Panoramic 3D view of Dimona reactor

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbjgDERSuiI

US judge: Iran must pay Wachsman family

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1237727560719&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Exxon Valdez-- truth and fiction

reprinted post from Greg Palast

STICK YOUR DAMN HAND IN IT
20th Birthday of the Exxon Valdez Lie
by Greg Palast
March 23, 2009
"Gail, Please! Stick your hand in it!"

The petite Eskimo-Chugach woman gave me that you-dumb-ass-white-boy look.

"Gail, Gail. STICK YOUR DAMN HAND IN IT!"

She stuck it in, under the gravel of the beach at Sleepy Bay, her village's fishing ground. Gail's hand came up dripping with black, sickening goo. I could make you vomit. Oil from the Exxon Valdez.

It was already two years after the spill and Exxon had crowed that Mother Nature had happily cleaned up their stinking oil mess for them. It was a lie. But the media wouldn't question the bald-faced bullshit. And who the hell was going to investigate Exxon's claim way out in some godforsaken Native village in the Prince William Sound?

So I convinced the Natives to fly the lazy-ass reporters out to Sleepy Bay on rented float planes to see the oil that Exxon said wasn't there.

The reporters looked, but didn't see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke.

And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces-colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous "bathtub ring" that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level. And it's still there. Less for sure. But twenty years later, IT'S STILL THERE, GODDAMNIT. And I want YOU, dear reader, to stick your hand in it. I want YOU, President Obama, to stick your hand in it before you blithely fulfill your Palin-esque campaign promise for a little more offshore drilling.

***
Tuesday marks the 20th Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez grounding and the smearing of 1,200 miles of Alaska's coastline with its oil.

It also marks the 20th Anniversary of a lie. Lots of lies: catalogued in a four-volume investigation of the disaster; four volumes you'll never see. I wrote that report, with my team of investigators working with the Natives preparing fraud and racketeering charges against Exxon. You'll never see the report because Exxon lawyers threatened the Natives, "Mention the f-word [fraud] and you'll never get a dime" of compensation to clean up the villages. The Natives agreed to drop the fraud charge -- and Exxon stiffed them on the money. You're surprised, right?

***
Doubtless, for the 20th Anniversary of the Great Spill, the media will schlep out that old story that the tanker ran aground because its captain was drunk at the wheel. Bullshit. Yes, the captain was "three sheets to the wind" -- but sleeping it off below-decks. The ship was in the hands of the third mate who was driving blind. That is, the Exxon Valdez' Raycas radar system was turned off; turned off because it was busted and had been busted since its maiden voyage. Exxon didn't want to spend the cash to fix it. So the man at the helm, electronically blindfolded, drove it up onto the reef.

So why the story of the drunken skipper? Because it lets Exxon off the hook: Calling it a case of "drunk driving" turns the disaster into a case of human error, not corporate penny-pinching

Indeed, the "human error" tale was the hook used by the Bush-stacked Supreme Court to slash the punitive damages awarded against Exxon by 90%, from $5 billion, to half a billion for 30,000 Natives and fishermen. Chief Justice John Roberts erased almost all of the payment due with the la-dee-dah comment, "What more can a corporation do?"

Well, here's what they could have done: Besides fix the radar, Exxon could have set out equipment to contain the spill. Containing a spill is actually quite simple. Stick a rubber skirt around the oil slick and suck it back up. The law requires it and Exxon promised it.

So, when the tanker hit, where was the rubber skirt and where was the sucker? Answer: The rubber skirt, called "boom" -- was a fiction. Exxon promised to have it sitting right there near the Native village at Bligh Reef. The oil company fulfilled that promised the cheap way: they lied.

And the lie was engineered at the very top. After the spill, we got our hands on a series of memos describing a secret meeting of chief executives of Exxon and its oil company partners, including ARCO, a unit of British Petroleum. In a meeting of these oil chieftains held in April 1988, ten months before the spill, Exxon rejected a plea from T.L. Polasek, the Vice-President of its Alaska shipping operations, to provide the oil spill containment equipment required by law. Polasek warned the CEOs it was "not possible" to contain a spill in the mid-Sound without the emergency set-up.

Exxon angrily vetoed ARCO's suggestion that the oil companies supply the rubber skirts and other materiel that would have prevented the spill from spreading, virtually eliminating the spill's damage.

Regulations state that no tanker may leave the Alaska port of Valdez without the "sucker" equipment, called a "containment barge," at the ready. Exxon signed off on the barge's readiness. But, that night twenty years ago, the barge was in dry-dock with its pumps locked up under arctic ice. By the time it arrived at the tanker, half a day after the spill, the oil was well along its thousand-mile killing path.

Natives watched as the now-unstoppable oil overwhelmed their islands. Eyak Native elder Henry Makarka saw an otter rip out its own eyes burning from oil residue. Henry, pointing down a waterside dead-zone, told me, in a mix of Alutiiq and English, "If I had a machine gun, I'd shoot every one of those white sons-of-bitches."

