After a brief sojourn into Wadi al-Mousa and Petra the other day, just 10 hours in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, plus an interesting moment at the Yitzhak Rabin border crossing on the way back involving an expired visa, there has not been much time to quote-unquote report. Time is always of the essence and it is a limited commodity.


Anat Kamm has disappeared again, this time from virtually all media accounts; the lens moved onto things like Icelandic disruptions of European travel plans, much more significant for geological and economical reasons; or onto the crisis in relations between Bibi and Bama—more precisely, the ideological crisis within Israel and its uber-Zionistic counterparts in the States. And the overwhelming silence of the moderates.

Take Ms. Kamm (below) as a case study. Since April 8 until the end of the month, the soldier/espionage case/cause celebre was a nonperson due to a gag order that would be lifted after enormous criticism and is now under house arrest awaiting trial. Let us get the facts in order before we can look at the broader implications. First we must seek out the hitna’alut, the way things were managed.


Uri Blau is (was?) a reporter for Ha’aretz, the premier Israeli daily. While traveling abroad, he received a reported 2,000 documents from a 23-year-old in the Zahal (IDF) named Anat Kamm. They are digital files of secret military reports on goings on in the West Bank. Kamm believed they document law-breaking in the officer ranks surrounding the controversial practice of targeted assassinations. The matter is found out and she’s under arrest. News media are told there had been a security breach; the GOC issued an order that nothing be said about it. (Shepherd Smith was shocked.) It is not known if Blau can return to his country.

The Forward weighed in on April 18, writing in its lead editorial (“Behind the Kamm Affair”), “Tempting as it is to turn Kamm and Blau into martyrs, their stories are not fully known, and what is known in complicated.” They ask why she copied (transferred to a flash drive probably, as Joel Katz speculated in a personal communication with this reporter) “so many documents, some of which allegedly contain sensitive information that could put at risk future military operations?” Those very documents were in Blau’s possession, and when his newspaper published them it had passed muster with the military censor. The allegation is not possible. Looking at the media analysis part of the equation, the Forward editorial dichotomizes reality: if you’re “on the left,” the Kamm-Blau affair “is but the most recent example of Israel’s dangerous march toward suppression of civil liberties and dissent in the name of security” and, if you’re “on the right,” these two “are grievously at fault for flouting the rule of law and abusing freedom of the press”—none of this was helped by the gag order, they write.

Richard Silverstein, a blogger, first broke the story for the Anglosphere in late March. He reported that “Anat Kam herself and others on the Israeli left have urged those who have published to remove their material” on her arrest, information the Shin Bet had blacked out. Further, “an Israeli peace activist told me that Kam was negotiating with the Shin Bet and hoped if little was made of this affair that she might get off with no jail time.” Silverstein concluded with a bit of equivocation: “I would hope her actions were based on a citizen’s disgust with the army’s brazen disregard for the rule of law. But it occurs to me, and I freely concede and even hope I am wrong, that the leak may’ve been motivated by an aspiring journalist who found herself in a position to advance her career by making such material public through Israel’s leading daily newspaper, Haaretz, and a respected investigative journalist, Uri Blau.” He did not know more at that time.

Yet by April 1, Silverstein noted that the story had reached the British press. He wrote, “The next time someone tells you journalism is all about the scoop, tell ‘em they’re wrong. For some reason, some scoops are too hot to handle.” In the London Times (April 3), James Hider reported that even the tabloid Ma’ariv sardonically commented, “Due to a gag order we cannot tell you what we know. Due to laziness, apathy and blind faith in the defence establishment we know nothing at all.”

Hider quotes from a 2008 report that surfaced which showed how “in March 2007 Major-General Yair Naveh…the senior Israeli commander in the West Bank at the time, allowed his men to shoot three leading Palestinian militants even though they did not pose a clear threat. The order was judged to be illegal by experts interviewed by the Haaretz journalist Uri Blau.” Kamm was working in Naveh’s office; she passed the allegedly incriminating evidence to Blau. “She faces up to 14 years in jail” if not a heavier sentence.


Looking at the media analysis part of the equation, the Forward editorial dichotomizes reality: if you’re “on the left,” the Kamm-Blau affair “is but the most recent example of Israel’s dangerous march toward suppression of civil liberties and dissent in the name of security” and, if you’re “on the right,” these two “are grievously at fault for flouting the rule of law and abusing freedom of the press”—none of this was helped by the gag order, they add.

