Foreign Policy In Focus

"A CNN investigative report [that] aired Thursday slammed the treatment of Palestinian children by IDF [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers [including] uncorroborated charges of sexual abuse against Palestinian youngsters while in IDF custody," reported Israel's YNet.

That a major network like CNN would run a piece accusing it of wrongdoing is a mark of how far Israel has fallen in favor with the American media and public, especially considering how sensitive the issue is. But wait -- children in custody? The stone throwers, for the most part. According to Palestine's Ma'an News (follow link for graphic details), Save the Children and UK-based based children's rights group Defence for Children International (DCI). . .

. . . confirm Israel routinely prosecutes Palestinian children as young as 12, describing the ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children as "widespread, systematic and institutionalised." . . . In 2009, DCI collected 100 sworn affidavits from Palestinian children and teenagers who said they were abused in Israeli military and police custody. Almost 70 percent complained of being beaten, four percent reported being sexually assaulted, and 12 percent said they were threatened with sexual assault. . . . all were dismissed without a single criminal investigation. . . . A 2009 report by Save the Children says [that the] psycho-social consequences of detention affect the immediate behavior of children, the way they think including their analysis of the outside world. 

Speaking of which, what "psycho-social" circumstances affect how members of the IDF "think including their analysis of the outside world"? Those most often cited include the Holocaust, Israel's sense of being surrounded by hostile states, suicide attacks and shelling by Palestinians, and Iran's role in funding Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.

The legitimacy of those concerns is unquestionable. But, an inability or unwillingness on the part of recent Israeli governments to behave like a citizen of the world or at least of its region instead of acting as if it exists in a vacuum can't help but make one wonder if deeper issues influence the psyches of Israelis, especially members of the IDF. The treatment of detained Palestinian youths might shed some light.

In fact, it can be safely surmised that the abuse in question is a symptom of a hyper-militarized state. According to the school of psychohistory, hyper-militarized states are often a reflection of authoritarian child-raising. The obvious examples are Germany and Austria in the late nineteenth century. (No comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany implied!)

In his landmark 2002 book The Emotional Life of Nations, the founder of psychohistory, Lloyd DeMause (who celebrated his 79th birthday yesterday), wrote: "Polls of Germans of the time show the majority were . . . routinely beaten by their fathers, and considered him 'absolute law in the family . . . we feared him more than we loved him.'"

Unwanted babies were often killed, but, "If a German newborn was allowed to live, it was then subjected to the most horrifying traumatic tortures that can be inflicted upon children, every detail of which became indelibly imprinted on their early amygdalan fear system and then re-inflicted upon 'enemies' during the war and the Holocaust."

As for the sex abuse, "When infants were removed from their cribs, they usually slept in the family bed and either were made part of the sexual act or regularly witnessed it close up. [Also] German doctors reported 'nursemaids and other servants carry out all sorts of sexual acts on the children entrusted to their care.'"

Needless to say, abuse and murder of children is nowhere near this widespread in either Israel or any Western state today. But neither is Israel immune to the same troubling degree of child abuse as any Western state. Back in 2008, Israeli child and spousal abuse expert Daniel Eidensohn told this story:

The holiday of Succot had arrived, and, when their father was out praying at the synagogue, the children were growing hungry. One of them, a girl, took the initiative and prepared nine pizzas for herself and her siblings. As they sat down to eat, their father arrived home, and gazed with rage upon his daughter's efforts. "Eat every single one by yourself," he ordered his terrified daughter, forcing her to obey until she vomited. The father . . . admitted to carrying out the actions described [as well as] sexually abusing one of his daughters, and to routinely verbally and physically abusing all of them. . . . Last month, it was the Rose Pizem case. The country listened in horror as details of the murder of the four-year-old at the hand of her grandfather, who stuffed her body into a suitcase and tossed it into the Yarkon river, emerged. Soon after that, three mothers murdered their young children in the space of a single week.

