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THE INSIDE HISTORY OF THE ISRAEL LOBBY Former top CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison give CounterPunchers the real scoop on the Israel lobby and precisely how powerful it is. Read how US presidents from Wilson, through FDR to Truman were manipulated by the Zionist lobby; how Israel bent LBJ, Reagan and Clinton to its purpose; how Bush's White House has been the West Wing of the Israeli government; how Washington's revolving doors send full-time Israel lobbyists from think-tanks to the National Security Council and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. For all who want a true measure of the Lobby's power, the Christisons' 8-page dossier, exclusive to CounterPunch newsletter subscribers, is a MUST read. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! |
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Today's Stories May 30, 2006 John Ross Tim Wise May 27 / 29,
2006 Paul Craig Roberts Kathleen Christison Kathy Kelly Christopher
Reed Lawrence R. Velvel Tom Barry Gary Leupp Col. Dan Smith Ron Jacobs Don Fitz Fred Gardner Peter Montague Raymond Garcia John Farley Seth Sandronsky Tia Steele Lenni Brenner Dr. Susan Block Scott Michael Perey Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Recipe of the
Weekend Website of the Weekend
May 26, 2006 Col. Douglas
MacGregor Brian J. Foley Michael Dickinson Missy Comley Beattie Pierre Tristam Joe Allen Kona Lowell Roger Burbach Website of the
Day
May 25, 2006 Les AuCoin Jeff Halper Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Bob Wing Elise Gould Robert Bryce Website of the Day
May 24, 2006 Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Lucinda Marshall Dave Lindorff Shmuel Rosner Moshe Adler Heather Gray Pratyush Chandra Paul Craig Roberts Floyd Rudmin Website of the Day
May 23, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Sharon Smith Sunsara Taylor Joel Whitney Alice Cherbonnier Ron Jacobs Kristen Ess Patrick Cockburn Website of the
Day
May 22, 2006 Alan Maass William Blum Elaine C. Hagopian Stan Cox Chris Floyd Alexander Cockburn Website of the Day
May 20 / 21, 2006 Patrick Cockburn Kathy Kelly Ralph Nader Hugh O'Shaughnessy Greg Grandin P. Sainath Greg Moses Stephen Philion Landau / Hassen Fred Gardner Missy Comley
Beattie Michael Dickinson Seth Sandronsky Luke Young John Zavesky Ben Tripp Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement
May 19, 2006 Winslow T. Wheeler José Pertierra John Ross Dave Lindorff Jeff Juel Alan Farago Eric Johnson-DeBaufre José Martî Jonathan Cook Website of the
Day
May 18, 2006 Bill Simpich Patrick Cockburn Christopher Brauchli Nora Barrows-Friedman Victoria Buch Eric Ruder George Wuerthner Juan Santos Website of the Day
May 17, 2006 Lenni Brenner Carlos Villarreal Larry Everest CounterPunch News Service Lee Sustar Anthony Papa William S. Lind Bruce K. Gagnon JoAnn Wypijewski Website of the Day
May 16, 2006 Ward Churchill Ted Honderich Paul Craig Roberts Annie Nocenti Charles V. Peña Ron Jacobs Norman Solomon Harvey Wasserman Michael George
Smith Harry Browne Website of the
Day
May 15, 2006 Alexander Cockburn William Blum Tanya Golash-Boza
and Douglas A. Parker Dave Lindorff Debra Schaffer
Hubert Patrick Cockburn Tom Turnipseed Ken Livingstone Gideon Levy Mickey Z. Jeff Faux Website of the Day
May 13 / 14, 2006 Vijay Prashad Joan Roelofs Kathy Kelly Michael Neumann Dr. Susan Block Daniel Cassidy Christopher Reed Mike Roselle Saul Landau Robert Fisk Ralph Nader Evelyn Pringle Fred Gardner Stanley Heller Conn Hallinan Valentina Palma Novoa David Krieger Col. Dan Smith Christopher Brauchli Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
May 12, 2006 Michael Snedeker Dave Lindorff Leah Fishbein
/ RJ Schinner Brian Kwoba Chris Kromm Kai Diekmann David Swanson Virginia Tilley Website of the
Day
May 11, 2006 Sunsara Taylor Jonathan Cook Tariq Ali Wayne S. Smith Mike Whitney Pratyush Chandra Joshua Frank Mickey Z. Francis Boyle Edward S. Herman
/ David Peterson Website of the
Day
May 10, 2006 Werther Larry Birns / Michael Lettieri Ramzy Baroud Kevin Zeese Evelyn Pringle Amira Hass Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Sharon Smith Website of the Day
May 9, 2006 Ray McGovern M. Shahid Alam Moshe Adler Walter MIgnolo Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor William S. Lind Todd Chretien Dave Lindorff Ishmael Reed Website of the
Day
May 8, 2006 Kate McCabe Paul Craig Roberts Col. Dan Smith Norman Solomon Ingmar Lee Robert Jensen Ricardo Alarcon Will Youmans / M. Kay Siblani Alexander Cockburn Website of the
Day
