A Balcony Over Jerusalem

by John Lyons

  The billionaire funds the Birthright – or Taglit – program under which hundreds of thousands of young diaspora Jews visit Israel, and gives financial backing to both American and Israeli politicians whose view of Israel fits with his. Adelson is famous for anointing with a huge financial donation the most ‘pro-Israel’ candidate in each presidential election.

  Jodi Rudoren said Adelson was largely perceived in both the US and Israel as ‘a bit of a clown, an old rich guy who doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him’. She added: ‘He’s got more money than God and he’s willing to spend it. It didn’t work: he spent $100 million on Mitt Romney and he lost. But anyone who’s going to spend $100 million on anything everyone is going to take seriously.’

  Adelson is by no means the only wealthy American funding Israel’s settlement push. In 2015 Haaretz newspaper found that between 2009 and 2013, private US donors used a network of tax-exempt non-profit organisations to funnel more than US$220 million to Israeli communities in the West Bank. ‘The funding is being used for anything from buying air conditioners to supporting the families of convicted Jewish terrorists, and comes from tax-deductible donations made to around 50 US-based groups’, the paper said. ‘Thanks to their status as non-profits, these organisations are not taxed on their income and donations made to them are tax deductible – meaning the US Government is incentivizing and indirectly supporting the Israeli settlement movement, even though it has been consistently opposed by every US administration for the past 48 years.’20

  One important American donor has been millionaire doctor Irving Moskowitz, who made his fortune in the US by buying and selling hospitals. Dr Moskowitz died in 2016 at the age of 88. According to his foundation’s website, in 1988 the City of Hawaiian Gardens in California licensed his foundation to operate The Bingo Club as a charitable, non-profit organisation. The Guardian’s Chris McGreal did a major investigation of the club. He found: ‘Each dollar spent on bingo by the mostly Latino residents of Hawaiian Gardens, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, helps fund Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in some of the most sensitive areas of occupied East Jerusalem, particularly the Muslim quarter of the Old City, and West Bank towns such as Hebron where the Israeli military has forced Arabs out of their properties in their thousands.’ McGreal quoted local rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, who said, ‘Moskowitz is taking millions from the poorest towns in California and sending it to the settlements.’21

  The US remains one of the few countries unconditionally supporting Israel. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy told me that the notion that the US is an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians as ‘grotesque’. ‘If the US decided now to stop supplying the Israeli Air Force with one screw [the occupation] is finished. No Israeli prime minister could say a word after that. The dependence is total … Any country the size of Israel cannot live without trade. The Jewish community in the US is the key to everything … I think the Jewish lobby is more powerful in America than the Christian Zionists, but those, together with the arms industry, are crucial.’

  The US could force an end to the occupation ‘within days,’ said Levy. ‘Israel doesn’t exist without the US … It’s only by really putting a very clear choice to Israel that you will get a result – either you get US aid, or you continue the occupation. The US also stops Europe from boycotting Israel.’

  Danish journalist Uffe Taudal found it ‘very odd’ that the US Congress was prepared to applaud Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who openly advocated policies contrary to Washington’s. ‘Netanyahu went to the US Congress and said Jerusalem will always stay united,’ he told me. ‘Everybody stood up and clapped – it has been official American policy for at least 40 years that the US wants Jerusalem as a capital for the Palestinians and a capital for Israel – except for four people they stood up and clapped against stated American bipartisan policy for Republican and Democratic presidents … At the heart of this [Israeli] strategy is very clever lobbying and very clever political diplomacy. The Israelis make sure that in Europe and the US whatever you say about this conflict you risk paying a huge political price.’

  I put to Jody Rudoren that many of Israel’s laws governing Palestinians would be illegal under the US Constitution – for example, limiting the number of Palestinians who can assemble to 10, or taking children from the age of 12 for nighttime interrogations. She agreed, adding that one could look at examples in Israel itself, rather than the West Bank: ‘There are communities here where there are racial criteria for entry to live, all sorts of things that nobody in America would ever accept. But … Americans by and large accept that Israel is a different type of place. They don’t apply their standards. They buy this idea of Israel as a Jewish State created out of the worst moment of history and that it may be an anomalous ethnocracy … they simply buy this Jewish–Israeli notion of a Jewish and democratic State.’