When it comes to the Orthodox Jewish community in general, in May of this year the Guardian reported:

The uncovering of sexual abuse perpetrated by religious leaders in the Catholic church is mirrored within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community [and] starting to be prosecuted in New York. And as with the Catholic church . . . ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders are beginning to permit the reporting to police of these crimes. . . . A little known Jewish law called mesira  . . . forbids a Jew from reporting another Jew to the gentile authorities. The law was in response to non-Jewish governments whose courts were staffed by antisemites. [Today most] Jewish communities recognise the legal system of the countries where they live [but] . . . . Perpetrators of, for example, domestic violence, child abuse, or sexual crimes, are often protected by the ultra-Orthodox communities and dealt with "in-house". They are sometimes beaten up by the self-appointed Jewish "police", and often moved to areas where there is no knowledge of their crimes

Whatever the rate of child abuse in Israel, though, how did its citizenry evince the passivity it displays in the face of its government's policies toward Palestine? The same, of course, can be said for the acquiescence of most Americans to the illegal wars that the United States is conducting. Bottom line, as Lloyd DeMause says, the "way to stop wars and terrorism is by giving more help to mothers toward improving child care, not by increasing military power." 

A prominent Israeli rabbi whose party shares power in the Netanyahu government called for the extermination of Arabs in a recent sermon.

The 89-year-old Ovadia Yosef urged God to strike “these Ishmaelites and Palestinians with a plague; these evil haters of Israel.” He then singled out the Palestinian leader of Fatah, exclaiming that “Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth.” Yosef is the spiritual leader of the Shas Party, an ultra-Orthodox right-wing outfit that governs in concert with other parties, including Likud.

In religious terminology, the Ishmaelites are the descendants of Ishmael, who was Abraham’s elder son. As the rabbi doubtless knows, the Arabs are considered the descendants of the Ishmaelites in Islamic tradition.

In response to the genocidal exhortation, Netanyahu issued a mild non-rebuke; his office meekly offered that the rabbi’s ravings “do not reflect” the views of the prime minister or the government. The lukewarm criticism is not surprising, since Netanyahu may harbor genocidal views of his own.

In May, a Netanyahu advisor told the American-Israeli “journalist” Jeffrey Goldberg that Netanyahu is serious about striking Iran and considers the Islamic Republic the modern-day equivalent of Amalek.

For those unfamiliar with the Old Testament narrative, the Amalekites didn’t make out too well. God commands the Jews to utterly exterminate them—“Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”

But returning to Rabbi Yosef: what elicited his angry declamation? It seems that the approaching peace talks are the culprit. Yosef and the rest of the far-right, who now loom large in Israeli society, loathe the prospect of “conceding” any lands they have stolen from the Palestinians, including the vast swath of Jewish-only settlements.

Of course, the far-right doesn’t see the land as stolen. For one thing, what’s commonly called the “far-right” in Israel-polite media parlance is best described as proto-fascist. This is, after all, the crowd that wants to impose state loyalty oaths on Israel’s Arab citizens—or even better, purge them from Israel altogether, lest the precious racial purity of the “democratic” Jewish state be further diluted. This is also the same crowd that seeks to erase history by making banning references to refer to Israel’s creation as “Al-Naqba”, or “The Disaster.” That’s the term used by Palestinians—and rightly so: even Israel’s own historians have conceded that their state was established through mass terror and ethnic cleansing.

But that doesn’t matter to Rabbi Yosef and friends. For them, the Palestinians are an annoyance, inserted by the irritating hand of history into lands that were ordained as Jewish by a divine real estate agent. Hence the favored Zionist slogan of “redeeming” the land.

What all this confirms is the hardening of hatred in Israeli society. Israelis have grown increasingly indifferent to the fate they mete out to their victims. The public did not question the obscene one-sided massacre in Gaza in 2008 (euphemistically called a “war”), in which Israel slaughtered 1,000 Palestinians, half of them women and children, putatively in “response” to unguided rocket fire that had all but ended.

Nor did the public quiver over the 2006 assault on Lebanon, during which Israel shattered Lebanese civilian infrastructure because Hezbollah kidnapped two soldiers. All told, 1,000 Lebanese were killed and entire neighborhoods were flattened; compare that with the Israeli death toll of 43 civilians and 117 soldiers.

Even the recent flotilla massacre elicited scant moral outrage in Israel. The national media merely indulged in the tired victimhood narrative, peddling the awesome claim that the Israeli soldiers were defending themselves from the crew. Never mind that the soldiers boarded an aid vessel in international waters and shot people in the face; pirates with public relations, you see, are completely different from regular pirates.