May 6 / 7, 2006 Jeffrey St. Clair Ariel Dorfman Joe Allen Fred Gardner Jeff Taylor Saul Landau Stephen Philion Trish Schuh Ralph Nader Robert Fisk Paul Cantor John Holt James Ryan Lawrence R. Velvel Greg Moses Laray Polk Ron Jacobs Ben Tripp Mickey Z. Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Website of the Week
May 5, 2006 Vijay Prashad Robert Fisk David Swanson Mearsheimer / Walt Dave Lindorff Sarah Ferguson CounterPunch
News Service Corporate Crime Reporter Website of the
Day
May 4, 2006 John F. Sugg Jonathan Cook Roger Burbach Chris Dols Christopher Brauchli Tony Swindell Website of the Day
May 3, 2006 Robert Bryce Paul Craig Roberts James Petras Lee Sustar David Bolton Joshua Frank Jeffery R. Webber Website of the
Day
May 2, 2006 Evelyn Pringle Tariq Ali Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Sen. Russell
Feingold Anthony Papa Website of the
Day
May Day, 2006 Norman Finkelstein Christopher Reed Michael Donnelly Dave Zirin Mike Whitney Gilad Atzmon Missy Comley Beattie Alexander Cockburn Website of the
Day
April 29 / 30, 2006 Peter Linebaugh Ralph Nader Robert Bryce Rev. William
Alberts Lee Sustar John Chuckman Eric Ruder Seth Sandronsky Ron Jacobs Ben Tripp Fred Gardner Don Monkerud Tommy Stevenson Lettrist International Contratiempo St. Clair, Vest
and D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website of the
Weekend
April 28, 2006 James Ridgeway Ramzy Baroud Sarah Knopp William S. Lind Werther April 27, 2006 Winslow T. Wheeler Robert Fisk Juan Santos Robert Jensen Dave Lindorff Jose Pertierra
April 26,2006 Robin Philpot Sherry Wolf Pratyush Chandra Joshua Frank Gary
Leupp Bill
Quigley
April 25, 2006 Gary
Leupp Paul
Craig Roberts Linda
S. Heard Ralph
Nader Mike
Whitney Michael
Donnelly Sharon
Smith Website
of the Day
April 24, 2006 Tim
Wise John
Stanton Dave
Lindorff Steve
Shore Amadou
Deme Mickey
Z. Ralph Nader Alexander
Cockburn Website
of the Day
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May 30, 2006 Shin Bet and the Israeli AcademyPartners in Human Rights Abuses?By JONATHAN COOK There were some remarkable admissions in a piece by the distinguished Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in the immediate wake of the British teaching union NATFHE's vote yesterday to offer members moral backing if they boycott Israeli universities. British academics opposed to Israeli colleagues' complicity in the lengthy and continuing occupation of the Palestinians are now advised to boycott them and their institutions. Today, and quite incidentally, Kimmerling wrote in the daily Ha'aretz newspaper of a decision taken by his own institution, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to offer a special fast-track degree programme to members of the General Security Service, or the Shin Bet, which has used its fearsome intelligence gathering abilties to maintain the occupation of the Palestinians for nearly four decades. The Shin Bet is possibly best
known for its interrogation methods when extracting confessions
from detainees. Although torture was banned by the country's
Supreme Court in 1999, the Shin Bet has continued with its notorious
practices during the second intifada, according to the Israeli
human rights group the Public Committee against Torture. According to Kimmerling, Shin Bet staff will not only be encouraged to further their education with government grants (maybe no bad thing), but the Shin Bet itself will be able to devise the study course. As Kimmerling notes, the most likely result will be a "professional studies" programme relating to the Shin Bet's work. Kimmerling rightly observes that such a programme clashes with the very values of free speech and free thought supposedly embodied by his university: "Although both institutions [the Shin Bet and Hebrew University] conduct 'research', the objects of the research and the methodologies are day and night." Such arrangements are nothing new in Israeli academia, Kimmerling points out. There are strong ties between the universities and the defence industry because "some university staff join academia after [military] service and careers in the defense establishment, and not all of them manage to 'go civilian'." In fact, Kimmerling understates the problem. Anyone who has spent time in an Israeli university will know that its academic staff and the country's huge defence industry are intimately entwined. The geography department of Haifa University, for example, was until very recently headed by Prof Arnon Sofer, who is best known in Israel for advocating ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, both occupied