  Jodi Rudoren believes the future of Israel was likely to be decided in a political battle between Europe and the US. ‘There are a lot of really simple things that Europe could do and whether they are prepared to do them instead of just saying them over again is an interesting question.’

  In the US, as in Australia, unconditional support for Israel is beginning to be challenged. A program has been started in Israel to offer a broader view than traditionally sponsored trips have taken. A group called Extend has been started, taking advantage of the fact that thousands of young American Jews come to Israel on Sheldon Adelson’s Birthright trips. Participants are offered a different perspective if they are able to ‘extend’ their trips. One organisation that offers a briefing to these youths is Military Court Watch, started by Australian lawyer Gerard Horton to monitor the treatment of Palestinian youths before Israel’s military court. Referring to Extend, Horton told me: ‘These participants get a briefing from Military Court Watch and they sometimes go back to their hotel rooms and are shell-shocked because they realise everything they have been taught is under question.’

  However, while Europe is becoming impatient with Israel, it appears that, if anything, US policy under Donald Trump will only further entrench the occupation.

  For 50 years, since Israel began the settlement enterprise on which it has based its occupation, the US has supported Israeli policy. With occasional exceptions, Washington has stood by as Israeli politicians have methodically steered their country towards the abyss of apartheid.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Lobby

  June 2013

  THE QUESTION STUNNED ME. IT WAS 16 JUNE 2013 AND THE email was from Paul Israel, head of the Israel–Australia, New Zealand and Oceania Chamber of Commerce. ‘How much longer are you here?’ he wrote. ‘Want to make sure we get time to catch up …’

  It was an odd message – where had Paul got the idea I was leaving? I needed to dispel these rumours straightaway. If it caught on that I was about to leave then I’d become a lame-duck correspondent. I was pleased to be able to let Paul Israel know that my term had recently been extended and my bosses in Sydney were happy with my work. ‘I’m here for quite a while yet’, I told him.

  About the same time, I began to hear from colleagues on the paper in Sydney that I was coming under increased attack by the Israeli Embassy. The editor of the Weekend Australian, Nick Cater, had invited Einat Weiss, the spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Canberra, to The Australian’s head office in Sydney. As I would later discover, she’d wandered the floor telling various editors that the embassy was not happy with me. To me, the idea of an officer of a foreign government wandering the floor of my newsroom criticising me was outrageous. I made clear my feelings to Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell, who had not known anything about Weiss’s visit.

  Meanwhile, the Israeli Embassy began trying to work out who my successor might be, even though there’d been no announcement that my term was ending – because it wasn’t. I heard from The Australian’s national security correspondent, Paul Maley, who told me later: ‘I’m getting a lot of attention from the Israeli Emba
ssy. They’re not happy with you, mate.’ Maley promised to keep me informed of developments. ‘I’m not going to let them play one journalist against another,’ he said.

  On 2 May, the embassy cranked up its efforts against me. Einat Weiss made another visit to my paper. She was about to finish her posting in Australia and had arrived – ostensibly – to bid farewell. But it seemed she was more interested in who my successor would be. Among others, Weiss sought out Paul Maley, who told me later that she’d asked about how much longer I’d be the Middle East correspondent. Maley replied that postings at The Australian were open-ended and that she should understand I was the principal point of contact on matters to do with Israel.

  It had been clear to me for some time that the stories I’d written about Palestinian children in the Israeli military court had angered Israel’s hardline supporters. I’d been reprimanded by the Israeli Army – not for inaccuracy but for choosing to do the story. Now the Israeli Embassy had attempted to discredit me.

