited for instructions from Moscow and Berlin on using force to subdue the demonstrators. The orders never came, and the police gave up. A month later the Berlin Wall fell. The security chief who wanted to subdue the rebellion is shown in the film staring out at the crowd in front of his headquarters.

“We planned everything,” he says. “We were prepared for everything, except for candles and prayers.”

When a colleague wrote to remind me of the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the end of Communist control over East Germany, I had just read Ali Abunimah’s essay,”After Goldstone, Hamas Faces Fateful Choice”, in the Electronic Intifada.

The parallel with Leipzig, while different in many historical circumstances, suggests that out of crisis moments, opportunities for new options may emerge. I am especially alerted to the parallel when I recall the instruction from the St. Nicholas pastor, “Put down your rocks.”

Abunimah begins:

The uproar over the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) collaboration with Israel to bury the Goldstone report, calling for trials of Israeli leaders for war crimes in Gaza, is a political earthquake.

The whole political order in place since the 1993 Oslo accords were signed is crumbling. As the initial tremors begin to fade, the same old political structures may appear still to be in place, but they are hollowed out.

This unprecedented crisis threatens to topple the US-backed PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, but it also leaves Hamas, the main Palestinian resistance faction, struggling with fateful choices.

Abbas, accustomed to being surrounded by corrupt cronies, sycophants and yes-men, badly misjudged the impact of his decision — under Israeli and American instructions — to withdraw PA support for the resolution at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, forwarding the Goldstone report for further action. . .

Torrents of protest and outrage flowed from almost every direction. It was as if all the suppressed anger and grief about PA collaboration with Israel during the massacres in Gaza last winter suddenly burst through a dam.

“The crime at Geneva cannot pass without all those responsible being held accountable,” the widely-read London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi stated in its lead editorial on 8 October. The newspaper called for the removal of Abbas and his associates who betrayed the victims of Israel’s massacres and “saved Israel from the most serious moral, political and legal crisis it has faced since its establishment.”

After an extended analysis of the choices now facing Hamas, which has been working through Egypt to work toward unity with Fatah, Abunimah concludes that  the PA government of Mammoud Abbas is now too weak and subservient to the US and Israel, to be a valid partner for Hamas.

Abbas’ disastrous Goldstone response, Abunimah argues, should lead to a totally new government in Gaza and the West Bank, specifically, he concludes:

The political collapse underway offers all Palestinians — including Hamas — a new opportunity: to build a broad-based, internationally legitimate popular resistance movement that mobilizes all of Palestinian society as the first intifada did, and to reconnect with Palestinians inside Israel who face an existential threat from escalating Israeli racism.

This movement must work with and enhance the global solidarity campaign to put maximum pressure on Israel — and its collaborators — to end their repression, racism and violence, and hasten the emancipation of all the people of Palestine.

Abunimah implies this new opportunity for a unified Palestinian government might be seized not through violence, but through non-violent methods  At least that is one option open to Hamas, one the Gaza leaders should be encouraged to choose.

Israel’s military superiority is so overwhelming that, like the East Germans of Leipzig in 1989, only a peaceful confrontation makes any sense. It would require an Israeli willingness to put down its guns as well.  And given the militant track record of the current Israeli government, that option is impossible without pressure from the United States government.

The section cited from Nikolaikirche is adapted from my essay from The Christian Century magazine, March 13, 1996, Copyright 1996 The Christian Century Foundation amd Copyright 2004 Gale Group

The picture at the top of this page is from the cover of the novel on which the film Nikolaikirche is based. The book is out of print, but a paperback edition is available on line. I have been unable to locate a DVD of the film.

by James M. Wall

Ha’aretz reported Wednesday:

The Palestinian leadership made a mistake by suspending action on a U.N. report on Gaza war crimes, a member of President Mahmoud Abbas’ inner circle said Wednesday – the first such acknowledgment after days of protests in the West Bank and Gaza. . . .

