Author: Daniel Luban

By now, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attempts to spin the story of Jawaher Abu Rahmah — the Palestinian woman who died last week following a protest in the West Bank village of Bil’in, by all indications due to exposure to tear gas fired by the IDF at the protesters — have fallen to pieces. (See +972 magazine for the most thorough coverage of the Abu Rahmah story.) Soon after Abu Rahmah’s death, a senior IDF officer — since revealed to be Major General (Aluf) Avi Mizrahi — gave a briefing to what one participant described as an “exclusive group of bloggers” raising questions about the circumstances of her death.

The secretive nature of the briefing reflected the fact that the allegations being made were simply innuendo that the IDF did not wish to attach itself to in public. (The Israeli Government’s press office did, however, subsequently disseminate the central allegation; they have since removed the offending tweet without a trace.) The main claim was that Abu Rahmah had died of leukemia, and that her death had nothing to do with tear gas. This claim was quickly discredited, but not before it had raced through the right-wing blogosphere. (Here’s one example.) In my mind, an even more galling innuendo was this one, courtesy of the same participant in the briefing:

IDF has heard about the honor killing theory, that Abu Rahma was stabbed to death for being pregnant as a family “honor killing”, however they cannot confirm this and the direction they currently are progressing is more in towards death from a chronic illness.

Who had discussed the possibility of Abu Rahmah’s death being an “honor killing?” As far as I can tell, no one. Here Gen. Mizrahi appeared to be engaged in what is referred to in rhetoric as “paralipsis” — that is, bringing something up under the pretense of not bringing it up. (“I won’t even mention that my opponent beats his wife.”) By gratuitously bringing up the mention of honor killing, the IDF seemed to be trying to raise the specter of Muslim Barbarism in the public mind while appearing high-minded and generous by dismissing it in favor of the leukemia theory.

In any case, now that these allegations have been discredited, a more interesting question is: who was in the “exclusive group of bloggers” that the IDF chose to disseminate its innuendo? It would be helpful, for future reference, to know which public commentators have been chosen for the role of unofficial IDF spokespeople.

For example, one of the most persistent propagators of the since-discredited claims about Abu Rahmah has been Noah Pollak, head of the right-wing advocacy group Emergency Committee for Israel. He was one of those who disseminated the cancer story, as well as numerous other IDF innuendos (it wouldn’t even be fair to call them IDF talking points, since the IDF itself was unwilling to get behind them in public.) Now, if Pollak wanted to mention the rumors, while making clear that they were unverified claims by an anonymous IDF official with a vested interest in the story, that would be one thing. Instead, he simply repeated each claim as fact. After the cancer story was discredited, he refused to offer any correction, and instead appears to have stopped talking about Abu Rahmah at all.

According to David Frum, Pollak (who understands that “modern warfare is PR by other means”) was instrumental in convincing the IDF to step up its media efforts. Yet the exact nature of the Pollak’s relationship with the IDF is a bit unclear. Given that Pollak is the head of an American advocacy group that was formed to intervene in the 2010 U.S. congressional elections, it would be helpful to know exactly what his relationship to the Israeli military is. Answers to the following questions would be a useful start:

1) Has Pollak made aliyah?

2) Has he ever served in the IDF? If so, when?

3) Does he have a formalized professional relationship to the IDF? If so, what?

4) Has he ever been paid by the IDF for services rendered? If so, what were they?

5) Has he consulted with the IDF on an unofficial basis?

Lest I be accused of making claims about “dual loyalty,” let me make clear that there is nothing wrong whatsoever with U.S. citizens having sympathies for other states, including Israel. An active relationship with the military of a foreign state, however, is a somewhat different question — while it should by no means disqualify Pollak from working in American politics, it is certainly the sort of information that the public deserves to know, particularly it he aims to be a player on the U.S. domestic political scene.

One interesting nugget from Josh Nathan-Kazis’s Forward article on the various Sept. 11 events going on at Ground Zero:

In addition to Wilders, the rally [led by Pamela Geller] will feature a videotaped address by John Bolton, ambassador to the United Nations during the second Bush administration, and speeches by Republican political candidates and by a conservative radio host. Former GOP House speaker Newt Gingrich was previously listed as a speaker, but he is not attending. A spokesman for Gingrich said that he had never intended to attend, and that the listing was based on a misunderstanding.

