Last Monday my dear friend Hiba was arrested by IDF soldiers in the
middle of the night. I ask you to join us in our efforts to free Hiba
who is being held without charges. We would appreciate it if you would
act quickly as there is another hearing scheduled for Wednesday, 10
April 2013. We hope your letters will influence the hearing. We are also
worried about her health. The prison authorities have changed her
medication and she is having allergic reactions to the new medicine. I
have attached a letter with more info and contact info. Please, please,
please take time to write letters and to share this message widely with
everyone within your circle by email, Facebook, twitter, blogs, etc.
Your help is very greatly appreciated by her family and friends.

Warm regards,
Trisha

In October when the election was announced, there was near-universal agreement that it’s all going to be one big garbage time. Prime Minister Bibi will cake-walk it to a second consecutive – and third overall – term in office, and the Right-dominated Israeli status quo of the 2000s will continue. I tended to agree with this view, but with this caveat: in Israel, anyone who calls the election results 3 months in advance is a fool.

Then, from mid-November the campaign became more and more interesting by the week. By now, I must confess that for me it’s been one of the most entertaining campaigns to follow. As a non-state-emissary expatriate I cannot vote, and in the 3 previous elections during our stay here I was far less engaged. Maybe it’s Facebook, and the incessant stream of punch lines and visual memes from fellow Israeli progressives (check out the memes in my previous diary from December). Maybe.

But also, my eyes tell me that something is happening. And yet, the dominant pundit line (parroted all over the English-language news universe, too) has continued to be “garbage time, garbage time, the election’s in Bibi’s pocket, the Left’s finished, …. b-o-r-i-n-g ! …”

Not.

“King Bibi”? What a Joke.

First, the myth of “King Bibi” is once again (for the umpteenth time) proven baseless. Most Israelis really don’t like Bibi. The massive, unprecedented protests of summer 2011 (now, perhaps prematurely, seen almost as a “Midsummer’s Night Dream” with no sequel) were in a large part personally directed against him.

And now during the campaign itself, Bibi has become more and more vulnerable:

- He launched a bloody offensive on Gaza in mid-November, in a cynical transparent attempt to boost his electoral standing, but emerged with multiple eggs on his face.

- Immediately afterwards, Palestine was accepted to the UN as an observer state, with only Israel, the US and a handful of tiny US satellites voting no – an outcome that Bibi had spent immense diplomatic efforts over more than a year to prevent.

- On the “Bibi’s stable economy” front, the bad news just keep coming. The most recent: the budget shortfall in 2012 was $10B, or 4.2% of the GDP – far more than the government had previously reported. It is my contention, that Bibi’s main motive for calling elections a few months early despite a reasonably stable coalition, was the wish to get them over with – before the bad news and deeply unpopular austerity steps he’ll doubtlessly try to push through. Many Israelis begin to suspect that Israel’s surprising relative resilience during the global crisis, faring far better than most of its trading partners, might have been obtained using Lance Armstrong methods.

On top of this: nobody mentions that, but Bibi is a lousy campaigner. In 4 election campaigns in which Bibi led Likud, his party never emerged the largest. Even in 1996, the country’s first direct-personal elections to the Prime Minister in which he upset Peres 50.5%-49.5%, Likud came in second to Labor in Knesset seats (32 vs. 34, out of 120). Then, in 1999 Bibi was voted out, and Likud fell to 19 seats. He wouldn’t get his hand dirty sitting in opposition, so he “retired” right away… for a couple of years, that is. The next time he led Likud was 2006, and Likud came in fourth with only 12 seats. Last elections – 2009 – he managed to score a come-from-ahead upset loss to the center-right Kadima party (27 to 28), gaining the premiership only via dirty back-room maneuvers.

0 out of 4 is not a coincidence. Not when your side of the political map is the one dominating the nation. Interestingly, the only thing that’s sure about Tuesday’s elections, is that this time – finally – Bibi will emerge as the head of the candidate list that wins the most seats.

How did he manage to guarantee that? In another signature back-room deal, he agreed with his deputy Lieberman (whose personality-cult party “Israel Beitenu” has cornered the market on the “Russian” vote in the past two elections), to run in a single list on a 2:1 alternating ratio. He didn’t bother to ask his party members, who were less than thrilled. Bibi – always the hysterical Basil Fawlty type of decision-maker – just couldn’t bear the thought of failing for a 5th time. Mind you, this is not a party merger: in another one of the endless string of news embarrassments Bibi has produced for himself this campaign, it became known that the parties split their ways, each taking its own marbles, the day after the election, and Bibi will have to negotiate with Lieberman almost like with any other party.

Anyway, together these two lovely parties won 42 seats in 2009. Given that Kadima had disintegrated to smithereens – and it’s a good thing, because it was always more hoax than genuine party, and given that further left, Labor is still picking up its own pieces – there is nothing nearly close to that size around.

But since its announcement, the Likud-Beitenu amalgam has been on a steady gradual decline, losing 1-2 seats per week. It is now polling mostly in the low 30′s. Take out Lieberman’s cut, and come government-maintaining time, Bibi might have barely 20 seats to his name, with which to dominate a 120-seat chamber.

So the election’s real story is Bibi’s deep unpopularity, and the public’s general malaise.

Unfortunately, as I detailed in December, by refusing do draw a contrast with Bibi on any topic except the economy, Labor’s leader Yachimovich has missed a golden opportunity. We might have been talking now about a tightening race; instead, we’ll likely have a fragmented Knesset parliament with no “King” or “Queen”.

Yes, Bibi is still the overwhelming favorite to be Israel’s next Prime Minister. But the odds now seem even greater that he’ll be much weakened, and will face a far more energetic opposition, than in the current term.

It’s all academic, some say; ending the Occupation is not on the menu anyway so the elections are just a game of distraction. I beg to differ. One of the hallmarks of uphill struggles against oppressive systems, is that they seem dominant and even scornful of your feeble attempts – right until the last moment. Then some internal fault cracks open, and it’s over. See under Soviet Union. See under Apartheid. See under U.S. Slavery and segregation.

Similarly, an election whose results are humiliating for Bibi, and after which no one can set up a government that lasts very long, could be such a crack. And given the huge number of undecided or unsure – most polls quote 20%-30% – the crack might open with the bang of an election-night surprise.

Sticking to the Headline, Changing the Bylines?

Pundits don’t like admitting they were wrong. So as the “King Bibi” meme crumbled, Israeli analysts stayed with the bottom line (“garbage time” etc.), but have changed the highlight. They’ve been trying two, in fact: “2013 will be the Right’s biggest victory” and “2013 will be the Left’s worst defeat.”

Wrong and Wrong again. And again.

The Fallacy in “2012-2013 is the Year of the Right and Settlers”

The solid Right + Orthodox bloc of parties consistently emerges with a majority in all current polls. In some polls even 70+ seats (even though most of the recent polls are closer to the halfway mark of 60).

The lazy Israeli pundits compare this to the 65 seats the same bloc had supposedly won in 2009 – at the time, the most ever – and just “do the math” to conclude that 2013 might mark a new record. But they willfully ignore the nature of that 28-seat behemoth of a “party”, Kadima, that is not counted with the Right.

Kadima was founded late 2005 by Ariel Sharon, at the time Prime Minister and leader of Likud. Despite adding to its ranks a few Labor figureheads (most notoriously Shimon Peres), Likud politicians have always outnumbered everyone else there combined, at least 2:1. Sharon’s successors at Kadima’s lead – Olmert, Livni and now Mofaz – all came from Likud. So in 2006 and 2009, Likud pulled the amazing feat of running under 3 brands: “classic Likud”, the Lieberman cult catering to “Russians”, and a moderate-posing “Kadima” brand (headed in 2006 by Tzipi Livni) catering to center and even (thanks to Livni’s gender and campaign style) to left-of-center. And the niche marketing paid off: the 3 arms combined won 70 seats (in 2006 the trio won “only” 52, then poached a few more in post-election wheeling and dealing).

That was the Israeli Right’s electoral high-water mark. I hope that in my lifetime I won’t see anything near that. Seeing two arms of Likud competing for the #1 spot, with one of them suckering votes from left of center, was downright sickening.

By 2013, Kadima has disintegrated. Its two remnants, running under Livni and Mofaz respectively, will be lucky to gather more than 10 seats together; quite likely less. And the number of genuine right-wingers who will enter Knesset under both combined, will almost surely be less than 5. So compare barely 40-45 seats controlled by the various Likud factions, to 70 right now. And compare roughly 70 right-wingers expected in the next Knesset, with about 85 in the outgoing one. The Right has passed its undeserved zenith.

The only ascendant force on the Right this campaign has been the Orthodox-nationalist “Jewish Home” party, led by a fresh and charismatic face, Naftali Bennett (son to US immigrants who converted to Orthodoxy, the Jewish analogue of Evangelist Christians). He’s polling around 15 seats, and – together with Ayelet Shaked, the only secular on the list – successfully and effectively hide the remaining dozen-or-so unappealing or even hideous potential members of the next Knesset on their list (Here’s candidate #14 Gimpel, also an American, in a must-see clip designed to encourage the potential far-right nutcase willing to blow up the Dome of the Rock; Gimpel’s the one on the left). On the merits, Bennett seems like a sleazebag who could sell anything to anyone, or at least try (that apparently is how he sold his start-up company and became a millionaire), and whose true views are far less user-friendly than his slang-sprinkled chummy talk.

Admitted, Bennett is a lucky shot for the Right-Orthodox parties, who for years languished under leaders with the charisma and general-public appeal of a rusty nail. But his rise is grossly over-hyped. His main electoral feat so far has been to bring back home the Orthodox votes that had preferred Likud, Shas or some other non-Orthodox party. He seems to be drawing some disaffected Bibi/Lieberman voters as well. My analysis (and also some recent on-the-ground reports) indicate that this is more due to Bibi’s weakness than to Bennett’s supposed magic.

In particular, the idea that Bennett’s popularity (and Labor leader’s Yachimovich’s cowardice about settlements) is an indication that settlers are now the new leaders of Israeli society, with their role widely accepted and respected – an idea promoted even by progressive analysts such as the 972mag website – is downright ridiculous.