Palestinian non-citizens from the West Bank and the minority of Palestinian citizens from Israel. Sofer, who has also taught at the National Defence College and the Police Training College for many decades, once boasted to me that he had imparted his values to almost every senior security official in Israel. Stickers on the doors of nearly every lecturer in his department declare membership of the National Security Studies Center, Sofer's own government-funded "research" body that disseminates his obscene ideas. Kimmerling offers his own high-profile example of this "partnership". Menachem Milson, the dean of the humanities faculty at Hebrew University, was in the 1970s and 1980s head of the military government -- misleadingly known as the civil adminstration -- in the West Bank. In that post he developed the notorious "Village Leagues", local Palestinian militias financed by Israel whose role was to weaken Palestinian support for Fatah and thus prolong the occupation while Israel concentrated on its illegal colonisation of the territory. Kimmerling himself has written at length about the terrible nature of Israel's occupation: that it has been designed to destroy any hope of Palestinian sovereignty even in the small ghettoes left to the Palestinians of their original homeland by extending Jewish domination. He even coined a term for this slow and relentless erosion of the Palestinian people's rights: politicide. So, given his own evidence, what are Kimmerling's conclusions about the legitimacy of the British union's boycott? That it is, he warns, "no small hypocrisy". This judgment echoes his denunciation last year of the short-lived decision by another British union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT), to recommend a boycott of several Israeli universities. After vigorous campaigning by pro-Israel supporters, the vote was rapidly overturned. What are Kimmerling's reasons for objecting to such boycotts? Because "no one dared propose a boycott of American or British academic institutions after the invasion of Iraq, or Chinese academe for human rights violations." Are these comparisons, dutifully trotted out by apologists for Israeli occupation of much less intellectual stature than Kimmerling, reasonable? Let's examine them. The Chinese abuse of its own population's rights and the violation of the Tibetan people's rights through its lengthy occupation of their homeland deserve continuous and vocal denunciation. But does it follow that a boycott of Chinese universities would have the same meaning and effectiveness as one of Israeli universities? China has long been treated by the West as a pariah nation, even if it often covertly trades with Western governments. No one in the West describes China as a democracy or believes that the Chinese authorities have allowed any room for civil society to emerge. In fact, we know that Chinese dissidents, including academics, have received terrible punishments, such as being imprisoned, tortured and killed. So how exactly does Kimmerling imagine that a boycott of Chinese universities will encourage dissident views, and how will this help progressive politics in the country? If the Chinese government offers no space for critical voices, how can actions by British academics make a difference? What is needed in the case of China is concerted sanctions by Western governments against the Chinese authorities. The fact that this has not been forthcoming is not the responsbility of European or American academia. Also, unlike China, the tiny country of Israel receives huge sums of aid from the United States -- this week it was announced that the House of Representatives has approved $2.5 billion for next year -- and special trading status with the European Union that greatly benefits the Israeli economy. Most of the US money does not have to be accounted for, thereby subsidising the occupation industry of which the universities are a part and the harmful government-sponsored initiatives of professors such as Arnon Sofer. So while on the one hand China is officially condemned as an authoritarian and anti-democratic state for its abuse of human rights, Israel is showered with financial rewards for its occupation. It therefore falls on British and American academics to distance themselves from their government's support for Israel through the limited means available to them. What about American and British universities? Following NATFHE's logic, should British academics be boycotted for the invasion and occupation of Iraq? Ignoring the obvious point that British academics are hardly in a position to boycott