U.S. Border Patrol Kills Mexican Teenage Stone Thrower Protesting the Occupation

The map shows El Paso belonging to Mexico until the mid-nineteenth century, when the U.S. government acquired sovereignty after invading Mexico City. (It is taken from a Latin American Studies web page that has several excellent maps on the land grab.)

Today's Los Angeles Times features an AP story "Border Patrol in El Paso kills Mexican teen":

Preliminary reports on the incident indicated that U.S. officers on bicycle patrol "were assaulted with rocks by an unknown number of people," Border Patrol Special Operations Supervisor Ramiro Cordero said Tuesday.

The article connects this violence with the U.S. government's targeted and deadly electrocution of someone walking across the border in California:

Less than two weeks ago, Mexican migrant Anastasio Hernandez, 32, died after a Customs and Border Protection officer shocked him with a stun gun at the San Ysidro border crossing that separates San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. The San Diego medical examiner's office ruled that death a homicide.

The article offers a compassionate portrait of the death's impact on the teenager's family. But, resembling coverage of similar events in Israel-Palestine, the reporter quotes extensively from the U.S. government explaining its armed presence in the area and provides no response from political and religious organizations challenging this.

Of course the real problem is not the unrecognized principle of Mexican or any other nation's sovereignty, but unrecognized principles of justice that require free movement and thus the elimination of birthright citizenship.

----
For a more balanced story, including an eyewitness challenging the Border Patrol version of events, listen in to NPR's Monica Ortiz Uribe on "All Things Considered."

English Only: British MP Presses PM Gordon Brown on Israel Human Rights Violations

Tonight I ended up watching the 30 minutes of "Ask the Prime Minister" session recorded last Wednesday. Prime Minister Gordon Brown was being asked to renounce not only capitalism, by one Labour Party Member of Parliament, alert to the ideology's recent difficulties, but also, by another, to insist that Israel allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Before making this request, the MP, I don't recall his name, explained that by preventing lorries carrying medical supplies and food from reaching Palestinians in Gaza, Israel was violating international law. The speaker described in some detail the devastation Israel caused during its bombing, and insisted on the importance of Israel allowing entrance into Gaza of lorries driven by United Nations and other human rights workers. It reminded me of how odd it is that a member of the U.S. Congress would never publicly press President Obama on Israel.

The British Prime Minister replied by saying that he had written a letter to the Israeli Prime minister requesting that Israel immediately allow the lorries entry.

Super-imposed on the screen in white letters: Lorry - Truck

The need to instruct on simple vocabulary revealed in form the differences in substantive political intelligence between our Congress and the British Parliament I had been watching.

Facts on the Ground: the Occupation in America

The Los Angeles Times ran a great story today about the 35,000 truckloads of dirt used to fill in a gulch in California, to change the landscape enough to make the earth a barrier instead of a corridor. And then the US government is adding layers and layers of fence, with the result that people will lose their homes, jobs, families, and communities.

It is true that unlike the Palestinians, the residents designated by their birth certificates or other legal documents as Mexicans are not being killed at war. That happened just over 150 years ago, and the losers never mounted another serious armed struggle against the victors. If they had, the US would turn their weapons on them without hesitation (as happened against the Puerto Rican separatists), and the civilians in the borderlands would be praying they were being attacked by the Israelis.

This comes to mind because I am receiving a welcome round of petitions through various listserves, from colleagues venting righteous anger against Israel's bombing of Gaza, including its educational institutions and therefore students.

I endorse their cause, but wonder at the irony. The state of California is using its police and prisons to illegally deport US citizens of Mexican descent. As UC faculty we are not protesting our own employer removing from "the homeland" residents born in Mexico and even the US. The state of California only exists in "our" borders because of occupation, terrorism, and state armies.

This is a point that Israeli nationalists make when challenged for their exclusions of non-Jews: what Israel did is no different from the US expanding into Mexico. (This also was a point repeatedly stressed by someone who was highly placed in Franjo Tudjman's government in Croatia in 1996 , and he included a fine-grained analysis of the US displacement of Native Americans.) The observation is only ever offered for the purpose of naming US hypocrisy toward its own occupation, assuming this is a fait accompli, but perhaps it might be turned to another purpose.

