US-Israel ties bad for peace: Soros

George Soros, the billionaire investor, has added his voice to the debate over the role of Israel’s lobby in shaping US foreign policy.
In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Soros takes issue with “the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC]” in Washington and says the Bush administration’s close ties with Israel are obstacles to a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
Soros, who is Jewish but not often engaged in Israeli affairs, echoed arguments that have fuelled debate in academia, foreign policy think tanks and parts of the US Jewish community.

“The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism,” wrote Soros. Politicians challenge it at their peril and dissenters risk personal vilification, he said.

AIPAC has consistently declined comment on such charges, but many of its supporters have been vocal in dismissing them.

Historian Michael Oren, speaking at AIPAC’s 2007 conference in March, said the group was not merely a lobby for Israel. “It is the embodiment of a conviction as old as this (American) nation itself that belief in the Jewish state is tantamount to belief in these United States,” he said in a keynote speech.

The long-simmering debate bubbled to the surface a year ago, when two prominent academics, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, published a 12,500-word essay entitled “The Israel Lobby” and featuring the fiercest criticism of AIPAC since it was founded in 1953.

AIPAC now has more than 100,000 members and is rated one of the most influential special interest groups in the United States, its political clout comparable with such lobbies as the National Rifle Association.

The AIPAC members are all US citizens and the group receives no funding from the Israeli government.

Its annual conference in Washington attracts a Who’s Who of American politics, both Republicans and Democrats.

Unwavering support

Mearsheimer and Walt said the lobby had persuaded successive administrations to align themselves too closely with Israel.

“The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism”

George Soros, the billionaire investor

“The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but much of the rest of the world,” they wrote.

No other lobby group has managed to divert US foreign policy so far from the US national interest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of Israel are essentially identical, they wrote.

The two academics said that pressure from Israel and its lobby in Washington played an important role in President George Bush’s decision to attack Iraq, an arch-enemy of Israel, in 2003.

Mearsheimer and Walt found no takers for their essay in the US publishing world. When it was eventually published in the London Review of Books, they noted it would be hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing such a piece.

It has been drawing criticism that ranged from shoddy scholarship to anti-Semitism, chiefly from conservative fellow academics and political supporters of the present relationship between Washington and Israel.

In his contribution to the debate, Soros said: “A much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can’t make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties.”

That influence is reflected by the fact that Israel is the largest recipient of US aid in the world.

Going mainstream

Carter’s book provoked angry reactions more
in the US than in Israel [AP]
Mearsheimer and Walt are now working on expanding their article into a book – to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The company has not commented on online reports that it paid the two authors a $750,000 advance and plans to print one million copies.

Another mainstream publisher, Simon and Schuster, already discovered that not only is it possible to publish criticism of Israel but it can also be good for the bottom line.

Former president Jimmy Carter’s book “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” shot up the bestseller lists after its publication last November; stayed there for more than three months and is still selling well.

It had an initial print run of 300,000 copies and there are now 485,000 copies in print, said Victoria Meyer, a spokeswoman for Simon and Schuster.

Carter’s book and its reference to apartheid provoked angry reactions – more in the United States than in Israel, where leftists opposed to the occupation of the West Bank have been accusing the government of apartheid practices for years and where the word has lost its shock value.

In response to charges of bias and anti-Semitism, Carter said he wanted to provoke a discussion of issues debated routinely and freely in Israel but rarely in the United States.

“This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times during a tour to promote his book. “It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine.”

According to Oren, the pro-AIPAC historian, the Carter book and the Mearsheimer-Walt paper had the same “insidious thesis” and suffered from the same flaw – ignoring oil as a driving element in US policies on the Middle East.

