This week’s postings @JfJfP.com

This week, January 23rd-29th 2017, still has Trump stamped all over it. But let’s begin the postings which have escaped that, although as several of these feature lively forms of resistance the impact of Trump politics can be seen even here. The resisters have more creative energy than all the hordes of Trump supporters.

The first is the massive women’s march to Washington plus all the linked women’s marches in other countries. We include them here because of the prominence of women who marched  in Jewish groups in many marches. All these women are determined to oppose the current dominance of male bullying and swagger and the quick recourse to violence:
Women’s protest shatters record

The second is an American Jewish group, formed in reaction to Operation Protective Edge in 2014, IfNotNow. They oppose the occupation and the conservative Jewish establishment saying both positions represent Jewish values:
#Jewish Resistance to the Occupation

Based in Ramallah the Stop the Wall coalition is also entrenched in a number of different, if connected, campaigns against the Occupation. Unlike those who plan and build the wall destroying homes, livelihoods, the natural passage of animals and waterways, Stop the Wall is committed to non-violent action. It is visited by a gentle young American physician:
Stop the Wall – creative non-violence

In contrast, Israel has a monopoly on sustained serious violence – Hezbollah and Hamas efforts are usually sporadic and ineffectual. It has more than one elite killer group but the best known is Mossad which recognise no borders or laws in its hunt and destroy missions. Asa Winstanley describes some of the most notorious operations:
Mossad’s murders

Chaim Levinson hears from Israeli interrogators themselves about the techniques they use to break a Palestinian’s spirit -for that is the purpose of torture. Having been judged illegal in Israel, Shin Bet and prison officers are learning ways round the new rules. Their methods are not as bad as 16thC racking perhaps but still horribly body- and nerve-racking:
Torture designed to break the spirit and leave no mark

Israeli agencies seem to have  stopped caring what others think of their treatment of a segment of Israeli citizens – Bedouin people. The bulldozers are going through their homes in an attempt to force them into an overcrowded crime-ridden township – and claim their land for new Jewish settlements:
Police use smash and grab tactics to drive Bedouin out

Emily Hilton, a board member of Yachad and with a history in organisations that want to make Israel work, has found the treatment of Bedouin the final straw. In a fine rhetorical piece she ends:
‘In the Jewish, democratic state, I watch Israel eat itself from the inside’

Like the Bedu, other Palestinians have no wish to be shipped off to habitations with poor law, amenities and no history. So Israeli Arabs, who still own land in Israel,  absolutely oppose Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal for a people swap: Palestinian villages to be taken into Palestine while Israel takes in some border Palestinian land:
Most Israeli Arabs don’t want to live in Palestine

Every poll finds that young American Jews are less and less enamoured with Israel – and much more open than their parents to the Palestinian cause. The young find Israeli treatment of Palestinians and the non-Orthodox particularly offensive, and incompatible with their (usually) liberal values. Anyway, what’s Israel to do with them? Leave it to the Christian evangelists:
Agenda of pro-Israel groups not shared by American Jews

As a very unnerving sign of the times the people most delighted by Trump’s victory are the Israeli right wing. They think he’s given the green light for unrestricted settlement expansion. This is a serious strategic problem for Netanyahu who has held settlement expansion and the march of the Right at bay by citing American disapproval and resisted American pressure by citing the need to neutralise the right wing. Is he now going to stand up against the rabid right – or make a deal with them?
Don’t bank on Trump

It certainly seems as though the last thing Bibi wants is the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem, as promised by Trump. But have some realities (facts) finally got through to him?
We will move embassy to Jerusalem, er, maybe

Alarmingly, one of those realistic advisers is not Trump’s choice of National Security Adviser, retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn. He appears to live in a hellish fantasy world where he is besieged on all sides by Muslims and only the military has the power to carry out any government policy:
US national security now run by a deranged paranoiac

And even more alarming, Trump has gathered to himself a set of retired generals in key positions. That means no-one in Trump’s governing circle has any experience of democratic politics and everyone believes the best solution to any problem is military and any order can be given which unquestioning sergeants will snap to carrying out:
Militarising US foreign policy

For supporters of Palestinian rights the most infuriating response to any account of the injustices Palestinians endure is – we must have balance. That ‘balance’, or ‘moderation’, is usually provided by Liberal Zionists – sharply criticised here by Barnaby Raine. Writing shortly after the revelations from Al Jazeera about setting up Israeli propaganda outposts in the UK, Raine points out the Israeli embassy could not have done this were there not a good supply of Labour ‘moderates’, or Liberal Zionists, to be Israel’s ‘cannon fodder’:
No place for ‘balance’ on Israeli apartheid