***

Exxon promised -- promised -- to pay the Natives and other fisherman for all their losses. The Chief of the Natives at Nanwalek lost his boat to bankruptcy. His village, like other villages, Native and non-Native, decayed into alcoholism. The Mayor of fishing port Cordova killed himself, citing Exxon in his suicide note.

On the island village of Chenega, Gail Evanoff's uncle Paul Kompkoff was hungry. Until the spill, he had lived on seal meat, razor clams and salmon Chenegans would catch, and on deer they hunted. The clams and salmon were declared deadly and the deer, not able to read the government warning signs, ate the poisoned vegetation and died.

The President of Exxon, Lee Raymond, helicoptered into Chenega for a photo op. He promised to compensate the Natives and all fishermen for their losses, and Exxon would thoroughly clean the beaches.

Uncle Paul told the Exxon chief of his hunger. The oil company, sensing PR disaster, shipped in seal meat to the isolated village. The cans were marked, "NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION." Uncle Paul said, "Zoo food."

Paul didn't want a seal in a can. He wanted a boat to go fishing, to bring the village back to life.

Two years after the spill, Otto Harrison, General Manager of Exxon USA, told Evanoff and me to forget about a fishing boat for Uncle Paul. Exxon was immortal and Natives were not. The company would litigate for 20 years.

They did. Only now, two decades on, Exxon has finally begun its payout of the court award -- but only ten cents on the dollar. And Uncle Paul's boat? No matter. Paul's dead. So are a third of the fishermen owed the money.

***
Lee Raymond, President of Exxon at the time of the spill -- and its President when the company made the secret decision to do without oil spill equipment, retired in April 2006. The company awarded him a $400 million retirement bonus, more than double the bonuses received by all AIG executives combined.

***

Gail's oily hand never made it to national television. The networks were distracted with another oil story.

After sailing back to Chenega from Sleepy Bay, I sat with Uncle Paul, watching the smart bombs explode over Baghdad. Gulf War I had begun.

Uncle Paul was silent a long time. The generals on CNN pointed to the burning oil fields near Basra. Paul said, "I guess were all some kind of Native now."
************
Greg Palast investigated fraud and racketeering claims for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. Now a journalist whose work appears on BBC Television Newsnight, Palast is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. Visit GregPalast.com for more.

Check out the YouTube clip of Greg Palast on Air America's 'Ring of Fire' with Mike Papantonio on the Exxon Valdez and on the death of investigative reporting in America. Listen in this weekend on your Air America station.
And get ready: This Friday - the launch of GREG PALAST INVESTIGATES - On the Trail with investigative reporter Palast - with three of his latest ass-kicking BBC Television reports.

Palast is looking for co-producers for the film's DVD release. Support the team behind the work that the Chicago Tribune calls, "Stories so relevant, they threaten to alter history." Pre-order the DVD today.Palast is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting.Alaska photos by James Macalpine for the Palast Investigative Fund, a 501c3 not-for-profit educational foundation.