Ref: Al Jazeera

Incidents of anti-Semitism in the Jewish State on the rise

I was walking my dog in Tel Aviv. When I went to cross the street there was a drunk-looking man standing next to me. My dog got scared and started to bark at him. I apologized and continued walking. I suddenly felt someone push me and I fell on the floor. The drunken man pushed me to the ground, took the leash and started to choke the dog. He was screaming at me “Stinking Zhidovka! (A derogatory name for a Jew in Russian). You Jews destroyed Russia and disturb all the normal people living here.” (Ella Shapira, a Russian immigrant)

Anti-Semitism? In Israel? Everyone is very worried about the rise of anti-Semitism around the world, yet recently there have been many headlines about anti-Semitic incidents here in Israel. Swastikas painted onto synagogues, desecration of headstones — these are no longer the legacy of the Jew in exile. The latest serious incident occurred in Bat Yam, where a group of teenagers burned an Israeli flag and mezuzahs.

One place that keeps hearing about these types of incidents is the organization Dmir Assistance in Absorption, the assistance center for victims of anti-Semitism.

“Everyone sweeps the issue of anti-Semitism in Israel under the rug” says Zalman Glichevsky, the president of the organization. “There is a leading skinhead website, and I discovered that they have a discussion group which includes Russian speakers from Israel.” Glichevsky, who immigrated to Israel in the early nineties, began to investigate the matter. He put an ad in a newspaper for Russian speakers and appealed to anyone who had ever experienced anti-Semitism in Israel.

Russian immigrants beating Jewish immigrants
“To my surprise,” he says, “I received hundreds of responses and I continue to receive them today. Over time I have collected a large archive of incidents. The police barely do anything, and in the majority of instances there is no report or publicity. Sometimes people call us to report an incident — but what can we do? We come, take some pictures, and put the report on our website.”

Ella Shapira from Tel Aviv is a veteran immigrant who came to Israel in 1976 from Leningrad. In her hometown, she was not able to pursue a career or get accepted to a university because she was a Jew. She personally experienced anti-Semitism and hoped that she could forget this unpleasant experience upon her arrival in Israel.

However she can tell of the many hateful utterances she has heard in the Russian stores, in public parks, or just in the streets. One incident, in 2001, even became physical, when a drunken man attacked her and yelled Russian slurs at her. “I walked in the streets and cried. “To where have we come, if in the Jewish state they humiliate me because I am Jewish”, she says.

Shapira is angered by the comprehensive disregard of the problem. “This is a subject that no one likes or is afraid to speak of. For the workers in the Jewish Agency, bringing new immigrants to Israel is a good business, many people profit from it. But they are bringing people who have no connection to Judaism, and some who have been brought up to hate it. I often encounter these situations. My outer appearance does not reveal my origins. Thus, a few weeks ago I went into a clothing store and the two saleswomen began to talk about me in Russian: ‘Here is a dirty Jew, she is going to touch everything and make it dirty.’ They were shocked when I answered them in Russian and explained to them that it is forbidden to speak that way.”

“I once heard a group of kids next to a school, cursing each other with the words ‘stinking Jew.’ I decided that I had to approach them and find out why they had so much hatred towards Jews. They explained that until they came to Israel, they had no idea that they had any Jewish blood. Their parents and relatives, including those who had come to Israel, hated Jews…the word ‘Jew’ in Russia was considered a bad word. Most of them were embarrassed to be Jews, hated it and learned from the Russians to hate Jews.”

Zalman Glichevsky says that he has tried to raise awareness among politicians, but most of his petitions were unanswered. “They simply do not want to harm the image of Israel. They have invested a lot in the image of Israel as a refuge from anti-Semitism. If there is more anti-Semitism here than in some other countries, then what is the point of the state of Israel?” He also warns: “anti-Semites who live in Israel and want to harm Jews can do it very easily. If in Russia the neo-nazis walk around with knives, here they have access to real weapons because they serve in the IDF.”

‘What I have experienced here, I never experienced in the Soviet Union’
The story of B., who a few years ago conducted a “battle” against her anti-Semitic neighbor and did not receive any support from the authorities, is another example of the festering anti-Semitism under our feet. She arrived 17 years ago to a neighborhood in the south of the country, and suffered anti-Semitism from her Russian-speaking neighbors, who were not Jewish.

