Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi has launched an Israeli electric car, and also arranged for four recharging stations. Israel is a perfect place for this experiment, since it is a relatively small and compact country, so the present lack of range of most electric cars (70-150 miles) may not be an issue for a lot of Israelis. The commuters between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, e.g., could use it, especially if it was easy to charge the car while one is at work. If the recharging stations could be solar or receive their power from solar or wind electricity plants, this development could be significant. (Portugal is another good candidate for this sort of arrangement).
Agassi stresses that as long as petroleum reigns, Israel will remain hostage to oil producers hostile to his country. (The natural gas fields in the Mediterranean extend into neighbors’ territory and are more a war waiting to happen than salvation, not to mention that natural gas puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere). Thus, a move to wind and solar would help make Israel energy-independent and make it more secure.
In this light, the Likud government’s hope of getting 10% of its electricity from renewables by 2020 is laughably unambitious. Why isn’t Alon Tal’s Green Party more popular? Why do Israelis put up with an energy policy so beholden to petroleum producers such as Iran and Saudi Arabia?
The China Bank is offering to fund such projects (China is another big solar player, and may be seeking access to Israeli solar technological breakthroughs).
Some of Israel’s Mediterranean coast is sufficiently low-lying, including the city of Tel Aviv, that the rising ocean levels that will be caused by global warming will submerge them over time. In past eras, an increase of 1 degree celsius translated into 10 to 20 meters increase in sea level. Even if we can hold our present increase to 3 degrees celsius through a crash global green energy program, that would be an increase of as much as 60 meters or 180 feet. Tel Aviv will certainly end up under water if humanity goes on spewing carbon dioxide into the air at this rate–not in this century, but over time. A majority of Israeli Jews live in and around Tel Aviv. Climate change is the real existential threat, not bluster from Iran.
The slow civil war in the Palestinian West Bank, occupied illegally by Israel, between the hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters planted there by the Israeli government and the local people who are being displaced, is a daily affair. Armed Israeli squatters encroach on Palestinian water and land daily. In recent days, remarkably, video has begun surfacing of settler shootings of Palestinians, with the complicity of the Israeli army, which typically stands by and watches the slaughter.
Meanwhile, Israel has been repackaging goods produced by the squatters in the Palestinian West Bank as ‘made in Israel.’ South Africa and Denmark have decided to forbid this practice, raising howls of rage in Tel Aviv.
When South Africans accuse you of Apartheid practices, you have to admit they know whereof they speak.
Mofaz has been sharply critical of reported plans by Netanyahu and his defense minister Ehud Barak, to launch a go-it-alone military attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Mofaz is not opposed to military action against Iran in and of itself, but wants it coordinated with the United States. He last week aligned himself with the views of former Israel domestic intelligence head Yuval Diskin, who strongly opposed a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran and who attacked Netanyahu as erratic. Mofaz said, “Let President Obama handle Iran. We can trust him…”
Having Mofaz in the cabinet makes Netanyahu less dependent on extreme hawks, and makes it highly unlikely that Israel will act on its own against Iran. I say this despite some attempts of right wing Israeli and pro-Israeli outfits like the so-called ‘Washington Institute for Near East Policy’ (which should be ‘Tel Aviv Institute for Near East Policy) to spin the news by saying that the new government is not necessarily less hawkish on Iran. Of course it is! Since the saber rattling by Netanyahu was part of a psychological war with Iran, Jewish nationalist hawks can’t afford to have this simple reality stated.
Mofaz’s joining the government comes at a time of changing leadership in Europe. Francois Hollande, the new French president, is less hawkish on Iran than was Nicolas Sarkozy. And, Vladimir Putin is now president of Russia again, and has been far more outspoken in wanting to prevent a Western attack on Iran than was Dmitri Medvedev, who seemed to vacillate with regard to Tehran.
Netanyahu can now remain prime minister until scheduled elections in October of 2013. He had just the day before called for new elections, in part because his Haredim (Jewish fundamentalist) allies would not accept a new bill providing for Haredim to serve in the Israeli military, nor would they accept Netanyahu’s plans to demolish illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank.
