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This is a guest post by AKUS
Some people just cannot get a break.
Consider, for example, the Guardian’s one time golden boy, Seth Freedman.
For a couple or three years he reliably churned out one anti-Israeli article after another. There wasn’t a taxi-driver, pizza vendor or orthodox Jew, real or imaginary, he couldn’t or wouldn’t cite as examples of Israeli intransigence. Not a celebration could be held in Israel without him pointing out that the glass, apparently half-full to the Jewish Israelis, was really three quarters empty when viewed from the Guardian’s website. Not a charitable effort could be carried out (except by a Freedman-approved NGO) without demonstrating that this was, in fact, yet another example of Israel’s futile attempt to cover up its transgressions against its Arab minority or Arab neighbors.
For example, when Israel sent the best field hospital to Haiti, we got a charming piece from Freedman headlined Israel’s double standards over Haiti . The subeditors reliably added the necessary extra drop of poison: “The Israeli relief effort in Haiti is laudable, but it underlines the state’s indifference to those suffering on its own doorstep”.
In one paragraph in the article Freedman ignores almost 100 years of attacks by Arabs against their Jewish neighbors and the Jewish State including, recently, 8,000 rockets from Gaza, to make sure we understand that this and other humanitarian efforts do not let Israel off the hook:
However, for all that Israel’s sterling work overseas deserves to be praised, it highlights the lack of compassion shown by the country’s leaders to those suffering on its own doorstep. Israel’s insistence on doing next to nothing to alleviate the suffering in Gaza while rushing to Haiti’s aid exposes just how far they are prepared to stray from the religious teachings to which they claim to adhere. Likewise, when Zionist movements such as Bnei Akiva trumpet the achievements of Israel’s relief teams as representative of the entire Jewish people, they inadvertently tar all Jews with the same brush when Israel’s frequent violations of international law are brought to light.
This is the sort of red meat the Guardian is looking for, and why those supporting Israel find the Guardian (and Freedman) so biased and basically disgusting. This is the contract that Freedman is supposed to deliver against.
But sometimes something funny happens – Freedman seems to let slip that he actually sees a glimmer of goodness in the evil country he has, for reasons I cannot comprehend, decided to call his own. You have to also understand that although Freedman has, apparently, no background in economics, his “training” as a stockbroker in London in the Internet bubble has in his own mind qualified him to comment on economic matters. So, on April 12, 2010, we got: Israel’s peace dividend.
This is a guest post by AKUS
The Guardian seems to have developed a strange interest in sartorial affairs in Israel and Gaza.
First, we had a rather unusual article by a vegetarian contributor, Seth Freedman, who has decided to make a stand against a community with which we would normally expect him to align himself with – the ultra-orthodox.
The sin the (male) members of this community are committing, despite the points Freedman might normally give them for their opposition to the Jewish state in which they (and he) live, is to continue to purchase and wear shtreimals – traditional hats lined with fur. The British are well known as a nation with an almost fanatical love of animals (and increasingly, a strong dislike of Israel and Jews exhibited by readers of the Guardian) so this topic is well within the mainstream, some editor at the Guardian apparently thought, of matters that might enthuse their reading public.
Well, the first comments were somewhat disappointing, revealing an unusually accommodating view of another of Israel’s apparent transgressions – for example, from an old “friend” of ours:
It only went downhill (sorry … J) from there with a well-deserved crack at the author that somehow escaped moderation:
Roughly half the comments on this thread were deleted, so it’s really hard to know what got the readers worked up. It must have been a bit disappointing to have the usual efforts at bashing Israel brushed aside by a largely incredulous readership on this occasion.
But clearly, clothing seems to matter. So … What could be better than to pay a visit to the Guardian’s pet territory – Gaza? It was time for a hard-hitting article from there about … clothes. Rory McCarthy, who we all thought had typed his last for the Guardian, remains on the beat and provided a suitable article which appeared on April 6th about the clothing trade in Gaza.
The article, which did not permit comments, starts surprisingly optimistically with its first sentence:
“Israeli authorities have allowed shoes and clothes into the Gaza Strip for the first time in three years of the tight economic blockade of the Palestinian territory”.
The second sentence, however, reveals the real point of the article:
“But Gazan businessmen say much of the shipment is ruined and their spiralling costs will never be recovered”.