What about ending US hypocrisy on civil rights, human rights, and the rule of law by doing the right thing and allowing free movement, at least starting with those on our borders? (Yeah, if Mexicans could move here freely then the Canadians might make a fuss. There goes the neighborhood, eh?)

Israel Turns Back Richard Falk, UN Rapporteur and Political Scientist

UN Special Rapporteur and Princeton Political Science Professor (emeritus) Richard Falk was supposed to enter Israel's occupied territories this weekend, at the invitation of Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas. Instead he was detained incommunicado and then shipped to Newark.

Here's a summary of the latest unfortunate episode of Israel rejecting norms of the international community and the United States sitting by and watching, sent by a colleague Lisa Hajjar, Law and Society Program, UC Santa Barbara.

Richard Falk was elected/appointed to be the UN Special Rapporteur for
Palestine in June 2008. He released his first report about the human rights situation in the Palestinian Occupied Territories (OPT) in October. Since he was appointed, the Israeli government has stated its opposition to him, citing his criticisms of Israeli human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza. The US government also opposed his appointment for the same reasons, and both governments had lobbied--unsuccessfully--to block his appointment.

He received an invitation from Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas to study the situation in the West Bank, and the Geneva office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights authorized his mission. He left the US on Friday, via Geneva, where he was joined by an assistant and a UN security detail.

When they arrived in Israel, the assistant and the security official were permitted to enter but Richard was detained at the airport, questioned and searched. He was informed that he would be denied entry, and was held for hours before being temporarily transported to some place beyond the airport (a VIP detention facility?).

The US Embassy was alerted to this situation by Richard's wife, from California, after Richard made a quick call from the airport before going into an incommunicado situation. It took more than 12 hours for people to learn what Israel's plans were--sending him to the US, via Newark, on a flight that departs at 11:15 a.m. Israel time.

This is a situation that begs political and diplomatic intervention. The incoming Obama administration should, at minimum, issue a strong and unequivocal endorsement of Falk's status as the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, and should exert diplomatic pressure on Israel to grant him entry when he next seeks to travel to the country to pursue his UN mission.

Richard is a friend and colleague with whom Balakrishnan Rajagopal and I co-edited a special issue of Third World Quarterly that was published this year as a book, International Law and the Third World. In describing the challenges to his appointment by Israel and the United States Richard has always sounded more bemused than than surprised. You can read his own statements about his current work in a BBC report from December 10, 2008 here.

Those who know Richard understand that his scholarly turn of mind and genteel manner can be a provocation only to those who care little for truth or the rule of law. Richard is the author of more than 30 books on international law; it is erudition and expertise that lead him to his political positions. To reject his appointment is to refuse a place for truth and justice in the Middle East peace process.

"Caramel" Opens Tonight

"Caramel" was written by and stars the director, Nadine Labaki. It is the Lebanese submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film and screened at Cannes.

Labaki hews closely to the advice "write what you know." The film is set in a Beirut beauty parlor in a Christian neighborhood and is based on people Nadine observed. Most of the cast are non-actors, though you'd never know.

"Caramel" has received terrific reviews, including analogies to Pedro Almodovar's work. I've been telling my friends it's like "Sex in the City" set in Beirut. It's a subtle and humorous exploration of the friendship and challenges faced by an intergenerational group of women. There is a great range of characters, from a crazy old lady who collects traffic citations from windshields to the butch lesbian who fixes the generator and washes hair, and develops a simmering relationship with one of the clients.

Labaki is an accomplished actress and music video director whose work is widely admired in the Middle East. Over drinks after the screening a Palestinian filmmaker told Nadine that his mother in Nazareth was a huge fan and that if Nadine came to their city the whole town would come to a stop.

Nadine smiled and then looked sad. Because of her citizenship, Israel and Lebanon both make such a visit impossible.

If you want to support its wider release, and have a great evening, go see "Caramel" this weekend.

Google Explains Jew Results

Google has replied to the petition to remove JewWatch.com from its search engine. No surprise that they won't remove the site, but their reply is more than a standard form letter and offers some interesting, though not entirely persuasive thoughts, on why anti-Semitic results appear.

f you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for "Jew" brings up one such unexpected result.

