297 Israel's'Get Goldstone' Campaign

Judge Richard Goldstone banned from attending his Grandson's Barmitzvah

(1) Judge Richard Goldstone banned from attending his Grandson's Barmitzvah
(2) Israel's hypocritical attack on Richard Goldstone
(3) The 'Get Goldstone' Campaign  
(4) Smearing Richard Goldstone - Stephen M. Walt
(5) A Tale of Two Apartheids
(6) Israel's 'targeted citizens'

(1) Judge Richard Goldstone banned from attending his Grandson's Barmitzvah

From: Kristoffer Larsson <kristoffer.larsson@sobernet.nu> Date: 15.04.2010 06:17 AM

http://writingrights.org/2010/04/14/breaking-news-judge-richard-goldstone-banned-from-attending-his-grandsons-barmitzvah/

Judge Goldstone has been banned by the South African Zionist Federation from attending his grandson's barmitzvah. The Chief Rabbi a neo-conservative who has betrayed the tolerant tradition of the late former Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris has blessed this travesty.

Silencing critics of Israel's war crimes is not enough, they have to infringe Goldstone's equal right to practice his religion and his family life. Every decent person will sign a protest against this injustice. The tactics of the Israeli neo-fascists should not be allowed to dictate policy in South Africa. These were the people who supported apartheid and now they support the apartheid state of Israel.

How many people would be prepared to join legal action in the Equality Court against the South African Zionist Federation?

Zackie Achmat

THE AFTER-SHOCKS of the Goldstone Commission into the Gaza conflict continue, this time reaching into the heart of a family simcha. Mr Justice Richard Goldstone is effectively being barred from attending his grandson's barmitzvah, due to be held in Johannesburg early next month.

Following negotiations between the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) and the Beth Hamedrash Hagadol in Sandton, where the event is due to take place, an agreement has been reached with the family. As a result, Justice Goldstone will not be attending the synagogue service.

Some of the role-players were tight-lipped. Avrom Krengel, chairman of the SAZF, said: "We understand there's a barmitzvah boy involved – we're very sensitive to the issues; at this stage there's nothing further to say." While Krengel said the SAZF had "interacted" on the matter with the chief rabbi, the Beth Din and others, his organisation was "coming across most forcefully because we represent Israel".

Rosh Beth Din Rabbi Moshe Kurtstag confirmed that the Beth Din had not been officially involved – though there had been "private talks" – and had not been asked by the synagogue to give a ruling on the matter. "But I know that there was a very strong feeling in the shul, a lot of anger (around the issue of Justice Goldstone attending).

"I heard also that the SAZF wanted to organise a protest outside the shul – (there were) all kinds of plans. But I think reason prevailed."

Signalling his agreement with the turn of events, Rabbi Kurtstag said he believed Justice Goldstone had done "a tremendous disservice not only to Israel but to the Jewish world. His name is used by hostile elements in the world against Israel and this can increase anti-Semitic waves.

"I understand that he is a judge, but he should have had the sense to understand that whatever he said wouldn't be good and he should have just recused himself. People have got feelings about it, they believe he put Israel in danger and they wouldn't like him to be getting honour (in synagogue).

"I think (the agreement) was quite a sensible thing to avert all this unpleasantness."

Reached in Washington where he is currently based, Justice Goldstone was reluctant to comment save to say: "In the interests of my grandson, I've decided not to attend the ceremony at the synagogue."

Mr Justice Dennis Davis said that while he respectedJustice Goldstone's decision, he assumed that pressure had been brought to bear on the family. "If that assumption is correct, then it is outrageous because it seeks to place a ban on somebody participating in his grandson's barmitzvah.

"Have we now got to the point that because we don't like what somebody says or does, we place a ‘cherem' on them? What right do we have to do that? I would like to add that people who are gleeful about it must remember what Pastor Niemoller said: ‘Who will speak up for them when they are finally excommunicated for some misdemeanor?'"

Retired president of the Constitutional Court, Mr Justice Arthur Chaskalson said it was "disgraceful" to put pressure on a grandfather not to attend his grandson's barmitzvah.

"If it is correct that this has the blessing of the leadership of the Jewish community in South Africa, it reflects on them rather than on Justice Goldstone. They should hang their heads in shame."