  I’d also been given the brush-off by the Australian Embassy in Tel Aviv. Since arriving in Israel, I’d been invited each year to an ANZAC Day ceremony in Jerusalem by Ambassador James Larsen and his successor (as of early 2010), Andrea Faulkner. In my ‘Stone Cold Justice’ story for The Australian I’d reported that Faulkner had been told by Australian lawyer Gerard Horton of the sorts of things being done to the children in the West Bank military court. Horton had also told Faulkner that members of the UK Parliament and most European countries had visited the court. But Faulkner had never followed up Horton’s allegations – despite promising to do so – and Australia remained one of the few Western countries whose diplomatic representatives had never visited the military court. After this story was published in November 2011, I was no longer invited to embassy functions.

  But the most sustained criticism of my article had come from AIJAC, a powerful Israeli lobby group in Australia. When I later returned to Australia, I interviewed Chris Mitchell about these events. By then he had retired. He told me: ‘Most of the attacks on you came from Colin Rubenstein and Bob Magid [the owner of Australian Jewish News]. The stories you did on Palestinian children were the ones that most upset Colin Rubenstein. My view was that in an elected democracy on the other side of the world we should be able to openly and honestly canvass an issue like this without the interference from a lobby group in Melbourne.’

  The joint investigation that Sylvie and I did for Four Corners on this subject with Sue Spencer, Janine Cohen, Mary Fallon and Neale Maude won the 2014 Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism. After it was shortlisted, The Australian’s Editor, Clive Mathieson, sent me a note: ‘I’m exceptionally pleased it’s made the shortlist after all the bullets we – and you – took.’

  AIJAC had been a problem for me from the start. Criticism can and should happen in every field of journalism. Reporters should be subject to challenge; a lot of the criticism is simply lobby groups doing their jobs. But it became more and more clear to me that AIJAC was behind much of the backlash against my reporting.

  Meanwhile, the head of AIJAC, Colin Rubenstein, seemed to have the sort of access to The Australian that I could only dream of. Newspapers are very competitive publications, with plenty of journalists competing to get their stories run in limited space. Getting a good run in the Weekend Australian – considered the prize ‘real estate’ because weekend papers have higher audiences – meant that I had to begin lobbying my editors early in the week. But one instance confirmed to me Rubenstein’s influence.

  In March 2010, Rubenstein criticised me for quoting 21 words of Yossi Beilin – three times a minister and one of Israel’s negotiators during the Oslo peace process – in an article about US Vice-President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel.1 In the same week he sent an email to Cater alerting him to a long story by one of AIJAC’s favourite journalists, Yossi Klein Halevi. That piece argued that President Obama, rather than Israel, was to blame for the lack of progress in peace talks. Cater sent the email and story on to the World News desk, with the message ‘Good piece for Saturday?’ Even though it was late in the week, Rubenstein’s email resulted in the clearing of an entire page for Halevi’s story.

  The Yossi Beilin case angered me because I realised that I was being pressured not to report a view that when reported in Israel caused few complaints. And the Halevi story showed me how AIJAC works. Given the limited audience of their website, it’s important for AIJAC to try to get their stories and preferred commentators published in the broader media. Once the Halevi piece had been published in the Weekend Australian, AIJAC was able to run it on its own website, pointing out that it was from the Weekend Australian. In my view, this was a lobby group with way too much influence: a point I made strongly to my editors.

  The more AIJAC attacked me, the more determined I became not to back off. I came to the view that there was no point in being a correspondent if you could only tell part of the story. I knew I had the backing of Chris Mitchell from an unequivocal email he sent me: ‘I had no idea things were this bad. I have NO relationship with Colin and think him a bully so feel free to come to me whenever you need. I am obviously sympathetic to Israel but I am just as keen to get things right. And I am keen on a range of views.’

  Around this period I learnt that there were times when Chris Mitchell would refuse to take Rubenstein’s phone calls – at which point Rubenstein would go through Cater. Mitchell told me at the time that he had asked Cater to keep Rubenstein ‘more at arm’s length’.