Investigative reporter Max Blumenthal pointed out (“The Strange Disappearance of Anat Kam,” April 7) the dissonance of a democratic state doing something so blatantly anti-democratic. Yet first he also lays out the facts. The exact documents in question, which Kamm had swiped and sent off on CDs, “revealed that in 2007, [IDF] forces assassinated a Palestinian Islamic Jihad member in direct contravention of a Supreme Court order that banned the killing of wanted militants if there was a reasonable chance to arrest them first.” Blumenthal also points to Maj. Gen. Yavneh as one of the key culprits. He also mentions that the articles published under Blau’s byline about the story were approved by the military censor. “According to multiple sources, Blau is terrified to return to Israel.” It is also revealed that the gag order was “issued in January,” which means it lasted for about two months.

Blumenthal also wrote that “some Israeli bloggers have taken down their posts, fearing that they could harm Kam’s defense — and possibly place themselves in danger — by provoking the Shin Bet and reactionary political elements.”


In the London Guardian on April 8, the day the order was finally lifted, Rory McCarthy observed that 700 of the alleged “2,000” documents were classified as state secrets. The same day Yossi Melman, in Tablet, reminded readers that Kamm is “by no means a member of the anti-Zionist left.” Melman continues,

Kamm, who admired Blau’s writing, told him she had stolen copies of secret documents during her military service at the office of the head of the IDF’s Central Command. Sometime later she gave Blau some of the documents, which she had been holding for 18 months. (A first attempt to hand off documents to Yossi Yehoshu, a reporter for Yediot Aharonot, failed.) Haaretz published articles based on a few of them not long after, in November 2008.

…Blau revealed that in March and April 2007, while Kamm was working at the office of the IDF’s head of Central Command, the army’s highest ranking officers knowingly planned to violate a 2006 Supreme Court ruling that forbade the assassination of Palestinian militants when their arrest was possible. In April 2007, the IDF’s Central Command received permission to assassinate an Islamic Jihad leader named Ziad Malaisha. The assassination, Kamm’s documents reveal, was planned and approved in meetings with the head of the IDF’s Operations Directorate, Brig. Gen. Sami Turjeman, and the IDF’s Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi.

Summaries of the meetings reveal that the officers were aware of the Supreme Court ruling they would soon violate. The assassination, which was postponed because of the April 2007 visit of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, took place in June 2007, the month Kamm left the army. Israel’s military censors approved Blau’s article, finding that its publication would not damage Israel’s national security.

That leaves Uri Blau, who explained himself by saying, “The Kafkaesque situation I found myself in forces me to return to basics. I am a journalist and my aim is to provide the reader as much information as possible and in the best way, with maximum objectivity. It’s not a personal agenda, or a matter of Left or Right.”

“Every journalist knows that exposes cannot be released without evidence — but no Israeli journalist has known until now that such exposes could have him declared an enemy of the state and find himself in jail,” he concluded.

Notices appeared in the April 7 and 14 issues of Ha’aretz that bear worth mentioning: first, former High Court justice Dalia Dorner “lashed out” against the gag order, saying it was “baseless” to do so given that “Israeli blogs and Web sites, along with foreign media outlets…have been discussing the affair in detail over the past several weeks” (Gili Izikovich).

A week later several other “prominent journalists” rallied to Blau’s defense, including Channel 1 newscaster Geula Even and Army Radio’s Razi Barkai, as well as “Israel Radio military correspondent Carmela Menashe, Yedioth Ahronoth researcher Ronen Bergman, and Channel 10 political correspondent Chico Menashe” (Ofra Edelman). The day before the blackout was lifted, Ze’ev Segal commented that the ruling “makes a mockery of Israeli democracy” (“The case we’re not allowed to report on”). All the while, the entire world knew what had happened.

In the December 1982 issue of Mother Jones Eric Nadler, writing about the growing influence of Kahanism, quoted Yossi Dayan, “Kach’s No. 3 man,” as saying, “you will soon see that our positions, which some call extremist or fanaticist, will be taken over—adopted by groups which consider themselves to be more mainstream than us. Wait and see.”

Amos Elon, writing in Life magazine (6 February 1970): “Israel was, after all, predicated upon a radiant dream of tranquility, of peace and justice for all men. It now finds itself in the morally disturbing position of a conqueror suppressing an alien population. Under present circumstances it cannot withdraw from the occupied areas without jeopardizing its basic security. But the spiraling effect of terror and repression, if the occupation continues, is bound to affect the moral fiber of society.”