A coalition of economically progressive NGOs has just commissioned a poll, asking Israelis what they would rather cut to resolve the huge budget hole. Here’s what they found: (emphasis mine)

According to the survey, which was conducted by the Panels research institute among 600 people, 81.9% think settlements should be the first source of budget cuts, followed by infrastructure (50.5%) and defense (40%)….

According to the Panels institute, the majority of respondents who characterized themselves as right wing also supported diverting funds from the settlements to help balance the budget.

82%. Far and away, the first thing nearly all Israelis (including a majority of right-wingers) would cut, is the subsidies to the settlements. So much for these times being “The Year of the Settler”.

Last but not Least: The Fallacy of “The Left’s Worst Defeat”

Granted, the Israeli center-left isn’t looking great these elections and is probably not ready to topple Bibi outright (even though this has become a distinct possibility according to most recent polls). There’s been too much fragmentation for that to happen. But the wailing as if this is a “worst defeat” of any kind, are seriously 180 degrees off mark. In fact, following upon the heels of the 2011 protests, these elections mark the continuation of the Left’s painfully gradual revival.

If this was the Left’s worst year, then for sure the only Zionist party openly running as Left, would have suffered, no? That party would be Meretz, who in 2009 fell to its lowest-ever mark with 3 seats. To make matters “worse” for Meretz, during the November mini-war it had the temerity to oppose, breaking an inglorious tradition of previous leaderships mumbling and reluctantly supporting Israel’s various military adventures. Surely, if this is “the Left’s worst year”, voters would be disgusted with such rampant Leftism, and will do away with Meretz once and for all?

Yes. In all recent polls, Meretz doubles its current strength, sitting on 6-7 seats – and still moving up from poll to poll. This, despite having no new faces and no campaign surprises (except the unplanned one of opposing the war).

The party that’s stuck in the polls is Labor, whose leader vehemently denied being part of the Left or even center-left, and refused to make the obvious settlement-economic connection that 82% of Israelis apparently can. It is no coincidence that labor’s stuck. Voters want a contrast, they want an opposition they can rally behind – not someone running away from herself.

But even so, Labor’s polling around 16-18 seats vs. 13 it won in 2009. And the incoming cohort is far more progressive and reliable than the outgoing one, five of whom (headed by Ehud Barak) are still shamefully sitting in Bibi’s coalition.

So no. 2013 is not a “worst defeat” year for the Left.

The Left’s worst defeat came some 12 years ago, when then-Labor leader, then-Prime-Minister Ehud Barak emerged from a failed round of negotiations with his “No Partner” lie, confirming the stereotype of The Arab as an illegitimate lying crook, and simultaneously letting the military unleash massive deadly fire on the riots that had started spreading. This watershed moment has hurled Israel-Palestine into an abyss, 12+ lost years and counting. The Labor party, in particular, has yet to recover – and in classic Battered Wife Syndrome fashion it invited Barak to lead it into the 2009 elections again, only to be abused by him some more.

Israelis now know who Ehud Barak is: a serial liar, a personally corrupt, deeply unpopular man. Right now he still sits in the Security Ministry, but he’s so unpopular that he gave up running again, and his joke of a “party” (basically, just a theft of 5 seats from Labor) has disbanded itself and will not disgrace the next Knesset with its presence.

Too many Israelis have a hard time letting go of the “No Partner” lie, and can’t seem to connect the dots to what they’ve since learned about the man who invented it. So the road to a full comeback of the center-left camp, to a camp not ashamed to put ending the Occupation and a viable Palestinian state at the top of its policy agenda, is still a rocky uphill one.

But don’t mistake the direction. Regardless of whether Bibi will have the pieces to cobble together a semi-stable government, the next Knesset will have in it a sizable cohort of 35-40 fighting progressives, perhaps even more. Now, this is something Israel hasn’t seen in over a decade.

At last, the direction indicated by the Israeli voter seems to be up, rather than to dig further into the hole we’re in. Unfortunately, most politicians usually lag behind the public, but eventually they catch up. Here’s hoping it happens in Israel-Palestine sooner rather than later.

(crossposted and slightly expanded from Daily Kos)

But still, we can be thankful.

The last several days of the military operation, renamed “Operation Cast Ballot” by Israeli anti-war bloggers, each cost over 20 human lives. Just the 21-hour balk by the Israeli government, postponing the ceasefire from midnight Tuesday to 9 PM Wednesday, caused at least 24 additional Palestinian deaths for a cumulative total of 172, as well as the sixth Israeli death, an IDF reserve lieutenant.

As I extend my condolences to the dead and wish recovery to the wounded, I am grateful – because the list could have been far, far longer. This operation lasted 7 days and 6 hours, and was cut short before any ground invasion. For comparison, recall two recent Israeli military operations: the 2008-2009 “Cast Lead” lasted 23 days, included a limited Israeli ground invasion and killed over 1,400 people, mostly civilians. The 2006 Lebanon war lasted 33 days, included a full-scale Israeli invasion attempt, and killed many hundreds, possibly over a thousand.

These two wars took place during George W. Bush’s Presidency.

Make no mistake about it: the one man to whom we owe most thanks for this operation’s quick ending, for the prevention of a ground invasion, and for the unexpected diplomatic horizons opened in its aftermath, is President Barack Hussein Obama.

And he did it in classical Obama style.

You don’t have to agree; this is my own blog post after all. However, if you delve into my posting history you’ll see that I dig Israel-Palestine pretty well. And living in the US under the Obama presidency, I also know to recognize his M.O. when I see it in action.

(and yes, Secretary Clinton too deserves a serving of thanks for doing the legwork)

If you care to read my description of the typical Obama M.O., hop over to the original post at Daily Kos. Here I just continue to the Gaza operation.

Many of my dear friends in the anti-war community, couldn’t bear to hear the State Department up to Secretary Clinton repeating the Israeli government talking points on this operation. Yes, it was shameful. But I also tuned my ear carefully to what the President said, and he – while still including many of these talking points when speaking about Gaza, always took care to add that he doesn’t want civilian casualties and he doesn’t want a ground invasion.

Consider the Bibi-Obama relationship. Bibi’s political hacks have been hurling propaganda and dog-whistle-laced insults at Obama since 2008 when the latter was only a Presidential candidate. When both took power, Bibi repeatedly defied and fooled Obama’s limited attempts to promote some sort of peace process. He often did it in a humiliating manner, earning many points with his right-wing Israeli base. Come 2012, Bibi injected himself into the US campaign to an unprecedented level, actively advocating for Romney.

Now imagine what would have happened, if the White House and State Department started issuing direct criticisms and ultimatums, telling Israel to stop its reckless Gaza operation. Bibi, himself in the midst of election campaign now (of which, make no mistake, the operation was part and parcel), has already banked on fanning the flames of nationalism. He would love Obama to try and chastise him, to give him the chance to defy Obama again. An open Obama-Bibi rift on the operation would have also caused instant mutiny among Jewish Democratic Senators and House members.

Instead, all Bibi got was a hug.

This is not a coincidence: embracing some of your adversary’s talking points is a classic Obama move. Sometimes it backfires. During this operation, it was spot-on. It denied Bibi the opportunity to defy him.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the phones were working. In fact, Obama took care to tell the world that he’s talking with Bibi on a daily basis. I don’t think these talks included threats – again, that’s not the Obama style – but there was doubtlessly a gradual narrowing of Bibi’s playing field. It became even narrower when Obama sent Hillary over to do shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Cairo, and when it became clear she’s not likely to leave without a deal.

———————————————–

I’m not saying it is all Obama and only Obama. There were other key factors at play in preventing an Israeli ground invasion:

The Arab Spring. As flustered Israeli officials leaked after their government’s initial ceasefire balk, this is not Mubarak anymore. Hamas is originally an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which is now in power in Egypt and owes the US far less than Mubarak ever did. Egypt and other Arab nations showed far greater involvement from day one. The parade of Arab officials in and out of Gaza helped keep Israeli actions in check, relatively speaking.

The preparedness of Hamas. Just as Obama has an M.O., so does Israel’s military. One step on their checklist seems to be “Always underestimate your opponent”. They really believed that the initial shock and awe in assassinating Jabari and the accompanying airstrikes, will throw Hamas off balance, and that within a couple of days of such strikes the organization will be in shambles. Didn’t happen. Besides increasing the operation’s price tag, this preparedness might have raised Israeli suspicions that Hamas might have an effective and intact game plan for ground invasion defense.

The opposition inside Israel. Over the past 12 years, the Israeli public has reliably – and for anti-war gadflies like myself, depressingly – always fallen in line behind all of its leaders’ military adventures great and small. So Bibarak might not have even considered the option of internal resistance. The vast majority of Israel’s Jews supported the operation. But a significant minority opposed, and was not willing to shut up about it. Most notably, Israel’s progressive Zionist party Meretz, led by the brave MK Zehava Gal-On, spoke out against the operation in general and a ground invasion in particular, from day one. Progressives also flooded social media with texts, posts, tweets and memes resisting – and perhaps even more effectively, mocking – the ill-conceived operation. The last time a similar level of resistance was seen during military action was in the 1980′s – during the First Lebanon war and then again during the First Intifada. In both cases, once the shit hit the fan (militarily speaking), the resisting minority was quickly joined by half the nation.

Finally, The Goldstone Effect. Many on the Left put this one front and center. What they mean is, that due to the world public-opinion backlash to Cast Lead, with the Goldstone report as its centerpiece, the Israeli government and IDF are a bit more careful and choose their targets less indiscriminately. I’m sorry, I don’t see much of that. The Palestinian casualty list already has at least 56 positively-identified women, children, elderly and journalists. And one can sadly assume that quite a few of the remaining victims were not combatants by any stretch of reality. Furthermore, the rhetoric coming out of Israeli cabinet ministers and other senior figures was, if anything, even more rabid than during Cast Lead. Finally, we should not forget that Goldstone himself was ostracized and brought to his knees in a humiliating recantation, while no Israeli official or officer has been brought to justice over Cast Lead. Not exactly a deterrent in my books.

———————–

But even with the Arab Spring, even with Hamas stronger than expected and internal resistance stronger than expected, even assuming the existence of some “Goldstone Effect”, the IDF was dominant enough militarily and Bibarak dominant enough politically to carry out the plan as probably intended: air-war shock and awe, call up reserves, and invade 5 days or so after the beginning. Moreover, the massive and criminal Hamas response, namely launching missiles far and wide into civilian Israeli cities and killing 3 civilians on the first day, created a sense of urgency and panic in the Israeli public, which served as pressure on the government to escalate and finish the enemy off. This was a pressure that Bibarak probably anticipated and counted on to push them forward.