Barry Rubin on journalism in Israel

BARRY RUBIN: PROPAGANDA, LIES, AND WIRE SERVICE ARTICLES
By • Barry Rubin -->
Published in: Gloria Center - Global Research in International Affairs
June 22, 2008
Today, journalism students, in our course, "Absolutely Introductory Basic Rules of Journalism, we will discuss the absolutely introductory basic rules of journalism.
I don't think I'm an old fogey but in my hazy memories of the good old days I think there was a time when reporters were supposed to represent both sides of the story. I hear some gasps of amazement in the classroom. Yes, it is true. Nowadays we are more enlightened and the process goes something like this:
Decide which side is the good guys. This can be based on your ethnic-communal background (unless you are Jewish since then you must lean over backward to prove yourself fair by supporting the other side), political ideology, or--if all else fails--which ever side is weaker. (The word "underdog" might not be PC any more so I will avoid it.)
Slant your article completely in favor of the "good guys" because they are after all the good guys. Writing an advocacy article for them is thus a good and moral deed. There can be no compromise with evil and since the bad guys lie all the time why even bother to listen to their arguments.
Incidentally, questions of past credibility are irrelevant. If one side can be shown to have lied repeatedly that doesn't count. Pointing this out could get you accused of racism or imperialism, while the "good guys," once so designated, are allowed to lie because they are pursuing a "good cause." Governments are held to lie always, especially if they are democratic ones.
While the above is written to be humorous and is no doubt somewhat exaggerated it does give a pretty good idea about the genesis of all too many newspaper articles nowadays.
Consider, for example, Dalia Nammari, "Israel curbs Palestinian building on disputed land ," AP. The article has 1,107 words long which by contemporary standards is quite long. Number of words used to explain Israel's position: 76. Number of words used to advocate the Palestinian cause? You do the math.
Basically, as so often happens, the reporter serves as the mouthpiece for one side (it always seems to be the same side) in language calculated to tug at the readers' heart-strings. Here's the lead:
"AQABEH, West Bank - The elders of this West Bank village hold their meetings under a carob tree, sitting on boulders arranged in a circle. It looks idyllic, but is born of necessity, the council doesn't have a meeting hall."
"Aqabeh, home to 299 people, has never received Israeli construction permits despite many requests, its mayor says. After losing a battle in Israel's Supreme Court in April, the village now lives with the threat of seeing 37 of its 47 structures demolished, according to a U.N. count. That includes 27 homes, a clinic, a mosque and a kindergarten that was co-financed by a U.S. charity, the Building Alliance. All were built illegally, Israel says."
Let's stop here a moment and rest under the shade of that carob tree. Israel's Supreme Court has often ruled against the Israeli government. For example, in response to Palestinian suits, the route of the security fence has often been altered at great expense to the Israeli taxpayer so as to make the lives of Palestinians easier. (Occupying powers usually don't let people from the side carrying out terrorist attacks against them to sue and win in court. Why, that might even be a good topic for a 1,107 word article some day!)
Why, then, did these villagers lose in court? The reporter might be expected to tell us, but that could ruin this touching story.
The article continues:
"Aqabeh's plight is similar to scores of Palestinian villages in `Area C,' the nearly two-thirds of the West Bank that remained under full Israeli control following a 1990s interim agreement with the Palestinian leadership."
Very cute. But wait a minute. Perhaps the reporter could tell us what percentage of the West Bank villagers live under Israeli rule in Area C. If we are talking about villages (not the town of Hebron) I would suspect the answer would not be much above 1 percent.
But wait, the article continues:
"On that land are Israel's 121 West Bank settlements, as well as military bases. But so are 150 Palestinian villages, home to tens of thousands of people."
So which is it? The answer is that even if villages are located in Area C, local control in most cases belongs to the PA, not Israel.
Note the deliberate dishonesty: yes, lots of land is in Area C but by the Oslo agreement's design Israel has full control over unpopulated land. Virtually all the villages are under Palestinian Authority (PA) rule.
And by the way, what is the housing situation for 99 percent of the West Bank villages? I would bet that they either have to pay off PA officials or just do what they want without regard to regulations.
But in one of the two sentences in which Israeli officials are allowed to speak, we get an interesting hint about that:
"Maj. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said demolition orders are usually issued early in cases of illegal construction, but are often ignored by residents."
So in fact Israel does not try to enforce these orders most of the time.
Why would Israeli authorities try to stop buildings from being constructed? The article tells us it is pure meanness or because it wants to take lands in future. But the overwhelming main reason for such denials is that the buildings would be close to roads or in other strategic locations where they could be used for ambushes. We aren't told this, in fact there is no mention of the fact that the Palestinian side is carrying out a war on Israel involving terrorism, which makes conditions significantly different than in a peaceful environment.
To a large extent, this article is merely an extended version of an interview with the village's mayor who is allowed to say whatever he wants, no matter how fantastic. For example, he says:
"Since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 eight villagers have been killed by stray bullets or by picking up unexploded munitions, and 42 have been wounded. The Israeli military could not confirm those numbers."
Now there are 299 people in the village. We are to believe that 50 of them--which would in practice mean one person in each family--has been killed or wounded by Israeli bullets. Is there any documentation for this? Are there any newspaper clippings, reports to humanitarian organizations, etc? And if so why aren't these cited.
I feel confident in suggesting that the mayor is lying and that the reporter is going along with the lies. As an Arab proverb goes: "How do you know it is a lie? Because it is so big."
Or this one:
"Aqabeh Mayor Sami Sadiq says Israeli officials told residents in 2004 that only buildings in the center, on 3 percent of the village's land area, would be safe from demolition. If all demolitions are carried out, two-thirds of the village's residents would be left homeless, he said."
Well, did they or is this a propaganda fantasy? The important thing to remember here is the test of logic. The village must be many decades, even centuries, old. So does this mean that 97 percent of the village dates from the last few years? It appears to be nonsense.
The article states, "Sadiq has been confined to a wheelchair since being hit by three stray bullets while cultivating his family's land in 1971, he said." Well, it should have been easy for the reporter to check this out since he would have filed compensation claims with the Israeli government. There would be documentation.
Sadiq's credibility doesn't strike me as being too good:
"In the past four decades, some 700 residents have left Aqabeh because of the many troubles, he said, mostly moving to neighboring villages outside of Area C that have approved zoning plans and where it is easier to build."
So there were 1,000 residents and now there are 300 but--let's use our brains, people--if that were true the village wouldn't need to be expanding, would it? Seventy percent of its housing would be empty. It would look like a ghost town. So why didn't the reporter mention this?
Why go on with more examples? This is nonsense on the face of it. In a world where professional standards applied, AP would be humiliated at making mistakes unacceptable in a high school newspaper. The reporter would be immediately fired and a stern memo sent to all staff members on avoiding such stupidities in future.
I must be an old fogey because I keep expecting things like this to happen.
And what really scares me is that I didn't even have to go hunting to find such propaganda masquerading as journalism--it was the first article I read in a 25-page compilation of AP stories.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal . His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism , with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). Prof. Rubin's columns can be read online .Barry Rubin is on the Board of Directors for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

