Israel’s ‘new, violent Zionism’ as a harbinger of Imperial geo-politics of submission and obedience

Strategic Culture Foundation | Alistair Crooke

For a Leviathan to function, it must remain rational and powerful, Alastair Crooke writes. 

Israel’s strategy from past decades continues to rest on the hope of achieving some literal Chimeric transformative ‘de-radicalisation’ of both Palestinians and of the Region, writ large – a de-radicalisation that will make ‘Israel safe’. This has been the ‘holy grail’ objective for Zionists since Israel was first founded. The code word for this chimaera today is the ‘Abraham Accords’.

Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s Strategic Affairs Minister, former Israeli Ambassador to Washington and key Trump ‘whisperer’ – writes Anna Barsky in Ma’ariv (Hebrew) on 24 August – “sees reality with cold political eyes. He is convinced that a real agreement [on Gaza] will never be concluded with Hamas, but [only] with the United States. What is needed, Dermer says, is the Americans’ adoption of Israel’s principles: the same five points that the Cabinet approved: disarmament of Hamas, return of all hostages, complete demilitarization of Gaza, Israeli security control in the Strip – and an alternative civilian government that is not Hamas and not the Palestinian Authority”.

From the perspective of Dermer, a partial hostage release deal – which Hamas has accepted – would be a political disaster. By contrast, were Washington to endorse the Dermer outcome – as an ‘American plan’ – Barsky infers Dermer suggesting: “we would have a situation in which everyone benefits”. Moreover, in Dermer’s logic, “the mere opening of a partial deal gives Hamas a window of two to three months, during which it can strengthen itself and even try to obtain a different ‘final scenario’ from that of the Americans – one that suits [Hamas] better”. “This, according to Dermer, is the truly dangerous scenario”, writes Barsky.

Dermer has for years insisted that Israel can have no peace without the prior ‘transformative de-radicalisation’ of all Palestinians. “If we do it right”, Ron Dermer says, “it will make Israel stronger – and the U.S. too!”

Some years earlier, when Dermer was asked what he saw to be the solution to the Palestinian conflict. He replied that both the West Bank and Gaza must be totally dis-armed. Yet, more important than disarmament however, was the absolute necessity that all Palestinians must be mutationally “de-radicalised”.

When asked to expand, Dermer pointed approvingly to the outcome of WW2: The Germans were defeated, but more significantly, the Japanese had been fully ‘de-radicalised’ and rendered docile by the war’s end:

“Japan had U.S. forces for 75 years. Germany — U.S. forces for 75 years. And if anyone thinks that was by agreement at the beginning they’re kidding themselves. It was imposed, then they understood it was good for them. And over time there was a mutual interest in keeping it”.

Trump is aware of Dermer’s thesis, but seemingly it is Netanyahu who instinctively dithers, so Barsky writes:

“A partial deal [with Hamas] will almost certainly lead to the resignation of Smotrich and Ben Gvir [from the government]… The government will fall apart … A partial deal means the end of the right-right government … Netanyahu knows this well, which is why his hesitation is so difficult. And yet, there is a limit to how long one can hold the rope at both ends”.

Trump seemingly accepts the ‘Dermer Thesis’: “I think they want to die, and it’s very, very bad”, Trump said of Hamas before leaving for his recent weekend trip to Scotland. “It got to a point where you’re [i.e. Israel] gonna have to finish the job”.

But Dermer’s notion about having the consciousness of adversaries seared by defeat was never just about Hamas alone. It extended to all Palestinians and the region as a whole – and, of course to Iran in particular.

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Newly Released FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks

Whitney Webb
Mint Press News 

New information released by the FBI has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. 

NEW YORK — For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Shortly after 8:46 a.m. on the day of the attacks, just minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, five men — later revealed to be Israeli nationals — had positioned themselves in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers and “high fiving” each other. At least one eyewitness interviewed by the FBI had seen the Israelis’ van in the parking lot as early as 8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the attack.

The story received coverage in U.S. mainstream media at the time but has since been largely forgotten. The men — Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari — were subsequently apprehended by law enforcement and claimed to be Israeli tourists on a “working holiday” in the United States where they were employed by a moving company, Urban Moving Systems. Upon his arrest, Sivan Kurzberg told the arresting officer, “We are Israeli; we are not your problem. Your problems are our problems, The Palestinians are the problem.”

For years, the official story has been that these individuals, while they had engaged in “immature” behavior by celebrating and being “visibly happy” in their documenting of the attacks, had no prior knowledge of the attack. However, newly released FBI copies of the photos taken by the five Israelis strongly suggest that these individuals had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The copies of the photos were obtained via a FOIA request made by a private citizen.