Now operationally, head-on from the southeast, Downtown Gaza City is only 4km from the border. Coming along the coast from the northeast, it is 6km over mostly open space. With the huge 75,000 reservist call-up (the IDF later reported it called up “only” 58,000), the IDF had more than enough brute force to think they can try and strike a beeline to downtown from both directions (while blocking the escape route on the southwest), reach the place where Hamas PM Haniyyeh and other political leaders sit, and physically pluck them from there for a humiliating check-mate. They didn’t need to conquer and occupy the entire Strip, or even all of Gaza City. This symbolic decapitation stunt would have sufficed.

The Israeli rhetoric during the first couple of days gave all signs that this was more-or-less the plan. One senior minister talked about “reformatting Gaza”. Another about “returning it to the Middle Ages.” Everyone from the top onwards said it is about time to “finish Hamas for good.” Other people who definitely have access to inside information – Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad comes to mind – used even more disgusting, eliminationist-genocidal rhetoric. And they were very confident about it.

Israel’s leaders also thought they had a fighting chance to pull this stunt off without major losses. Sure, it was a gamble and the odds were decreasing by the day. But this entire operation was one huge gamble, so why not carry it to the end? Also considering this was launched during an election campaign, the humiliation of stopping short becomes an even greater incentive to up the ante and complete the gamble (and indeed, right now Bibi is facing an opinion backlash from the right and even parts of the center for having come out “the wimp”).

As late as Tuesday, even as the Egyptian mediators were reporting that a ceasefire is near, the Israeli air force dropped thousands of leaflets on Gaza’s outlying neighborhoods – precisely along the routes I described above. The leaflets told the residents – some 150,000 of them – to leave their homes and concentrate in a prescribed area in downtown Gaza.

Didn’t happen. Instead of ground invasion, we got a ceasefire. And Obama more than anyone else is the man who stopped it. There is simply no other logical explanation. Denying this explanation, in my view, is like refusing to revise the theory of matter after the Rutherford Experiment. In that experiment, alpha particles shot at a thin gold leaf bounced almost straight back from the leaf. This meant there was something very massive inside the leaf stopping them, marking the birth of the theory of atomic nuclei.

Like in that experiment, there is simply no force other than the US Presidency, that could have so quickly and so thoroughly stopped Bibarak’s plan from going forward. I listed all the other options above, I acknowledge their contribution – but they just don’t add up.

————————–

Now, here’s the sweetest part. In their ceasefire press conference, according to some observers Bibarak and Lieberman, even as they tried to declare victory, looked more like “three sixth-graders called down to the Principal’s Office, counting the minutes until the humiliation was over.” And they had to thank the very people who just ran all over them!

First, Egyptian President Morsi. Last year on the Knesset podium, Bibi said of the Arab Spring that it moves the Arab world “not forward, but backward”. That his own neocon forecast that the Arab Spring would turn into an “Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli and anti-democratic wave” turned out to be true. Now Bibi had to thank Morsi personally and describe him as a regional leader.

But that’s nothing compared to his words to President Obama, expressed repeatedly both in the presser and on Bibi’s Facebook page: (translation mine)

I wish to extend a special thanks to President Barack Obama for his unqualified support for Israel’s operation, his support for Israel’s right to defend itself, and his support for the “Iron Dome” missile-defense system.

To quote Bubbanomics: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That’s the Obama revenge. It is served cold, with no anger, and in style.

Yes, Obama as the sitting US President is complicit in the continuation of Israel’s Occupation regime over the Palestinians and in particular in the decades-long imprisonment of Gaza. Like so many other problems, he inherited these problems in an especially bad shape (remember, Cast Lead took place during Bush’s lame-duck period and ended days before Obama’s inauguration).

Obama still needs to fix that. But this week, he was the man who could stop the slaughter of hundreds of people, maybe even thousands, and he stepped up and did it. He also laid down, for the first time in many years, a practical workable framework for improving the life of Gazans. This gives me more hope for the coming 4 years.

Thank you, President. And a Happy Thanksgiving.

Thursday, morning, however, found them going to my dad-in-law’s doctor’s appointment in Ashkelon – the largest town in the Strip’s vicinity, and one of the missile launchers’ favorite targets. The appointment was disrupted four times by missile alerts. My father-in-law, one of the kindest, most inspiring men I have ever known, is not mobile enough anymore to evacuate so rapidly (I think it’s 30 seconds in Ashkelon, maybe 15). But the building itself wasn’t hit, and what’s more – perhaps for the first time, my dad-in-law’s deteriorating lucidity worked in his favor: he didn’t stress out, just wondered why everyone keeps disappearing and leaving him with the security guy.

I don’t think my wife asked her mom about her opinions on the recent bloody flare-up. Frankly, there’s hardly a need to ask: since Fall 2000, she – one of the strongest, most impressive women I have ever known, and never formally a right-winger – has become as patriotistic as they come. Or rather, as patriotistic as most Israeli Jews have become. It is really hard to resist the right-wing brainwash there, or even to *notice* that you are being brainwashed. It is even harder to resist the social pressure that brands you as “deluded” or even “traitor” if you dare express dissent. Just visualize being in the same mental state most Americans have been in right after 9/11, for 12 straight years and counting.

But we, sitting outside the present Israeli consensus both physically and mentally, remember other times, and disturbing chains of events.

Until 2002 we lived not far from my in-laws, in Nehora which is even a bit closer to the Strip. Compared with other parts of the country, that southwest corner of Israel was fairly quiet at the time. The only disturbance was the sound of helicopters flying overhead en route to pounding the poor residents of Gaza. We just happened to be below the route.

Then in July 2002, our Air Force liquidated Hamas military chief Saleh Shehade, using a gentle one-ton bomb on a Gaza apartment building that killed 14 other human beings. The Air Force chief infamously said about the liquidation and its human toll, “If I’d flown that plane myself, all I’d feel was a little tug on the wing as the bomb drops.” He was rapidly promoted to IDF Deputy Chief of Staff, then to Chief of Staff. In that role, he engineered the 2006 Lebanon War – a Shock and Awe display designed to gently, again, nudge Lebanese into dismantling Hizbullah. And his gemful mouth then said, “We will turn Lebanon back 20 years”. Well he tried – bombed the crap out of the Beirut Airport, bombed a power plant leaking oil into the Mediterranean and causing immense damage to natural beaches, and killing some 1000-odd people. Then, the brave, brave Chief of Staff was disgraced twice: once by not winning the war, and once by the discovery that on the morning of the war, just before it was launched, he had found the time to call his broker and tell him to sell.

But enough with General (retired) Halutz. Back to Hamas military chief, and that 2002 one-ton assassination. They told us it had to be done: not only did Shehade have blood on his hands, but the killing dealt a blow to several ongoing attack plans and literally saved many lives. The Troubadour reminded us yesterday, that his wife was injured in a Jerusalem bombing that was a direct revenge to Shehade’s killing. And despite all prognostications by Israel’s pundits and ass-licking military-affairs journalists, Hamas maintained its strength, especially around the Gaza Strip. Rockets on nearby Sderot gradually turned from a rare event to a common occurrence. Attacks on military and settlements inside Gaza gradually rendered the maintenance of both untenable.

So in March 2004, the IDF assassinated the political leader of Hamas, the aging wheelchair-bound Ahmed Yassin. And a few weeks later we also killed his successor Abd El-Aziz El-Rantissi. Hamas in Gaza was definitely dealt a mortal blow. So much so, that only a couple of months later the IDF completely lost control of the situation, and got embroiled in bloody incursion centered on Rafah. The following year Hamas beat the crap out of Fatah in the Palestinian municipal elections, and was in Gaza in full force, to declare ownership on the victory when the IDF and settlers finally left the Strip’s interior. In January 2006 Hamas won the parliamentary elections, and the rest is a more widely known, and very, very, *very* sad history.

All the while, Israel’s pundits and ass-licking millitary-affairs journalists keep telling us, after every assassination and bloody military operation, how Hamas is getting weaker. How the Palestinians are now learning their lesson. In reality, of course, Hamas has turned from nearly-irrelevant status in summer 2000, just before Prime Minister Barak decided that “Arafat is not a partner for peace” and chose the Military Option instead – to a movement who in 2012 controls Gaza Strip’s interior, plays on the regional and international stage, and is able to launch missiles from the Strip to Tel Aviv. (Update: AND JERUSALEM (1st time since 1970)

Anyone who claims that assassinating Hamas leaders is a reasonable strategy, belongs not in the reality-based community but on Planet Unskewed Polls. And anyone daring to claim that there was really no choice, right now, to do anything else except liquidate Hamas’ military chief…. I seriously have no words to describe such a claim. Such a claim is beyond craven, beyond stupid, it is Dick Morris ridiculous.

Not only has the Hamas-leader-assassination strategy backfired spectacularly; its basic premise is outlandishly stupid. Hamas is a broad-based movement, with political, military, social and other branches. The Palestinian struggle’s dynamics rarely revolve around one person. Not even Arafat. As long as Hamas is large enough and has a military wing, killing its head is little more than a temper tantrum or a PR stunt.

And trash talk about “wiping out Hamas” is eliminationist and genocidal. If Israel wants to weaken Hamas or turn it away from terror, the best way is to undercut Hamas’ cynical and corrupt strategy of gaining power through violence – by instead, granting respect and tangible victories to the nonviolent elements of Palestinian society. Of course, anyone who even briefly follows Occupation news knows that Israel does the exact opposite. As The Troubadour wrote so cogently yesterday, nothing terrifies Israel’s powers-that-be more than a nonviolent, determined, principled and unified Palestinian uprising. Therefore, they quash and frustrate nonviolent protest, treat moderate leaders like worthless lackeys, and bait the militant movements in order to keep them popular, dominant and hungry for revenge.