How McCain will win-- disenfranchise Hispanics

May 12, 2008
Voter ID Battle Shifts to Proof of Citizenship
By IAN URBINA
The battle over voting rights will expand this week as lawmakers in Missouri are expected to support a proposed constitutional amendment to enable election officials to require proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote.
The measure would allow far more rigorous demands than the voter ID requirement recently upheld by the Supreme Court, in which voters had to prove their identity with a government-issued card.
Sponsors of the amendment — which requires the approval of voters to go into effect, possibly in an August referendum — say it is part of an effort to prevent illegal immigrants from affecting the political process. Critics say the measure could lead to the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of legal residents who would find it difficult to prove their citizenship.
Voting experts say the Missouri amendment represents the next logical step for those who have supported stronger voter ID requirements and the next battleground in how elections are conducted. Similar measures requiring proof of citizenship are being considered in at least 19 state legislatures. Bills in Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma and South Carolina have strong support. But only in Missouri does the requirement have a chance of taking effect before the presidential election.
In Arizona, the only state that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote, more than 38,000 voter registration applications have been thrown out since the state adopted its measure in 2004. That number was included in election data obtained through a lawsuit filed by voting rights advocates and provided to The New York Times. More than 70 percent of those registrations came from people who stated under oath that they were born in the United States, the data showed.
Already, 25 states, including Missouri, require some form of identification at the polls. Seven of those states require or can request photo ID. More states may soon decide to require photo ID now that the Supreme Court has upheld the practice. Democrats have already criticized these requirements as implicitly intended to keep lower-income voters from the polls, and are likely to fight even more fiercely now that the requirements are expanding to include immigration status.
“Three forces are converging on the issue: security, immigration and election verification,” said Dr. Robert A. Pastor, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University in Washington. This convergence, he said, partly explains why such measures are likely to become more popular and why they will make election administration, which is already a highly partisan issue, even more heated and litigious.
The Missouri secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who opposes the measure, estimated that it could disenfranchise up to 240,000 registered voters who would be unable to prove their citizenship.
In most of the states that require identification, voters can use utility bills, paychecks, driver’s licenses or student or military ID cards to prove their identity. In the Democratic primary election last week in Indiana, several nuns were denied ballots because they lacked the required photo IDs.
Measures requiring proof of citizenship raise the bar higher because they offer fewer options for documentation. In most cases, aspiring voters would have to produce an original birth certificate, naturalization papers or a passport. Many residents of Arizona and Missouri already have citizenship information associated with their driver’s licenses, and within a few years all states will be required by the federal government to restrict licenses to legal residents.
Critics say that when this level of documentation is applied to voting, it becomes more difficult for the poor, disabled, elderly and minorities to participate in the political process.
“Everyone has been focusing on voter ID laws generally, but the most pernicious measures and the ones that really promise to prevent the most eligible voters from voting is what we see in Arizona and now in Missouri,” said Jon Greenbaum, a former voting rights official at the Department of Justice and now the director of the voting rights project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a liberal advocacy group.
Aside from its immediacy, the action by Missouri is important because it has been a crucial swing state in recent presidential elections, with outcomes often decided by a razor-thin margin.
Supporters of the measures cite growing concerns that illegal immigrants will try to vote. They say proof of citizenship measures are an important way to improve the accuracy of registration rolls and the overall voter confidence in the process.
State Representative Stanley Cox, a Republican from Sedalia and the sponsor of the amendment, said that the Missouri Constitution already required voters to be citizens and that his amendment was simply meant to better enforce that requirement.
“The requirements we have right now are totally inadequate,” Mr. Cox said. “You can present a utility bill, and that doesn’t prove anything. I could sit here with my nice photocopier and create a thousand utility bills with different names on them.”
From October 2002 to September 2005, the Justice Department indicted 40 voters for registration fraud or illegal voting, 21 of whom were noncitizens, according to department records.
In 2006, the Missouri legislature passed a photo identification bill that the State Supreme Court later ruled unconstitutional because it placed too much of a burden on voters. It was that ruling that has spurred state lawmakers to try to change the constitution.
The proposed amendment does not require the signature of the governor but would need to be approved by the voters in the state’s August primary in the governor’s race to take effect before the presidential election.
If passed this week, the amendment clears the way for a pending bill that would require some kind of identification in order to prove citizenship and to register to vote. But many questions about the bill — like whether current registered voters will have to obtain a new form of identification — have not been resolved.
Lillie Lewis, a voter who lives in St. Louis and spoke at a news conference last week organized to oppose the amendment, said she already had a difficult time trying to get a photo ID from the state, which asked her for a birth certificate. Ms. Lewis, who was born in Mississippi and said she was 78 years old, said officials of that state sent her a letter stating that they had no record of her birth.
“That’s downright wrong,” Ms. Lewis said. “I have voted in almost all of the presidential races going back I can’t remember how long, but if they tell me I need a passport or birth certificate that’ll be the end of that.”
A 2006 federal rule intended to keep illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid was widely criticized by state officials for shutting out tens of thousands of United States citizens who were unable to find birth certificates or other documents proving their citizenship.
Supporters of citizenship requirements, however, say the threat of voting by illegal immigrants is real. Thor Hearne, a lawyer for the American Center for Voting Rights, a conservative advocacy group, cited a California congressional race in 1996 in which a Republican, Bob Dornan, was narrowly defeated. Mr. Dornan contested the results, claiming that illegal immigrants had voted.
After a 14-month investigation by state, county and federal officials, a panel concluded that up to 624 noncitizens may have registered to vote. The report came to no firm determination of whether any of those people had actually voted.
Mr. Hearne said the requirement would not pose a significant hardship on voters.
“There were a lot of the same alarmist charges regarding Indiana voter ID law and how it would disenfranchise so many people,” Mr. Hearne said, “and those allegations were not accepted by the Supreme Court.” He added that if states actively provided a free form of identification proving citizenship, the number of people who would be disenfranchised would be very low.
“To those who have spent great energy opposing some of the voter registration or voter identification requirements, I would say their energy would be much better spent working toward trying to provide identifications to those who need them or assisting these people with getting registered,” Mr. Hearne said.
But organizations working in Arizona say they are doing just that and running into problems.
“The requirement is having a devastating effect on our voter registration work in Latino communities because so many citizens simply don’t have a passport or original birth certificate,” said Michael Slater, deputy director of Project Vote, a liberal advocacy group that is working with Acorn, a national organizing group, to sign up new voters in Arizona.
But Arizona officials say the measure is broadly popular in the state
“The voters of Arizona feel strongly about proof of citizenship when registering to vote as a basic eligibility requirement,” said the secretary of state, Jan Brewer, a Republican, testifying before Congress in March.

