The "security" wall, and more on Israel/Palestine

I've failed to mention previously, though I should have, the excellent blog Lawrence of Cyberia, run by a former GCHQ analyst. From that blog comes this important post on Israel's so-called "Security Wall". An excerpt:

"The next time Israeli apologists tell you that the Wall is a security measure that keeps suicide bombers out of Israel, just remember the number 1,276. One thousand, two hundred and seventy six is – at a minimum - the average number of permit-less Palestinians who bypass the Wall on a weekly basis to work in Israel. They are asking you to believe that the destitution Israel’s West Bank land grab inflicts on some of the poorest people on earth is justified because a wall which is breached at least 1,276 times a week by undocumented workers is nevertheless impermeable to suicide bombers. That’s what they’re asking you to believe.

That’s how stupid they think you are."

Read the rest here.

A couple of other things worth mentioning while I'm on the subject. First, the Israeli theft of Palestinian land continues, as the Guardian reports this week. The theft of land in and around East Jerusalem is a particularly vicious act. Israeli planners know very well that East Jerusalem is the economic and cultural heart of Palestine. Emaciating it and severing it from any future Palestinian state is to render any such state effectively stillborn. It is hard not to share the view of Baruch Kimmerling that the aim of the continued cantonisation of the occupied territories is the "politicide" of the Palestinians. That is to say, "the dissolution of the Palestinian people's existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic entity".

In light of this latest Israeli land-grab, the "offer" from the vice-prime minister Haim Ramon to divide Jerusalem with the Palestinians in any future peace deal cannot be mistaken for anything other than the odiously cynical act that it is. We will take what we please from you, says the minister effectively, and you can keep the bits we don't want. Another "generous offer" which the Palestinians will no doubt be condemned for failing to accept.

Elsewhere, the famed "Israel lobby" in the US has suffered an immensely gratifying defeat. Juan Cole writes that:

"Father Dease, the president of the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, has reversed himself and invited Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak at UST. Dease had been misled by a smear campaign against Tutu launched by the Zionist Organization of America, which was angered by the archbishop's criticism of Israel for its mistreatment of the Palestinians. ZOA falsely charged that Tutu had compared Israel to Hitler and the Nazis, which was a bald-faced lie. Some Israeli newspapers were taken in by the propaganda and some Jewish community leaders in Minneapolis are continuing to spread the falsehood."

That the campaign against Tutu failed strikes me as the lobby's equivalent of imperial overstretch. The problem with the kind of hysterical groupthink exhibited by the lobby (by which I mean the problem for them) is that they lose all touch with how people think in the outside world. And any political campaign that fails to understand how others think is doomed at some level.

You'd have to be completely detached from reality to think you could accuse Desmond Tutu of anti-semitism and come out the better for it. Even the poverty of Western political culture has some limits.

Its by getting overexcited, and thereby exposing their true colours, that political hysterics and headbangers find themselves suffering severe reversals.

In the case of the Israel Lobby, Tony Karon makes a good case for the idea that they may recently have been going too far for their own good, and that an potentially effective backlash is now well underway.

When establishment thinkers like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt turn against an official policy or an orthodoxy you know a real change may well be coming. Maybe not change to the extent you wish for, but change nonetheless. It will be interesting to observe the fortunes of the Israel lobby in the coming years.