McCarthy reports that “goods have sat in storage for three years, costing their owners thousands of pounds in fees and in some cases arriving so riddled with damp that the items are unsellable.”
The reason is that according to McCarthy, Israel, incredibly, regards Gaza as a “hostile entity since the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas seized control in June 2007”. Somehow, McCarthy manages to avoid the entire issue of rocket fire that occurred daily into Israel during the first two of the last three years, stopped only and nearly completely by Operation Cast Lead. Clearly, he thinks that Israel should have catered to the sartorial requirements of the Gazans even as they terrorized Israelis living next door to them by firing rockets randomly into Israeli communities, including, not unimportantly, firing rockets at the very crossing points those goods would have had to use in order to reach their destination in Gaza.
But wait – that’s not all, as they like to say on late night TV, while trying to sell a variety of dubious goods to insomniacs. Two days later, on April 8th, McCarthy discovers that Hamas is – incredibly – taxing the residents of Gaza.
“Hamas”, McCarthy has discovered, “has begun to raise new taxes in Gaza in an apparent effort to shore up their coffers – as the economy of the small, overcrowded strip of land descends into a vast and often unfathomable parallel market”.
I have news for McCarthy – where I live in the US, local government has begun to raise taxes in an apparent effort to shore up its coffers as well. The point is, it appears, that it’s getting tough to maintain Hamas’ ability to fund its bureaucracy which no doubt includes thousands of “civilians” parading around with AK-47s:
“Taxes [are] even levied on smuggle [sic] goods as Gaza’s rulers unable to cover pay for 30,000 staff three years into Israeli blockade”.
Mind you, it looks like there’s a lot to tax:
Hamas is much more creative than we might think: “Hamas [has started imposing] a tax on smuggled goods, then charging administrative fees on tunnel operators and now importing goods itself to trade in the market in Gaza. But in recent months it began reviving old, long-forgotten tax codes. A 25% tax has been imposed on the cheap petrol smuggled in from Egypt.” A bit like the only recently rescinded 108 year-old 3% excise tax on telephone communications imposed in the USA in 1898 to help pay for the Spanish-American war.
This litany of attempts to paint life in Gaza as so bleak and heavily taxed despite rings a little hollow when a moment’s reflection would show most of us that we are faced with the same issues in our own communities. Moreover, the articles appeared about a week after an article in the Economist that opened by pointing out that some in Gaza are even prospering – a theme we see repeatedly in the media outside the pages of the Guardian and the screens of Press TV and the BBC. In fact, in a sort of back-handed swipe at Israel and the PA, the Economist even points out some benefits of living in Gaza:
“Israel’s siege still causes misery. Yet some economists say the strip is growing faster than the West Bank run by Hamas’s rival Palestinian Authority (PA), albeit from a far lower base. The petrol pumped into Gaza by underground pipes and hoses from Egypt costs a third of what it does in Ramallah, the Palestinians’ West Bank capital, where Israel supplies it. Free health care is more widely available in Gaza. Imports travel faster through the tunnels than via Israel’s thickets of bureaucracy. The web of Israeli checkpoints that still impedes Palestinian movements and commerce on the West Bank is absent in Gaza.”
Those tunnels seem to be able to allow cars to pass through, and those taxes used to pay Hamas’ bureaucrats seem to have a positive effect as well:
“As well as lower prices, Gazans benefit from civil-service payrolls. Several outfits pump cash into the strip’s economy: the local Hamas government; the UN, which employs 10,000 Gazans; and Salam Fayyad’s West Bank government, which is the largest employer of all. Payments to Hamas and its connected tunnel-operators boost the economy too. A car-dealer bringing in a new Hyundai saloon through the tunnels stands to make a profit of $13,000”.
So here are two views of the same situation – one, deploring the destruction of tee-shirts and imposition of taxes in Gaza, the other pointing out what seems like a situation reminiscent of any third-world country – or Greece. What both seem to miss, however, is how easily the whole situation could be normalized – all Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza have to do is renounce terror, end rocket fire into Israel, release Gilad Shalit, and demonstrate a willingness to live peacefully next to Israel . Then, if they are coping quite well now, they could be doing a great deal better in the future.