Coming soon (lot of busy-ness being dealt with): comment and updates on the Anat Kam case; some gems from back issues of Life; thoughts from the pseudonymous Magnes Zionist; and some stuff Akiva Orr wrote.

Not a lot of time these days for original reporting. But my two cents is good enough, probably.

KFAR SABA — Goldstone and the ever-growing ripples of dissent fighting are refusing to dissipate. This past week Isabel Kershner reported,

Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, an advocacy group that focuses on freedom of movement for Palestinians, said her organization was harassed last year by the Israeli tax authorities. She said they questioned why Gisha should be tax exempt when that status was meant for organizations that promoted the public good. Eventually, she said, the authorities backed down.

Then an ultra-Zionist nongovernmental organization called Im Tirtzu...attacked a major organization, the New Israel Fund, which channeled about $29 million to Israeli groups in 2009, including some Arab-run, non-Zionist groups. The fund describes itself as pro-Israel and says it does not agree with all the positions of the groups it helps, but it supports their right to be heard.

Im Tirtzu published a report in January asserting that 92 percent of the quotes from unofficial Israeli bodies supporting claims against Israel in the Goldstone report were provided by 16 nongovernmental organizations financed by the New Israel Fund.

The New Israel Fund dismissed Im Tirtzu's findings as a fabrication, saying most of the references it cited had nothing to do with Gaza during the Israeli offensive.

Interestingly, Keshev put out a small report not mentioned by Kershner, although it easily debunks Im Tirtzu’s claims, without having to resort to the familiar he-said, he-said story: the group “analyzed the information sources of the Goldstone report based on references cited in the report, while ignoring many other sources ... including cabinet members, IDF generals, government institutions, and major Israeli media, Maariv included”—a right-wing tabloid. Further, as an example of the paucity of the claim that the New Israel Fund, which bankrolls Israel’s civil society organizations, created the Goldstone demon, “the B’Tselem [Israeli group that monitors human rights violations in the West Bank] materials to which the Goldstone report refers are actually debriefings that were previously submitted to the attorney general and the military advocate general, which were followed by Military Police investigations.” Keshev adds that Im Tirtzu’s “financial sources are kept secret from the public.”

In the same article, Kershner does not name a source, a figure in the current Netanyahu coalition government who “affirmed” that last year it was decided to aggressively go after Israeli watchdogs, that is named by Jpost reporter Herb Keinon: Ron Dermer, who helped influence Bush’s messianic view on foreign policy and is now a “right-hand man on policy” for Bibi, according to Didi Remez at the indispensable Coteret.

Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day; today’s top headline in Haaretz reads, simply, “IDF order will enable mass deportation from West Bank” — a move which is “aimed at preventing infiltration,” defined radically broadly to mean “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, citizens of countries with which Israel has friendly ties (such as the United States) and Israeli citizens, whether Arab or Jewish. ... The new guidelines are expected to clamp down on protests in the West Bank,” as part of the increasingly obvious war on dissent within Israel. Alas, it appears we have really learned nothing.

Heads up, Bibi: this is where American Jewry seems to stand. The pollsters did not make breakdowns by age, which would have been more interesting.

Finally, something light: Sacha Baron Cohen plays an Israeli tour guide named Jacob (funny, not Yaacov) and Homer pretends to be the Messiah, incurring the wrath of a united mass of Jews, Muslims and Christians. Sounds like a peace plan that could work.

Nir Hasson and Avi Issacharoff report in Ha’aretz:

Israel’s decision to approve new East Jerusalem houses effectively prevents any peace negotiations from taking place, the Palestinian Authority said on Tuesday, following an Interior Ministry statement released earlier authorizing 1,600 new housing units.

This arrives on the heels of Barak’s decision to approve 112 new Jewish homes (referred to as “apartment units” in one of the reports) in the West Bank, which came exactly one day after the PA finally agreed to “indirect” talks on the eve of V.P. Joe Biden’s visit, in which he made pains to assure a nervous Israeli public of his credentials as some kind of born-again Zionist.

Barak also declared that, for now, Iran does not pose “an existential threat” to Israel; during the vaunted Herzliya conference last month, he made some waves when he spoke of Israel’s possible future as “an apartheid state” if no peace can be made with the Palestinians.