And what public relations it is. As Netanyahu smugly observed to a settler audience some years ago, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”

Yes, the “right direction”—as determined by Israeli fanatics who openly clamor for genocide and Israel-first lobbies who suppress criticism with hysterical charges of “anti-Semitism.”

And so long as Americans adhere to the fiction of Israeli victimhood, Netanyahu’s boasts will remain well-grounded.

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam also posts at Crossing the Crescent.

Fooled you! It's not what you think. Far be it from me to justify Israel's oppression of Palestine by trotting out the tired "they shoot rockets at Israel" argument. Half-Jewish in descent, but raised in another religion, I know little about Judaism. But there's no denying that I can "feel" it inside me.

I'm also prone to the Jewish self-loathing that afflicts many of us. For example, the heightened interior life -- a.k.a., neurosis -- to which many Jews seemed privy to me when I was young struck me as "uncool." Thus I've long wondered if the outsized anger with which I respond to how Israel treats Palestine was a variation of that syndrome.

Then I had an epiphany (insert hosannas by celestial choir of indeterminate denomination here). I realized it wasn't self-loathing I was experiencing but that other syndrome known to reflective Jews. You know, the one where we expect more from Jews than from others. How can we treat Palestinians like they're animals? Of course, that line of thinking is not only vanity, but the flip side of a thought process that leads the "chosen people" -- Israel and its American supporters -- to justify subjugating the members of another race and religion.

You may have heard of Budrus, a documentary about nonviolent resistance in the West Bank town of the same name soon to make its U.S. debut. In the course of a commentary on the film at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Hugh Gusterson writes that when it comes to dealing with Palestine, Israel is all about the bidding up.

"Israel follows an escalatory strategy of violence. … Whatever resistance the Palestinians attempt is treated as a bid that the Israelis must counter. [For example, if] the resistance is non-violent, the response is tear gas, nightsticks, and rubber bullets. …  The theory seems to be that the exercise of violence is like bidding at an auction and that the Palestinians, once they see they are outbid, will, like a good rational actor, fold their hand. …

"But Palestinians . . . are not rational actors. … They are enraged and humiliated human beings who are embittered by life under collective punishment and determined not to surrender the one thing left to them: the ability to resist. Unless Israel wants an endless emergency, a permanent cycle of violence, their Palestinian strategy is failing miserably."

To show why it's failing, Gusterson circles back to Palestinian terrorists.

". . . Budrus dramatizes the no-win situation within which Israel has imprisoned the Palestinians. If the Palestinians resist the occupation with violence . . . they are shot at, imprisoned, blockaded, their homes destroyed -- and their land is taken away, bite by bite. If, as in Budrus, they resist with non-violence . . . they are tear-gassed, beaten, shot at with rubber bullets -- and their land is taken away, bite by bite."

A rigged auction, in other words.

Posted as a complement to Stephen Zunes's Foreign Policy in Focus piece Israel's Dubious Investigation of Flotilla Attack.

In a letter to President Barack Obama date June 17, 329 out of 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives referred to Israel’s May 31 attack on a humanitarian aid flotilla in international waters, which resulted in the deaths of nine passengers and crew and injuries to scores of others, as an act of “self-defense” which they “strongly support.” Similarly, a June 21 Senate letter — signed by 87 out of 100 senators — went on record “fully” supporting what it called “Israel’s right to self-defense,” claiming that the widely supported effort to relieve critical shortages of food and medicine in the besieged Gaza Strip was simply part of a “clever tactical and diplomatic ploy” by “Israel’s opponents” to “challenge its international standing.”

The House letter urged President Obama “to remain steadfast in defense of Israel” in the face of the near-universal international condemnation of this blatant violation of international maritime law and other legal statutes, which the signatories referred to as “a rush to unfairly judge and defend Israel.” The Senate letter condemned the near-unanimous vote of the UN Human Rights Council for what it called “singling out” Israel, even though no other country in recent memory has attacked a humanitarian aid flotilla in international waters. Both letters called upon the United States to veto any resolution in the UN Security Council criticizing the Israeli attack.

What is perhaps most disturbing is that many of the key arguments in the letters were misleading and, in some cases, factually inaccurate. 