Perhaps it’s time for the Guardian, the Quartet, the “activists” of all stripes, the meddlers, the eitzes-gibbers, the Jimmy Carters, the Banki Moons, etc. etc. to pass that message to Hamas and the people in Gaza who just want a normal life. It’s really not that difficult to get it if they really want it. And then they can have all the tee-shirts and Hyundai saloons they want.
I was just over at TheBrothersofJudea website which tracks antisemitism in the Huffington Post and caught this:
Now I haven’t actually ever seen a reader link to Stormfront on “Comment is Free” (though I have seen links to a variety of far-right websites) and it got me thinking about whether Stormfront types are attracted to “Comment is Free”, a blog that is supposed to be the ideological opposite of the far-right.
It seems though that “Comment is Free” has developed somewhat of a following among the far-right.
Jonathan Hoffman has already ably discussed on these pages Seth Freedman’s March 9th article from the point of view of its economic inaccuracies. But of course Freedman wasn’t in the least bit interested in the economic reasoning behind his story; he was merely using it as a tool to push his political agenda. No sooner had he planted the idea that the EU and the OECD should be using membership of that latter organization for ‘carrot and stick’ actions against Israel, then the below the liners took up the theme big time. And given that Freedman himself brought up the subject of boycotts against Israel, it was hardly surprising that this was one of the dominant themes in the comments too. Check out this first moniker.
9 Mar 2010, 1:45PM
Seth
I support a 100% boycott of all Israeli economic and cultural activity. Do you ?
9 Mar 2010, 2:04PM
Sod the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, sod the EU, the US, and the UK — the time for a full-bodied boycott of Israeli goods and services is way, way past ‘last resort’.
And I would like to remind viewers that we are currently in the middle of The Sixth Annual Israeli Apartheid Week 2010.
9 Mar 2010, 2:23PM
In the meantime, it is incumbent on organisations such as the OECD and EU to flex their muscles in a fashion that is measured yet firm. That seems to be the approach that the EU is taking of late, but the OECD seems to be falling short of its own responsibilities. If, as expected, Israel’s membership is ratified in May, it can only be hoped that the OECD’s opposition to Israel’s misdeeds comes late rather than never.
One can understand Seth Freedman’s hesitancy and opposition to the Global BDS Movement, but “opposition to Israel’s misdeeds” just ain’t gonna come from any of the above any time soon. Israel’s impunity is one of the most sickening spectacles in the world today — and in the absence of credible censuring from governments / economic organisations, it is time that the concerned citizens of this world took whatever steps are open to them. I recommend Seth watch these two highly informative videos on the subject.
Video 1
Video 2
In spite of the rubbish peddled recently on CiF as evidence of the folie-a-deux between Georgina Henry and Matt Seaton about the community policy it seems that our old mucker, Seth Freedman is still afforded special status there. Status, that is, to make as much of a fool of himself as he always has.
Regular readers of CiF and CiFWatch scarcely need to be reminded that Freedman is a very confused person. He vacillates between his own form of sympathy for his adopted country and misguided condemnation of it. In his recent offering, for example, having rooted for the Bil’in and Nil’in protesters in the past, stones and all so to speak, we now see him supporting the non-violent action of Sheikh Jarrah protesters:
The path of violent protest in Bil’in and Nil’in has proved to be a cul-de-sac, with ever-harsher measures taken by the army response and ever-increasing scepticism from those on the Israeli street. In the hiatus resulting from the army’s announced closures in the villages, protest organisers would do well to consider how they proceed when the restrictions are lifted – and taking a leaf out of the Sheikh Jarrah protesters’ book is no bad place to start…..
Now this shows some insight on Freedman’s part, but I am not going to hold my breath that it will last. Non-violent protest is to be preferred to the sort of violence which usually obtains on the West Bank, stoked by the ISM and its hangers on. However, not surprisingly, Freedman’s detractors below the line, whose sympathies lie with more with the bare-knuckle approach of the ISM, are not at all impressed by this new, peaceable (for the moment anyway) Freedman. One of these, boblondon, got into a protracted exchange with Freedman, (both Freedman’s and his posts were subsequently deleted, but not before we got hold of it). Unfortunately we couldn’t get one of the comments but the following should give readers a flavour. My comments are in the text:
Read the rest of this entry »
This is a guest post by Jonathan Hoffman
Seth Freedman’s article on Israel’s imminent accession to the OECD is a mixture of ignorance and prejudice – perfect for a “Comment Is Free” article on that country, in other words. For a former investment banker, his ignorance of economics, statistics and the workings of the OECD is shameful. For a Jew who took advantage of the Law of Return and still lives in Israel even though he makes a living from badmouthing it in the Guardian, his prejudice is despicable.