Israeli spy? Or persecution?

What's Really behind the Screaming Headlines about the Arrest of an Octogenarian Spy for Israel? Lenny Ben-DavidFormer diplomat. Washington consultant to foreign embassies. Lobbyist. Writer. Editor.
American engineer Ben-Ami Kadish was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly providing to an Israeli "handler" classified data on nuclear weapons, F-15 fighter jets, and the Patriot missile air defense system.
A few important points of perspective are vital: Kadish is 84 years old. The alleged crime took place some 25-30 years ago (!), between 1979 and 1985. Today Mr. Kadish lives an open, active life in a New Jersey retirement village where, according to a community newspaper, he and his wife open their sukka every year to raise money for local charities and for Magen David Adom.
According to the New Jersey Jewish News, "Ben-Ami grew up in what was then Palestine and fought with the Hagana. He also served in both the British and American military during World War II and is an ex-commander of the Jewish War Veterans Post 609 in Monroe."
News accounts suggest that Kadish's handler was the same man who directed Jonathan Pollard. Probably to avoid any issue of statute-of-limitations, the indictment alleges that this Zayde maintained ties to his handler until last month.
Why now?
Do federal prosecutors really see octogenarian Kadish as a major criminal?
More likely, Kadish is being used by American officials as a means to loosen support for Israel as the two countries enter a tenacious period of negotiations.
This is a pattern of American pressure that repeats itself.
The tactic is geared to embarrass American supporters of Israel, particularly Members of Congress, who oppose weapons sales to Israel's foes, dangerous concessions to the Palestinians, or the abrogation of previous commitments to Israel.
During the last 30 years, particularly, in times of tension, American officials claimed that Israel stole plans for the Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, diverted nuclear material from a U.S. plant in the 1960s, illegally obtained krytron triggers for nuclear weapons, pilfered computer components from Patriot missiles, and used American technology on the Lavie aircraft that was later transferred to China. The 2005 arrest of two AIPAC staffers is more of the same, and they were charged under the creaky 1917 Espionage Act statute older than Kadish. For years, unnamed American spy-hunters have been looking for an accomplice to Jonathan Pollard. Leaks on these stories almost always took place on the eve of some contretemps with the U.S. State Department.
Today's case against 84-year-old Kadish reflects more the impatience of the U.S. Secretary of State with Israel's decision to continue building in Jerusalem and in settlement blocs and to retain security roadblocks. To push ahead in the illusionary Annapolis process at all costs, the State Department must de-emphasize President Bush's letter to Prime Minister Sharon stating that it is "unrealistic" to seek a "full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949." With President George Bush on his way to Israel to celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary, what better way to deflate the goodwill and cut-down the gifts the President is supposedly bringing?
Lastly, in the twilight of George Bush's administration, a presidential pardon for Jonathan Pollard is again being discussed, at least by Jewish and Israeli sources.
Disclosure of another Pollard-like spy would be an effective tool to keep Pollard locked up for good.
Lenny Ben-David