Her complaints to the authorities were not answered, the officials did not want to recognize the fact that anti-Semitism exists in Israel, they simply recommended that she “move and stop dealing with this matter.”

Today she lives in the same apartment, but feels very disappointed that she was not able to find an answer to her problem. She says that in the past few years she has heard a lot of anti-Semitic messages, but she is no longer able to fight the battle, since she claims she did not receive appropriate support from the government.

“The person who harassed me has moved somewhere else, but there are thousands like her,” says B. “This is a problem for the country where these people are given opportunity after opportunity. The police do not want to get involved and they (the anti-Semites) do not let us live. When I came to this country I was younger and I thought that this was a democratic country. Now I am sure that you cannot change anything…what I experienced here, I did not even experience in the Soviet Union…I hope that I will have the chance to escape from here. The only thing that is keeping me here is my children and grandchildren.”

The web site of the Jewish Agency fervently keeps track of anti-Semitic incidents around the world. The president of Israel even congratulated the site for this activity. Zalman’s organization decided to take advantage of President Katzav’s involvement and a few years ago sent him a letter explaining that the problem of anti-Semitism also exists in Israel. He responded that he is aware of this problem, but the matter is not in his realm of treatment.

The Responses: The Police are dealing with it
The spokesman for the Ministry of Internal Security, Yehuda Maman, explained to Ynet “any instance of vandalism or harming government symbols is dealt with by the police. The Minister for Internal Security, Avi Dichter, is leading the minister’s committee in a struggle against violence. His flagship project, which has been approved by the minister’s committee and the government, is ‘a city without violence.’

“The project is being run in Eilat and will soon be expanded to ten other cities, including mixed cities and one Arab city. The struggle against violence, including harming state symbols, is not only the responsibility of law enforcement agencies; it begins with education at home, and formal and informal education. It begins with an understanding that these occurrences are unacceptable and that everything must be done to uproot them at the source. All of us as a society have to do more to eradicate this phenomenon.”

Michal Chaim, a spokeswoman for the police, said “every instance of incitement and anti-Semitic racism is examined by the Ministry of Justice and the police work according to their instructions, and in instances of damage we open an investigation when they are referred to us.”

Ref: israelinside

Iraq: follow the money

‘Let’s hope they’re not waiting for the Americans to fix it’

US agencies in Iraq claim that extraordinary sums have been spent on reconstruction projects; that thousands have been completed and that many more are under way. But the cash (some of which was Iraq’s own) has gone to shady contractors who have done a bad job or none at all.

The video downloads showed scenes of soldiers donating a generator to a health clinic or delivering shoes to Iraqi children. The soldiers said: “We came over to help the people of Iraq.” The people said: “Last year Fallujah looked like a demolition zone. Now I can see improvements everywhere. It is very beautiful in Fallujah”. Or: “This is a great day for my village. The coalition forces are doing great things here.”

The United States agency Usaid publishes Iraq Reconstruction Weekly Update: Reporting Progress and Good News, which presents reconstruction as a stream of projects doing wonders to improve the lives of admiring and grateful Iraqis. The US Defence Department and the agencies involved seem to be describing an alternative reality in their reports of progress. A recent update boasted that the department had spent $10.5bn so far for 3,500 projects, nearly all of which had been started and 80% completed (1).

Independent auditors have repeatedly pointed out that reports from these agencies are exaggerated or false. The State Department reported that 64 water and sanitation projects were complete and 185 were in progress; the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said the claims were hugely exaggerated. The State Department could not even provide GAO auditors with a list of the completed projects, making it impossible to evaluate them (2). Again and again the agencies have been criticised for their incompetence.