According to a former high-ranking American intelligence official who spoke to the Jewish Daily Forward in 2002, the FBI concluded in its investigation that the five Israelis arrested “were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, NJ, served as a front.” At least two of the men arrested were determined to have direct links to the Mossad after their names appeared in a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives. According to one of their lawyers, one of the men, Paul Kurzberg, had previously worked for the Mossad in another country prior to arriving in the United States. Another of those arrested, Oded Ellner, subsequently stated on Israeli TV that the five Israelis had been in New York at the time “to document the event,” meaning the attack on the World Trade Center. 

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See also: Hello Israel I: Dancing Israelis and Artistic Pursuits

 Chabadniks, Zionists & 9/11 Insiders (1)

Palestinians regularly arrested for Facebook 'incitement' - but Israelis get away with it

Danielle Alma Ravitzki
Mondoweiss

When I first heard of Dareen Tatour's story, I had this terrible feeling deep inside. I am a musician myself, I know what it is like to express oneself through art. I imagined myself in her place, being arrested and persecuted for my art. Dareen is a Palestinian poet placed under house arrest since 2015, indicted for incitement to violence against the Israeli regime through a poem she posted on Facebook. Then it dawned on me that this could not actually happen to me, since I am a Jewish citizen of Israel, not a Palestinian. Israel has this tendency to oppress minority groups, and non-Jews specifically, through its homicidal apartheid regime. I reached out to Dareen, and we immediately connected. I met a beautiful young woman, so intelligent, so loving. We became friends immediately.

This April, after an extended legal saga of over two-and-a-half years, I joined Dareen at her final court hearing in Nazareth. Driving for hours on my way there, I had an ominous premonition. Her story is nothing but Kafkaesque, and her condemnation will most probably give rise to a wave of schadenfreude on the part of Israelis, quick to rejoice at the misfortune (and injustice) of weaker populations. When I walked into the courtroom, the judge was whispering and reciting her verdict very fast: "Dareen is convicted of incitement and support of terrorism." She said it in such a low voice, she was asked to repeat her words louder a couple of times. Her stance was that after Dareen published her poem, there were many terrorist attacks against Israeli Jews. Yet, was the judge not deliberately ignoring the numerous attacks made towards Palestinians at that same time exactly? The verdict had a strong air of discrimination, it is unjust, and it is down-right detrimental to the freedom of speech and expression. This verdict not only silences art, it criminalizes it.

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Mastermind of Odessa Massacre Embarrasses Ukraine’s Jews

Washington's Blog

Tapped phone conversation: “Bennie [his nickname]‘s affairs are Bennie’s affairs. He can do whatever he wants to do, even if he believes himself to be the Second Coming of Hitler … [but] we need to distance ourselves from that, immediately and publicly.”

A tapped phone conversation between two Jews in Ukraine deals with a third Jew’s having masterminded the massacre of anti-Kiev demonstrators via incineration inside the Odessa Trade Unions Building on May 2nd in Odessa. [Note by Washington's Blog:  Mr. Zuesse has written an entire book on the Holocaust, and is obviously not anti-Semitic.  In addition, his account is largely confirmed by this piece in Forbes (scroll down to point number 5).]

One official in this conversation, “Noginsky,” is a lobbyist for Ukrainian exports to Russia; the other, “Epshtein,” is Ian Epstein, the Israeli Consul in that region of Ukraine. The Jew who had masterminded the massacre is “Bennie,” the nickname for Ihor Kolomoiskyi, a Ukrainian gas-magnate, who was chosen by the Ukrainian Presidential contender and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (another gas-magnate) to be the regional governor in the Odessa area. (Tymoshenko’s ally, the far-right economist Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whom the Obama Administration had selected to run the interim Ukrainian government while Tymoshenko campaigns for the Presidency, did the actual appointing of Kolomoiskyi, on Tymoshenko’s behalf.) Ihor “Benny” Kolomoiskyi also had offered a bounty of $5,000 for each corpse produced from the Trade Unions Building. He was very active behind the scenes in that massacre.

Here is the key excerpt from an English-language transcript of this tapped phone conversation (which also transcribes yet another, in which Kolomoiskyi warned an enemy, “Tsarov,” that a million-dollar bounty had been placed on his head):

Noginsky: [Boris] Filatov [a deputy of Kolomoiskyi] was also going on [complaining] about [Kolomoiskyi’s] paying a bounty for [corpses of] Moskali [pro-Moscow Ukrainians]. I just think that … Jan Borisovich [the first two names of Epstein], the fact is that Bennie’s affairs are Bennie’s affairs. He can do whatever he wants to do, even if he believes himself to be the Second Coming of Hitler. Well. And we’re going to end up with, I guess, a second Nazi Germany on the territory of a small chunk of Ukraine. Bennie is a multi-millionaire, and is the master of that domain. And whatever happens to other Jews around the world … I just think that somehow or another we need to distance ourselves from that, immediately and publicly.

