Amos Schocken, the publisher of Israel's liberal daily Ha'aretz newspaper, has defended his paper's applying the word "apartheid" to the Israeli- occupied West Bank, as well as the phrase "Jews-only roads." According to journalist and blogger Phillip Weiss, who attended an Oct. 23 conference called "Israel and its Jewish Defamers," by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), Schocken's statements came in a result to inquiries from CAMERA, which is led by Andrea Levin:

Our October issue featured the story "Israeli High Court Returns Palestinian Lands? Don't Believe the Hype!" by WW4 REPORT co-editor David Bloom, finding: "A review of the decisions shows that even in the few cases where the High Court decided in favor of Palestinians, the benefits to the villages have been minimal... In a widely publicized ruling, on Sept. 4, the town of Bil'in won a case at the High Court to have the barrier moved, saving 500 acres of its farmland which had been isolated from the rest of the village by the wall. But the very next day, in a separate ruling that received little media attention, the court ruled that Matityahu East, a large, new settlement outpost being built within the wall on part of Bil'in's land, could stay. So while the publicized decision returned lands to Bil'in, the quiet one upheld an illegal grab of other village lands." Our October Exit Poll was: "Separation barriers appear to be the icon of the new security state from the West Bank to Baghdad to the US-Mexican border. Are there still potentialities for a just co-existence (Israeli-Palestinian, Sunni-Shi'ite, gringo-Latino), or do 'good fences make good neighbors' and it is just a question of where to draw the line?" We received the following responses:

The recent controversy over the cancellation of two concerts sponsored by the group OneVoice, to have been held simultaneously on Oct. 18 in Israeli-occupied Jericho and Tel Aviv, has drawn wide recriminations from its New York-based leadership. OneVoice was founded by Daniel Lubetsky, a young Israeli-Mexican-American polyglot businessman. He has called the mostly Palestinian critics of OneVoice "extremists" who are against peace. Ironically, one of the Israeli musicians Lubestky hired for OneVoice's ill-fated Tel Aviv show was the popular Israeli singer Ehud Banai. Banai recently got into some hot water of his own with the Israeli left. We were first tipped off to this controversy by a comment left on OneVoice's blog:

From the Alternative Information Center, Oct 16.

The general secretary of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, did his reserve military duty at a checkpoint in the Jordan Valley, deep in the occupied Palestinian territories, acting just like any other good Israeli soldier.

From the NYC civil service paper The Chief-Leader, Oct 19:

Thompson and Israel

To the Editor:

The undersigned trade-union activists disagree with New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson and the Jewish Labor Committee, who have joined the witch-hunt against British unions for boycotting Israel (The Chief, Sept. 7).

Our September issue featured the story "The Israel Lobby & Global Hegemony: Revisited" by WW4R editor Bill Weinberg, arguing that "Israel replicates the historical cycles of Jewish scapegoating by serving as imperialism's proxy." Refuting the thesis of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their new book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Weinberg contends that the Iraq adventure is fundamentally a war for control of oil. "Yet even the anti-war left increasingly chases after shadows like the supposed Zionist conspiracy, abandoning principles of anti-imperialism," Weinberg writes. He accuses Mearsheimer and Walt of belonging to a tradition of "nativist xenophobia," and warns that the eventual backlash against Israel could come in "an orgy of anti-Jewish hatred which will only play into the hands of Israel's advocates of 'transfer,' finishing off the work of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948." Our September Exit Poll was: "Mearsheimer and Walt: Heroic truth-tellers or right-wing conspiracy theorists?" We received the following responses:

The following was reported by Amit Cohen in the center-right Israeli paper Ma'ariv in Hebrew on Sept. 19:

Abu Mazen instructed his general "Slaughter them"
The clip [shown at the Ma'ariv link] apparently shows a meeting in Abu-Mazen's [President Mahmoud Abbas] bureau in Gaza in which members of the preventive security force identified with [Fatah strongman in Gaza] Muhammad Dahlan participated. When meeting the older gentleman dressed in black uniform, Abu Mazen asks him "are you the head of the preventive security force." When the answer is in the affirmative Abu-Mazen says one word, "slaughter [them]"

Part of a statement from al-Awda and other groups, online at NYC Indymedia, Sept. 13:

We believe that it is critical, necessary and essential that the building of the antiwar movement in the United States take place in a manner that emphasizes political unity and political clarity - political unity that links communities and movements in common struggle against US imperialism and political clarity that defines that struggle and its component parts, placing the struggle of the Iraqi and Palestinian people for national liberation at the center of our demands, just as it is in the center of the crosshairs of imperialism and in the center of resistance; as well as the struggles of the people of the Philippines, Colombia, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba, the Sudan, Haiti, Lebanon, Somalia and everywhere else in the world where imperialism is waging war and occupation and people are resisting, organizing and building. Similarly, the struggles of Black, Chicano, Latino, Asian, Arab, Native and other oppressed nations and communities within the US must be central to our work as an antiwar movement that has real meaning for those most directly affected here; for example, the struggle of Katrina victims to rebuild their communities in the face of racism and oppression, and the struggle of undocumented and other immigrants for full equality, legalization, and workers' rights.