From Ha’aretz:

Danny Carmon, Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UN, told Israel Radio that the term “‘nakba’ is a tool of Arab propaganda used to undermine the legitimacy of the establishment of the State of Israel, and it must not be part of the lexicon of the UN.”

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Thursday said that the Palestinians will be able to celebrate their independence day on the same day that the word “nakba” or catastrophe is erased from their lexicon. Livni was referring to the Palestinians’ “Nakba Day” which is commemorated on May 15, the day Israel was founded in 1948.

...

Defense Minister Ehud Barak also addressed the crowd in Jerusalem, saying that “there is no future for a nation that doesn’t know its past.”

Quite.

Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, makes an admirable, if not entirely successful, foray into the realm of truth-telling in today's column:

With the oil price heading upwards and President George W. Bush heading for Saudi Arabia, as part of a Middle Eastern tour, it is time to accept the truth. The pursuit of oil is fundamental to US foreign policy.

The importance of oil to American foreign policy is both obvious and curiously difficult to acknowledge in public. In the run-up to the Iraq war it was left to the left to make the argument that this was a “war for oil”. Establishment people – those in the know – rolled their eyes at this “conspiracy theory”.

... It is common to say that the Gulf is a “vital strategic area”. “Strategic” is shorthand for saying that it is home to two-thirds of the world’s known oil reserves.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the crunch, Rachman bottles it. Writes he:

It is unfair to mock. The Iraq war was about lots of things: WMD, remaking the Middle East, democratisation, human rights, Israel, terrorism, the desire for a massive demonstration of American power. But oil was certainly among the motives.

We know, of course, how far WMD matters to the Bushites. Enough for their own troops to use chemical weapons against Iraqis, to use WMD as a convenient pretext for war, to use it to ensure the "facts were fixed around the policy", determined well in advance, of war on Iraq. The extent to which democratisation has been a key goal is evidenced rather starkly by recent US policy in Gaza. The war can plausibly be said to have been about terrorism insofar as it was predicted to increase the threat of terror, and has now done so. A brief tour around the relevant pages of the mainstream human rights monitors, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B'Tselem (the Israeli centre for human rights in the occupied territories) - or a look at Norman Finkelstein's own brilliant, painstaking trawl through these sources - should be sufficient to demonstrate why "human rights" followed by "Israel" (the recipient of billions of dollars in military aid from the US annually) as putative motives for invasion strain credibility just a little bit.

As Rachman's column does help demonstrate, however, one can often read things in the business press that wouldn't make it into the more popular press. Even here, though, such is the state of the mainstream media that you often can't get away with stating the bleedin' obvious without sugaring the pill with propaganda. Which is a shame for us readers - and catastrophic for Iraq.

Before I forget, this one's worth mentioning. Those devious Persians, as it turns out, are not quite so devious after all. That's if the privately-expressed opinion of Ministry of Defence briefing papers are anything to go by. As The Times reported on 17 April:

Report reveals Iran seized British sailors in disputed waters

Fifteen British sailors and Marines were seized by Iran in internationally disputed waters and not in Iraq’s maritime territory as Parliament was told, according to new official documents released to The Times.

The Britons were seized because the US-led coalition designated a sea boundary for Iran’s territorial waters without telling the Iranians where it was, internal Ministry of Defence briefing papers reveal. ...

Newly released Ministry of Defence documents state that:

— The arrests took place in waters that are not internationally agreed as Iraqi;

— The coalition unilaterally designated a dividing line between Iraqi and Iranian waters in the Gulf without telling Iran where it was;

— The Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ coastal protection vessels were crossing this invisible line at a rate of three times a week; It was the British who apparently raised their weapons first before the Iranian gunboats came alongside ...

Iran always claimed that it had arrested the Britons for violating its territorial integrity.

Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, repeatedly told the Commons that the personnel were seized in Iraqi waters.

The MoD, in a televised briefing by Vice-Admiral Charles Style, the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, produced a map showing a line in the sea called “Iraq/Iran Territorial Water Boundary”. A location was given for the capture of the Britons inside what the chart said were “Iraq territorial waters”. But the newly released top-level internal briefing accepts that no such border exists.

Rather embarrassing to those elements of the press - which is practically all of it - that went along with the official line.

Equally intriguing is the question of when The Times got hold of these documents - given that they were buried in its pages around a year after the story broke (and subsequently ignored by most of the rest of the press). There is a compelling precedent for the press deliberately sitting on official documents at a time when "it wouldn't do to mention that particular fact", in Orwell's words - as Nick Davies recalls in Flat Earth News, during the Falklands War Times editorial staff deliberately suppressed internal government documents casting doubt on its public line over the status of the Falklands islands. Could history be repeating itself? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Former US President Jimmy Carter, writing in The Guardian yesterday:

The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world. An entire population is being brutally punished.

This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.

Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank have been imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional 10 who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.

... [E]conomic sanctions and restrictions on the supply of water, food, electricity and fuel are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about one million of whom are refugees.

Israeli bombs and missiles periodically strike the area, causing high casualties among both militants and innocent women and children. Prior to the highly publicised killing of a woman and her four children last week, this pattern had been illustrated by a report from B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights organisation, which stated that 106 Palestinians were killed between February 27 and March 3. Fifty-four of them were civilians, and 25 were under 18 years of age. …

All Arab nations have agreed to recognise Israel fully if it will comply with key United Nations resolutions. Hamas has agreed to accept any negotiated peace settlement between the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, provided it is approved in a referendum of the Palestinian people.