Rumors of war by the end of spring are flying around. Yoel Marcus does not want to keep the military option—aerial attack—off the table; meanwhile, Iran has test-fired a new missile from a destroyer. Step by step both nations seem to be walking toward the abyss, but hopefully that is not the case.

UPDATES (Mar. 11): According to Ir Amim, plans are underway to create as many as 50,000 new units in E J’lem; at TAU, Biden declared current state of affairs “not sustainable,” which should be obvious to all reasonable people.

Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, writes a moving tribute to the lessons he and his family learned from Yad Vashem this past January.

Tony Judt explains human society at the edges. Choice quote:

The thin veneer of civilization rests upon what may well be an illusory faith in our common humanity. But illusory or not, we would do well to cling to it. Certainly, it is that faith—and the constraints it places upon human misbehavior—that is the first to go in times of war or civil unrest.

SDE BOKER—Visiting a real Bedouin home is a mind-altering experience, in the sense that it utterly eviscerates the romanticized, tourist vision of nomads living off the land in dignity and serenity. The reality is that these are very oppressed people who live in poverty, at the sufferance of the state, which demands proper permits for them to roam or even grow their own food. The contrast between the Jewish-owned agricultural areas and these miserable “unrecognized” villages is quite stark. No pictures here, out of my own perhaps misguided sense of respect. One could make the comparison with the condition of the American Indians, although Bedouins make up a higher percentage of the population (about two percent) than our indigenous peoples. So there are of course differences.

JAFFA—Usually it is one of those redundant cliches to say how old—and mixed—this place is, four thousand years of volatile history. There is a lot of construction going on, indeed “gentrification.” Hebrew graffiti all over, a lot of Arabic posters shredded or defaced. Today it seemed to be a relatively quiet type of powderkeg. It was very stark to observe the built-up, commercial areas from the concrete neighborhoods, some of which were crumbling. The beauty of this ancient place is somewhat belied by the painful fact that its demographic character (read, Arabic population) is gradually being pushed out, although this correspondent did not see anything to confirm this. A few cranes dot the landscape, and bulldozers roll down a thoroughfare; however, it is difficult to tell what is going on.

According to Nazareth-based British journalist Jonathan Cook, one of the neighborhoods here, Ajami, is undergoing a serious influx of fundamentalist settler-types moving in, which is antagonizing the locals, mostly because a realty company at the center of it will only sell homes to Jews. Ajami was not visited today because, on top of it being hard to find — plus my lack of knowledge of Arabic aside from as-salaam aleikum, which is a good way to convey good will to the decent people who live there) — as well as something heard to the effect of “it’s a bad neighborhood.” You can read about a documentary film concerning the same here.

The head of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel reports that former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg has joined in the demonstrations at Sheikh Jarrah, quite possibly one of the most contested areas of East Jerusalem.

What appears to be going on behind the ongoing protests, according to Ir Amim.

TEL AVIV—This correspondent is sick of ideologues and absolutist thinking, completely disgusted with a mindset that sees nothing wrong with making massive generalizations; with attitudes that in most circumstances would be seen and recognized as hateful. Are there circumstances in which it is justifiable to ignore human morality for the sake of survival? Are we under constant existential threat, or are we the dominant peerless military power in the region? These are not trivial questions.

My thinking, at this point, is that it is oxymoronic to believe that the reality is just a matter of different definitions and-or perspectives while also demanding that there is an ultimate truth, that this is real and that is not real. It is simultaneously contradictory to hold a view in which The Other is a fundamentally dangerous, murderous Enemy which only understands the language of force, and giving ourselves the image of a virtuous light unto nations, with the highest moral code. Or that, and this is quite an oddity, it is both the case that some things really are black-and-white but, when push comes to shove, Hey, it is quite complicated and it is irrelevant to talk about right or wrong. Applying the moral code we see in ourselves in our mirrors, even in a judicious way, may put us in a bad light. Hence we become extremely defensive and disbelieving. No, we cannot do things like that, it’s not what you see or hear, they are agents of evil, etc. I believe that Israel faces real security problems, there are people not too far away who want to do Israelis lethal harm, and self-defense is good and right. That is not moral confusion.