A project for the construction of 150 urgently needed health clinics was a disaster. After two years and $186m, only six were completed — and the agency reduced the contractor’s obligation to providing only 20 public health centres, instead of 150 (3). When the contractor delivered medical equipment, none of the US government agencies involved inspected it or kept an inventory. When the auditors looked at the goods, it was obvious without even opening the crates that nearly half were damaged or had other problems. The equipment sat in a warehouse and there was no plan to distribute it (4).

On the Baghdad Police College, which was a $72m contract, the construction was so poor that the auditor found: “The government’s quality assurance programme was essentially non-existent in monitoring the contractor’s performance” (5).

Worst-case scenario
The failure of reconstruction is underestimated as a cause for the larger failure of the US in Iraq. When the US toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, there was optimism and appreciation in Iraq; the hope was that the US occupation would be brief and Iraq would then be left to run its own affairs. But the occupation turned out to be the worst-case scenario. Reconstruction was botched and it quickly became clear that the US had no intention of leaving.

In summer 2003 the occupation authorities handed out massive contracts to US corporations for construction projects, but nothing actually materialised. There was little electricity for fans in the summer heat, or to operate water and sewage treatment plants, or provide refrigeration for critical medicines. The humanitarian situation deteriorated immediately. Without adequate water treatment, there were epidemics of dysentery and water-borne diseases.

The disappointment was all the worse because the Iraqis believed that US, with its wealth and might, could fix anything if it chose. Comparisons were made with Saddam’s regime: after the massive bombing during the first Gulf war in 1991 destroyed all Iraq’s infrastructure (bridges, roads, electrical generators, telecommunications, factories, oil refineries), the Saddam regime instituted an emergency reconstruction campaign. Using jerry-rigged contraptions or cannibalising parts from one plant to get another one operating, electricity was back on within weeks.

Every engineer in Iraq, including nuclear physicists, was sent out to rebuild bridges. Within three months the telephone system was reconstructed. Whereas, when there was an electricity blackout in New York City in 2003, people over in Baghdad joked: “Let’s hope they’re not waiting for the Americans to fix it.”

US officials refer to Saddam’s government as a kleptocratic regime. But that description applies just as much to the reconstruction under the US. The initial reconstruction was done through the Development Fund of Iraq, which included all income from oil exports and leftover money from the Oil for Food programme (6). It was entirely under the control of the occupation authority, which used Iraqi money to sign large contracts with US contractors and a few companies which belonged to US allies. The authority could also sign contracts extending beyond the occupation, which any successor Iraqi government would then be obliged to pay.

During the 14 months of the occupation, the DFI contained a total of $21bn. At the end of those months the US had spent $18bn and committed Iraq’s successor government to pay billions more, much of it to US companies.

Stories of the mismanagement of these funds are legendary. On 29 June 2003 the US handed over control of the fund to the interim Iraqi government. In the two weeks before that, the US had airlifted $5bn in shrink-wrapped packages of $100 bills to Iraq, and had handed them out like candy. There were pictures of contractors arriving carrying duffle bags to hold the money; the US authorities not only didn’t count the money before handing it over, they didn’t even weigh it. $1.4bn was handed out, with no explanation or records other than the entry “Transfer of Funds”. The single largest amount that could not be accountedfor was $8.8bn transferred from the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to Iraqi ministries.

Hundreds of irregularities
All this has been documented by auditors, including those from US agencies. The DFI was audited by outside accountants KPMG and later Ernst & Young, hired by the UN international advisory monitoring board. Its report from December 2004 noted that there were “hundreds of irregularities” in the CPA’s contracting process, including missing contract information and payment for contracts that had not been supervised.

A typical KPMG audit for 2004 found 37 cases involving $185m of contracts where files could not be located; there were 111 cases with no documentation for services performed under the contracts (7). Another audit found that the Halliburton subsidiary firm, Kellogg, Brown & Root, had “significantly and systematically” violated US federal contracting rules by providing false information about its costs (8). Despite this, KBR’s contracts were repeatedly expanded and renewed.