Epshtein: Distance ourselves from what?

Noginsky: From Kolomoisky. From Bennie.

Epshtein: And how are we gonna do that?

 They come to no conclusion.

Here is yet a different translation of that phone-conversation.

Kolomoiskyi is a huge donor to far-right Israeli causes, and a supporter of Netanyahu. Consequently, Epstein would not reasonably be expected to support what Noginsky was urging.

Kolomoiskyi recently hired Joe Biden’s youngest son.

I wrote the 2000 book, WHY the Holocaust Happened: Its Religious Cause & Scholarly Cover-Up, which is the only book that scoured through Hitler’s own writings and private notes and statements to his friends about when he first came up with the idea for the Holocaust and why he did it, and there is no reason a Jew cannot be genocidal or hate-filled like he was, and I think that “Benny” Ihor Kolomoiski is such a Jewish type of the Christian Hitler. I agree with the statement that this report presents from Noginsky, “He can do whatever he wants to do, even if he believes himself to be the Second Coming of Hitler. Well. And we’re going to end up with, I guess, a second Nazi Germany on the territory of a small chunk of Ukraine.” And Yulia Tymoshenko, who really made Kolomoyskyi the governor, said (see 1:23 of this recorded conversation) of Russians, “I will use all of my connections and the whole world will rise against Russia and bomb them into oblivion.” She then is asked (1:48) “What are we going to do with 8 million of Russians left in Ukraine, they are outcasts?” and she answers simply (1:57), “Kill them with a nuclear weapon.” There is no hint of humor in her voice. She sounds grim. These people are like Nazis; they are fascists.

———-

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

An Israeli and Palestinian, Brought Together by Breast Cancer

 

 Ruth Ebenstein and Ibtisam Erekat (Yitz Woolf)

The Atlantic

With a tinge of anxiety, I maneuvered my six-seater Fiat through a neighborhood in East Jerusalem that I did not know—and that most Jewish Israelis don’t frequent. Aboard were my mom, my kids, and my friends Ibtisam and Ahmed Erekat. After our family get-together, I was giving the Erekats a ride to the stores on Salah al-Din street, where they would shop and then head home to al-Eizariya, their village under joint Israeli-Palestinian control on the southeastern slope of the Mount of Olives.

I asked Ahmed the name of the neighborhood. “A-Tur,” he replied. ‘Wasn’t that the home turf of someone who had tried to blow himself up on a public bus some 10 years earlier?’ I thought to myself, before pushing that thought to the back of my mind.

Though cancer catalyzed the connection, human chemistry gelled it.

 

My mom was sandwiched cozily in the front seat in between Ibtisam and me, and my sons, Yuval, 7, and Eitan, 5, were playing a game with Ahmed, Ibtisam’s husband, in the back seat. Every time I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw my two giggling boys, I couldn’t help but smile. There was something so normal and mundane about giving the Erekats a lift. As if, for just a moment, our friendship could exist absent the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The view from my car window could have been a Monet: Purple bougainvillea jutted out of sparkling Jerusalem limestone, forming a makeshift arch against a cloudless blue sky. The autumn sun warmed my forearm. The road stretched before us, empty and quiet.

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Rigging the Game Against the Palestinians

Paul R. Pillar  RINF Alternative News

Now that Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempt to breathe life into the diplomacy known as the Middle East peace process has been widely pronounced – even by those who appropriately salute his efforts – to be a failure, different quarters are chiming in with recommendations for what to do next about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some suggestions are helpful; others would only help to perpetuate the Israeli occupation and lack of an agreement, and may be tacitly intended to do just that.

The New York Times editorial board proposes that the United States, as a last act before ending this phase of its active diplomacy on the problem, post on the international bulletin board its own sense of what the principles of a final settlement ought to look like. This is probably worth doing, and it has the merit of reflecting the fact that the basic lines of a feasible two-state solution have been apparent for some time.

Perhaps this would help to clarify who is resisting such a settlement and who is not. This has been tried before, however, most notably with the Clinton parameters, and it was insufficient to push the process over a finish line.

A couple of other limitations and uncertainties, revealed in the most recent diplomacy, would have to be overcome for such a U.S. declaration of principles to help. One concerns whether the Obama administration would be able and willing to backtrack on how, in its recent efforts to get some kind of preliminary agreement, it moved away from the consensus feasible settlement and adopted certain Israeli positions, such as regarding a continued troop presence in the Jordan River valley, that were bound to be unacceptable to any Palestinian leader.

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