He reveals his ignorance for all to see by assuming that the OECD is a political organisation, like the European Union, and that therefore there is some kind of political ‘test’ which aspiring members need to pass (as for example Turkey does in relation to EU membership). That is incorrect. The OECD is an economic cooperation organisation, best thought of as an economics version of “Weightwatchers”. Thus Freedman’s phraseology (eg “welcoming Israel in from the cold” and “willingness to overlook”) is entirely inappropriate. Freedman’s final sentence (“it can only be hoped that the OECD’s opposition to Israel’s misdeeds comes late rather than never”) is simply crass.
Freedman digs himself in further by suggesting that “Israel’s credit rating will be upgraded as a result” of OECD entry. There is absolutely no link between OECD entry and movements in a sovereign’s credit rating. While it is true that OECD members have higher average ratings than non-OECD members, the point is that a country would not be granted accession unless its economy was considered strong. And as has been seen with Greece recently, OECD membership is no guarantee at all that a country’s credit rating will not be downgraded.
Now to the prejudice. Freedman suggests that a statistical issue has the potential “to derail” accession. The issue in question is said to be the coverage of the West Bank statistics that Israel submits to the OECD. But the truth is that the OECD decided to commence the accession process over two years ago and that since then Israel has fully followed and implemented the guidance of the OECD, including far reaching regulatory amendments. It is very common for countries to accede to the OECD and then fine tune their economic procedures afterwards, including statistical coverage.
Even the Abu Dhabi newspaper article to which Freedman links – written by Jonathan Cook, no friend of Israel – concedes this.
Indeed it may not be possible to divide the West Bank’s statistics to separate the value-added accruing to settlers and that accruing to Palestinians (as Freedman suggests that some members of the OECD are requesting). If an enterprise employs both settlers and Palestinians – as is common – then it is impossible to subdivide that enterprise’s income.
PS Israel is one of five countries, along with Chile, Estonia, the Russian Federation and Slovenia, that were invited in May 2007 to open negotiations for membership of the OECD.
This is a guest post by Margie in Tel Aviv
There was panic in the ranks of the Bigots’ Brigade when Seth Freedman attempted to give his approval to a scheme backed by Israeli authorities in an article last month entitled “Building a peaceful future“. They read the words over and over and scrambled to find something derogatory to say. It was notable that even the lickiest lick-spittles didn’t come up with the usual phrases of adoration that we are used to read.
There was no, ‘Well done, sir.” No. “Brilliant article, Seth.” How disappointed he must have been to be deserted by his usual claque. The search for something to say was something to behold however.
What was he talking about? The scheme itself is a dual solution to housing and social problems, attempting to build a neighborhood in which both Jews and Arabs can live together and learn eventually to understand each other. The usual way that things are done in the Middle East is for people to keep to themselves and to live in homogeneous neighborhoods. A practised eye can spot an Arab village in Israel by the look of the terrain – imposing houses, much larger than those the Israeli Jews live in and characterised by the unusual town-planning. Streets go round houses in Arab towns. In Jewish towns houses are built side by side along a preplanned roadway. You can distinguish between a Christian Arab and Moslem Arab area by the presence or absence of minarets. It is unusual for Moslems and Christians to live side by side.
There is a great deal of resistance by the Arab communities to having Jews live within their towns. A proposal to build housing for Jews in the centre of Israel in Jaffa in a suburb called Ajami is bitterly opposed by the Arab residents who see it as a ‘settlement’. Whatever the political motives it shows the determination of the Arabs to keep themselves separate.
I wonder what Seth’s next article will be about? Maybe this.