I’m feeling passionate right now because I’m tired of feeling like I’m being deceived, that I cannot know anything because I’m not Israeli but just a Jew who happens to be living here (for the next five months; expect occasional reports). Ironically, this is my state in essence, it is legally defined as the state of my people, by my very ancestry and heritage. Therein lies another contradiction, a very absurd one at that: my word on what Israel does is totally null, but this place is supposed to belong to me, my birthright. And, perhaps it is needless to say, by the fact of being American it is also my client. I do not intend to show any disrespect; quite the contrary. I love this place and the people, wonderful, intelligent, full of life and determined to just go on.

Here’s a question to ask myself, and of course toward others: when it is a genuine reflection of what is really happening (or what was happened) and when is it actually defamation and propaganda? Why is it that every serious, legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and actions is completely dismissed as a manifestation of antisemitism, another arrow to the heart of the Jewish people? Take the infamous Goldstone report and the incredible responses it has elicited as an instructive case-in-point, but just one aspect of a larger war on dissent that appears to be going on.

Israeli democracy is being threatened, according to credible reports that have appeared in the press, a serious threat to the health and future of the Hebrew commonwealth. Fundamentalist thinking is increasing, war drums are being beaten over the Iranian dilemma, and a flood of hasbara information desperately attempts to tell us, with all requisite seriousness, that we are not only under threat, real enough, but the notion of our own wrongdoing, no matter how big or well-corroborated and not inspired by ideological preconceptions, is outrageous and defamatory. More as things develop.

(Above: Bethlehem from a vantage point in Gilo. Most say the general purpose of that gray structure there is for security; others, silly radicals and dangerous types, claim it is meant for annexation or even apartheid, not necessarily my claim on balance. So who knows?)

The last remaining American veteran of the First World War has turned 109.

With the passing of Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger, America has lost two very important voices. One was an outspoken activist who was unafraid to challenge power, and the other was an iconoclast who drifted into a hermit-like existence. Perhaps drift is the wrong way to put it; perhaps it was his conscious choice to do so, to seclude himself into the nether-regions of New Hampshire. Whatever the case, both men despised phony people, for different reasons. Despise is a word that requires a note of elaboration. At first glance it appears to denote hatred but, in fact, it literally refers to the act of looking down upon. Zinn and Salinger, quite literally, looked down upon phonies, inauthentic people, cogs in machines, because such people chose to become, or had no choice but to be, automatons, serving a higher purpose over which they had no real control.

Much is said about a famous address Zinn made in the Boston Common in 1971, addressing the plainclothes tools of state power interspersed among the listening crowd. He, along with Daniel Ellsberg and others, were beaten the next day, by interlocutors of law and order, although on an individual level the agents wielding heavy batons were at the very least reluctant to carry out their orders and, according to the account Ellsberg has given, expressed their sympathies for the cause.

As for the creator of Holden Caulfield, an ennui-obsessed teenage lost soul who despairs of the world, the impulse to change the world retreats to a desire to escape. It is certainly understandable; the world can be a demented, dangerous place, filled with mercenary, unfeeling people. But that is far from all that it is. Perhaps it was the hope that there are decent people everywhere you go, doing what they can to improve things, even in the smallest ways, that kept people like Zinn going, up to the very end.

In glossy graphical form, we see where our money is going.

Former HuffPo writer E.A. Hanks breaks up with something called the Left. Credit is due to Sebastian Goldstein.

Anderson Cooper jumped in and carried a Haitian boy, bleeding and helpless, to relative safety. People are giving him a lot of kudos for his bravery and compassion; I never cared for him but that was a real class-act. Also, this raises the question of when reporters/journalists/TV personalities can take the mask off and just be human. In the photos, the Haitian cops look sort of shocked, astounded. I have to keep reminding myself that the aid is barely trickling in, the hospitals collapsed for days with rising levels of what we lazily call anarchy, literally absence of government — there are reports of paramilitaries, private citizens rich enough, here and there, to arm make-shift police forces. Hence Cooper’s newsworthy rescue. “Looting” is in use again, as if it is a criminal act to do whatever you can to survive when civilization is destroyed, to defend your life; especially when there’s barely any aid, too few people to distribute, and no order.

Seriously?

Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, has witnessed a catastrophe that has ripped through its capital, Port-au-Prince. Over 100,000 Haitians are feared dead, although the search for bodies has just begun and aid relief continues to flow in from all around the world. (The projected toll is about one percent of its population.)

In a report from the capital, Pooja Bhatia seems to sound uncomfortably like Pat Robertson.

A second night in the streets.