Netanyahu therefore likely brought Kadima on board so as to be less beholden to Shas and other parties that strongly back the Haredim. Moreover, the extreme right in Netanyahu’s cabinet had blocked any serious negotiations with the Palestinians, putting Netanyahu in difficulties with the US & Europe, whereas Mofaz has a plan for moving forward on the Palestinian front, which he presented to Netanyahu on joining his government. (It is patronizing and unrealistic, but no one else in the government has even talked about the need to formulate a plan).
The coalition was made possible because Shaul Mofaz, who was born in Iran, had recently replaced Tzipi Livni as head of Kadima. Livni had refused to join a Netanyahu-led government. Mofaz is less rigid on the issue. Likewise Kadima was facing the loss of several seats if elections had been held. They would likely have been picked up by the Labor Party, which could have more than doubled its strength. Labor and the liberal Meretz Party were furious about the back room deal, which deprived them of a chance to grow the number of seats they hold.
GOP Vice-Presidential hopeful Marco Rubio on Wednesday called for unilateral US military action against Syria and Iran and blamed President Barack Obama for declining to send troops to Syria in the absence of a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force. He also said that in addition to sanctioning Iran, “We should also be preparing our allies, and the world, for the reality that unfortunately, if all else fails, preventing a nuclear Iran may, tragically, require a military solution.”
So Rubio is campaigning for the vice president slot in the Republican Party by promising to embroil our country in two major Middle East wars, and moreover to do so without the backing of international law. But this step is precisely the mistake George W. Bush made in Iraq, and it meant that the US was mostly on its own in fighting, dying and paying for that war. Syria is 2/3s the size of Iraq, and Iran is 3 times more populous, so Rubio is committing us not only to bear more thousands of war dead and badly wounded but also to spend trillions in distant Middle Eastern deserts.
The US now has a two-party system in which one party is systematically pledged to make the US an international outlaw, with all the immense costs that entails.
Meanwhile, the chief instigator of war with Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has clearly lost the fight inside the Israeli security establishment and even among his own colleagues.
First, Israeli deputy premier and minister of intelligence and atomic energy Dan Meridor gave an interview with Aljazeera English in which he admitted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the face of the map.’
I made the same point in 2005 and was raked over the coals by the late Christopher Hitchens and his Neoconservative friends, and by Likudniks (Meridor is a member of the Likud Party!). My dispute with Hitchens was instanced as a reason I shouldn’t be allowed to teach in the History Department at Yale University, and Likud apparatchik-posing-as-historian Michael Oren also attacked me at that time (he was a visitor at Yale and is now Israeli ambassador to Washington). Ethan Bronner at the New York Times did a hatchet piece on my stance, concluding with no evidence that Ahmadinejad had said the words, and he even implied that I don’t know the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb in Persian. I have been grossly insulted many times in the press and cyberspace, but I mind that one most of all. And the Likudniks complained that I was on Aljazeera or cited it.
So now the deputy premier of Israel, 7 years later, admits publicly that I was right all along, on Aljazeera.
And, of course, I’ve been saying these things for years and vilified for it, but this is the Israeli Army chief of staff speaking now.
It seems obvious to me that Meridor and Gantz are attempting to box in PM Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, whom the Israeli officers and intelligence chiefs consider insane or at least ‘absolutely stupid’ on the Iran issue. Meridor completely pulled the rug out from under Netanyahu, who has quoted ‘wipe off the face of the map’ till he was blue in the face.
What Gantz said echoes the position of US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and of US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey. Netanyahu leaked vicious attacks on Dempsey, a shameful act for a supposed ally. Gantz inevitably depends heavily on the US Pentagon, and appears to have thrown in with Panetta and Dempsey against Netanyahu, both because the Obama administration wants him to, and because Israeli military and intelligence leaders are aware that a strike on Iran would potentially unleash a maelstrom in the Middle East with which Israel may not be well-equipped to deal in the absence of US backing (and Obama has made it clear there won’t be US backing). In part, Gantz’s statement, which undercut Netanyahu, may have been Dempsey’s revenge.
