Hvem interesserer sig også for retfærdighed i Mellemøsten?

Robert Fisks syn på de nyeste WikiLeaks her, naturligvis mest centreret om situationen i Mellemøsten.

Fisk er efter min mening en af de mest kritiske, men også mest klarsynede og vidende reportere, der findes. Hans vurdering efter at have pløjet sig igennem X antal lækkede diplomatrapporter burde egentlig ikke komme bag på særlig mange: USA interesserer sig egentlig ikke for retfærdighed i Mellemøsten:

It’s not that US diplomats don’t understand the Middle East; it’s just that they’ve lost all sight of injustice. Vast amounts of diplomatic literature prove that the mainstay of Washington’s Middle East policy is alignment with Israel, that its principal aim is to encourage the Arabs to join the American-Israeli alliance against Iran, that the compass point of US policy over years and years is the need to tame/bully/crush/oppress/ ultimately destroy the power of Iran.

Hvilket også lader til at være målet for de arabiske oliediktaturers udenrigspolitik by the way. Så på den måde er de muslimske lande, Amerika og Israel smukt knyttet sammen til det samme mål, nemlig ødelæggelsen af Iran. Uofficielt, naturligvis, strengt uofficielt.

Men om dette nye, fælles mål bringer os ét skridt nærmere afklaring, fred og demokrati i Mellemøsten er overordentligt tvivlsomt. Resultatet bliver snarere mere af det samme: flere postuleringer, flere aggressioner, flere våben og flere væbnede konflikter. Alt sammen på den civile befolknings bekostning.

Så hvem interesserer sig i virkeligheden for retfærdighed i Mellemøsten?

Når diskussionen drejer sig om Israel

Hvis man vil danne sig et hurtigt overblik over positionerne i den lettere betændte debat om USA, Israel og det palæstinensiske  spørgsmål, kan man bare følge den on going kontrovers mellem The Atlantics to bloggere Andrew Sullivan og Jeffrey Goldberg.

Sullivan er den moderate stemme, der, sine naturlige israelske sympatier til trods, ikke er bleg for at kommentere og gå voldsomt i rette med den israelske regering, når dens politik er åbenlyst kontraproduktiv. Goldberg er mere old school pro-Israel-amerikaner, der lader til at tage enhver kritik af Israel som et udtryk for, om ikke direkte antisemitisme, så ihvertfald for dumheder, der indirekte går antisemiternes ærinde.

Begge d’herrer kommer ofte med gode og valide pointer i deres blogposts. Men det er sigende, at selv så nærliggende kommentatorer som de to bloggere ofte ryger i totterne på hinanden, når talen falder på Israel-Palæstina konflikten.

Andrew Sullivan om Israels grundlæggelse og udvikling:

Like America’s founding, it was not immaculate, and its survival has been a brutal struggle in which Israel has not been as innocent as some want to believe, but whose enemies’ anti-Semitism and hatred is tangible and omnipresent and despicable … Israel, for its part, remains, in its own proper borders, a model state for that part of the world; its openness and democracy vastly exceed any neighboring regime’s; it has made more of a tiny strip of land than most of its neighbors have of their vastly greater territory and resources put together. If I were Jewish, I’d be proud. But I’m not, and I can still admire a great deal.

My decision after the Gaza horror to challenge and debate some of the ideas I once held with respect to Israel in a post-9/11, post-Cold War world does not mean I wish Israel ill. It means I think Israel has not acted as a real and constructive ally this past year, and is increasingly at odds with US interests in the Middle East and in the world in general, and is committing assisted suicide if it does not get out of the West Bank sooner rather than later.

Det forekommer mig at være en sund, skeptisk tilgang til emnet. Goldberg selv har på det sidste også trukket lidt i land fra sine polemiske angreb og istedet søgt en ny måde at behandle Israelstoffet på. Men han undlader ikke at gøre sin politiske, non-kritik af Israel klar. Som han skriver:

As Goldblog readers know, I’m deeply distressed by many currents in Israeli society and politics, the continuing, disproportionate power of the settlement movement being chief among my concerns. But I find myself hesitant to criticize Israel these days because my words are inevitably used by people who don’t have Israel’s best interests, or the best interests of American Jews, at heart.  So I want to find a new way to write about these issues. The new way, obviously, is the old way. The best use of my time, I think, would be to return to what I originally was meant to do when I joined The Atlantic a couple of years ago, which is to write reported, carefully considered, fact-checked and closely-edited articles about the issues that interest me. In other words, don’t expect to see too much on Goldblog about this set of issues, generally. I appreciate all of your letters (except those that begin “Dear Zionist Douchebag,” or, “Dear Self-Hating Jewboy Douchebag”), and I’ll figure out, as I go forward, what to do with this blog, but I don’t think that writing in anger is good for anyone. So here’s hoping that the Goldblog Unilateral Disengagement Plan goes better than the Gaza Disengagement Plan.

Kritik, velbegrundet og saglig kritik, kan aldrig være skadelig. Selv ikke når kritikken gælder Israel. Men det er Goldberg øjensynlig ikke enig i. Her skurrer Goldberg’s ellers sikkert velmenende løfter om saglighed allerede en smule, synes jeg.