Pappe: Ben Gurion's Plan D for ethnic cleansing reviewed

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
by Ilan Pappé Oneworld Publications, 2006. 256 pp. $27.50Reviewed by Seth J. Frantzman
Middle East QuarterlySpring 2008, pp. 70-75http://www.meforum.org/article/1886
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Flunking History
Among many Israeli academics and Western revisionists, it has become fashionable to examine Israel's war of independence from an Arab perspective in which Jews were the aggressors and Arabs the victims.[1] This trend began in 1989 with works by Ben-Gurion University professor Benny Morris[2] and Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim,[3] and developed further with the writings of the late Hebrew University anthropologist Baruch Kimmerling,[4] Neve Gordon[5] at Ben-Gurion University, and Meron Benvenisti,[6] a political scientist who served as deputy mayor of Jerusalem between 1971 and 1978.
Many of these so-called New Historians and their fellow travelers may have embraced the notion of reverse victimization in order to rationalize the unexpected survival of Israel in the 1948 and 1967 wars. They present every massacre of Jews as an understandable response to a Jewish offense, for example portraying both the April 13, 1948 Mount Scopus convoy massacre and the May 15, 1948 murders of fifty Jews who had surrendered to the Arab Legion at Gush Etzion as an Arab reprisal for the April 9-11, 1948 Irgun attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin.[7]
Pappé's Polemics
Ilan Pappé has now seized on what the New Historians started and brought it to new heights by promoting revisionist arguments that place exclusive blame on early Zionists for victimizing Arabs and destroying opportunities for peace and reconciliation. Indeed, it has become the strategy by which Pappé has salvaged his turbulent career: He left Haifa University in 2007 after the exposure of his research errors undercut his master's thesis and his endorsement of the British boycott of Israeli universities prompted the president of the university to call for his resignation.[8] From his new position at the University of Exeter, he has promoted his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,[9] which argues that even prior to Israel's independence, Zionist officials plotted to expel Arabs from Palestine.
Pappé's thesis is that Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, working with the Zionist leadership in Palestine, made special preparations for ethnic cleansing known as Plan D. This plan envisioned the conquest by the Haganah—the Mandate-era precursor to the Israeli army—of areas occupied by Arabs but allotted by the United Nations to the Jewish state.
Pappé's evidence for a Zionist plan to cleanse Palestine of its Arab population derives from his interpretations of the Haganah archives and the Israel State Archives files. Among the evidence Pappé finds damning are Haganah intelligence surveys of Arab villages, including information on the number of armed men, the mukhtars (village or neighborhood headmen), and any anti-Zionist activities.[10] Pappé uses the presence of such lists to suggest parallels between Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and Palestinian Arab suffering as a result of Israel's creation.[11]
Pappé also argues that Jewish forces, whether Haganah, Irgun, or the Lehi group, which sought to evict the British from Palestine, attacked Arab villages prior to the May 15, 1948 Israeli declaration of independence. He writes:
On a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country … When it was over, more than half of Palestine's native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted.[12]
This passage, characteristic of so much of Pappé's book, is a cynical exercise in manipulating evidence to fit an implausible thesis. Yigal Yadin, the chief of operations of the Haganah, adopted Plan D on March 10, 1948, as part of preparations for the onset of open warfare between Arabs and Jews in Palestine that the Arabs themselves were promising would follow a declaration of statehood. Morris described it as "a blueprint for securing the emergent Jewish state and the blocs of settlements outside the state's territory against the expected [Arab] invasion on or after 15 May,"[13] but recognized that "Plan D was not a political blueprint for the expulsion of Palestine's Arabs."[14]
Pappé does not agree and says that new material from Israeli military archives, a reassessment of older material, and Palestinian oral history suggest that the plan was far more nefarious.[15] But Pappé, in this example as in many others, is blinded by his need to fit events into a preferred narrative, and what little new evidence he includes does not persuade when considered in the context of historical events—a context that Pappé rigorously obscures.
The Importance of Context
Pappé would have his readers believe that in the years before the Israeli declaration of statehood, the Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine were lacking in the hostility to Jews that made Jewish war-planning necessary. To take just one time period, between the U.N. General Assembly vote to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947, and Israeli independence almost six months later, Arab irregulars killed 1,256 Jews in Palestine[16]—almost all of whom were civilians. Pappé might be onto something if Plan D had been drafted in the absence of Arab violence against Jews, or if the Arab states surrounding Palestine were not so serious about answering the declaration of a Jewish state with a war of annihilation. But inconveniently for Pappé, those were the realities of the time—realities that undermine the thesis of his book.