I should underline that I think Iran is often a bad actor in the Middle East, and agree its nuclear enrichment program should be watched like a hawk. I like Israel and Israelis and think they’d be much better off if they’d give the Palestinians the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and stop rampaging around stealing territory and launching fruitless wars. I don’t mind having been slammed for my stances; at least I won’t go to my grave with no one having noticed I was here. But I do mind that my prediction was correct, that unindicted felon and traitor Richard Bruce Cheney (much more guilty than Bradley Manning) has managed to clone himself in the next generation, and that if the Republicans capture the White House we could be back to unilateral wars in the Middle East. Our country is now stuck in a game of Russian roulette, and people like Rubio are the bullet in the chamber.
Here are the top ten reasons Israel’s Likud Party would have wanted to censor American television news on this occasion (and of course we don’t know all the occasions they have successfully done so):
1. The report told Americans that there are Palestinian Christians. Right wing Israelis have attempted to displace, expropriate and erase the Palestinian nation, and to convince Americans that Palestinians don’t exist or if they do are enemies of the U.S. When the foe of the US was the Soviet Union, they made the Palestinians Communists. When the foe became al-Qaeda, they made the Palestinians violent fundamentalists. But if some percentage of Palestinians is Christians, then that fact disrupts the propaganda. In fact, millions of Palestinians are descended from the 700,000 or so Palestinians ethnically cleansed by the Israelis from what is now Israel in 1948, of whom about 10 percent were Christian.
2. The report mentioned that some Palestinians are Lutherans, Catholics and Episcopalians, establishing a link of commonality between them and Americans. The Israeli Likud Party wants Americans identifying only with Israelis, not with Palestinians.
3. The report told Americans that Israel is occupying and colonizing Palestinian land. Most Americans think it is the other way around because of the success of Likud disinformation.
4. The report let it slip that Palestinians in the West Bank need a permit to travel to Arab East Jerusalem and are subjected within the West Bank to humiliating check points that turn a 7 mile journey into an all-day ordeal. This system sounds an awful lot like the old South African Apartheid.
5. The report allowed Palestinians to speak for themselves and to refute Oren’s anti-Palestinian talking points. It is a key principle of right wing Israeli propaganda that Palestinians should never be allowed to challenge the Israeli narrative on American television.
6. The report allowed a prominent Palestinian businessman and Coca Cola distributor to say that he knew of no Palestinian Christians who were leaving the West Bank and Jerusalem because of Muslims but that rather they were leaving because of Israeli oppression.
7. It allowed the Palestinians to point out that the West Bank now looks like Swiss cheese, with Israeli colonies grabbing the good land and water, and the stateless Palestinians pushed into the holes.
8. The report described the Palestinian Kairos Document, calling for nonviolent, peaceful struggle by Palestinians against Israeli Occupation and land grabs. Likud propaganda insists in racist fashion that all Palestinians are inherently angry and violent and that their protest against being made stateless and homeless by Israel is irrational.
9. The report quotes an Israeli scholar who puts “Political Judaism” on par with “Political Islam.” It is a key principle of Likud propaganda that no movement in Israel may ever be compared to movements in the Muslim world.
10. The report allows Palestinians to point out that the way the Israelis built the Separation Wall isolated Bethlehem, Jesus’s birthplace and a city that still is 18% Christian, had made it “an open-air prison.”
A group of European peace activists bicycling near Jericho in the Palestinian West Bank were stopped by Israeli occupation forces, and Lt Col Shalom Eisner, deputy commander of the Jordan Valley territorial brigade, abruptly slammed his rifle into the face of Danish activist Andreas Ias. A video of the event has emerged which makes it clear that the cyclists were entirely peaceful and that Lt. Col. Eisner’s burst of rage was unprovoked. The Danish ambassador has asked Israeli authorities for an explanation, and President Shimon Peres has expressed dismay at this act, as has PM Binyamin Netanyahu. But Ias, the victim, says he is surprised by the shock the incident produced, since he says he saw Israeli soldiers behaving this way routinely with Palestinians in the area.