If you use Google to search for "Judaism," "Jewish" or "Jewish people," the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for "Jew" different? One reason is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word "Jewish" when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:

* http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol01/vol01.174
* http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500.asp

Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like "Judaism," "Jewish people," or "Jews" than the single word "Jew." In fact, prior to this incident, the word "Jew" only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it's likely that the great majority of searches on Google for "Jew" are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.

The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page.

We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.

Sincerely,
The Google Team

I applaud Google's interest in ordinary language philosophy, i.e., the different motives for the use of "Jew" as distinct from "Jewish" or "Judaism." However suggestive their hypotheses, they are not entirely satisfying. First, most of the sites that appear when people use "Jew" are not "disturbing," including what is now the second-ranked site, the Wikipedia entry, which used to be first until this controversy appeared to bump up the JewWatch.com ranking to #1. Also, Google makes an uncharacteristically inaccurate statement about its own search engine: if you type in "Jews" and not "Jew," JewWatch.com also appears as the second site on the list (after the Wikipedia entry) and the third url on the list is for Jews for Jesus. And finally, as I pointed out yesterday, the explanation does not explain why similar results do not show up when people enter "Christian" or "Muslim."

While the details of Google's response are not entirely accurate, the spirit of its engagement is a welcome change from corporate double-speak that ignores the substantive issues. Their engagement, if not expertise in linguistics and counting (the results in their own search engine), are much appreciated.

Website Banning Petition in Progress

A few hours ago my girlfriend received a note forwarded from her mother's friend, asking her to sign a petition to remove "JewWatch.com" from the Google search engine. The note tells people, correctly, that JewWatch.com comes up very high on the google.com search engine if you type "jew." It was the second entry, after the Wikipedia entry. (A website has a high ranking on the google pages if a lot of people visit it through the google keyword searches or if a lot of other sites link to it, which the google engine can figure out by crawling through the web and finding the urls on other pages.)

The message says the site is anti-Semitic and tells recipients that if 500,000 people sign a petition requesting its removal from the search engine, Google will oblige. (The petition itself states Google will do this with a mere 50,000 signatures.)

I find it hard to believe that Google will in fact remove a site from its search regardless of the number of people who request this. If it does, this is a well-kept secret in the normally transparent Google operation, as its not mentioned in any of the means for removing site content. Hard to prove a negative, so I have a query into the Google Press Center about this.

The emailed message does raise an interesting question, and it's not about whether google should remove the site. (Of course not. That's a no-brainer for anyone who doesn't want their viewing habits controlled by the preferences of 50,000 or 500,000 people with too much time on their hands, though not enough time to realize that their messages are going to send people to the JewWatch.com site and further bolster its ranking.)

The intriguing question is why would JewWatch.com be the second site listed when "jew" is entered? Moreover, what does it mean that other entries on the first google page for "jew" are actually much more pernicious than JewWatch, including "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem," a 1920 anti-Semitic screed by Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford car company. That site also includes links to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and other creepy sites.

I tried typing in "Christian," "Muslim" to see if something similar occurred, but it didn't. One reason is probably that Christians comprise 33% of the world's population and about 20% are Muslim. Jews are fewer than one half of one per cent of the world's population. Assuming that people who are members of a group are more favorably disposed to that group than those who are not, chances are that in absolute numbers, a lot more people are not-Jews than not-Christian or not-Muslim. If ten percent of Jews are not favorably disposed to Muslims and Christians, that's about 138,000 potential anti-Muslim or anti-Muslim website viewers. If 10 percent of Muslims (120 million) and 10 percent of Christians (198 million) hate Jews, that's 318 million people, more than enough for a robust Google ranking.

The sites that appear if you type "jew" are not just anti-Zionist or "anti-Israel Lobby" sites, to use the less charged language of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. These are sites that denounce people as Jews, and not just those who favor Israel.

The obvious reason for the sites' popularity is that a ton of people fear and hate Jews. However this is not a reason but another question. Why? What's going on with the hypothetical ten percent driving these rankings, people markedly singling out Jews and not other minority groups for international approbation? While it's true that hatred is more likely toward a religion other than one's own, the first pages of Google hits for "Confucian" or "Zoroastrians"--religions with fewer adherents than Judaism--display no links to hate-filled websites.