Excerpts from the Ha’aretz story:

Abbas made the [original decision to postpone consideration of the Report] under heavy U.S. pressure, Palestinian and Israeli officials have said. U.S. officials told Palestinian leaders that a war crimes debate would complicate efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, according to participants in such meetings.

Abbas’ aides have defended the step, saying the Palestinians needed more time to win international support for the U.N. report. They said deferring action did not mean burying the report. But Abbas apparently underestimated the angry response at home.

With every day, there were more protests, marches and statements of condemnations, not only from his Hamas rivals, but also from human rights groups and intellectuals.

On Wednesday, senior Abbas adviser Yasser Abed Rabbo told the Voice of Palestine radio that the Palestinian leadership had erred. “What happened is a mistake, but [it] can be repaired,” said Abed Rabbo, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization. “We have the courage to admit there was a mistake.”

In Gaza, public outrage at Abbas reached a new level on Wednesday, when hundreds of posters criticizing the Palestinian president appeared in public areas around Gaza City. Abbas and Hamas have been bitter rivals since the Islamic group violently seized control of Gaza from pro-Abbas forces in June 2007. . . . . . .

On Tuesday, a close associate of Abbas told Haaretz that if Israel does not soften its positions on the peace process, the Palestinian Authority will resume pushing to get the Goldstone report moved to the Security Council, and thence to the International Criminal Court. . . .

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told the French media Tuesday that Abbas is now considering asking Arab states to raise the Goldstone report in the Security Council themselves. Erekat also threatened to reveal the names of all the countries that pressured Abbas to pull the motion and instead negotiate with Israel without preconditions. . . .

On Monday, Palestinians poured into the streets of Ramallah to protest their government initial decision to “postpone” any action on the Goldstone Report.

The protests came as a surprise to the Palestinian leaders. Over the week-end Karin Laub (Associated Press) described Abbas as rushing “to limit the fallout from his decision”.

What led Abbas to make such a mistake? Is he that removed from the Palestinian people not to be aware that rejecting the Report would have a negative impact?

The Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, based in Jerusalem, issued a statement September 30, which began with a prophetic warning about present conditions in the Occupied Territories. (The statement is being distributed to a wide audience in the US by Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA).)

The situation in the Occupied Territories, including the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, is dire and desperate. Israel continues to jeopardize any opportunity for a peaceful negotiated settlement by creating facts on the ground in defiance of the international community.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Israel has already finalized its intended objectives in the Occupied Territories and has a blueprint for a final resolution of the conflict, which it aims to achieve unilaterally. . . .

The Sabeel statement concluded by denouncing the decision of the Palestinian Authority to postpone further attention to the Goldstone Report:

Sabeel strongly denounces the postponement of the discussion of the Goldstone Report on Israel’s war on Gaza, at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The report must be followed up, Justice must take its course and the guilty must not get away with impunity. (To read the full Sabeel Statement, “Choose Life”, click here.)

President Abbas has lost the respect of  his public by allowing his actions to be dictated  by the US and Israel. As Ha’aretz columnist Amira Hass reported, Abbas decided to postpone consideration of the Goldstone Report after he met in Ramallah with the American consul-general.

In a single phone call to his man in Geneva, Mahmoud Abbas has demonstrated his disregard for popular action, and his lack of faith in its accumulative power and the place of mass movements in processes of change.

For nine months, thousands of people – Palestinians, their supporters abroad and Israeli anti-occupation activists – toiled to ensure that the legacy of Israel’s military offensive against Gaza would not be consigned to the garbage bin of occupying nations obsessed with their feelings of superiority. Thanks to the Goldstone report, even in Israel voices began to stammer about the need for an independent inquiry into the assault.

But shortly after Abbas was visited by the American consul-general on Thursday, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization got on the phone to instruct his representative on the United Nations Human Rights Council to ask his colleagues to postpone the vote on the adoption of the report’s conclusions.