While it’s impossible to know the actual story, it sure sounds like Gingrich decided that associating himself with the likes of Geller and Geerts Wilders was not a sound political strategy for a 2012 presidential hopeful. Similarly, it’s notable that even John Bolton — who is about as far right as any high-profile U.S. political figure, and who wrote the forward to Geller and Robert Spencer’s latest book — is declining to appear in person. Perhaps Gingrich and Bolton calculated that there is a not-insignificant chance that Geller’s Muslim hatefest will end in some kind of “incident” — see the near-miss at last week’s Ground Zero rally for an idea of what this would look like — in which case participation at the rally would become politically toxic for whoever was involved.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, one of the most important stories about the whole controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” is the extent to which prominent Republican political figures, most notably Gingrich, have mainstreamed a virulently Islamophobic discourse that was once limited to the right-wing fringes. Does Gingrich’s pulling out of the Geller rally mean that he has reconsidered the wisdom of trying to carve out a niche for himself as America’s most prominent Islamophobe? It would be premature to say so for sure, but keep an eye on Gingrich and other prominent Republican opinion-makers in the months to come.

Liel Leibovitz and Gideon Levy have the rundown on a just-publicized tape of Benjamin Netanyahu from 2001. Addressing an audience at the West Bank settlement of Ofra without realizing that the cameras are running, Netanyahu claims that he has “de facto put an end to the Oslo accords” and boasts of his ability to manipulate U.S. policymakers. Among the tape’s highlights (from Liebovitz’s writeup):

“I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in their way.”

On getting the U.S. to concede to Israel the right to define which areas of the West Bank were “closed military zones: “From that moment on, I de facto put an end to the Oslo accords.”

“They asked me before the election if I’d honor [the Oslo accords]. I said I would, but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I’m concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue.”

Bill Clinton is “radically pro-Palestinian”.

With the exception of the last line about Clinton, all of these statements appear to fit Michael Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe — that is, when a politician unwittingly tells the truth.

Bret Stephens, the neoconservative foreign policy editor for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, proclaims in his column today that “the Iranian Green Movement is dead”. The column is a revealing one, although not for the actual argument, which is shoddy even by Stephens’s standards. (He predictably places all blame on Obama for the Green Movement’s failure to topple the Iranian regime last June, but rather incredibly goes on to suggest that what the protesters really needed was for Obama to publicly declare U.S. support for an Israeli attack on Iran. Surely not even Stephens — for whom the answer to any foreign policy question is “increase support for Israel” — can actually believe this.)

No, what is revealing about the column is what it tells us about the intentions of Stephens and the rest of the neoconservative Bomb Iran crowd. In the year since the 2009 election crisis, these hawks have constantly (and rather smugly) proclaimed their undying support for the Green Movement, and sought to wrap their own hawkish stance — which originates primarily in a concern for Israeli interests — in the moral authority of the protesters. Of course, the notion that the protesters were fighting to have Israel bomb their country, or the U.S. “cripple” it with sanctions, was absurd on its face, but then the neocons have never been shy about claiming to speak on behalf of others. Thus the reverent mention of Neda Agha-Soltan became a staple of every warmongering op-ed, as if Neda died in order to maintain Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.

The only problem for the hawks was that the Iranian opposition began increasingly to speak for itself in the Western media, and rather unfortunately failed to stay on message. We saw this, for instance, in Akbar Ganji’s comments of last month, in which he warned that military strikes or economic sanctions would “destroy” the Green Movement, and stated that “any foreign intervention is bound to hurt us”. Similarly, opposition leaders have been outspoken in defending Iran’s right to enrich uranium, leading Stephens’s Washington Post counterpart Jackson Diehl to lash out at the Green Movement for failing to hew closely enough to the preferences of Washington neoconservatives.

It is in this context that we need to read Stephens’s obituary for the Green Movement; his column may be indicative of the tack that those pushing war against Iran will increasingly take in the future. If the opposition refuses to stay on message, in other words, the only way forward is to proclaim its irrelevance, and if opposition leaders warn that a military attack will destroy their movement, the only way forward is to declare it dead already. If nothing else, this trend may bring a little more honesty into the Iran debate, as the neocons stop pretending to speak on behalf of the Green Movement and admit that they couldn’t care less what it wants.

Victor Davis Hanson: With Obama and his moral equivalence, Israel is hardly any better than Hamas or Hezbollah or the Palestinian Authority. I wonder, though, if they really believe that.

What if a Jew says he wants to live in Ramallah because it’s a nice place? Arabs live in Nazareth and other places in Israel, so what if a Jew says he wants to be a Palestinian citizen?

Michael J. Totten: That’s impossible.

VDH: Jews aren’t allowed there.

MJT: It’s crazy, isn’t it?