I don't think the answer is the one that B'nai B'rith has in mind but rather, that it lies in Israel's own policies that conflate Jewishness with Israeliness and hence encourage those who oppose Israel to oppose Jews. When I was living in Istanbul and a Turkish sect supporting Al Qaeda blew up nearby synagogues in 2003 and killed 29 Jewish Turks while they were worshiping, Israel arrived to assist with the removal of corpses and the investigation. Much to the country's dismay, the bodies were buried with Israeli and not Turkish flags. Perhaps this was the decision of the families, or of the Turkish government to show their solidarity and appreciation of Israeli aid. But this decision to collapse dying for being Jewish with the celebration of Israel was not made by the folks running JewWatch or other anti-Semitic sites.

Indeed Israel puts itself forward as a Jewish state. It allows anyone who can prove Jewish descent to become a citizen and denies this to anyone not already in its borders, including those who have been removed by force. It is therefore not all that surprising that Jews and not just the Israel lobby would be held responsible for the crimes committed by and in the name of Israel. Indeed to do otherwise, which has been demanded of outsiders since Israel's founding, is to expect a high if not absurd level of sophistication. During World War Two the United States government interned its own citizens if they happened to be Japanese. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt, married to a great civil rights leader, could conflate nationality with ethnicity, then it seems unsurprising that folks with far less cosmopolitan aspirations would do the same.

This does not mean that FDR was correct in assessing the loyalty of his citizens. The confusion reflects that nationality creates ethnicity: Ireland makes possible "the Irish," Korea "the Koreans," and so forth. Before Judaism was Judaism, the Israelites were a nation, one that God told Abraham he would choose for covenant. (Jews were named such much later, by the Romans after the largest tribe in Judea.) Yes, anti-Semitism existed before the modern state of Israel. Long before that. But it did not exist before Israel the patrilineal nation of descent, the one following from the lineage of Abraham before becoming matrilineal after the destruction of the Second Temple. In both cases, belonging to the Jewish or Israeli nation is largely a matter of descent and kinship, just like all other nations, a mark of belonging and therefore of exclusion as well.

If Jews want to stop being targeted in the fight against Israel, then Israel needs to forsake its status as a Jewish nation, and join all other countries in opening their borders. The best way to make sure JewWatch goes away, is to remove the Muslim Watch at the Israeli borders.

Israel Violates International Law and Moral Decency, Refusing Targets of Genocide

Sudanese refugee held in an Israeli jail because he is a national of a country Israel regards as an enemy.

One of the reasons that Adolf Eichmann gave for the "final solution" being genocide was that Jews could not be removed from Germany in any other way, since no other country would take them in sufficient numbers, including the United States. (See Hanna Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem [1963].)

In recognition of the impediments national borders pose to victims of state violence -- serving as armed guards for the perpetrators -- the United Nations passed a resolution affirming that signatories would allow all those presenting themselves as refugees due to state persecution entry into their countries and hearings to determine the legitimacy of these claims.

In yet the latest expression of its hypocrisy, symptomatic of the untenability of the international system of nation-states more generally, Israel has just turned away thousands of refugees from Darfur, without mandated hearings and in violation of their commitments under international law. Here's some of what the Washington Post reported today.

Authorities announced that they had expelled 48 of more than 2,000 African refugees who have entered illegally from Egypt in recent weeks. Officials said they would allow 500 Darfurians among them to remain, but would deport everyone else back to Egypt and accept no more illegal migrants from Darfur or other places ....

Egyptian police told the Associated Press, however, that Egypt would send the Sudanese back to Sudan. An Egyptian Foreign Ministry official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israel had sought no assurances about the future of the refugees. "Israel just said, 'Please take them,' " the Egyptian official said.

Refugees from Darfur are escaping what President Bush and others have called genocide by government-allied Arab militias against ethnic African villagers. In addition, Sudan and Israel officially are enemies, and Sudan's government has said any refugees sent back from Israel would be considered as having dealt with an enemy state and treated accordingly....

srael apparently expelled them without hearings, in contravention of a refugee accord it has signed that requires countries to determine whether deportation will subject asylum-seekers to mistreatment, said Ben-Dor, the Israeli refugee lawyer.

More than half the members of Israel's parliament, including opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, signed a petition earlier this month urging Israel not to send the refugees back to Egypt....

"The expulsion is an inhumane act that violates international law," said lawmaker Dov Khenin of the Hadash party, according to the Haaretz newspaper Web site.