The Israeli government had acknowledged prior to the writing of the letter that the extensive blockade of humanitarian goods was not necessary for their security, but as a means of pressuring the civilian population to end their support for Hamas, which won a majority of legislative seats in the most recent Palestinian election.  In addition, the Israeli government announced a significant relaxation of the embargo two days after the letter was written. Despite this, the House letter claimed that the purpose of the blockade was “to stop terrorists from smuggling weapons to kill innocent civilians,” thereby placing this large bipartisan majority of the House even further to the right than Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s rightist coalition. 

There was no mention in the letter than no such weapons were found on board any of the six ships hijacked by the Israelis nor on the previous eight ships the Free Gaza Campaign had sailed or attempted to sail to the Gaza Strip. In addition, even though the ships had been thoroughly inspected by customs officials prior to their disembarkation, the House letter claimed that had the Israelis not hijacked the ships, they would have “sailed unchecked into Gaza.”

Similarly, according to the Senate letter, Israel’s naval blockade was necessary “to keep dangerous goods from entering Gaza by sea” and falsely claimed that the intent of the Israeli blockade was “to protect Israel, while allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza.” Particularly striking is the fact that, despite that the International Committee on the Red Cross and a broad consensus of international legal experts recognize that the Israeli blockade of humanitarian goods is illegal, the Senate letter insisted that the blockade “is legal under international law.”

The House letter insisted, despite the fact that several of those killed on the Mavi Marmara were shot at point blank range in the back or the back of the head and a video showing a 19-year old U.S. citizen shot execution style on the ground, that “Israeli forces used necessary force as an act of self-defense and of last resort.” Similarly, the Senate letter refers to the murders of passengers and crew resisting the illegal boarding of their vessel in international waters as a situation where the Israeli raiders were “forced to respond to that attack” when they “arrived” on the ship. 

The House letter also claimed that the other ships were “commandeered peacefully and without incident,” even though on the other ships, despite completely nonviolent resistance, passengers were tasered and brutally beaten and were attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets. Similarly, the Senate letter insisted that, in spite of these potentially fatal beatings and other assaults, “Israeli forces were able to safely divert five of the six ships challenging the blockade.”

Even though the Israeli government has never entered Gaza to disperse aid to the people of that territory since the start of the siege years earlier and reputable relief organizations have documented that the Israelis had routinely refused to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip, these House members claimed that Israel had offered to “disperse the aid . . . directly to the people of Gaza.” And, despite the fact that the five aid ships that Israel had allowed to dock in Gaza in previous months had distributed their humanitarian cargo directly to those in need, the senators claimed that it would have otherwise gone “into the hands of corrupt Gaza officials.”

Learning what actually transpired in the tragic incident was apparently of little interest to the 87 senators who signed the letter defending the attack. Despite the apparent whitewash forthcoming in the internal Israeli investigation, the senate letter supported Israel’s alleged intention to carry out “a thorough investigation of the incident,” insisting that Israel “has the right to determine how its investigation is conducted.” This comes in spite of a recent public opinion poll shows a clear majority of Americans — including 65 percent of Democrats — favor an international inquiry over allowing Israel alone to investigate the circumstances of the attack . 

Ironically, a number of progressive organizations, web sites and list serves have called on the peace and human rights community to support the re- election of some of the very senators who signed this letter, including Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, and Russell Feingold. MoveOn, Council for a Livable World, and other progressive groups with PAC money have been are calling on their members, many of whom are peace and human rights activists, to donate their money to these right-wing Democrats who defend attacking peace and human rights activists and lie about the circumstances to justify it. They have no problems with supporting the re-election of those who lie and mislead their constituents in order to defend illegal actions by allied right-wing governments, even when they kill and injure participants in a humanitarian flotilla on the high seas.

There may be an underlying current of racism at work here. It is unlikely MoveOn, Council for a Livable World and other groups would defend such actions if, for example, if the activists were helping those under siege in Sarajevo in the 1990s or West Berlin in the 1940s, who happened to be white Europeans.

It is important to remember that the majority of Democrats joined in with Republicans in supporting the Salvadoran junta in the early 1980s and the Suharto regime in the 1990s until voters made clear they would withdraw their support from them if they did not change their policy. AIPAC and other right-wing “pro-Israel” groups are only as powerful as the absence of counter-pressure from the peace and human rights community. Letters like these will continue to be supported by most Democrats only as long they know they can get away with it.