(2) Israel's hypocritical attack on Richard Goldstone
From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 13.05.2010 06:32 PM

Gold stones, glass houses

Posted By Sasha Polakow-Suransky

Monday, May 10, 2010, Foreign Policy magazine

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/05/10/gold_stones_glass_houses

The Israeli government has it in for Richard Goldstone. Ever since Goldstone, a Jewish South African judge, issued a report in September charging Israel (and Hamas) with war crimes during the January 2009 invasion of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attacked him -- and his report -- as a grave threat to Israel's legitimacy.

On Thursday, leading Israeli government officials escalated their campaign against Goldstone, accusing him of sending 28 black South Africans to their deaths while serving as a judge during the apartheid years.

"The judge who sentenced black people to death … is a man of double standards," Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin proclaimed. "Such a person should not be allowed to lecture a democratic state defending itself against terrorists." Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon insisted, "This so-called respected judge is using this report in order to atone for his sins," likening Goldstone's statement that he was forced to uphold the laws of an unjust regime to "explanations we heard in Nazi Germany after World War II."

And the newspaper Yediot Ahronoth declared breathlessly -- with nods of approval from Jeffrey Goldberg and Jonathan Chait -- that "the man who authored the Goldstone report criticizing the IDF's actions during Operation Cast Lead took an active part in the racist policies of one of the cruelest regimes of the 20th century."

So did Israel's government.

Goldstone's apartheid-era judicial rulings are undoubtedly a blot on his record, but his critics never mention the crucial part he played in shepherding South Africa through its democratic transition and warding off violent threats to a peaceful transfer of power -- a role that led Nelson Mandela to embrace him and appoint him to the country's highest court.

More importantly, Ayalon's and Rivlin's moralism conveniently ignores Israel's history of arming the apartheid regime from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s. By serving as South Africa's primary and most reliable arms supplier during a period of violent internal repression and external aggression, Israel's government did far more to aid the apartheid regime than Goldstone ever did.

The Israel-South Africa alliance began in earnest in April 1975 when then-Defense Minister Shimon Peres signed a secret security pact with his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha. Within months, the two countries were doing a brisk trade, closing arms deals totaling almost $200 million; Peres even offered to sell Pretoria nuclear-capable Jericho missiles. By 1979, South Africa had become the Israeli defense industry's single largest customer, accounting for 35 percent of military exports and dwarfing other clients such as Argentina, Chile, Singapore, and Zaire.

High-level exchanges of military personnel soon followed. South Africans joined the Israeli chief of staff in March 1979 for the top-secret test of a new missile system. During Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli army took South African Defense Force chief Constand Viljoen and his colleagues to the front lines, and Viljoen routinely flew visiting Israeli military advisors and embassy attachés to the battlefield in Angola where his troops were battling Angolan and Cuban forces.

There was nuclear cooperation, too: South Africa provided Israel with yellowcake uranium while dozens of Israelis came to South Africa in 1984 with code names and cover stories to work on Pretoria's nuclear missile program at South Africa's secret Overberg testing range. By this time, South Africa's alternative sources for arms had largely dried up because the United States and European countries had begun abiding by the U.N. arms embargo; Israel unapologetically continued to violate it.

The blatant hypocrisy of the latest attack on Goldstone is nothing new. In November 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel's U.N. ambassador, gave a stirring speech to the General Assembly denouncing apartheid and insisting that "Arab oil producers provide the umbilical cord that nourishes the apartheid regime." (Never mind that Israel remained absent from the 1980 U.N. vote to impose an oil embargo on South Africa in deference to its friends in Pretoria.)

Netanyahu was right that Arab and Iranian oil was flowing through middlemen to the apartheid regime, but he categorically denied Israel's extensive military and trade ties with South Africa, calling charges of lucrative arms sales "flat nonsense" and accusing his critics of trying "to defame Israel."

In fact, Israel was profiting handsomely from selling weapons to Pretoria at the time. Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman estimated that the two countries did $400 mllion to $800 million of business in the arms sector in 1986. According to declassified South African documents, the figure was likely even greater: A single contract for modernization of South African fighter jets in the mid-1980s amounted to "approximately $2 billion," and  arms sales in 1988 -- one year after Israel imposed sanctions against the apartheid regime -- exceeded $1.5 billion. As the former head of the South African Air Force Jan van Loggerenberg told me bluntly: "Israel was probably our only avenue in the 1980s."

