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Israel Lobby Holds High-level Closed Conf to Mold 'Peace Process'

MER UPDATE:

After yesterday's exclusive MER article the following:

RASHID KHALIDI BACKS OUT AT LAST MINUTE

Israeli/American Jewish Front-Group -- Brit Tzedek v'Shalom --
removes photos and cancels event with Khalidi
"due to unforeseen circumstances".

Elliot Abrams with American Zionist leaders Rashid Khalidi cancels

Pictures removed from Jewish/Israeli Organization HomePage

MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 17 December: These are sensitive times indeed. And it's a demonstration of a kind of positive cleansing effect that candid, hard-hitting, expert, timely information and analysis can have. Exposure can be a significant corrective and disinfectant. In fact this small episode can serve as a good demonstration of what kinds of impact would be possible on a regular basis if a major step could be taken through MER to create a vibrant international think-tank -- one with Washington HQ but also with associates and representatives in other key locations -- with it's own regular policy reports, analysis and commentary articles, newspaper op eds, radio and TV appearances, and online timely and regular TV programs.

As best we can tell here's what seems to have happened as a result of MER's exclusive article about Professor Rashid Khalidi and his involvement with the American Jewish front-organization known in hebrew as Brit Tzedek v'Shalom.

As a result of the MER article and contacts with him it appears Professor Khalidi abruptly changed his mind and backed out at the last minute from the conference call he had previously agreed to be the featured speaker on last evening for the Zionist propaganda organization.

The organization it seems then quickly changed the homepage of it's elaborate website, removing the main lead picture at the top which showed members of the organization posing with senior National Security Council neocon Elliot Abrams. Also removed quickly was the picture of Khalidi just below that of Abrams among a line up of a few Palestinians of which he was the most prominent.

Additionally all information about the phone conference which was advertised to feature Khalidi at 8pm Thursday evening simply disappeared; all mention of something that had previously been prominently promoted simply vanished without explanation or comment as if it never was to be.

Links to yesterday's MER article:

RASHID KHALIDI NOW HELPS
Israeli and American Jewish Zionist Propoganda Groups

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Original exclusive MER article as published 16 December 2004:

RASHID KHALIDI NOW HELPS
Israeli and American Jewish Zionist Propoganda Groups

MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 16 December: Not only in the occupied territories have the Israelis now put in place the kind of occupation Palestinian 'Vichy-style Régime' they have worked so hard and so long to bring about. Various organizations and academics from the Palestinian camp are also on the growing 'to be used' list of the Israelis -- some for the Likud and Sharon, more for Labor and Peres.

Now that Likud and Labor are formally uniting once again, with long-time friends Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres teaming up more openly in the classic Good Cop-Bad Cop roles, a big push is on to enlist and use as many willing or co-optable Arabs, especially Palestinians, as can be found.

The overall goal is to create the political and public relations environment to push ahead with a kind of disguised Palestinian surrender, then twist the controlled Palestinian regime to sign away as many legal rights and U.N. resolutions as possible, and then if possible co-opt it into signing an agreement for a false, permanently crippled if not still-born, Palestinian mini-Statelet with 'provisional borders.

If accomplished...still a very big "if"...then it will be said that anyone who opposes or keeps fighting, regardless of previous historic or legal considerations, is a "terrorist" as for good or bad "the Palestinians" have themselves accepted and "legalized" their own dispossession on top of the apartheid realities that now exist. In that context then the occupation will essentially be continued in new even more convoluted forms for the foreseeable future. That is indeed why Sharon has all-but-said he desires now that a few thousand settlers be removed from fenced-in Gaza -- actually a long-discussed and desired option for many in the Zionist movement -- in order to be able to keep and expand the important cities and major settlements throughout the Jerusalem area and in the West Bank.

Whatever one's view of these developments, this is the brazen reality of the overall historical context in which finding willing or co-optable Palestinians of all kinds is the order of the day.