On Sunday, January 22nd 1995, my former husband set off early in the morning to drive to Tel Aviv for work together with a neighbour who had asked for a lift as he was starting a month’s reserve duty and needed to get to his base as early as possible. A couple of hours later their route brought them to the Beit Lid junction, where their journey came to a dramatic halt. They had arrived just seconds after a double suicide bombing which killed 21 Israelis and wounded some 69 others. Our neighbour happens to be an army medic and my former husband a Magen David Adom ambulance volunteer, so they lost no time and set to work treating the injured as best they could until the emergency services arrived with proper equipment. A few weeks later, one of the soldiers they had saved from bleeding to death got in touch, together with his parents, to say thank you. There’s a saying in Hebrew that ‘anyone who saves a life saves a whole world’, and everyone who has ever had the privilege of being able to save a life will know just how true that saying is.
On Friday, January 22nd 2010, Seth Freedman took a cheap and very nasty pot shot at Israel’s rescue mission to Haiti in yet another CiF article written in his own Bri-nylon journalistic style. Freedman concluded “It is a damning indictment of Israel that it is prepared only to come to the aid of those who fit certain political critieria, rather than that of every victim crying out for intervention.” Actually, it is a damning indictment of the writer of that sentence that because of his own political criteria he chooses not only to ignore, but to deliberately conceal the many ongoing Israeli projects which have supplied Palestinians with aid, even in the midst of war, both official and unofficial, benefiting people and even animals. Were Freedman’s aims purely humanitarian, he would surely have something to say about the PA’s cynical denial of vital medical care to some of its population. Sadly, Freedman apparently sees no moral quandary in employing his selective viewpoint as a means to push his warped political agenda and solicit praise and agreement from his below the line clones.
Seth Freedman’s latest promotion of Combatants for Peace (astute readers will remember that he’s been there before) had the rather predictable effect of falling on deaf CiF ears; so much so that Freedman himself felt obliged in several instances to leap in and try to save the day.
What motivated Freedman’s attempts to rescue his own thread from the swamps of antisemitic and racist discourse? Well for a start the anti-Zionists and one-staters were out in force.
10 Jan 2010, 12:09PM
I wonder if the Israelis joining the protests though, would want the Palestinians as neighbours.
This would involve the dismantling of zionism and end the state of Israel as a Jewish state.
10 Jan 2010, 12:23PM
Keo2008
I see no contradiction between this kind of peaceful protest and moving gently, gently, towards a 2-state solution.
- or -
A 2 state or apartheid solution? Palestinian refugees are still waiting in their refugee camps and squalor and in the meantime Israel invites as many Jews as it can possibly stuff into the land it has ‘acquired’ to forestall any claims by the refugees.
Zionism – whether it’s the settlers or the ‘peace’ lobby, wants to cement this state of affairs and this is an outrage.
10 Jan 2010, 12:33PM
And yes, zionism is an evil ideology.
In his CiF piece of January 20th Seth Freedman bemoans yet again what he terms ‘occupation tourism’ and specifically that of the International Solidarity Movement. The latter seemed none too pleased by Freedman’s article and posted the following rebuttal on CiF.
21 Jan 2010, 12:36PM
“In Palestine, solidarity not tourism”
Rebuttal statement on behalf of ISM London
By Pete Jones
As volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement, London we were disappointed to read Seth Freedman?s highly misleading description of the non-violent protests by the Palestinians of Bil?in, and the ISM’s support for them (“Palestine’s occupation tourism”, Comment is Free, 20th January).
Blaming the victim, Freedman bizarrely berates Palestinian participants in the unarmed weekly protests against the Israel occupation army for ?aggression?. This reverses reality. It is the Israeli army that invades the village at night, the Israeli army and settlers that are occupying over 50% of the village’s land. Israel is the aggressor.
As someone who lived in Bil?in for almost two months and participated in a number of demonstrations, I witnessed the leaders of the Popular Committee regularly calling for stones not to be thrown during demonstrations. These calls are made both during the march if the youth (shabab in Arabic) are seen preparing to throw a stone, and in announcements during the week. There is plenty of video footage of Bil?in demonstration organisers asking shabab not to throw stones.
The ability of the leaders of the Popular Committee to make such calls may have been diminished recently — considering the fact that two of them, Abdullah Abu Rahmeh and Adeeb Abu Rahmeh were kidnapped by the Israeli army and are still being held prisoner, and a third, Mohammed Katib has been banned, by Israel, from the village during demonstrations.