And this, without mentioning the elephant in the room: the people of Gaza, how they got there and what Israel had done to them over the years. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis lists the Strip among the world’s 10 most populous slums. Its origins are not so different: just like Gaza, many of these slums are the result of war and displacement. Gaza is singled out because it is the victim of a nation who’s the darling of Western elites, a nation that has gotten so used to getting a free pass, it is insulted at the very idea of paying the price for anything. Instead, the West has chosen to villify and demonize all Gazans, men women and children, and to condemn them to live not only in a slum, but in the world’s largest de-facto open air prison slum.

Does anyone in the West really think they have the moral authority to wag a finger at Gaza’s residents? They don’t need hypocritical Western politicians and pundits to tell them lobbing missiles at other people is bad. They know it’s bad. But they also know that the rest of the world is perfectly sweet and easy with dishing them far-worse-than-bad, every day, every month, every year, for decade after decade.

Have you ever envisioned what it is to live in a small confined region, not knowing how you’ll feed your family, not knowing whether your family will survive the next air bombing or shelling, having enemy drones, helicopters and jets zoom overhead at all times of days and nights without any defense against them – no defense at all? And nowhere to go. Day after day, year after year, decade after decade. And with all that, the Beautiful People of the world look at you and see a monster, a primitive, a blood-thirsty menace that should be placed in this situation forever, you, your children, your grandchildren. With no end in sight. Have you really imagined that?

The Israelis around Gaza are now traumatized too. It is sad. It is a ripple effect of what we have inflicted on the people inside.

If you claim to care about Israel-Palestine but have not yet lifted a finger to end the travesty that is Gaza’s forced imprisonment and impoverishment, then the blood of the people dying right now in Israel-Palestine is on your hands too.

———————————-

And I haven’t even mentioned the Glorious Leaders who are spearheading this cynical burst of bloodshed. Prime Minister Bibi was here just recently, trying to meddle in the US election campaign and making an ass out of himself in front of the entire world. Bibi is a combination of corrupt, douchebag, racist and granny-robbing prick that even the 2012 GOP has not produced the likes of. And he is joined by people even worse than him – Barak and Lieberman. People with no worldview except their own self-aggrandizement, methods and consequences be damned.

A needless round of mutual killing, in order to manipulate public opinion for January’s Israeli elections, is so not beneath these criminals.

Don’t mistake the cowered show of “unity” in Israel once the guns blaze, with genuine support. The Israeli public and its center-left politicians have internalized the Battered Wife Syndrome. And after every new round of war and violence, our politicians emerge more corrupt, more brazen than before. I’m not talking just “Wag the Dog” corrupt. I’m talking about steal-money corrupt. Each of them – Bibi, Barak, Lieberman, Olmert, the comatose Sharon, and countless others – has a personal portfolio of corruption scandals. Like the Mob, they largely escape justice through a legion of sleazy millionaire lawyers, webs of criminal loyalty, and fear.

Or maybe you suspect the politicians but still trust the generals, respecting the uniform they wear. Silly, these are the same people! Nowadays, IDF top brass get embroiled in corruption and abuse scandals even before they make the convenient hop from the general’s office to the Israeli cabinet or the big-corporation boardrooms. Gen. Halutz above is a typical example. Beside the fact that after 40 years of calling the shots wrong and failing to see any writing on any wall, it is about time to doubt the judgment of Israel’s security-state apparatus

If you are liberal or progressive, and you believe these politicians and generals, that Israel’s best interest has demanded the liquidation of Hamas’ military chief, right now – then we are in serious trouble.

——————————————–

What many American progressive-liberals who do get it, are still not aware of, is that your voice means a ton. Especially now.

Unlike previous operations, this time there are visible cracks in the faux wall of Israeli unity. For the first time in some 30 years, one Israeli Zionist party, Meretz, is dissenting from the start. The language its leaders are using are a bit more nuanced than what I wrote here, but still strong enough. Its leader MK Zehava Gal-On called Bibi and Barak pyromaniacs. Bingo. Quite a few mainstream journalists have expressed skepticism at the timing and motives, and publishing disturbing information (h/t heathlander).

Whether these rays of dissent turn into a full blaze, or are swallowed by jingoistic darkness, depends to a large degree on what Israelis hear from the West and especially America.

So please let President Obama know how you feel, both online and by phone, (202)456-1111.

Contact your local elected officials. Write about it in the local press. In blogs. Tweet about it, share it on Facebooks (Israelis love these social media).

Contact Israeli embassies and consulates and let them have an earful.

Join a local demonstration or action group organized by Jewish Voice for Peace.

It does matter. Any day by which we shorten this murderous mad-dog game, literally saves lives.

If you have other links or action ideas, please post them in the comments.

Thank you.

(crossposted from Daily Kos)

In other words, last week was the perfect week in Israel for a bad news dump.

Israel’s iconic CEO Shai Agassi has been fired from his position at the electric car company Better Place. He will be replaced by Evan Thornley, the current CEO of Better Place Australia.

…Agassi was fired amid massive financial losses, according to Haaretz headlines this morning. …We reported earlier this year that Better Place was bleeding capital: no surprise given its intense PR and marketing outreach to the global public. So could this be the reason for the Agassi let-go? The company isn’t opening up.

After launching in Israel a couple of months ago the public hasn’t caught on to the appeal of driving fully electric cars with switchable batteries and only about 500 cars in Israel have been sold, out of Better Place’s 100,000 car promise to Renault – the manufacturer of the electric EV. For the last couple of years celebrities and the public were happy for photo-ops test driving the cars, but they are less enthusiastic about buying them, given the high price and controlled rates at the charge stations.

In the Israeli scene, Agassi’s dismissal is equivalent to Apple’s dumping of Steve Jobs. True, Agassi ain’t no Jobs and Better Place ain’t no Apple, but they sure like to pretend they are.

So… some readers might be wondering: who the heck are Better Place?

My (limited) Better Place Connection

As its English Wikipedia entry says, Better Place (abbreviated BP, how fitting) makes

Subscription-based electric car charging points and battery-switching stations.

I know this description very well, because I put it in there a few months ago. Before that, the entry (which is still >90% promotional BP material) claimed that the company’s product is

Electric cars

which is a classic Romney-esque, or, if you will, Agassi-esque lie. Because you see, the sad truth is that more than anything else, BP is in the PR business.

I have multiple personal interests in the BP story, although none of them is of the conflict-of-interest type. Here they are:

1. As a recent proud Nissan Leaf owner and evolving EV/PHEV advocate, I have an interest in the flourishing of EV technology, and see the technological concept at BP’s core as worthy of consideration.

2. Some 4 years ago when I first heard of BP and read the Agassi gospel, it seemed very convincing, and I was in fact in the process of looking for a job that would repatriate us to Israel. I thought BP could use an applied statistician or operations-research type, to help develop stuff like station-deployment strategy. So I submitted my CV and also inquired via informal channels, but never heard back from them, so it never really became serious – and that’s ok. But the affair has kindled my interest in this peculiar company; an interest that was re-awakened once we ourselves got into the EV world.

3. This story showcases some of the do’s and don’ts (mostly don’ts) of trying to introduce EVs to the general public and to an un-initiated market.

4. Even more so, it highlights much of what is wrong with 21st Century Israeli mentality, in a setting that is less of an emotional minefield than the standard Israel-Palestine topics – but which nonetheless can help shed light upon the dynamics of those other problems as well.

5. Speaking of which, I am also keenly aware of the deliberate role that BP has tried to play in the repulsive “Brand Israel” campaign.

Shai Agassi: The Man, The Vision, The Insufferable Egomania

In the Israeli hi-tech community (in which I have multiple siblings, relatives, friends and some direct personal history) there is tremendous admiration for Shai Agassi. I am not familiar with all the reasons, but the fact is that at a young age, he became the VP of international software giant SAP. A completely unrelated anecdote: I am just now having my first experience with an SAP software product (its “Business Objects”), and it SUCKS – to put it mildly

Agassi’s meteoric rise was noticed by Israel’s eternal Elder Statesman, Shimon Peres, who invited him one of those charming 0.1%-er events, some World Young Leaders Forum in Davos in 2005. There, when these Atlases were asked to do Humanity a favor and solve its problems rather than just make tons of money for themselves – Agassi came up with the idea of turning EVs into A Car for Everyone, as the most effective thing he could do to “make the world a Better Place”. Get it? Better Place. Clever, huh?

To my knowledge, till that point Agassi had zero interest or experience in green technology. Being a quick learner, he did some research and decided that currently the main obstacles to universal acceptance of EVs are price and range anxiety. And he came up with an innovative solution: turn EVs into switchable-battery cars – and develop a business model in which the consumer owns the car, but rents – or rather subscribes – to receive a full electricity service (including both the batteries and the charging) from a single provider. This model, he argued, will drive the cost of ownership down, while the switchable battery will make the EV’s range problem all but disappear.

Elegant idea. It is also a classic piece of Israeli out-of-the-box thinking: come into a new field, see something no one else does, then squeeze it to the max. Within a short while, and with Establishment backing, Agassi established BP and raised hundreds of millions without even needing to go public. He was also a lead character in the “Brand Israel” propaganda book Start-Up Nation (first author: Dan Senor, currently employed as Romney’s foreign-policy advisor). In 2008-9, on practically every week you could read about Agassi in some major US magazine or hear him over the mainstream media, explaining how lucky the world is to have him around.

The problem is that Agassi never intended to set up an operation to make electric cars, or even to develop those mission-critical switchable batteries. Rather, like Microsoft, he preferred to position BP away from the sweaty, painful job of making the hardware, and right on the customer interface where he could cash in on consumer dependence, and brand the BP logo upon their EV experience. He also planned to retain the rights to sell the vehicles on behalf of manufacturers (despite openly claiming to have no interest in car sales).

In other words, BP is little more than a hyper-glorified EV dealership network.

Did I mention that Israel has no car-making industry? Another old Israeli joke: we can make the world’s best tank, but we can’t make a decent car to save our own lives. Also even though some Israeli companies have done EV-battery R&D, I don’t think any are directly involved in the making of present-generation EV batteries.

You know what, it’s ok to premise your business model upon service and upon that elusive “user experience”. But what is not ok, is that from the get-go Agassi regarded car manufacturers with open disdain. In his numerous interviews he conveyed that EV makers are lazy bums. If they weren’t so slow, he and his magnificent vision would have saved Humanity long ago. He was also, and still remains, dismissive of any other EV/PHEV/Hybrid concept besides his own. In particular he has always ridiculed the Prius. Even now, when everyone agrees the Prius is an unqalified success, all Agassi has to say is point out that “they only have 2% of the world car market, so what’s their impact anyway?”