The Palestine Post provides a detailed window into the period. Between 1932 and 1948, the paper, which would later change its name to The Jerusalem Post, was Mandatory Palestine's newspaper of record. An English-language daily, it catered both to Palestine's British administrators and the relatively small number of Jewish residents in Palestine who spoke English. It was not always sympathetic to Zionists, especially not to those who resorted to force of arms, and often sided editorially with the British against the Irgun and Stern Gang. For instance, on February 20, 1948, it headlined a story about an Irgun attack on British servicemen, "Terrorists Murder Soldier in Jerusalem."[17] And rather than ignore the Arab population, The Palestine Post perhaps overemphasized their claims. Analysis of the newspaper's casualty reports shows that between November 1947 and May 1948, it over-reported Arab casualties threefold when its figure of over 3,500 is compared to British Mandatory statistics.[18] The editors of The Palestine Post did not know how history would be written, and there is every reason to believe the reports between November 29, 1947, and May 15, 1948, sought to depict events accurately.
Nor should historians ignore context, as Pappé willfully does. Those who read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine will not learn that in the first week after the passage of the U.N. partition plan, Arabs murdered 62 Jews. In the following month, Arabs killed an additional 200. By March 1, 1948, 546 Jews had been murdered and, by Ben-Gurion's declaration of independence, the total was over 1,000.[19] Arab paramilitaries, militias, and terrorists besieged Jerusalem and cut the Jewish neighborhoods' water supplies and surrounded Jewish villages in the Negev. Arab snipers attacked Jews in Haifa and other mixed villages.[20] A sniper from Beit Dajan shot a 14-year-old girl,[21] and Arab fighters attacked more than a dozen kibbutzim between December 1947 and March 1948.[22] Massacres were common: Arab rioters killed 39 Jews at Haifa's oil refinery on December 30, 1947, and two weeks later Arab irregulars killed 35 Jews trying to reach Gush Etzion. On February 1, 1948, an Arab terrorist blew up The Palestine Post building and, three weeks later, a terrorist's bomb killed 44 Jews on Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda Street. Massacres continued for weeks both inside Palestine and in the neighboring states.[23] On March 21, the bodies of 11 missing Jews were found; three had been burned.[24] Local Arab villagers or Bedouins may have precipitated the autumn 1947 violence,[25] but by spring 1948, Arab volunteers from Iraq and Syria were increasingly participating.[26] On April 11, 1948, for example, Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood attacked Kfar Darom near Gaza City.[27]
In this context—a state of low-level terrorism and violence that Pappé, given the narrative he wishes to promote, is loath to disclose—it is not the least bit curious that Zionist leaders in Palestine were developing plans to defend themselves in the case of the outbreak of full-scale war. It would indeed be strange if Jewish strategists were not doing so.
The Real "Plan D"
While no scholar disputes that Zionist leaders adopted Plan D, Pappé's argument—that Plan D is evidence of a desire to conduct ethnic cleansing and constituted a war crime—is a leap of logic. The reality of that time period is one in which Jewish leaders were faced with problems far more urgent and existential than altering the ethnic makeup of certain territories. On the same day that the Zionist leadership adopted Plan D, British Mandate authorities admitted that Fauzi el-Kaukji, leader of the Arab Liberation Army, was in Palestine operating in Samaria.[28] Snipers attacked Jews in Haifa, and Arabs launched mortar attacks on Tel Aviv. There were reports that British forces were evacuating.[29] The Zionist decision to seize land to deny Arab attackers strategic territorial advantages was inevitable and motivated by legitimate military considerations. Villages such as Ishwa and Jaffa hosted foreign fighters from Iraq, Syria, and even Yugoslavia,[30] and thereby, sacrificed their status as noncombatant areas.
The decision to implement Plan D had little effect on the Arab forces, which continued their assault on all parts of the Jewish yishuv (the pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine).[31] As Arab forces tried to isolate and eradicate pockets of Jews, Jews traveled in convoys that often became the focus of Arab ambushes,[32] some of which involved more than 500 Arabs.[33] Major Plan D operations, such as Operation Nachson to open the road to besieged Jerusalem, began on April 6, just five weeks before Israel's independence.
Nor do the lists that Pappé finds so damning provide conclusive evidence of malfeasance. Cobbled together over the course of the decade before Israel's independence, the Haganah lists were not a blueprint but rather an intelligence assessment. In 1943, the Palmach (the Haganah's regular fighting force) and the Haganah Intelligence Service began to survey villages in order to evaluate their capabilities should hostilities erupt. Jewish pilots also conducted aerial surveys.
These intelligence assessments were so parochial that, today, they could serve as a resource for research into Arab village life of the Mandate period. One representative Haganah intelligence report surveys the hamlet of Beit Umm el-Mais near Jerusalem and reveals that the sons of Hasan al-Jura moved to the ruins of the village around 1905, that the village consisted of one clan, and that its residents were illiterate and had no connections to nearby kibbutzim. The only terror suspect was Ismail Hamdan, who was involved in the 1936-39 Arab revolt. The village possessed 11 modern rifles divided among 25 men.[34] Another Haganah report noted that the nearby village of Beit Thul was 300 years old, possessed 400 sheep, and that Arab nationalists persecuted members of the village during the revolt.[35]