It is true that these efforts are not always successful and some hot-headed youth end up throwing stones at the soldiers after the main demonstration, usually after they have been attacked with rubber-coated bullets and tear gas (which sometimes result in death, such as in the case of the late Basem Abu Rahmeh, a peaceful Palestinian protestor murdered by an Israeli soldier in April of last year). Freedman does not live in Bil?in and does not have to live with the regular night-time raids of the Israeli army, in which teenagers as young as 13 are seized, and therefore has no right to dictate the method of resistance to the Palestinians.
Israeli occupation forces have even gone to the extent of infiltrating stone-throwing “mistarvim” (Israeli forces disguised as Arabs) into the protest (see “Gandhi Redux” in Haaretz, 6th September 2005).
Freedman’s claim that ISMers are ?occupation tourists? is also false. In fact the ISM has had an ongoing presence in Bil?in since the villagers’ struggle began in 2005. It is telling when Freedman claims that “activists and NGO workers who have been operating in the region for years can be relied upon to update the watching world on the state of play in the village [without the need for ISMers]” and yet does not name a single one of these mysterious NGOs or activist organisations. The reality is that the ISM has an ongoing and long-term presence in the village. Volunteers often live in an apartment, many staying for months and forging long-term friendships with the people of Bil?in.
ISM volunteers are obliged to attend an intensive training course before they are permitted to work with the organisation. This training ensures ISM activists know the principles which guide the organisation?s work: non-violent action only, Palestinian-led action only and group action only. Freedman seems to scoff at the idea that ISM?s work should be Palestinian-led.
No ISM activist has the authority to tell a Palestinian how to run their resistance. We are not in Palestine to teach non-violence — in fact the Palestinians’ own long tradition of non-violent resistance has a lot to teach us all, from the protests and strikes against the British occupation in the 1930s onwards.
Freedman’s description of this central principle as an attempt to “absolve” ourselves “of any responsibility for the aggression emanating from the Palestinian side” is a typically orientalist attitude based on the false assumption that we westerners know what’s best for the Palestinians and should lead them.
On the contrary we in ISM view our role as witnessing the occupation so that we can raise awareness in our home countries while at the same time making the environment a little safer in Palestine. As a former Israeli solider, Freedman might know that the Israeli army has different rules of engagement at Palestinian protests when internationals or Israelis are involved in them. Live ammunition is not supposed to be used when they are present, but is allowed when Palestinians are alone.
Freedman has written some excellent CiF articles about the Israeli occupation of Palestine in the past, but shifting away from a colonialist point of view is often a long and difficult process. We wish him a speedy progression.
Oh dear; not pleasant. Not very historically accurate either on the subject of ‘the Palestinians’ own long tradition of ‘non-violent resistance’ . Mind you, they’re pretty busy bees down at ISM London, so accuracy will obviously be doomed to taking a back seat. Keep the last sentence of that rebuttal in mind – we’ll come back to that rather condescending and patronising statement later.
This is a guest post from Joy Wolfe
It was only a matter of time before praise for Israel’s effort in Haiti was turned into a chance to attack her – What kept you so long Seth?
Perhaps the only surprising thing about Seth Freedman’s despicable attempt to diminish the efforts of the Israeli search and rescue and medical in Haiti is that he restrained himself for a whole week.
It is not Israel who is indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinian people, it is their own leadership who, for the past 61 years, have deliberately deprived them of a decent standard of life and any benefit form the millions of dollars of international aid that should have guaranteed them statehood and, proper living conditions and all the benefits of peace.
But irrespective of that, to accuse Israel of double standards when she goes to the aid of disaster victims, fully equipped and ready to get straight on with the rescue effort, is truly contemptible. There is a long catalogue of disasters where Israel has been at the forefront of the mercy missions and it is not to gain brownie points or recognition. The Israelis put themselves in physical danger when risking their lives to save victims, and subsequently provide medical attention and care that is second to none. Amazingly, the international media has fully recognised the quality and quantity of Israel’s aid. It is hard to comprehend the sheer scale of the field hospital that was set up in such a short space of time. But Seth Freedman seeks to highlight the tiny minority of sick minds who tried to diminish this effort, even making obscene allegations that only appeared in little known outlets, but he needed to give them more exposure. Watching the dedicated medical teams at work, seeing and hearing the gratitude of the Haitian people whose lives they touched, makes the thought of the accusations totally reprehensible.