If even Israel cannot abide by the only meager protection available to those facing slaughter by their states, i.e., allowing them a place of sanctuary, then this seems rather damning evidence that the nation-state is a failure and it might be time to try new rules for controlling movement and membership.

The Israel Lobby

The image is from a website for fake PhDs, which have the same value these days as the ones from Ivy League universities, or so it seems to the folks messing around with the free speech and exchange of ideas at elite academic institutions.

ITEM ONE:
Over the last couple of years two very prominent political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt, teaching in two of the most reputable universities in the world (University of Chicago and Harvard University) have been promoting a paper and now a book (The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy) pointing out the discrepancy between U.S. strategic interests and support for Israel.

Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the only reason that the U.S. has given huge amounts of military and foreign aid to Israel has been the political and economic clout of Israel's domestic lobbying interests, namely U.S. citizens who are zealots on this cause. Ironically, proof of their argument is that their own book tour is being interfered with by Zionists who apparently made statements that rattled a variety of potential venues, including the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that had committed to and then canceled their talk. According to the New York Times:

The subject will certainly prompt furious debate, though not at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a Jewish cultural center in Washington and three organizations in Chicago. They have all turned down or canceled events with the authors, mentioning unease with the controversy or the format.

The authors were particularly disturbed by the Chicago council’s decision, since plans for that event were complete and both authors have frequently spoken there before. The two sent a four-page letter to 94 members of the council’s board detailing what happened. “On July 24, Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us (Mearsheimer) and informed him that he was canceling the event,” and that his decision “was based on the need ‘to protect the institution.’ He said that he had a serious ‘political problem,’ because there were individuals who would be angry if he gave us a venue to speak, and that this would have serious negative consequences for the council. ‘This one is so hot,’ Marshall maintained.”

Mr. Mearsheimer later said of Mr. Bouton, “I had the sense that this phone call pained him deeply.”

Mr. Bouton was out of town, but Rachel Bronson, vice president for programs and studies at the council, said, “Whenever we have topics that are particularly controversial or sensitive, we try to make sure someone from another point of view is there.” In this case, she said, there was not sufficient time to set up that sort of panel before the council calendar went out. There are no plans to have the authors speak at a later date, however.

ITEM TWO:
Two months ago Norman Finkelstein--another Israel lobby critic who has debunked work by Alan Dershowitz and written a terrific, incisive, and well-documented book The Holocaust Industry, about the intellectual, political history of "the Holocaust"--was denied tenure at De Paul University even though his department had unanimously supported him. As bad as this is, even more bizarre are the efforts underway by a former Barnard alum whose firm does technical writing for Israeli firms to hold up the tenure of Dr. Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor at Barnard College. The online petition has over 1,000 signatures, supposedly from Barnard alumnae, though a brief scan suggests that at least half of them are from men, which is fitting for an enterprise placing such a low value on integrity.

The concerns are supposedly directed to a book published by the University of Chicago Press in 2001, but since the woman who authored the petition is in no position to second-guess the faculty who peer-reviewed the book at the University of Chicago Press, it appears that Paula Stern, the petition's author, is acting on the old-fashioned value of narrow-minded bigotry. Since it now seems that tenure is being determined by petition, feel free to sign one supporting Dr. Nadia Abu El-Haj here.

One thing I never understood: why do conservatives point to the large numbers of progressives in academia and complain about bias, rather than scratch their heads and ponder the consequences of the general population's poor education, contemplating the possibility that they might be dead wrong through ignorance. If experts trained in the best universities in the world hold views that are more open, cosmopolitan, egalitarian, and tolerant than the views held by everyone else, doesn't that suggest these scholars might be onto something? We don't look at the general public's opinion on physics and, since no one there can explain why e=mc2, say that Einstein was biased in favor of relativity, so why is it cause for censure if people in universities, professors, no less, have knowledge on other matters about which the general public also is uneducated?

During the first Gulf War, in 1992, Professor Kirin Chaudhry, in the Political Science Department at UC Berkeley (when I was a grad student) was on a local news show asked if she thought the U.S. invasion was a good idea. She said no. The local anchor's eyebrows shot up, "You realize you are disagreeing with 85% of the rest of the country?" he said. I'll never forget Dr. Chaudhry's reply. She looked him straight in the eyes and very calmly replied, "That's because they're poorly informed by news programs such as yours."