Declassified South African arms-procurement figures (which exclude lucrative cooperative ventures and shared financing arrangements) reveal the full extent of Netanyahu's lie. The "independent IMF figures" he cited (which excluded diamonds and arms) suggested trade was a minuscule $100 million annually. It was actually between five to 10 times that amount -- depending on the year -- making the apartheid regime Israel's second- or third-largest trading partner after the United States. Not all of the weapons Israel sold were used in external wars, and there is no denying that Israeli arms helped prolong the rule of an immoral and racist regime.

Before casting stones from their glass house, Ayalon, Rivlin, and Israeli journalists would do well to examine -- and acknowledge -- their government's own shameful history of collaboration with the apartheid regime.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs and author of The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.

(3) The 'Get Goldstone' Campaign  
From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 13.05.2010 06:32 PM

by MJ Rosenberg

Media Matters - May 10, 2010

http://mediamattersaction.org/blog/201005100004       

The Israeli right (and its friends in the US) will never tire of their obsession with Judge Richard Goldstone. Because he had the temerity to write a United Nations report calling Israel's actions in Gaza 'war crimes,' they are utterly unhinged by the man.

Their obsession is personal because they have no way to knock down the facts about the Gaza war (1400 Palestinians killed, including 320 kids, while 13 Israelis were killed, four by friendly fire). Not only that, the Israelis leveled Gaza and have now kept it under blockade since 2007.

In other words, defenders of the Gaza war cannot win any argument about Gaza unless they change the subject.

So they have decided to focus on Judge Goldstone's record as a South African judge during the apartheid regime. Here is the Israeli argument in a nutshell. It is from the Yedioth Achronoth 'expos?' on Goldstone that appeared on Thursday.

A special Yedioth Ahronoth investigation reveals Richard Goldstone's dark side as a judge during the Apartheid era in South Africa. It turns out, the man who authored the Goldstone Report criticizing the IDF's actions during Operation Cast Lead took an active part in the racist policies of one of the cruelest regimes of the 20th century.
Here is the most telling part of the article.

Israeli politicians and the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday welcomed the Yedioth Ahronoth investigation, which revealed Goldstone's dark past as a cruel judge in South Africa under the Apartheid regime.
A Foreign Ministry official referred to the investigation as 'explosive PR material'. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman plans to instruct his office to send the information published in the newspaper to all of Israel's representatives in the world to be used in their PR activities.

That article appeared Thursday and on Friday Jeff Goldberg in the Atlantic, Jonathan Chait in the New Republic and Alan Dershowitz immediately wrote columns bashing the judge in just the terms specified. This is all in the first 24 hours after the the alleged directive to Israeli diplomats was mentioned. On Monday, Jennifer Rubin of Commentary weighed in.

(4) Smearing Richard Goldstone - Stephen M. Walt

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 13.05.2010 06:32 PM

Smearing Richard Goldstone: a counterfactual

Posted By Stephen M. Walt Tuesday, May 11, 2010, Foreign Policy magazine

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/blog/2072

It's been a long time since I've offered a counter-factual for you to ponder, but one popped into my head as I was reading the latest set of all-too-predictable smears being directed at South African Judge Richard Goldstone, who directed the U.N. report documenting Israeli war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the 2008-2009 Gaza offensive.

If you're coming in late, the basic story is that Israeli newspapers and government officials have been spreading the story that Goldstone (who is Jewish) condemned a number of black activists to death when he was a judge in apartheid-era South Africa. Never mind that 1) it was his job as a judge to uphold the (admittedly harsh) laws of his country, 2) he is widely acknowledged as having played a positive role in the transition to majority rule, 3) Israel was one of white South Africa's staunchest allies, which makes these pious denunciations of apartheid absurdly hypocritical, and 4) none of this tells you a darn thing about either the contents or the merits of the report on Gaza that bears his name. For able rebuttals of this smear campaign, see here and here.

So here's my counterfactual. Suppose Goldstone's U.N. report had exonerated Israel's conduct during the Gaza War, and placed most if not all of the blame on Hamas. Suppose further that a prominent Palestinian group had then delved into Goldstone's past and tried to discredit the report by disclosing the same information about him. Do you think Israeli officials and/or media pundits like Jonathan Chait, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Alan Dershowitz would have rushed to pile on Goldstone, as they have leapt to do over the past few days? Isn't it more likely that they would have rallied to his defense, and denounced those unscrupulous Palestinians for trying to confuse the issue? Do these guys really think they are fooling anyone?