Not long ago it was Sari Nusseiba working closely with a former head of the Israeli Shinbet who was put on international tour to promote the 'peace process'. Yasser Abed-Rabbo has been the chosen interlocutor for long-time Peres protege Yossi Beilin and the 'Peace Now' crowd. More recently, also sponsored by the ever-deceptive Israeli-manipulated 'Americans For Peace Now' organization, Ziad Ziad, a long-time quisling 'Palestinian Authority Minister', went on tour for them in the U.S. with a former Mossad official, Yossi Alper, who in October declared the 'two-state solution' all but dead.

The newest little twist for establishment American Jews working closely with the Israelis is to get academics like Professor Rashid Khalidi on board and indirectly serving as fund-raisers and legitimizers for their own duplicitously crafty efforts. It was just a few years ago now that the Israeli and American Jewish establishments set up a new umbrella organization in the U.S. -- Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, fittingly and ever-so-deceptively named "Justice and Peace" in Hebrew.

Professor Edward Said always prevented himself from being used by these kinds of masked Zionist propaganda front-organizations, though sadly in his case he allowed himself all too often to be badly used in other ways by the Arab 'client regimes' and their own 'client organizations', all of whom are now nearly totally exhausted, moribund, discredited, dead or dying.

Much worse however, now Khalidi, who took over at Columbia University upon Said's death, is succumbing to the pressures...and rewards...and allowing himself and the name of Said whose chair he now holds to be used by the 'liberal' Zionist front-groups. (Note: Khalidi has nowhere near the stature and credibility of Said, but another tragic reality for the Palestinians is that there is hardly anything left of the various Palestinian and Arab-American organizations to put forward alternatives or to protest misguided actions; especially in today's increasingly fearful situation at American universities and in fact throughout the organizational community).

Believe it or not, without protest by him Khalidi's picture now appears on the home page of this latest American Jewish propaganda group just below a picture of the notoriously anti-Palestinian neocon Elliot Abrams -- friend and ally of Ariel Sharon, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and the most hard-line elements long associated with AIPAC, JINSA, and the Israeli-Jewish lobby crowd in Washington. Pardoned by the previous President Bush for lying to Congress Abrams was brought back to government by Condi Rice to be the Middle East National Security Council director in the current Bush White House.

Those who know Khalidi for some time are aware that he has played an increasingly demeaning game for many years now in the U.S., always very careful to play ball with the powers that be and to always be politically correct and shift gears when to his benefit. But Khalidi hasn't gone so far before as to actually help the American Jewish Zionist organizations in tandem with the worst of the Washington Jewish neocons; which may be both another sign of the times as well as a sign of the pressures he faces fearing that the more hard-line Zionist organizations will target him even though he has been so 'accomodating'.

Indeed though he was given a chance to explain his views prior to publication of this MER article, all he had to say was that sometimes he is "careless" and doesn't "know what he is getting in to" -- and how right he may be about that!

Khalidi may view his now closer-than-ever association with the 'liberal' Israelis and their American Jewish Zionist front-organizations as a way to protect and insolate himself under the increasingly difficult conditions in the USA. But to many Palestinians and observers of the Middle East scene Khalidi is primarily a careful, admittedly articulate, sell-out far more interested in himself and the benefits and rewards he can bring his way -- something another Arab intellectual academic, Fouad Ajami, along with Washington operative, James Zogby, are so well known for -- than in standing up forcefully in a consistently principled way for his own people.

While courageous Israeli academics like Tanya Reinhart at Tel Aviv University, long time Israeli writers like Uri Avneri, and brilliant journalists like Robert Fisk are in fact speaking up loudly warning about what Sharon and Peres and their armies of propaganda agents and client organizations are up to; tragically Palestinian academics like Rashid Khalidi are cowering more than ever even to the extent of allowing themselves to be more blatantly used by the Zionist organizations than ever before.