This Just In: Israeli Land Policy Breaks God's Law

This morning I happened to be reading the Hebrew Bible, looking out for passages on the treatment of foreigners (for the conclusion of the book I'm finishing) and I came upon this tidbit from Ezekiel that I hadn't expected.

God is setting out the boundaries for the land of Israel and explaining to Ezekiel where within these each of the 12 tribes should reside. In the process he tells Ezekiel to tell the Israelites that aliens should be able to remain where they are and that their inheritances must be protected. Let's listen in (as told by the Revised Standard Edition):

Thus says the Lord GOD: "These are the boundaries by which you shall divide the land for inheritance among the twelve tribes of Israel. Joseph shall have two portions.
[14] And you shall divide it equally; I swore to give it to your fathers, and this land shall fall to you as your inheritance.
[15] "This shall be the boundary of the land: On the north side, from the Great Sea by way of Hethlon to the entrance of Hamath, and on to Zedad,
[16] Bero'thah, Sib'raim (which lies on the border between Damascus and Hamath), as far as Hazer-hatticon, which is on the border of Hauran.
[17] So the boundary shall run from the sea to Hazar-e'non, which is on the northern border of Damascus, with the border of Hamath to the north. This shall be the north side.
[18] "On the east side, the boundary shall run from Hazar-e'non between Hauran and Damascus; along the Jordan between Gilead and the land of Israel; to the eastern sea and as far as Tamar. This shall be the east side.
[19] "On the south side, it shall run from Tamar as far as the waters of Meribath-ka'desh, thence along the Brook of Egypt to the Great Sea. This shall be the south side.
[20] "On the west side, the Great Sea shall be the boundary to a point opposite the entrance of Hamath. This shall be the west side.
[21] "So you shall divide this land among you according to the tribes of Israel.

And here's the kicker:

[22] You shall allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the aliens who reside among you and have begotten children among you. They shall be to you as native-born sons of Israel; with you they shall be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel.
[23] In whatever tribe the alien resides, there you shall assign him his inheritance, says the Lord GOD.

So that's what God says. What did today's Israelis actually do? Some land they bought from absentee Arab landlords in the early twentieth century and then used the land title to evict farmers whose families had lived in Palestine for hundreds of years. Some land they traded. And most of the land, they stole during various wars. About 93% of all land in Israel is owned by the government.
As a secret report of the Israeli government indicates, despite all these efforts 39% of the land Israel claims to own is actually still titled to Arabs whose inheritance rights, which along with God's dictum, are being violated. Here's what the New York Times published about this last year in a front-page article by Steven Erlanger (November 21, 2006):

An Israeli advocacy group, using maps and figures leaked from inside the government, says that 39 percent of the land held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians....
One case in a settlement Israel intends to keep is in Givat Zeev, barely five miles north of Jerusalem. At the southern edge is the Ayelet Hashachar synagogue. Rabah Abdellatif, a Palestinian who lives in the nearby village of Al Jib, says the land belongs to him.

Papers he has filed with the Israeli military court, which runs the West Bank, seem to favor Mr. Abdellatif. In 1999, Israeli officials confirmed, he was even granted a judgment ordering the demolition of the synagogue because it had been built without permits. But for the last seven years, the Israeli system has done little to enforce its legal judgments. The synagogue stands, and Mr. Abdellatif has no access to his land.

Ram Kovarsky, the town council secretary, said the synagogue was outside the boundaries of Givat Zeev, although there is no obvious separation. Israeli officials confirm that the land is privately owned, though they refuse to say by whom.

Mr. Abdellatif, 65, said: ''I feel stuck, angry. Why would they do that? I don't know who to go to anymore.''

He pointed to his corduroy trousers and said, in the English he learned in Paterson, N.J., where his son is a police detective: ''These are my pants. And those are your pants. And you should not take my pants. This is mine, and that is yours! I never took anyone's land.''

According to the Peace Now figures, 44.3 percent of Givat Zeev is on private Palestinian land....

[I]n the Palestinian village of Burqa, Youssef Moussa Abdel Raziq Nabboud, 85, says that some of the land of Migron, and the land on which Israel built a road for settlers, belongs to him and his family, who once grew wheat and beans there. He said he had tax documents from the pre-1967 authorities.