See, instead of using the fact that the world’s leading family-car manufacturer has taken an entire decade and $10 billion in R&D money to push a technology more consumer-friendly than the EV into the mainstream – as a lesson about the enormity of the task at hand;

Instead of adopting some humility, some respect for car makers upon whose success his company completely depends, and a highly collaborative attitude – Agassi has chosen to be the insufferable prick who snorts at everyone else.

Of course, those familiar with Israeli culture will immediately recognize this behavior as our salient national trait – stronger even than our “out-of-the-box” glory. This infinite hubris is especially typical of the post-1967 macho Israeli male. We come across as arrogant even when we don’t intend to be (believe me, living in Seattle I have learned this the hard way). And when we do intend to show how great we are, like Agassi (or like Prime Minister Bibi on the UN podium) – we might as well walk with a T-shirt saying

I’m Israeli. I’m Perfect, and everyone who doesn’t worship me is an Idiot.

(corollary: those who do worship me are also idiots, but they are very useful)

So it is not surprising that BP only managed to convince one EV manufacturer to try switchable batteries, and that too with only a single model. The maker is Renault of France. On the plus side, it is essentially merged with Nissan, maker of the fabulous Leaf. So the basic tech know-how is there. But the Renault brand is far weaker than Nissan, because of worse reliability history. We know – our first car was an aging Renault 11, that had cost us dearly in repairs and breakdowns.

Yet, BP had the temerity to symbolically “order” in advance (a “non-binding order”, whatever that means) 100,000 Renault Fluence EVs. For reference: to this day, 2 years after the worldwide launch, Nissan has sold only 38,000 Leafs.

Israel: The Curious Pilot Site

Rather than go for major world markets where EVs and other green vehicles are gaining acceptance – the US West Coast, Europe’s larger nations or Japan – Agassi opted for trying the Better Place concept in small countries: Israel and Denmark, but predominantly Israel. While choosing to start at home might seem natural, Israeli companies with global aspirations rarely target, or even bother to regard the Israeli market. And when it comes to EVs, switchable-battery or otherwise, Israel might have been one of the last choices on the list.

The Israeli market was completely un-initiated on multiple levels. Since the 1980′s Israeli economy and society fell head-over-heels into low-information consumerism. Generally speaking, that is not a mindset conducive to jumping on the EV bandwagon. Also, while the world has been paying increasing attention to global warming since the start of this century, Israelis were busy trying to figure out why they are still stuck in a dirty war of attrition with Palestinians – and fell back upon the most emotionally satisfying (and low-information) explanation, namely “Clash of Civilizations for Dummies: We Good, Them Bad”. Then, when word of climate change reached Israel, my compatriots looked around and saw that their most staunch allies in this War on Terra cause, also happen to be adamant global-warming deniers. So to this day, the Israeli mainstream has remained skeptic and even derisive of global warming information and activism. This includes even a sizable chunk of progressives, who at the very best think this is a “boutique” issue for people who don’t have other more serious problems.

And those Israelis genuinely concerned about the country’s CO2 footprint, surely know that Israel’s electricity sources are 99.6% fossil – mostly coal and gas. So if one looks for a green-tech solution, then the first order of business is to start harvesting Israel’s immense solar potential – and given its limited area and high rate of urbanicity, this means massive campaigns for rooftop solar. Conversion to EVs should be, at best, a secondary effort, especially an experimental EV project starting from scratch. Even on that front, far more can be accomplished far more quickly by more aggressively encouraging hybrids and PHEVs.

But Agassi cooked up solutions to these marketing challenges as well. On a personal marketing level, he thought that just like Steve Jobs succeeded in convincing an entire generation that its life is worthless if it doesn’t buy the latest Apple entertainment gadget, Agassi decided he’ll convince the common Israeli that EVs are The New Cool. And that they are the easiest thing in the world. The service contract has been packaged and presented as following the cellphone-service paradigm (Israelis are among the world’s most devoted to cellphones and smartphones). On the collective level, the sales pitch in Israel was “stopping the world’s dependence on [Arab] Oil”. No mention of global warming.

In 2010 BP launched a huge visitor center set inside a decommissioned oil mega-tank on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. A few weeks later, as we were in Israel for our son’s Bar Mitzva, we visited there. My dad, a hard-core BP enthusiast, ordered our visit spots in advance. During the visit, the sales pitch was exactly as I described. Lots of scary images of “unstable regimes” controlling oil, a bit about smog-inducing tailpipe emission, not a word about CO2 or global warming. The Cool part, besides a lot of happy talk during the presentation, included a drive in a Renault EV (at that time not yet the Fluence, but converted gas cars) for any grownup who so desired. As a souvenir from that visit, my son still happily sports BP stickers on his bedroom door.

I chatted a bit with the visitor-center guides, and was bemused to learn that they are not BP employees at all. The entire visitor center and everything conveyed in it is run by an entity completely separate from BP’s real operations. I don’t know how common this is – maybe it’s par for the course for established companies – but IMHO for a start-up company with an experimental vision this is not a good sign.

The Real Reason for Choosing Israel

Of course, Agassi is not a complete chump. He wasn’t banking on winning over the Israeli consumers one by one. His plan was (and still is) to steamroll over them.

As I mentioned, this has been a heavily Establishment-backed enterprise. Agassi appointed the outgoing IDF deputy-chief-of-staff (another EV expert, I presume) as CEO of BP-Israel. His biggest investor (36%) is the Israel Corp: as its website proudly boasts, this multi-industry behemoth is Israel’s largest holding company. It derives most of its revenue from an exclusive license to mine the Dead Sea’s potash and other minerals, which it has been doing with reckless abandon to the point that the entire Dead Sea basin is experiencing a multi-dimensional environmental disaster. It has also, according to various reports, not paid up its royalties to the state for this privilege.

Not exactly the natural partner for a clean-tech venture – unless you want to help them do a bit of Greenwashing, that is. But it is a great partner, if you want to create a new national monopoly.

In stark contrast to the promotional crap by Senor et al. (as also evidenced by what Romney said during his disastrous Israel visit), Israel’s economy is not characterized by “freedom and individual initiative” or anything of the sort. Rather, most key economic activities are dominated by monopolies or oligopolies, with the inevitable cronyism and corruption. In that respect, the main difference between the 1950′s and 1960′s and nowadays, is that socialist-type monopolies have been replaced by private monopolies, quite often simply by privatizing the old ones and selling them at dirt-cheap prices to connected cronies. Even “New Economy” markets that only came into being recently, such as cable TV, are dominated by a monopoly – backed by government rules and regulations enacted supposedly “to protect consumers”, but actually to achieve the opposite. Most of Israel’s economic activity is said to be controlled by 19 families. One of these families controls the Israel Corp.

Using his acquired politico-economic clout, Agassi went to the government (at that point, completely un-initiated about EVs) and told it that tons of EVs are coming on our shore, and regulations must be crafted to prevent chaos. First, consumers should be forbidden from trickle-charging from their home plugs, because that might saturate the grid. Second, the installation of charging stations should be allowed only to professional, accountable companies such as…, say, that company called Better Place.

The government gave Agassi what he wanted to the letter, not anticipating the PR backlash. In late 2010, Haaretz newspaper leaked the most egregious regulation:

All electric cars imported into Israel will contain a mechanism that will block them from being charged anywhere but at charging stations. Only companies that offer charging stations and a control center will be permitted to provide electricity for the cars.

According to another 2010 Haaretz story, BP employees actually sat on the Israeli Standards Institute committee writing the regulations.

The news spread fast through the international media. To stem the tide, the government published a “policy principles document” in Hebrew and English (pdf). Out of literally hundreds of documents on the Energy Ministry’s Hebrew website, only 5 have been translated to English, and this is one of them. There is a lot of happy-talk and pretty pics in this strange leaflet, which bears no date stamp, document number or signature of authorizing official. We are assured that the Ministry is *for* competition and *for* the little guy. Anyone can get a certified electrician to install a charging station at her/his home. No need to be hooked to a provider, whatsoever. Our friend the Israeli government just wants to keep everyone safe.

The document not translated, is of course the actual regulations (Hebrew, pdf). Here are some selected excerpts from this document dated 5772-2012 and authorized by Engineer Igor Stefansky, head of Electricity Affairs:

Definitions

…”Charging System” – a system designated for EV charging, that includes a Charging Station, a plug, a socket, cables and anti-electrocution deviced;

…”Charging Station” – a designated electrical instrument, used solely for EV charging.

Electric Vehicle Charging

2. (a) EV charging will be carried out only via a Charging Station.

Later, the document indicates that only one type of plug/socket is allowed (presumably, the Level 2 type, called “Type 2″ in English in the document). So… no trickle-charge from the home socket. Out the door goes the viability of current-generation plug-in hybrids in Israel – and with it the danger of a simpler range-extended EV competition to BP’s monopoly, such as the Volt or the plug-in Prius.

To their credit, these regulations unlike the original 2010 version do allow one to go semi-DYI and get one’s own electrician to install an L2 station. However, there is a long list or specifications, and you must have an electrician inspect it once a year. Rest assured, if you are a stand-alone customer you will stick out like a sore thumb, and the government inspectors *will* visit your home, possibly unannounced, to protect the precious grid from piracy. Hooray for the Little Guy.

But the regulations only set the playing field for the real gambit. After all, monopoly or no monopoly, the Israeli consumer still has to want an EV in the first place, right?

Wrong. Roughly half of Israel’s car market is composed of employers leasing cars as benefit for their employees. Due to various tax loopholes, and to the high cost of cars in Israel, this is a lucrative deal for both sides, and in the middle-class to upper-middle-class professions (e.g. hi-tech) it has become a standard.

Therefore, all Agassi needs to do is convince enough companies (or have the Israel Corp. CEOs convince their CEOs) to try on his EVs and force them upon their employees.