Lior Sternfeld writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment
Israel’s center-right Kadima Party has just elected an Iranian-Israeli, Shaul Mofaz, as its leader, in an attempt to position itself to defeat the hard right Likud Party’s Binyamin Netanyahu in the next elections. Mofaz is promising to take up the plight of Israel’s middle class, which is facing high prices and high rents at a time when the super-rich are flourishing. He is a realist on Iran, being an expert on that country’s nuclear program, and agrees more with President Obama’s cautious approach to containing Tehran than with Netanyahu’s conviction that military action should be taken against Iran as soon as possible. Mofaz wants to be prime minister, and he would be a very different kind of leader for Israel than Netanyahu, who is wedded to settlements and war.
Mofaz, a former commando, is hardly a liberal. But his victory inside Kadima does represent a turn toward the center, and it coincided with with some other dramatic, if small and limited developments. An Israeli couple recently launched a massive love-spreading Facebook campaign to defuse tensions between the Israeli and Iranian peoples. The Israeli campaign proclaimed, “we love you- we will never bomb you”, and their Iranian counterparts answered: “we don’t hate you.” It is little enough, but its proponents had a kind of euphoria.
On top of that, two weeks ago couple of thousand protesters gathered in Tel-Aviv to dissent against the hawkish government (namely, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak). Their civic courage echoed around the world. Media outlets worldwide celebrated the fringe phenomenon that revived otherwise dead peaceful hopes.
Last summer, as well, was miraculous in Israeli terms. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets, inspired by the Arab spring. They went to demand social justice and confront the right wing neo-liberal economic policy. It was miraculous because prior to that moment, Israelis seemed to loose their faith in changing their reality and forfeited to cynical politicians before the game has even started. It was miraculous because it provided a glance at the government official priorities, which placed the development of the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories above the development of cities and neglected populations inside Israel. It was miraculous because the public called aloud to prioritize public education, civil rights, social democrat principles, over the militarized discourse. Some even argued that Israel would not be the same any more. What a summer.
These four seemingly unrelated episodes might suggest that the Israeli public has matured. It has grown out of the militarized discourse; it has come to understanding that social justice cannot be achieved while apartheid regime is practiced on behalf of this same public in the Palestinian territories. One could seriously think that the Israeli people will not let their politicians deceive them anymore with false declarations of “security needs” or that “the settlements do not pose an obstacle to peace.”
But no. Regardless of everything that has happened since the summer, Netanyahu and his right wing Likud party still win the opinion polls. The leaders of the protests, the leftists and the doves, were left behind in the morning after. How can one reconcile demands for social justice with voting to a reactionary party? How can one participate in the virtual or actual Iran-Israel love campaign and still support Netanyahu/Barak in approval surveys? Well, the Israeli public can.
After years of manipulation, Israelis have come to believe that these objectives can be separated, and can be isolated to single issue each. They came to believe that social justice, civil rights, and security can be granted to the Jewish citizens of Israel, without including the Palestinians (whether they possessed Israeli citizenship or not). They came to believe that the entire Middle East genuinely wants to eradicate Israel and the Jews and therefore only a strong stance will ensure their existence.
The Israeli public finds it easier to believe to the darkest prophesies on either side. Maybe it is part of the contemporary Jewish condition: they do not believe the Arab leaders when they talk about peace (be it the Arab League peace initiative, or the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders who repeatedly say they will respect the peace accord with Israel). But they take every esoteric threat dead seriously. They do not trust Israeli politicians who promise to strive for peace, but they will vote once and again to politicians they neither like nor trust, who promote fear and warn of regional threats (and exalt some kind of primitive national pride), just because they sound more as though they have their feet on the ground.
These conflicting trends within the Israeli public raise questions about the national mindset. Attempts like the demonstrations that took place in Tel Aviv last summer and last month should not be taken lightly, but neither should one see them as a sign that the mercurial Israeli public has had a lasting change of heart. The jury is out on whether Israeli optimism and dedication to social justice can finally win out over the pessimists and the hawks.
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Lior Sternfeld is pursuing a Ph.D. in History at the University of Texas, Austin.
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