Nor were the Zionists the only ones to make such assessments. The British kept similar intelligence about kibbutzim and Arab villages alike, especially during the Arab Revolt, noting items such as the presence of weaponry and the extent of illegal immigration.[36] Such British lists are evidence of military preparedness and routine intelligence collection, not evidence of plans to ethnically cleanse the Jewish population. Moreover, the Haganah files may have saved Israeli lives by portraying an accurate picture of Arab defenses and probably saved Arab lives by enabling the Israel Defense Forces to avoid collateral damage.
As a work of scholarship, Pappé's book falls short, and it does so in a particularly damning way. He ignores context and draws far broader conclusions than evidence allows by cherry-picking some reports and ignoring other sources entirely. He does not examine Arab intentions in the five months between the U.N. endorsement of Palestinian partition and Israel's independence, nor does he consider the widespread public statements by Arab officials in Palestine and in neighboring states declaring their goal of eradicating the Jewish presence in Palestine.[37] It is obvious why a polemicist such as Pappé would cleanse—so to speak—his narrative of any such references: To avoid doing so would strike at the core of the reality that he wishes to foist upon his readers, one which precisely inverts the historical record and turns a coordinated Arab attempt at ethnically cleansing Palestine of its Jews into a Jewish attempt at ethnically cleansing Arabs.
Pappé's writings may win plaudits among his new British peers, whose disdain for the state of Israel is legendary. But his disregard for the obligations of the historian and his indifference to academic integrity condemn his work to the realm of the polemic, not scholarship.
Seth J. Frantzman is a doctoral candidate in historical geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His blog is available at http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/
[1] For background on the New Historians, see Efraim Karsh, "Rewriting Israel's History," Middle East Quarterly, June 1996, pp. 19-29.[2] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem (London: Cambridge University Press, 1989).[3] Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).[4] Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide (New York: Verso Books, 2006).[5] Neve Gordon, Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics and the Case of Israel (London: Zed Books, 1995).[6] Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).[7] Shlaim, Collusion, p. 164; Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2006), p. 571; Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem (Chelmsford, U.K.: Grafton Books, 1982) p. 266; Hillel Cohen, author interview, Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University, Nov. 13, 2005; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), pp. 209, 214.[8] Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv), Apr. 26, 2005.[9] New York: Oneworld Publications, 2006.[10] Pappé, Ethnic Cleansing, pp. 17-22.[11] Ibid., pp. xiii, xvii, 235.[12] Ibid., pp. xii-xiii.[13] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 163-4.[14] Ibid., p. 164.[15] "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," interview with Ilan Pappé, ZNET, Oct. 3, 2006, accessed Aug 3, 2007.[16] The Palestine Post (Jerusalem), May 6, 1948.[17] The Palestine Post, Feb. 20, 1948.[18] The Palestine Post, May 6, 1948; British mandatory figures published in The Palestine Post, Nov. 29, 1947 to May 1, 1948.[19] The Palestine Post, Jan. 2, 7, 27, Feb. 2, Mar. 2, Apr. 1, May 1, 1948.[20] The Palestine Post, Dec. 9, 11, 1947.[21] The Palestine Post, Mar. 21, 1948.[22] The Palestine Post, Dec. 1947 through Mar. 1948; David Tal, War in Palestine, 1948: Strategy and Diplomacy (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 57-123.[23] See, for example, Marina Benjamin, Last Days in Babylon (New York: Free Press, 2006), pp. 151-2; for Libya, see Joseph B. Schechtman, On Wings of Eagles: The Plight, Exodus, and Homecoming of Oriental Jewry (New York: A.S Barnes and Company, 1961), p. 138; for Egypt, see Michael M. Laskier, The Jews of Egypt, 1920-1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Middle East Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 1993), pp. 126, 187.[24] The Palestine Post, Mar. 21, 1948.[25] The Palestine Post, Dec. 14, 1947.[26] The Palestine Post, Apr. 19, 1948; Tal, War in Palestine, 1948, p. 20.[27] The Palestine Post , Apr. 12, 14, 1948.[28] The Palestine Post, Mar. 11, 1948.[29] The Palestine Post, Mar. 5, 8, 9, 1948.[30] The Palestine Post, Mar. 23, 1948; Emilio Traubner, "Sarajevo to Tel Aviv," The Palestine Post, Dec. 3, 194[31] The Palestine Post, Mar. 19, 1948.[32] The Palestine Post, Mar. 23, 1948.[33] The Palestine Post, Mar. 19, 1948.[34] "Beit Um Al Mies," Village Survey Project of the Shai, Haganah Archives, Tel Aviv, 105/378.[35] "Beit Thul, May 22, 1943, Village Survey," Haganah Archives, 105/95 A 150.[36] "General Sir Al Cunningham to Secretary of State for the Colonies: Weekly Intelligence Appreciation, 13 March 1948," Public Record Office, London, CO 537/3869.[37] Martin Gilbert, The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 37; Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti: Hajj Amin al-Hussaini (Portland: Frank Cass, 1993), pp. 66-9.