''They have the power to put the settlement there and we can do nothing,'' he said. ''They have a fence around the settlement and dogs there.''

Mr. Nabboud went to the Israeli authorities with the mayor, Abu Maher, but they were told he needed an Israeli lawyer and surveyor. ''I have no money for that,'' he said. What began as an outpost taking 5 acres has now taken 125, the mayor said.

Mr. Nabboud wears a traditional head covering; his grandson, Khaled, 27, wears a Yankees cap. ''The land is my inheritance,'' he said. ''I feel sad I can't go there. And angry. The army protects them.''

The words of God on this matter deserve one last mention:

[22] You shall allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the aliens who reside among you and have begotten children among you. They shall be to you as native-born sons of Israel; with you they shall be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel.
[23] In whatever tribe the alien resides, there you shall assign him his inheritance, says the Lord GOD.

This morning's paper mentioned yet another atrocity Israel committed. Today it was the death of a Palestinian denied entry at the border so he could go to the hospital. Buried in a New York Times story about Holocaust benefits titled "Olmert Will Rework Aid Plan for Survivors of the Holocaust" we learn about Israel's own annihilation policies:

In Gaza, a Palestinian man seeking treatment in Israel for kidney failure died while waiting at the Erez border crossing. Israel had agreed to allow the man, Wael Abu Warda, 27, to travel to an Israeli hospital for treatment. He arrived Thursday night but was not allowed through; an Israeli Army spokeswoman said that Palestinian officials had withdrawn the request for him earlier on Thursday. He was told to return Friday morning. A second request was made on Friday and approved, the army said, but another patient was sent through instead. In the meantime, Mr. Warda died.

Image is from 2006 commemoration of the 1948 War that led to Arab expulsion and expropriation; it is in southern Bethlehem in protest of a wall being erected.

U.S. Taxpayers Paying $30.4 Billion for Bigoted Gated Community: Israel

According to the New York Times (7/28/07 A1), the U.S. will be ratcheting up its aid to Israel to $30.4 billion for military aid alone over the next ten years. Israel already tops the world in its per capita military spending. In fact, Israel's military spending is virtually off the chart, at $1,429.03 per person over 40% higher than the second country on the list, Singapore, which spends $1,009.94. Third on the list is the United States, at $935.64/person annually, a number that is stunning when one considers that, like Iceland, which spends nothing on its military, the U.S. has secure borders. Its only enemies are there as a result of the U.S. military occupation in the Middle East. If the U.S. had not put military bases in Saudi Arabia and supported Israel, Al Qaeda would not be targeting the U.S.

In other words, the high military budgets are creating conflicts for Israel and the U.S., not solving them. Think about the negotiated settlements Israel would have to contemplate without a virtually infinite military budget allowing them to assassinate and imprison Palestinians, and about the absence of a terrorist haven in Iraq if the U.S. had not overthrown the guy maintaining, if not law, at least order in that country, which posed no threat to the U.S. until the U.S. army invaded.

Challenging the idea of checkbook security is that despite (because!) of hundreds of billions spent in Iraq, the area is a disaster zone on numerous dimensions, from the hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed and maimed to the absence of running water. Even in Afghanistan, where the U.S. had a more legitimate claim to invade, military spending is not leading to anyone's safety. One reporter writes for the Boston Globe:

one thing that money can't buy these days in Afghanistan is security. Although the United States, which now has about 35,000 trained troops, members of the Taliban walk the streets openly in four provinces. Resurgent Taliban fighters recently executed a female prison warden and three men accused of being foreign spies.

Instead of giving $30.4 billion to the Israeli military, why not reduce their budget to zero until it becomes a civilized country? Israel shocks the rest of the world's conscience because they have done to Palestinians what the Nazis did to Jews in Europe under the Nuremberg laws: deny previously legal residents citizenship based strictly on criteria of heredity. I, who have spent very little time there (when I was visiting through a program designed to turn teenage Jews into Zionists--the result was my allergy to nationalism), am eligible for citizenship that has been denied to people who were born and raised there. It is appalling that the U.S. government, which claims to support civil rights and equality, would tolerate much less gild the military regime attached to this illiberal, repressive, and decidedly undemocratic country. The image is from last summer, July 28, 2006, when Israel launched a missile landing on an apartment building in Lebanon.