Israels jagede kritikere

Når jeg siger jeg holder med Israel i forhold til dets arabiske naboer, mener jeg ikke, som jeg også har forklaret, at jeg betingelsesløst støtter alt hvad Israel gør og mener. Selvfølgelig ikke. Forbrydelser er forbrydelser ligemeget hvem der udfører dem. Og ingen af siderne kan vist sige sig fri at have sin del af uforsonlige krigsliderbukse i rækkerne. Heller ikke Israel.

To witness: Den glimrende artikel af den ansete journalist Johann Hari om Israels fundamentalistiske selvudnævnte beskyttere der med absurde anklager om ‘antisemitisme’ forsøger at lukke munden på enhver der nuancerer debatten. I  ‘The loathsome smearing of Israel’s critics‘ skriver Hari blandt andet:

I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile “pro-Israel” writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, “Honest Reporting” claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, “Honest Reporting” will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups “nascent McCarthyism”. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: “Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary … It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.” If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

Hat tip: her

Hvorfor jeg holder med Israel

Ligegyldig i hvilken diskussionsammenhæng spørgsmålet opstår (middage, foreningsaftener, åndssvage konspirations-artikler i den stadig mere aktivistisk-skingre Universitetsavis), finder jeg som oftest mig selv forsvarende Israel overfor de arabiske lande.

Nej, jeg ved godt Israel ikke er perfekt. Landets behandling af sit palæstinensiske mindretal er (uanset de historiske grunde, der ligger bag) ikke et demokratisk, liberalt samfund værdigt. De fortsatte bosættelser hjælper mildest talt ikke på fredsprocessen. Og zionismen som ideologi er i min optik hverken værre eller bedre end andre xenofobiske og ultranationalistiske statsideologier, selvom den er forfattet af jøder.

Men alligevel. Jeg KAN ikke lade være med at se Israel som den eneste seriøse spiller i Mellemøsten, der både oprigtigt ønsker og aktivt gør noget for at skabe en varende fred. Dets modstandere (Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran og 6.000 andre muslimske/islamisktiske/palæstinensiske frihedsgrupper) ønsker ikke fred i nogen rationel, kompromisskabende forstand. De ønsker i langt overvejende grad fred ved at udslette Israel. Hvordan kan man skabe fred på det grundlag?

Det samme tænkte jeg, efter jeg læste denne post på The Daily Dish:

Talking about anti-Semitism is evading the issue.  The issue is the threat posed to Israel by totally selfless Muslims and leftists all over the world.  They are willing to die and to cause millions of their people to die because they believe it is just to destroy Israel.  They don’t care about the Palestinians, who could have a state tomorrow if they were willing to accept Israel’s right to live.  Launching rockets against Sderot was pointless.  The fact that the number of casualties was low is irrelevant.  They were launched to prevent peace and to kill Jews.  They were also launched to provoke a retaliatory attack, which would lead to more martyrs.  Israel is not facing an enemy with self-interest.

Iran hates Sunnis and Iranians scorn Arabs.  Ahmadinejad is willing to let half the Iranians get killed in a nuclear retaliation in order to do what is righteous and beautiful–destroying Israel.

Your mistake is assuming that Israel’s enemies are practical.  They aren’t.  Hitler wasn’t practical when he drove out Germany’s atomic scientists.  He wasn’t practical when he diverted trains supplying his soldiers in order to use them instead to get as many remaining Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz as possible before the war was over.

Israel aided Haiti knowing perfectly well that the aid would receive no publicity and no gratitude.  Israel admits gay Palestinians knowing perfectly well that some of them will try to become suicide bombers.  Never before in history has a country facing such danger behaved with such morality.  Israel admits Darfurian refugees; Arab countries try to kill them.

Jeg kunne ikke have sagt det bedre selv.

Israels undergang bliver USA’s undergang

I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play. And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel. It is a strong and beautiful principle.

Michele Bachmann, republikansk medlem af kongressen for Minnesota i hendes tale om den ‘guddommelige forbindelse‘ mellem Israel og USA, holdt til et arrangement i The Republican Jewish Coalition i Los Angeles sidste uge.

Som liberal, sekulær europæer er der noget nærmest middelalderagtigt over den slags udtalelser. Tror de virkelig på, at nationer opnår en eller anden slags guddommelig velsignelse, såfremt de støtter Israel? Eller at de samme nationer vil blive ramt af guds vrede, såfremt de begynder at stille kritiske spørgsmål til fx Israels forsatte udvidelse af bosættelser på besat område?

Ja, det gør de. Og det er derfor det nogle gange kan være så svært at forstå den politiske og samfundsmæssige dagsorden i USA. Simpelthen fordi den bygger på religiøse antagelser, vi i Europa overhovedet ikke er vant til, griber ind i politiske diskussioner.

Hvilke rationelle argumenter kan man komme med mod en person som Michelle Bachmann? Hvilke historiske og politiske facts kan man rulle ud imod hende for at få hende til blot at modificere sin utvetydige støtte til alt hvad Israel gør? Det står jo i Biblen!

Det er altså ikke kun islamistiske mørkemænd vi skal være bange for. De kristne kan også gode være med. Religion er herligt.

(By the way: Bibelcitatet Bachmann hentyder til er dette, vistnok guds tale til Israel: “And I will bless those who bless you / And the one who curses you I will curse / And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed“. Fra New American Standard Bible.)