(5) A Tale of Two Apartheids      
From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 13.05.2010 06:32 PM

By Mats Svensson
The South African Civil Society Information Service(SACSIS)
May 11, 2010

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/478.1

In May 2009, I was invited to a launch of a report in Ramallah. The report was called Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law, Cape Town, South Africa, May 2009. I felt both happiness and sorrow when first I held the report in my hands. Happiness that somebody dared to begin telling the truth, but also sorrow about my own silence; that I had hidden behind my own cowardice and not been able to see what appeared so clearly for others. The truth, on paper, came from Cape Town.

If you want to understand apartheid and colonialism, take yourself to South Africa. Rent a car and drive out to Mamelodi. Sit in a shebeen or small jazz club, listen to the music and ask questions. If there's anything a South African understands, it's apartheid. As the mother has breast fed her child, the child has simultaneously received apartheid's whole system. As a Swede, I can never understand this. What recently happened in South Africa was disgusting and at the same time too consistent in its science. But, it also implies that researchers in South Africa observe, know and have a strong sensitivity to apartheid's tendencies elsewhere.

During my years in Palestine, I worked for short periods close to persons who were near President Mbeki and the Mandela couple. We worked in the Gaza Strip talking with factions. Often my South African colleagues would cry out that apartheid in South Africa was a picnic compared to the West Bank and Gaza.

After 15 months of research, South Africa's Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) declared that what is happening in Palestine is not only occupation, but also colonialism and apartheid.

There are similarities and differences between the HSRC's report and Tor's books. They are both based on an extensive factual basis, not feelings. At the same time, there is a decisive difference. In the South African report, it is shown that the international community is politically silent and there is little to report on. The authors of the report have chosen to analyze concepts such as colonialism and apartheid and do this in relation to legality. It is research with an address, research that means that we need to take a position, judge, value and as humans, react.

Colonialism and apartheid are expressions that we, as humanity, have decided to fight. They are both crimes against fundamental human rights. Each state has a legal responsibility to the international community not to be an active part of apartheid or colonialism. In accordance with this, each state has a responsibility to cooperate to end all forms of colonialism and apartheid; and not to recognize forms of actions that have their origins in colonialism or apartheid; and not to support countries committing these crimes. Sweden also stands behind this undertaking. It has been manifested under the common notion of international law.

After long periods of colonialism during which different European countries were the oppressors and the poor in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the oppressed, it finally became clear that this must be fought. Each Swede, with principles of law as a guiding star, stood behind this and came to support different liberation struggles around the world. In the same way, a clear understanding of apartheid as part of the utmost evil was formed.

But the HSRC shows that apartheid remains. Professor John Dugard was the United Nations (UN) special rapporteur for Palestine in the UN Human Rights Council for several years. In his final report in January 2007, he posed the following question to the international community: “What are the legal consequences of a regime of prolonged occupation with features of colonialism and apartheid for the occupied people, the occupying power and third states?” The “third state” in this case, includes, but is of course not limited to Sweden.

Dugard's question is the starting point for the HSRC's report about occupation, colonialism and apartheid. And, after 15 months of intense research, The HSRC declared that the similarities between apartheid in South Africa and today's politics in Israel are many. The state of Israel is guilty of colonialism as well as apartheid. Those who have participated in commissioning the report come from different institutes in South Africa, England, Israel and Palestine.

Apartheid in South Africa had three starting points; to divide the population into groups based on race and give the white race preference in terms of rights, services and privileges; to divide the country up into geographically segregated areas, transferring the population into these, based on their race; and to institute a combination of security laws and rules created to oppress and suppress any resistance, which also had the effect of strengthening a system of domination based on race.

The authors of the report consider that the Palestinian people live under a similar system. The three prerequisites are visible in the occupied territories. The system of privilege is extensive and well built, the geographically segregated areas clear and well established and the security laws are one-sided and in place to preclude all forms of resistance.

The South African report has been handed over to and read by every diplomat in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Tel Aviv. At the same time, every self-respecting nation has, long ago, signed onto fighting apartheid in case its ugly face should surface again. And now it surfaces. South African researchers now cast the spotlight not only on Israel, but also on each country within the European Union as well as America and others within the UN family.