2012: The Great NoseDive

One of the things Agassi did not foresee, is that in summer 2011 the slumbering consumerist Israeli will wake up and start speaking out her hatred of the crony-capitalist system choking her country. The precursor to the unprecedented wave of public protests that engulfed the country, was a campaign organized via Facebook to boycott Tnuva cottage cheese. Tnuva was a socialist-cooperative dairy monopoly privatized in 2008. In a classic 1-2 punch, shortly after the privatization the government “by chance” deregulated basic dairy products, and immediately the price of many products, most conspicuously cottage cheese, skyrocketed. Cottage cheese became a symbol for the rotten system, and eventually the Tnuva CEO, only a year earlier crowned Person of the Year by magazines, was unceremoniously dumped in the protests’ wake.

During the same summer of protests, the following op-ed named “An electric car named cottage cheese” appeared in Haaretz, explaining the view from the rebelling consumer’s eyes:

…First, there’s the price of the car. The electric car will cost NIS 123,000, slightly more than a regular Renault Fluence. That’s the price that was set, even though purchase tax on the electric car will be only 10 percent instead of 70 percent. In other words, the main beneficiary of the huge tax break Better Place obtained from the state, which amounts to some NIS 70,000 per car, will be Better Place itself.

Second is the price of the energy. The minimum package that Better Place is offering its customers covers charging or replacing batteries for up to 20,000 kilometers worth of travel a year, at a cost of NIS 13,000. On its website, Better Place compares this to the cost of the gasoline an ordinary family car would use in traveling the same distance (about NIS 14,700 ) and gives itself a big pat on the back. The problem is that Better Place’s calculations display a troubling resemblance to the pricing tricks employed by the cell phone companies.

Expecting to be lionized and admired for its quick, huge financial backing, its nationalistic mission statement and its cell-phone friendly package, BP has found itself helplessly and haplessly glued to all that is hated by the Israeli consumer.

And either for that reason, or for plain old cautious purchasing instincts, leasing fleet managers have so far stayed away from BP’s offerings as 2012 rolled around and the cars became available. To this date, only several hundred were sold or leased, many of them for employees of BP or related entities.

Trying to mollify the situation, BP quickly offered newer and somewhat better deals for would-be buyers. The car costs NIS 120-130k (>$30k) without the battery (the battery costs another NIS 77k, or nearly $20k). If you don’t want to buy the battery (and BP really doesn’t want you to), then full electricity provision (including the installation of L2 stations and unlimited battery-swap service) can be purchased for as little as NIS 22k for the first 40,000km in advance purchase, or for NIS 650/month and NIS 0.65 for each km over 1000, on a monthly plan.

Still, buyers are not coming. These prices make the BP car only slightly cheaper per km than the average gas car in Israel (assuming you do use up the km you paid for in bulk), and considerably more expensive than a Prius. And consumers are completely bound and dependent upon BP, unless they want to shell out the NIS 77k, pay to install their own L2 station (or buy it over from BP it the latter would allow it), and buy on-demand charging at an inflated price from BP and other (yet non-existent) providers while away from the home. Perhaps consumers in other, more green-friendly countries might still jump on this package deal, especially when offered by a reliable entity. But BP by now is anything but reliable (in fact, it is beginning to emit the stench of death). Besides, Israelis know that a monopoly can jack the prices up any time it feels like (cottage cheese, anyone?). They had been exactly in that single-provider story during the 1980′s to mid-1990′s with the cellphone monopoly “Pelefon”, to this day a hated and despised brand. Funny that Agassi himself would tout the cellphone-company as a model for his business.

Committed to its megalomaniac vision, BP nonetheless proceeded to build a full, dense national infrastructure, with the big-cost items being dozens of battery-switching stations. Roughly 40 are now built and 20-30 are operational. Not being a public company, BP does not disclose its internal operations and finances. But Israel Corp. is public – and through it the public receives a report of BP’s bottom line. In Q2 of 2012, BP racked up a record $64 million loss, bringing the cumulative bleeding since its inception to a whopping $477 million. And this, without giving a hand, not even a finger, to the actual designing of EVs or their batteries!

The often-quoted cost of a battery-switching station in BP publications is a half-million dollars. But judging from the rate of cash burn vs. the number of stations (there are also a dozen reported up in Denmark and a few more scattered about), the inevitable conclusion is that the real cost is at least 3-4 times higher.

Considering the idol-worship around Agassi the Genius, the entire affair is hilariously funny. For a company that placed PR and spin as its top priority, ending up as a ridiculed monopolistic bad guy is quite a feat. And then, look at BP’s basic operational planning of a pilot in their own home country, for which they had all the time in the world to prepare.

Any middle-schooler with a sense for numbers could have told BP that they should start with the Tel Aviv region where the majority of Israelis live, and with maybe 5-7 switching stations enabling a drive to locations reasonably distant from Tel Aviv. *And* while offering sweet deals for the early adopters, to compensate for the untested and not-yet-complete service – just like the first competition to “Pelefon” did when they came online with their crappy but much awaited-for cellphone service in 1995. Then, as a customer base and a revenue stream are established, start gradually expanding.

But no: only a charismatic Genius, a Technological Guru for All Things can be that stupid.

Epilogue: Is Better Place a Green Company?

In late September, BP partnered with leasing company Albar for a limited-time leaseback offer: no need to buy the car outright. Rather, pay NIS 2000 (>$500) for 36 months, for up to 12,000 km/year. This sounds more like the lucrative deals offered here (such as the one that landed one our Leaf), and indeed Albar reported leasing 48 EVs over the Holidays, about 6% of its total deal volume for that period. But this seems too little, too late.

The new BP CEO might still pull off a last-minute stunt and save the company from early self-destruction. More likely, the Israeli and other governments will try to pitch in to bail it out. Already the EU bank loaned out 40 million Euros to help BP finish up its Denmark deployment (BP’s website boasts this as a success!).

The question remains whether BP should be considered a green company. My categorical answer is No. The battery-switching idea itself is a green idea, that might be workable and relevant for many cases. But the way BP has approached its implementation is wrong on so many levels, that it is disqualified from being considered a green company.

Besides BP’s monopolistic foul play and cynicism towards reducing the footprint of Israel’s electricity, as described above, the expatriate Palestinian site Electronic Intifada identified BP early on as a classic “Brand Israel” project to greenwash the Occupation. All the ingredients were there, including the appointment of an Israeli general with a past of overseeing the Occupation of the West Bank directly, as BP-Israel CEO. In addition, BP (just like all other Israeli infrastructure companies) has no qualms about installing stations – including battery-switching station – to serve Israeli West Bank settlers and Israelis who shortcut their drive through Occupied Palestinian territory on Apartheid highways that are essentially closed to Palestinians (such as the Jordan Valley, or the infamous Highway 443 to Jerusalem). In a classic Israeli-Western wink and nod, both BP and its foreign investors pretend that none of this (which is often illegal under the investors’ home-country rules) is really happening.

Additionally, as a sign that PR for the state of Israel is part of its core business strategy, BP’s leadership has never bothered to correct the mistaken notion (conveyed by its own PR) that it actually produces cars or batteries. Rather, the idea has been to produce as much international noise as possible. Noise that runs far ahead of the reality, and projects the false image that “Israel is a leader in the EV industry.”

Left almost unasked, is the more basic question of the BP pilot’s carbon footprint. True, EVs are more efficient in energy usage than gas cars, but

1. Israelis’ car-fleet is much more energy-efficient than say the US’s, so the gain is not as dramatic;

2. The battery-switching installation present a considerable footprint overhead compared to ordinary EV infrastructure;

3. The prohibition of home-plug recharging (written in at BP’s request) adds a redundant footprint-overhead, because people using their EVs for ~1000 km/month or less, or those who can recharge at work for even part of the workday, don’t really need an L2 station; and last but not least,

4. As said, Israel’s electricity sources are almost exclusively coal and gas. During my 2010 visit to the BP visitor center, I confronted the guide directly regarding Israel’s electricity sources and the resultant CO2-futility of this huge EV project. “I’m with you”, she said, “BP is working with the government to install more solar panels and other renewables”, and indeed the visitor center has some nice solar PVs for show. But as written above, the visitor-center operation has nothing to do with BP itself, and BP used its leverage with the government solely in order to write its own rules. The fledgling Israeli solar-PV market was left to fend for itself, constrained by arbitrary government quotas (set, of course, to protect the public; why else?). For the record, the solar potential in Israel is so high that placing solar PVs on all rooftops will probably answer all the country’s electricity needs. Not to mention Palestine, where the per-capita consumption is much lower.

One cannot avoid feeling some schadenfreude towards Agassi. It is rare to see in our world, a case when someone with so much power and leverage to do the right thing, pays so quickly for his corrupt decision to choose the opposite, and for his insufferable “worship me” arrogance. Besides, Agassi will surely land some other sweet deal sooner or later, so why not mock him in the meantime?

But there’s a bigger problem. For Israelis, BP has become synonymous with the EV. As the company’s image tanked and stank, the very concept of EVs has been sullied. Maybe economic and environmental realities will eventually pull Israeli hearts back towards EVs, but a complete BP debacle will likely push such reality many years into the future. And as is true everywhere but especially in Israel, it takes much longer to revise a bad law (e.g. the home-plug prohibition), than to write it correctly from the start.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank and Gaza, with no global propaganda echo-chambers at their service, resourceful Palestinian engineers and handymen are hard at work, trying to free their society of dependence upon Israeli-monopoly oil and power by designing and building EVs and even solar-powered EVs from scratch, at dirt-cheap cost.

As this story went online, yesterday was the first day of full post-Holiday action in Israel. There was a ton of news – culminating with the PM himself calling for early elections for the second time in a few months. First time was a bluff… will it pan out this time? And do people really care, with the nearly-all-crappy options on Israeli voters’ menu?

Anyway… Better Place had two major pieces of news today, a direct follow-up to the news that opened this post:

Shai Agassi stepped down from his position on Better Place’s board of directors on Tuesday, after he was replaced last week as the company’s CEO, and despite a promise to the company’s workers not to do so.

According to officials within the company’s vehicle department, Agassi, who owns less than 5% of the company, became entangled in a conflict with the Israel Corporation, Better Place’s parent company, over his termination.

Those same officials report that a breach of trust between Agassi and the Israel Corporation…

And it gets worse:

Now Israel Corporation has to consider whether to inject additional funds into Better Place after investing $229 million in the venture. Facing a cash crunch, Better Place is seeking an additional $150 million from investors.