“No Eastern land occupied by a sedentary population has as uncertain a water-supply as Palestine. Its Mediterranean climate leaves it without any rain for about half of each year, on the average. Since Palestine is at the southern end of the rainy westerly winds, its rainfall becomes progressively more scanty as one goes south towards the Negeb. Winters with inadequate rainfall are both frequent and unpredictable, and disastrous famines have thus been common throughout its history.”
The above words were written by the famous archaeologist W.F. Albright in his fascinating book ‘the Archaeology of Palestine’ in 1949, but Seth Freedman would have us believe that water shortages in this part of the world are not only relatively new, but somehow deliberately engineered. In his familiar florid style, Freedman recounts his visits to encampments of the Jahalin Bedouin tribe and with typical British romanticism – a sort of ‘Lawrence of Suburbia’ – dramatically depicts the suffering of these noble tribesmen at the hands of the dastardly Israeli regime.
This is a guest post by AKUS
On CiF Watch you’ve met the Tooth Fairy, Ben White:
and Santa’s Little Helper, Rachel Shabi:
And now it’s time to meet the Arsonist, Seth Freedman:
In another article displaying a “sparkling” (ahem) display of empathy for 150,000 Palestinians threatened daily by the 500 (admittedly objectionable) Jewish citizens of Hebron, legitimately occupying mainly a set of houses to which at least in some cases they have ownership papers from which those Jews who survived the 1929 massacre fled, Freedman once again pulled the flip-flop for which he has become … slightly known.
Hawkeye
Omar2
WellofSense
Medusa
The Alchemist
Louise
Tosca
Maimon
Telling the Truth
Israelinurse
Adam Levick
Margie in Tel Aviv
Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
Living under a military junta
April 21, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: Comment is Free, Guardian, Oliver Worth, Seth Freedman | by Hawkeye | 33 comments
This is a guest post by Oliver Worth
It’s official: The rights of private enterprises to decide what to sell is now the antithesis of democracy – that is, of course, if one reads Seth Freedman’s latest CiF piece ‘Suppressing Book Bolsters Settlers’.
Freedman begins by making a peculiar comparison between those trying to boycott Israel from abroad and the choice of the Tzomet Sefarim bookstore to stop selling a left wing political pamphlet. What he doesn’t mention, or fails to see, is that these two occurrences couldn’t be further apart. Whilst the decision of the Tzomet Sefarim to stop stocking this particular piece was as a result of unpopularity and customer complaints (a regular occurrence in a democratic society), the tactics used by anti-Israeli boycotters in the UK such as BDS are about preventing people from teaching and speaking – surely the exact opposite of liberal democracy.
What Freedman admits is that there had been a storm of criticism of the pamphlet, though he uses this as his ‘proof’ that the decision was forced because of threats of violence, rather than as obvious reasons why the pamphlet was so unpopular. He refers to quotes in the book such as settlers being referred to as “messianic madmen” and their children as “brainwashed zombies”, yet sees this as a vindication of his belief that the book must have been withdrawn because of threats, rather than because the pamphlet is crass, poorly written and ultimately detrimental to the firm’s bottom line.
Having run out of ideas to justify how a bookstore deciding to stop stocking a book must be the first sign of a totalitarian regime, Freedman goes on to rant about his own experiences in the Israeli territories, writing in a way that would lead one to believe he’d been participating in a situation at home in an Indiana Jones film, before quietly admitting there was actually “no real impediment to our work or safety”.
Seth concludes that this whole event proves that “Israel’s claim to be a fully functional bastion of democracy” is a “facade”, despite the fact that the state did not ban the book, nor even bat an eyelid at the publication of anti-government propaganda in a nation where such rights are cherished. That Freedman sees the rights of businesses to stock what they wish to sell as a contradiction of democracy once again reminds us what can happen when rash politics clash with reason.
The good news is Mr Freedman has inspired me to concoct my own system of democracy detection. Simply go to a bookstore near you, and if the shelves are not laden with extreme political propaganda, you can be sure you’re living under a military junta.
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