  Later, back in Australia, Mitchell would tell me: ‘Sometimes with Colin Rubenstein I’d say, “Send a letter or write a column,” but other times if I wouldn’t take his call he’d go behind my back to Nick Cater. I got upset with Colin when he rang me and attacked [Australian reporter] Elizabeth Wynhausen as “a self-loathing Jew”. I thought it was inappropriate for him to be making that kind of comment about one of my staff. For some time after that I stopped taking his calls.’

  At the same time I heard that Cater did not want my work to appear in ‘Inquirer’, the flagship section of the Weekend Australian. This was devastating. When I’d been the paper’s Washington correspondent under Paul Kelly, the ‘Inquirer’ section (then called ‘Focus’) had been what all the correspondents aimed for. I phoned Cater and he confirmed that he’d asked for my work no longer to appear in ‘Inquirer’. He told me that ‘the Middle East is such a complex part of the world that a correspondent should spend the first 12 months learning about the area and just writing news’. I’d never heard of this happening to a correspondent in my more than 30 years in journalism; normally if a newspaper funds an overseas bureau they want as many features and analysis pieces as possible, rather than just straight news stories, which they can get from the news agencies, or ‘wires’.

  But I wasn’t just having problems with the ‘Inquirer’ section. I discovered that Cater had commissioned a freelance journalist in Jerusalem to do a story on something that I’d been covering for more than a week.

  At nine o’clock on the morning of 31 May 2010, the news broke that Israeli special forces had stormed the Mavi Marmara, one of six ships in the ‘Gaza Freedom Flotilla’, which was seeking to break Israel’s three-year blockade of Gaza. Among those on board were Australians and New Zealanders, including journalists. There was serious violence on the Mavi Marmara and nine Turkish citizens were killed; a tenth later died in hospital.

  I drove south to the port of Ashdod, where the boats with people from the flotilla were being landed by the army. When I arrived, many of the media were up on the hill overlooking the Mediterranean to see the flotilla coming in, and a huge demonstration was taking place. From their crocheted caps – kippahs – I could tell they were mainly young right-wing religious protesters who were on the side of the army. They were carrying signs such as ‘It should have been more than nine.’ The mob was starting to turn against the media – putting their signs in front of an Israeli reporter from Al Jazeera, for instance, every time he tried to do
a live cross.

  There were three Palestinian women sitting on the hill, and a mob of perhaps 100 protesters gathered around and chanted: ‘Go home! Go back to where you came from!’ These women were actually Israeli citizens. I thought, this is going to get ugly.

  Some of the foreign media there went and spoke to the head of army PR, Avital Leibovich, about the situation but she said, ‘Look, that’s not my problem. Talk to the police about it. It’s not an army issue.’ So we then went and saw Micky Rosenfeld, the head of PR for the police, and he said, ‘Oh look, it’s fine. They will be OK. There are a lot of high emotions here.’

  By now the women were starting to be pushed, and we began having an argument with Micky Rosenfeld, telling him: ‘You should do something!’ Then the police started arguing among themselves about what to do. Finally, some of them moved in and helped the women get away as a group of the young Israelis brought their faces up close to the women, shouting: ‘Go home!’ It was a very ugly mood and my first taste of the dark side of a section of Israeli society.

  As we talked to various people it was difficult to tell whether the army or the activists had started the violence in the flotilla. In the Middle East, one side always disputes the other side’s version. Just after the incident Israeli journalists were going on TV and one of them said, ‘The flotilla was not in international waters, it was in Israeli waters.’ After a day or two it was confirmed that the flotilla had been in international waters, but by then seeds of doubt had crept in. I came to see this occur over and over again. Often when there was a story critical of Israel, or a war, some Israeli journalists would quickly appear on television and muddy the waters by claiming an incident was not true or adding enough doubt to make the foreign media hold off reporting it as fact, to soften it with qualification.