So dumping Agassi was not about “changing from the early start-up to a mature company”, as BP officials tried to spin it last week. Rather, it is a last-ditch effort before total meltdown. Agassi was apparently in denial about how bad things are.

(crossposted from Daily Kos, and slightly revised)

These parts are highly worth revisiting. Bibi’s brazen, out-and-out racism and lunatic brand of nationalist-supremacy, were expressed in no uncertain terms upon the United Nations stage. The man’s true colors were there for all to see.

I owe the discovery of the lesser-known first half of Bibi’s speech, to Palestinian-American comedian Amer Zahr, a.k.a. The Civil Arab. Myself, I was probably going to ignore the Bibi speech altogether – had the Web not suddenly exploded with images of Acme bombs.

But Zahr, as he says, must listen:

As a Palestinian, I tuned in. It’s my duty. Plus, I say the guy’s name at least 3-4 times a day (I won’t tell you how), so the least I could do was to listen to his speech.

And here’s the speech itself. Some gems (with my comments), starting from the very first sentence:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Three thousand years ago, King David reigned over the Jewish state in our eternal capital, Jerusalem.

Leave aside the universal consensus among archaeologists and historians (except far-right Zionist ones) that the David-Solomon kingdom’s extent, and possibly even existence, was dramatically overblown by the Old Testament writers who lived several centuries later.

There is one fact that is beyond dispute. That kingdom, or city-state, or chieftainship or whatever David presided over (if he really existed), was Israelite. Not Jewish. As even the Biblical record grudgingly admits, the Israelites happily worshipped multiple gods, including regular human sacrifice right there in our eternal Jerusalem, in a ravine we call Gei Ben Hinom and the English transliterated as Gehenna. So much for “Jewish State.”

The Jewish religion in any form recognizable to us today, was still about 500 years in the future, to be born upon the ashes of the Israelite period, and bearing a very distinctive Diasporic character. In fact, the only period of full Jewish sovereignty between the religion’s true birth and modern times was the Hasmonean kingdom, a short-lived, corruption-ridden little operation that eventually succumbed to its incessant internal strife.

Considering Bibi’s bragging later in his speech, and his attempt to pose as the all-knowing teacher lecturing a willfully ignorant world, it is ridiculously ironic for him to begin with such a piece of blatant, crappy, ignorant antiquity-worship in his first sentence. And he’s just getting warmed up:

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Every year, for over three millennia, we have come together on this day of reflection and atonement. We take stock of our past. We pray for our future. We remember the sorrows of our persecution; we remember the great travails of our dispersion; we mourn the extermination of a third of our people, six million, in the Holocaust.

But at the end of Yom Kippur, we celebrate. We celebrate the rebirth of Israel. We celebrate the heroism of our young men and women who have defended our people with the indomitable courage of Joshua, David, and the Maccabees of old. We celebrate the marvel of the flourishing modern Jewish state.

I know Yom Kippur. Dammit, I’ve fasted every Yom Kippur for the past 30 years. This junk of Bibi’s has almost nothing to do with Yom Kippur. And please, let other Jewish (or Judaism-knowledgeable) readers correct me if I’m wrong. Yom Kippur is mostly for atoning for one’s personal sins, and for the community’s sins. Not for reaffirming our collective sense of external persecution and its myth of supremacy. For that, we have plenty of other holidays, thank you very much.

And the central figures of Judaism, surely during Yom Kippur, are not Joshua-David-Maccabees who flexed the Jewish Muscle (the latter are rarely mentioned outside of Hanuka), but the prophets who spoke truth to power and pointed to the community its own sins.

But the speech is just about to get much, much worse:

In Israel, the past and the future find common ground. Unfortunately, that is not the case in many other countries. For today, a great battle is being waged between the modern and the medieval.

The forces of modernity seek a bright future in which the rights of all are protected, in which an ever-expanding digital library is available in the palm of every child, in which every life is sacred. The forces of medievalism seek a world in which women and minorities are subjugated, in which knowledge is suppressed, in which not life but death is glorified.

These forces clash around the globe, but nowhere more starkly than in the Middle East.

Israel stands proudly with the forces of modernity. We protect the rights of all our citizens: men and women, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians – all are equal before the law.

Clash of Civilizations? Really? In 2012?!? Has this guy stepped out of a time machine? And in whose books is the idealization of Medieval times bad, but the idealization of an imagined 3000-year-old past good? Of course, in a hypocritical racist bigot’s books: “my ancient history good, your ancient history bad”.

Regarding the great treatment of non-Jewish citizens, forgive me, dear Smug Prime Minister, but I prefer the direct testimony of their own legal-advocacy NGO Adalah over your childish self-congratulations. Their current headline reads “NCPB (National Committee for Planning and Building) reaffirms plans to build Jewish town on ruins of Bedouin village.” Par for the course of the Enlightened Jewish State.

Where were we? Oh, yes, explaining how great we are. And modest.

Israel is also making the world a better place: our scientists win Nobel Prizes. Our know-how is in every cell-phone and computer that you’re using. We prevent hunger by irrigating arid lands in Africa and Asia.

…And gratuitously induce hunger by strangling the West Bank and Gaza. Let us not forget that if it was not for a certain 2010 Flotilla, to this very day your government would have still rationed the food allowed into Gaza, to make sure those medievalists don’t get too fat and lazy.

And Israel’s exceptional creativity is matched by our people’s remarkable compassion. When disaster strikes anywhere in the world – in Haiti, Japan, India, Turkey Indonesia and elsewhere – Israeli doctors are among the first on the scene, performing life-saving surgeries.

Like they did just a few weeks ago… oops. no. A few weeks ago, Israel deliberately let a group of Eritrean refugees almost die of thirst and hunger inside its own territory, stranded between border fences in plain view of its soldiers who were under strict orders not to offer any assistance, only limited amounts of water. And this was not an isolated incident: Bibi government has set a disgusting precedent, inciting against this recent wave of African refugees, and building massive concentration, sorry, “internment” camps for them.

Should we laugh or cry? I say laugh:

President Abbas just spoke here. I say to him and I say to you: We won’t solve our conflict with libelous speeches at the UN. That’s not the way to solve it.

Says the guy who just slandered the entire Middle East except his own country.

We have to sit together, negotiate together, and reach a mutual compromise, in which a demilitarized Palestinian state recognizes the one and only Jewish State.

Because that is what negotiations are all about: me dictating to you a-priori how they must end.

Ok, enough about us good guys. Let’s go back to some bad-guy classics that never get old:

Israel wants to see a Middle East of progress and peace. We want to see the three great religions that sprang forth from our region – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – coexist in peace and in mutual respect.

Yet the medieval forces of radical Islam, whom you just saw storming the American embassies throughout the Middle East, they oppose this. They seek supremacy over all Muslims. They are bent on world conquest. They want to destroy Israel, Europe, America. They want to extinguish freedom. They want to end the modern world.

Where’s Jon Stewart when we need him?

They want to drag humanity back to an age of unquestioning dogma and unrelenting conflict. I am sure of one thing. Ultimately they will fail. Ultimately, light will penetrate the darkness.

We’ve seen that happen before. Some five hundred years ago, the printing press helped pry a cloistered Europe out of a dark age. Eventually, ignorance gave way to enlightenment.

So too, a cloistered Middle East will eventually yield to the irresistible power of freedom and technology. When this happens, our region will be guided not by fanaticism and conspiracy, but by reason and curiosity.

Because hey, nothing even remotely resembling that, has really happened around us over the past two years, right?

In last year’s UN speech, at least, Bibi was careful to pay a completely phony lip-service to the Arab Spring, despite being the most notoriously anti-Arab-Spring world leader from day one. Now all pretenses are gone. He made a boastful “I told you so” Knesset speech in late 2011 (Haaretz summarized, “Netanyahu: Arab Spring pushing Mideast backward, not forward”). By September 2012, Bibi is sure that his anti-Arab-Spring view has been scientifically proven correct, a closed case. He was right and everyone else was wrong, and it’s not even worth deliberating upon.

So what is worth mentioning at length?

Some 70 years ago, the world saw another fanatic ideology bent on world conquest. It went down in flames. But not before it took millions of people with it. Those who opposed that fanaticism waited too long to act. In the end they triumphed, but at an horrific cost. My friends, we cannot let that happen again.

At stake is not merely the future of my own country. At stake is the future of the world. Nothing could imperil our common future more than the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons.

Oh yessssssss, now it’s nearing perfection. To juxtapose Nazism and Iran within two sentences, in one “Islamo-Fascist” fell rhetorical swoop – and to top if off with a modest 70 spoons or so of personal and nationalist megalomania. mmmmmm…

From here, the road is open to an escalating tirade against Iran and its nukes – right up to the Wile E. Coyote bomb that everyone saw.

What I find most amazing, is that among Israelis – this bunch of supposedly savvy, world-weary political cynics – Bibi is considered a great speaker. Haaretz even ran an article, claiming that after the speech Republicans were wishing Bibi could run for President instead of their own batch of clowns.

It has been a while since I’ve read such a bad speech. The cartoon-bomb skit turns out to have been the least douche-baggy part of it!

(crossposted from Daily Kos)

On the first, second and third looks, none of us could stop laughing – My wife, me and our 15- and 13-year-old sons. We all understood how ridiculous it was on so many levels. And like us, countless Israelis went online and posted hillarious memes mocking their at-best-barely-tolerated leader.

And we can leave it at that. When it comes to the media, Bibi is an uncurable douchebag, obsessed with media coverage and attention, but never quite getting how ridiculous he comes across. Or not caring much: “as long as they spell my name right.” After all, this is how he launched his bid for the national leadership some 20 years ago:

He went on state TV (then the only channel in Israel), demanding to be placed on stage in prime time because he has an “announcement”, and then telling the country live on prime time that his political opponents within the Likud party have a cassette proving he has been unfaithful to his 3rd wife, and are trying to blackmail him. I kid you not (and I can’t believe I actually found a direct link to this pre-Internet news story!). The cassette never surfaced, and everyone had a good laugh – but Bibi laughed last. His 3rd wife stayed with him despite the affair; did she have a choice now? (btw: She, too, has turned out to be quite a character who likes to torment the Netanyahus’ hired help). Bibi went on to become Likud leader, then prime minister, and every time we thought we got rid of his sorry face – he has found a way to come back, like an untreatable itch.