As reconstruction projects were completed, stories emerged of terrible incompetence and neglect. The US awarded a contract to renovate Al-Hillah General Hospital, south of Baghdad, to include the installation of four new elevators. The project officer signed a certificate of completion, authorising full, immediate payment even though the project was not completed. Three months later an elevator crashed, killing three people. The contractor had never installed new elevators, only badly renovated the existing ones (9).

In another case, the contractor responsible for construction at Al-Sumelat water plant had done such incompetent work that the plant could not produce drinkable water: the pipeline was installed in three unusable segments, none of them connected to the main (10). There have been dozens more incidents involving shoddy work, goods that were never delivered or equipment that never worked.

The US agencies have tried to justify the slowness of reconstruction by referring to the poor condition of Iraq at the time of the 2003 “liberation”: “US projects have helped Iraq stabilise its oil production and recover from decades of neglect under the previous regime” (11). “Before April 2003 many of the country’s water treatment plants were in serious disrepair, and the wastewater treatment plants were either completely inoperable or only partially operational” (12). “The Iraqi healthcare system had not been funded or managed in a sustainable, systematic manner for at least two decades before liberation” (13).

But Iraq was in such poor condition not because of the neglect by the regime but because the US and its allies bombed its infrastructure in the 1991 war. Then the US used its veto on the Security Council for 13 years to block Iraq from importing any equipment to rebuild industry, agriculture, electricity production or the other things necessary for the functioning of an industrialised society.

The rationale behind the harsh economic sanctions was that the Iraqi regime would lose its legitimacy; the Iraqi people would see the state for the corrupt regime it was. The hardship would cause such desperation that the Iraqi people would rise up against Saddam and overthrow the regime. It did not happen under Saddam, but it is happening under the US occupation.

The abject failure to provide electricity and water, and to restart the economy, and the plundering by US companies, have all contributed to the insurgency that demands the departure of foreign troops.

Ref: Le Monde, By Joy Gordon

British journalists’ union to work with Israelis despite boycott

Britain’s National Union of Journalists says it will continue working with its counterparts in Israel despite a vote by its annual meeting to boycott Israeli goods. The motion was adopted Friday on a vote of 66-54, committing the 35,000-member union to boycott Israeli products, while demanding that sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government and the United Nations.

“This is not, as some critics have indicated, an institutional boycott,” NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear said in a statement released Tuesday. “The NUJ will continue to seek to work with all its sister unions in the region, be they Israelis or Palestinians.

“The boycott call has nothing to do with reporting,” Dear added. “The NUJ is not telling members how to report Israel – beyond its permanent injunctions to members to report independently and fairly on all matters, and not to produce racist or discriminatory copy.”

The British government said it disagreed with the boycott, but also said it valued freedom of expression and would not interfere in what it called an internal discussion. “The government believes that, as a friend of both Israel and the Palestinians, we can best exert influence by encouraging both sides to take the steps needed for progress toward peace through close engagement,” Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells said in a statement.

Dear said the call for the boycott related partly to the kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston in Gaza. “The Palestinian journalists’ union has given huge support to the campaign for his release – holding demonstrations and strikes against the Palestinian authority to demand more action from them. We work closely with the Palestinian union through the International Federation of Journalists and the boycott call was a gesture of support for the Palestinian people – notably those suffering in the siege of Gaza, the community Alan Johnston has been so keen to help through his reporting,” Dear said.

In Israel, Simon McGregor-Wood, chairman of the Foreign Press Association, which represents foreign media covering Israel and the Palestinian territories, said the group opposed the boycott. “We feel it’s highly inappropriate for journalists to clearly take a position on the coverage of any story,” said McGregor-Wood, ABC News’ bureau chief in Israel and himself a British journalist. “From what we know, it appears to be unreasonable to go against the basic tenets of journalist objectivity and balance.”

He said the FPA’s board discussed the British boycott at its annual meeting this week and would issue a formal statement after studying the resolution. But he said it was clear that his organization did not want to be associated with this sentiment.

Ref: Haaretz