VDH: That fact all by itself should tell the Obama administration that there’s something weird about that place and there’s no moral equivalence.

~ Interview with Michael J. Totten

VDH’s implication — that Palestinians are free to move to Israel at will, while Israelis are not similarly free to move to the West Bank — is, to say the least, peculiar. Still, he has no need to worry. Any Jew who takes a fancy to the Ramallah area — whether or not they’ve so much as set foot in the region before — is free to move to any of the several settlements that surround the city, where he or she will enjoy tax breaks, cheap housing, and government subsidies. But what about the reverse? What if a Palestinian from Ramallah decides that he or she wants to live in Tel Aviv (“because it’s a nice place”)? More to the point, what if a Palestinian whose family was driven from the Nazareth area in 1948 wants to move to Nazareth? VDH settles for implying (rather than stating explicitly) that they are free to do so, because he clearly knows (but chooses not to dwell on) the fact that this would be impossible. To allow it would be to open the door to the right of return, and thus — as VDH would surely warn apocalyptically — the “destruction of Israel”.

It should surprise no one that VDH displays an understanding of the issues at stake that is almost entirely backward. Still, it’s revealing that he holds up this particular example as proof that “there’s no moral equivalence” in the conflict.

(For anyone who hasn’t read it, now is as good a time as any to plug Chase Madar’s brilliant VDH parody from last year’s American Conservative.)

Flotilla passengers aid an injured Israeli commando.

Via Ali Abunimah, the Turkish paper Hurriyet has posted a gallery of photos recovered from the passengers of the Mavi Marmara, the now-famous ship involved in last week’s flotilla incident. Another photo from the set, displayed here, has been posted on the Economist’s Facebook page; it clearly shows the same commando and passenger as one of the other photos in the set. While we must be cautious about the authenticity of any of the information coming out about the flotilla attack, the IDF seems to concede to Ha’aretz that the photos are authentic: while attempting to spin the pictures, an IDF spokesperson did not dispute that they are real.

Taken together, the photos more or less definitively dispel the claim, advanced by the IDF and its media defenders, that the passengers aboard the ship were a “lynch mob” determined to kill Israeli soldiers. On the contrary, the photos show that the passengers managed to capture Israeli soldiers and escort them below deck, where they would have had more than enough opportunity to kill them had they wanted to. Far from doing so, they actually helped treat the soldiers’ wounds, as shown in the photo above.

The photos also lend support to the testimony of one of the passengers aboard the ship, former U.S. marine and Gulf War veteran Ken O’Keefe, who described the passengers’ capture and subsequent treatment of three IDF commandos:

We had in our full possession, three completely disarmed and helpless commandos. These boys were at our mercy, they were out of reach of their fellow murderers, inside the ship and surrounded by 100 or more men. I looked into the eyes of all three of these boys and I can tell you they had the fear of God in them. They looked at us as if we were them, and I have no doubt they did not believe there was any way they would survive that day. They looked like frightened children in the face of an abusive father.

But they did not face an enemy as ruthless as they. Instead the woman provided basic first aid, and ultimately they were released, battered and bruised for sure, but alive. Able to live another day. Able to feel the sun over head and the embrace of loved ones. Unlike those they murdered. Despite mourning the loss of our brothers, feeling rage towards these boys, we let them go.

While the same caveats are in order regarding O’Keefe’s testimony as regarding every other piece of information being released about the flotilla raid, the photos seem to verify his account. In any event, his testimony is worth reading in full.

The week since the Mavi Marmara incident has seen a dizzying amount of propaganda and misinformation released by the IDF and its supporters. There was the claim that the ship’s passengers were “Al Qaeda mercenaries,” since retracted; the claim that Mavi Marmara passengers told an Israeli navy vessel to “go back to Auschwitz,” already partially retracted and seemingly on its way to a full retraction; the claims that passengers had opened fire on the IDF commandos, now dropped without a trace. As more and more details emerge, it has come to appear that the initial image of the flotilla raid was in fact the correct one: namely, that the ship’s passengers acted in self-defense after coming under surprise attack, and that despite the killing of at least nine of their fellows they resisted the urge to take retribution against the commandos.

Of course, all this must remain speculative, for the IDF has still refused to release its complete and unedited footage of the raid. Immediately after the attack, the IDF released a heavily edited clip that highlighted footage of passengers attacking commandos without showing what happened before or after. But if the facts of the raid are as clear and unambiguous as the IDF is suggesting, surely there is no reason to hold back on the full video. They have an opportunity to clear things up once and for all.