themselves, let's examine Kimmerling's argument. He is suggesting that there is a double standard at work: British academics are seeking to punish Israeli academics for the occupation while no one is punishing British academics over the occupation of Iraq. But this analogy is patently false. First, the reason the British union wants Israeli academics punished is for their collective silence and collaboration with the occupation. One of Israel's main universities, Bar Ilan, has a campus in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, which the government intends to annex behind the wall it is building. As Ariel is about 14km from the Green Line, the pre-1967 border, such a move will end any hope of a viable Palestinian state. With a few honorable exceptions -- Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart and Kimmerling himself -- almost no one in Israeli academia is speaking out against the occupation or about their own universities' implicit or overt support of it. Kimmerling's article about the Shin Bet studies programme is a very rare example of such public dissent. That is hardly true in Britain, where academics have been at the forefront of the huge opposition in the UK to the invasion of Iraq and to the country's subsequent occupation. Campuses are alive with protest and debate about the legitimacy of Britain's role in Iraq. The fact that it is not represented in the British media is a failure by the country's media, not the academics. The same is most definitely not true in Israeli universities, where protests by Jewish staff and students all but never occur. Arab students who have tried to protest against the occupation of the Palestinian territories at Haifa University, where most of them are based, must seek a permit from the university authorities which they are almost always denied. Demonstrations are usually filmed by university officials. Students are then arrested later by the police, and others punished by university special disciplinary committees. Arab students facing these sanctions have rarely received any support from Jewish students or academics. (It should also be noted that Palestinians are denied all acess to Israeli universities to study, while their own educational opportunities are severely damaged by the checkpoints, curfews and invasions associated with the occupation. Arab students belong to the country's minority of Palestinian citizens, one in five of the population, who are grossly under-represented on campuses and systematically stripped of their voice. Arab lecturers account for less than 1 per cent of academic staff.) The second point is that whereas the American and British occupation of Iraq is in its infancy, the Israeli one is reaching what should be its mid-life crisis. At what point does inaction, turning a blind eye, become culpable? Surely four decades of ignoring the Israeli occupation stretches our denials of moral responsibility beyond credibility. Were the occupation of Iraq still to be in its stride by the year 2040, and British universities keeping quiet, I would very much hope academics around the world would be taking action against their British and American colleagues too. Which leads us to the third difference. Whereas the success or failure of American goals in Iraq is still open to question, Israel's plans to steal Palestinian land have been consistently successful and are only gathering pace. In fact, as British union delegates appear to understand, hopes of salvaging any viable state for the Palestinians have almost run out of steam. The Israeli government is now planning the final stages of its annexation of Palestinian land -- misleadingly called "convergence" -- and with it the destruction of any chances of meaningful Palestinian statehood. Kimmerling, however, does have one valid point. In truth, it will be hard to boycott American academics and universities even if they prove themselves in the long run to be as spineless as Israeli ones. This is because the Western academic system is sustained by American academia; without it, the system would probably collapse. The fact that it will be difficult to penalise American academics may be unfair, but it is hardly justifiable grounds for British academics to shun their moral responsibilities to bring whatever pressure they can to bear on Israel to end its gratuitious occupation. Such boycott campaigns can be effective -- as should be obvious from the high-level efforts made by the Israeli government last year to help overturn the boycott vote by the AUT. Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org. |