Such a meeting would not have taken place without direct orders from the Obama White House, where Obama’s advisors continue to show little sensitivity to the deep resentment the Palestinian public justifiably harbors toward the Israeli government that conducted such a brutal three-week invasion of Gaza earlier this year.

President Obama’s image in the Middle East has been badly battered by his mishandling of the Goldstone Report, a 500-page carefully-documented report that was written under the direction of Richard Goldstone, a South African Jewish judge.

Obama did more than make his own mistake in rejecting the Report. He also forced Mahmoud Abbas to follow Obama’s order to postpone UN consideration of the Goldstone Report.

What is the impact on Abbas’ standing within the West Bank and Gaza?

A leading Palestinian journalist, Rami Khouri, has called on Abbas to resign. Before news broke that PA officials had acknowledged  that Abbas made a “mistake”,Khouri wrote in the Beruit Daily Star:

In one move Abbas can help rebuild the credibility of the Palestinian presidency while simultaneously strengthening overall Palestinian national unity and political cohesion.

He should simply call early elections for the Palestine Authority presidency, not stand as a candidate, and instead devote time to using his other position as head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee to achieve a critical need absent from Palestinian life for decades: namely, building a national consensus by giving voice to all groups of Palestinians and especially to refugees living in camps throughout the Middle East.

Khouri describes the Goldstone Report as a missed opportunity for President Abbas:

Here was a rare case of a credible international judge making strong accusations against both Israel and Hamas, and suggesting that their conduct be considered by the UN Security Council.

It was an opportunity to bring pressure to bear on Israel through the institutions of the United Nations. However, Abbas caved in to US pressure, making it clear that he was more concerned about his relations with Washington than relations with, well, his own people.

Khouri recalls Abbas’ years of service in the Palestine cause and concludes:

Abbas is a spent force, lacking both serious legitimacy and perceptible impact. He hangs on to some thin threads of credibility from his long association with Yasser Arafat and the Fatah leadership from the days when they represented a Palestinian national strategy, and mattered because they retained some self-respect. Sadly, this is no longer the case.

Khouri acknowledges the deep Palestinian split between Hamas and Fatah, but he points out:

There is still a national consensus that all Palestinians agree on, as expressed in the seminal Prisoners’ Document that came out of the agreement a few years ago among leading Palestinian factions who negotiated it during their stay in Israeli jails.

Looking to a post-Abbas future, Khouri sees an opportunity for Abbas to redeem himself:

Mahmoud Abbas has failed his people, but he can partially redeem himself and set the stage for his successor to play a more effective role. He should act with honor and confidence by stepping down as Palestinian president, calling a new election to bring in a more legitimate and capable leadership, and focusing his energy on where he started his days decades ago when he still had credibility and courage – by reconstituting the PLO as the coordinating body for all Palestinians.

Khouri has the credentials to call on Abbas to resign. He is currently Director of the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut as well as editor-at-large of the Daily Star. In October, 2006, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and in November 2006, he was the co-recipient of the Pax Christi International Peace Award for his efforts to bring peace and reconciliation to the Middle East.

President Obama badly mishandled the Goldstone Report.  He allowed his White House advisors to mislead him into thinking the Palestinian public would sit quietly by while their president  followed instructions from the White House to reject the Goldstone Report.

Obama is surrounded by staff members who are strong supporters of Israel.  He is smart enough to recognize that, like Abbas, he also made a mistake, not only by rejecting the Goldstone Report, but by believing he could operate in the Middle East with no Palestinian input into his decision-making.

Mr. President, the White House switchboard will find Rashid Khalidi’s number in New York City.

I am sure he will be happy to talk with you. I am also confident he has Rami Khouri’s Beruit number.

Both men will tell you that Palestinian leaders expect to be treated with the same respect you give other world leaders.

Picture above of President Abbas is by George Azar, from the New York Times