Researchers ask us what the third party is going to do. Apartheid is back. Apartheid is near. A short plane ride away and you can again experience what we all thought had been buried forever. We are asked to take a stand, have the courage to walk out on the stage and make our voices heard.

Israel bears the main responsibility for eradicating the crime it has created. This can be done by removing the structures and institutions that have led to apartheid and colonialism. There are also rules that demand compensation from Israel for the damage caused. Israel must also ensure that each individual in Palestine has the right to decide over his or her future, political belonging and economic and social development. For this to become possible, everyone living in Israel or within the occupied territory must be equal before the law.

In this effort to ensure that each Palestinian can live freely, a third party, for example Sweden, has an important voice and an important role. The international community demands, in accordance with international law, that Sweden also lives up to the common undertaking, to fight apartheid and colonialism in all its forms. South Africa has given us a baton and now it is up to us to dare to pick it up, to begin to call a spade a spade.

Mats Svensson, Senior Policy Specialist, Sida, has been living in Jerusalem and working in the Swedish Consulate. For the last year, he has been on leave from the Swedish International Development Agency and walking along the separation wall in the West Bank from south to north, following house demolitions and settlement expansions in Jerusalem, and documenting life under the Israeli occupation.

Israel bans the basics of life

As we get ready to launch our cargo ship and Israel rattles its sabers threatening to violently stop our 8-boat flotilla, the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza cannot be forgotten. It is they who pay the price for the inaction of governments, particularly in the EU and the US.

According to the BCC and Amira Hass in columns last week, Israel allows only 81 items into Gaza for basic and bare necessity life. These items, many of them that have nothing to do with rebuilding a shattered infrastructure after Israel's brutal Operation Cast Lead at the beginning of 2009, are mostly 'added to the list' of imports because of pressure from Israeli merchants who make a great deal of money if their item gets on the approved list.

(6) Israel's 'targeted citizens'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/09/israel-targeted-citizen-arab-discrimination

The plight of Israel's 'targeted citizens'

A new documentary examines the many ways Arabs are discriminated against by the government and Israeli society

Rachel Shabi

guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 April 2010 19.06 BST

Of all the myriad tags used to define Israel's Palestinian population, "targeted citizen" has to be one of the more appropriate. It's the title both of a track by the "Arab-Israeli" rappers, Dam, and a short film in which they and others expose the persistent double-dose of discrimination and suspicion meted out to "Arabs of Israel".

Produced by Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Targeted Citizen spells out the core contradiction that informs such treatment in its opening frames: "As non-Jews living in a self-defined 'Jewish state', discrimination against them is institutionalised and intentional."

The film then runs through some of the more glaring instances of this inequality for Palestinian-Israelis, who comprise 20% of the population: the discriminatory and unequal allocation of state funding and resources, and – as an inevitable consequence – higher unemployment, fewer university degrees and many more people living below the poverty line. Throughout, various Adalah professionals explain how the Israeli state consistently ignores its own equal-opportunities objectives.

Then there's the curtailment of rights routinely dished out to a population that is viewed as a potential fifth column. Israel started its relations with the "Arab minority" population by putting them under direct military rule for around 20 years and, since then, "Arab citizens of Israel" have experienced the hostile glare of state scrutiny, the dull provocation of heavy policing and the grinding routine of mass arrests at demonstrations in Israel (such as during the Gaza assault of December 2008).

And sanctioning all of that is the sort of ambient, casual racism – and the accompanying blindness to it – that runs through contemporary Israeli society and is revealed through some of the street interviews featured within Adalah's film.

Released a few weeks ago to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, this work comes at a time when rights for "the Arab sector" seem at risk of further erosion, to a growing chorus of approval among Israel's Jewish population. Last month, the Nakba bill, which would criminalise commemoration of the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, passed its first Knesset reading. At around the same time, a poll showed that 50% of Jewish-Israeli school kids believe "Arab-Israelis" should not be granted equal rights.

In this context, Adalah's film is an urgent exposure of a problem that's routinely dismissed as fictional, or lost to the louder, deadlier cries of the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is a plea to cut the bogus talk of equality or inclusion and a reminder that it is long past time for Israel to face up to the distinctly non-democratic treatment of its targeted citizens.