So yes, His Bibiness’ douchebaggery – as a person in general, and on TV in particular – is a known quantity.

But on another level – the one of power relations and political machinery – yesterday’s speech was infuriating. Bibi of course knows that the drawing is cartoonish; that he is turning into a joke the very same subject he has demanded the world to regard as the gravest danger to its future. But he has already told the United Nations, at the very same event last year, exactly what he thinks about it:

Well, here’s what’s happening now — right now, today. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon now presides over the UN Security Council. This means, in effect, that a terror organization presides over the body entrusted with guaranteeing the world’s security. You couldn’t make this thing up.

So here in the UN, automatic majorities can decide anything. They can decide that the sun sets in the west or rises in the west. I think the first has already been pre-ordained. But they can also decide — they have decided that the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest place, is occupied Palestinian territory.

And yet even here in the General Assembly, the truth can sometimes break through. In 1984 when I was appointed Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, I visited the great rabbi of Lubavich. He said to me — and ladies and gentlemen, I don’t want any of you to be offended because from personal experience of serving here, I know there are many honorable men and women, many capable and decent people serving their nations here. But here’s what the rebbe said to me. He said to me, you’ll be serving in a house of many lies. And then he said, remember that even in the darkest place, the light of a single candle can be seen far and wide.

So this is what the douchebag was doing yesterday at the UN. He was on a holy mission, lighting a candle. A candle that says,

“I am pissing on all your faces, telling the lot of you that you are useless idiots, and you can do nothing about it. You guys don’t get it, and never will, but it doesn’t matter. My friends are too powerful for all of you together, and we will continue to set your agenda to benefit only our narrow interests. Because we know better than you.

No, because we ARE better than you.”

If this sounds familiar, it is because this is precisely the style of leadership evident from Mitt Romney’s “47%” video, from the rest of the 2012 GOP clownfest, from 8 devastating years of George W. Bush, and from right-wing politicians in general. Self-aggrandizement and self-promotion for its own naked sake, a belief in the ability to reinvent reality through the power of lies told with immense self-conviction – and cartoonish disdain for everyone else but themselves:

Cartoonish disdain for adversaries – or any random group of Humanity they choose to pick on – whom they demonize beyond belief. For a truly cartoonish example, in Israel this year it has become national right-wing sport (with the center towing along) to rabidly incite against refugees fleeing the horrors of South Sudan and Eritrea.

Cartoonish disdain for those who sometimes voice feeble disagreement, but are too chicken to challenge them as they should (for Bibi, a big chunk of his UN audience; for GOP politicians this would be “the Librul Media”). Ironically, this group often deserves the disdain because spinelessness is the worst disease in politics. But what you won’t hear from the right-wing scumbags, is that their own ascendancy is first and foremost the result of this very same spinelessness at the Center.

Cartoonish disdain for their own supporters, whom they take for total chumps. As Romney has discovered since September 17, many of these supporters do not respond kindly when faced with the undeniable truth of this disdain. Meanwhile, Bibi has been playing the Israeli public like a violin with his Iran crap, distracting from his full support for the continued Occupation of Palestine despite its inevitable dead-end fate (that is the biggest ticking bomb for Israel, as everyone really knows). And of course, no mention of the hundreds of Bombs Israel itself holds, most of them apparently stashed right on the outskirts of its own major metropolitan areas. With their existence not acknowledged, and with the decisions about how to store them, and if and when to ever use them, entrusted to people like Bibi with zero oversight. No, it is only the would-be Iranian Bomb that Israelis need to worry about.

The Israeli public, alas alas, seems to have infinite appetite for being lied to and laughed at by its own leaders nowadays.

And finally, disdain for their powerful benefactors too. Bibi had no qualms about jumping head-first into the US Presidential campaign this month, producing blatant, English-language, theatrical made-for-US-campaign-ads, anti-Obama speeches. This, despite Obama giving Israel everything it has asked for in 3.5 years, and more. Perhaps the billionaires throwing money down the GOP campaign drain think that these soulless politicians do respect them. Or perhaps they, too, don’t care.

After all, most GOP-supporting billionaires are probably smart enough to know that 21st-Century right-wing politics is all about selling cartoonish lies to the highest bidder, cashing out like bandits – and then finding someone else to pay for the consequences of basing policy on a tower of lies.

(crossposted from Daily Kos)

The Hibakusha Peace Boat Project is a unique, civil society initiative that enables Hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to participate in around-the-world voyages to give personal testimonies about the effects of the atomic bombs, foster exchanges with youth and citizens around the world, and call for peace, international cooperation and a sustainable future.

The Israeli Disarmament Movement

The Israeli Disarmament Movement is made up of two different sectors that work together; the official NGO Regional Peace and disarmament Movement (RPM), and the grassroots movement According to Foreign Sources. Both aim to up public discourse in Israel on the matter of nuclear disarmament and other nuclear-related issues, which include a strong and loud opposition to a war on Iran. While ambivalence regarding such discussion is still very strong in Israel, the movement is working to develop educational materials, create public awareness and lobby for a WMD-free zone in the Middle East as a step forward or a side-by-side program with other endeavours for a comprehensive Nuclear Weapons Convention for a Nuclear Weapons Free World. The Israeli Disarmament Movement also represents the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons – ICAN.

Hibakusha in Israel

The Hibakusha Peace Boat, According to Foreign Sources, and ICAN in Israel are organizing a week-long visit of four Hibakusha in Israel starting September 10th.

This is an historic visit as it is the first time Hibakusha will be visiting Israel, as well as the first time that Israelis will have opportunity to meet Hibakusha and hear their personal stories.

For most Israelis, any discussion about nuclear weapons is taboo. However we believe that the compelling message that the Hibakusha bring with them of “No More Hiroshimas, No More Nagasakis,” conveys a new angle and supports our demands for an open nuclear discourse in Israel. Additionally we hope that their visit will help us create discourse that might generate more focus on the need for Israel to participate in any regional or international talks promoting a Nuclear Weapons Convention or a Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone in the Middle East.

We believe that this visit will open new doors for the Israeli media, Israeli civil society, and hopefully members of parliament.

Agenda

Among other activities, the Hibakusha will meet with Holocaust survivors, visit Yad Va-Shem (Israel’s Holocaust Museum ), place wishes calling for a world free of nuclear weapons in the Wailing Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, hold public events in East Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, and meet with MPs and mayors.

For more info: http://www.u235.org.il/en/

One would think that in an enlightened society such a simple request would be guaranteed beyond doubt. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. For an entire generation, the Occupation regime, aided and egged on by the settlers that regime has introduced into the region, has been trying to uproot a few thousand indigenous residents. The mechanisms have ranged from military edicts, bad-faith legalistic arguments in court, pressure on the ground, and naked violence and vandalism.

On the court front, residents have last week achieved what seems like a minor victory. The Occupation regime now insists that “only” 8 Massafer-Yatta villages be evacuated and destroyed, instead of the 12 that the original 1999 edict declared to be part of an IDF “firing range”. According to lawyers who represent the residents, during the court battle the regime offered this reduction from 12 to 8 in exchange for stopping the struggle. Now the regime has been (apparently) forced to do so in exchange for nothing. The regime probably sees now that its flimsy – no, outrageous – arguments that it can declare a “firing range” over an entire stretch of populated land and pretend the people there have never existed, has very little chance of winning the day, even in the skewed playing field of Israel’s own courts. Therefore, it perhaps tries to appear more “rational” and “reasonable” by excluding 4 villages from the count. The High Court has responded by erasing the original 12-village petition, and inviting plaintiffs to resubmit an adjusted one for the 8 villages within several months, without any impact on their petition rights.

That victory noted, the IDF still controls the region very tightly, and has continued to try and inflict misery and intimidation upon residents, in the hope that they leave of their own accord. This summer’s campaign has started, as reported here, with sweeping evacuation and demolition decrees, in apparent violation of the pending court case. Now, during the first week of August the IDF raided two of the 4 villages removed from its evacuation edict! Then, on August 7 it raided Jinba village, which is among the 8 still included in the court case. Images of this “heroic” use of military might and resources against defenseless civilians, are below.

The pictures were taken in Jinba by Btselem activists, and transmitted to us by Guy Butavia. The raids were implemented using helicopters, which landed and took off in the village 6 times.

The cave dwellers’ hamlet of Jinba is one of the largest and oldest of this type of locality in the cave region of the South Hebron Hills\Massafer Yatta region. This being summer, many children who normally stay in Yatta during the school year (because no adequate secondary school exists in the cave-dwelling region) were in the village. The residents’ sheep, as usual, were also around, receiving the military’s attention as well:

Intimidation alone was not enough for the brave soldiers, so they also tossed out the contents of some closets, and spilled large jugs of milk and cream.

Amira Hass reported this raid on Haaretz, but apparently that newspaper’s English mirror is now attempting again to charge a premium for reading the only somewhat-independent mainstream Israeli source for news on the Occupation.

Then, on August 16, the region’s settlers once again pitched in. As Operation Dove reports:

In the afternoon of August 16th some Palestinians discovered that an olive grove situated in Humra valley had been recently destroyed during the night, according to a Palestinian. Thirty olive trees were broken or severely damaged. The olive grove belongs to a Palestinian family that lives in Yatta, a Palestinian town close to At-Tuwani. The area in which the olives trees were cut is located in front of Havat Ma’on, an illegal outpost.

The amount of Palestinian trees tore down and damaged [in the region] since January 2012 rises to 97: a largest number is located in Humra valley. The olive grove’s destruction represents several problems of subsistence for Palestinians. Operation Dove has maintained an international presence in At-Tuwani and South Hebron Hills since 2004.

Once again, the settlers and the military Occupation prove in action that they are two arms of the same beast: the beast of nationalist supremacy, dispossession and violence. In addition, over the past few days the military has confiscated private Palestinian vehicles in the region, under the pretext of “unauthorized driving inside a firing range.” The Occupation makes a joke of the concept “issue pending court decision”, and uses its power on the ground to intimidate and forcibly drive people off their land.

So far, the residents, aided by concerned citizens of Israel and around the world, have remained determined to stand up for their rights.

More images from the two vandalism incidents can be found below (credit for both sets goes to Guy Butavia).

(Crossposted from the Villages Group blog, where a few more images can be seen)