This holds promise of progress, but despite the brief fanfare and positive statements at the peace conference last November in Annapolis, the process has gone backwards. Nine thousand new Israeli housing units have been announced in Palestine; the number of roadblocks within the West Bank has increased; and the stranglehold on Gaza has been tightened.

It is one thing for other leaders to defer to the US in the crucial peace negotiations, but the world must not stand idle while innocent people are treated cruelly. It is time for strong voices in Europe, the US, Israel and elsewhere to speak out and condemn the human rights tragedy that has befallen the Palestinian people.

Tomorrow, central London will see mass protests calling for an end to this onslaught - which is aided and abetted by Britain. It will also commemorate the 60th anniversary of what Palestinians call “al-Nakba”, “the catastrophe”: the forced expulsion from their homes in mandatory Palestine of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who remain refugees to this day. As Avi Shlaim, author of The Iron Wall and perhaps the most eminent scholar of Israeli history comments, “We now have a term to describe what Israel did to the Palestinians in 1948 which did not exist then – ethnic cleansing. So let us call a spade a spade.”

If you can make it, I’ll see you there.

London’s election results don’t inspire a great deal of hope for the future of democracy. Along with an unapologetic casual racist for mayor, we now have a fascist on the Assembly. That means just over one-in-twenty Assembly voters, or 130,000 people according to the BBC, cast their ballot for the BNP. Nor are the two entirely unconnected: if most BNP voters (constituting around 2.84% in the Mayoral election) did as their leadership suggested and cast their second-preference vote for Boris Johnson, they are likely to have contributed just over half of his “top-up” votes. Some of the fascist imagery coming out of the Tory camp, indeed, has been quite alarming. Notwithstanding Johnson’s contrast between the “skinny and dark” Iraqis and their American overlords – resembling “a master race from outer space” – according to the Guardian, a Conservative shadow minister jubilantly compared Johnson’s inching to victory to the fascist march on Rome of 1922. This “lighthearted reference”, we are told, “gave a taste of the high Tory spirits”. It’s certainly the image that springs to my mind when in celebrating mood.

In addition, the “new” Conservative party have continued to display their characteristic concern for Latin American democracy, their representative at a recent hustings I attended describing Ken Livingstone’s meeting with a “Venezuelan dictator” (if you failed to notice such a meeting, that’s because it didn’t happen: Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has been repeatedly elected in an extraordinary sequence of free and fair elections, despite the best efforts of the business-led, US-supported opposition to sabotage his government, on one occasion by force).

Surely most alarming, though, has been the extremely aggressive pro-Johnson campaign on the part of that bastion of fair and honest reporting, the London Evening Standard, led above all by Andrew Gilligan. As Gilligan openly admits, “[t]he Standard helped set the agenda in this election” – not only as the single paid-for London paper, indeed, but since it “could put around 500 billboards on London streets every day” promoting its message. According to one Professor Adrian Monck, cited in the Guardian: “In a city with just one newspaper, the fact it backs one candidate so wholeheartedly feels odd, it feels partisan.” It’s through this kind of insightful commentary, reader, that one becomes head of journalism and publishing at City University. More plausibly, as the Compass group conclude (even if they are far too quick to applaud Ken Livingstone), the Standard has been “used day in and day out as a battering ram, not just against Ken Livingstone, but against the ideals of more democratic, egalitarian and sustainable politics. This is not the freedom and independence of the press but the disfigurement of the fourth estate into a blatant propaganda machine for the rich and powerful”.

The tangle of vested interests involved in this whole affair is actually quite startling: the Standard is owned by Associated Newspapers, whose “contract to supply London underground stations with its free Metro newspaper will run out” in 2010. “The contract’s renewal is a decision for Transport for London, whose chairman the mayor appoints. Metro has proved a success for Associated and it is determined to defend it.” Gilligan, moreover, is a far-from-independent voice, having been “instantly hired” by Boris Johnson, then editing the Spectator, following his ouster from the BBC – which certainly helps account for his willingness to do the Tories’ work for them, smearing Johnson’s opponents and writing risible pseudo-scientific bollocks in his defence. In an attempt to defend his own record, published in the Independent today, Gilligan refers to his success in gaining “the top prize in newspaper journalism” – while failing to recall who it was that actually delivered this prize: the leader of the Conservative Party.

The Standard’s campaign to sink what little remains of the Labour left in London has been pretty extraordinary, then, but in many ways is simply a manifestation not only of newspapers’ domination by powerful vested interests, but the fact that the media and political class are for the most part so close there’s barely a dividing line between them. Overall, the result among the public seems to be a pattern of widespread confusion, delusion, largely in accord with the usual dominant interests, or simple ignorance – which is presumably how we end up in this mess. One example I encountered in London was people’s sheer lack of understanding of how the voting mechanism worked. Two friends intended to cast first-preference votes for Livingstone, second-preference for Sian Berry; one woman I met on the day after the election had voted in precisely this way, selecting Ken first, Lindsey German second. In all instances, these second-preference votes would simply have been wasted. What’s more, if anything these examples most likely under-represent the true level of this failure. I largely mix with students – MA students in fact – whom one would expect to enjoy a level of education a good deal higher than most. If even they don’t understand the voting mechanism, how far do the rest of the population? And if they don’t understand even the straightforward process of how to vote, how do they fare in mustering the necessary information to decide who to vote for?

The implications of the last question are actually rather important. There’s an illuminating case study, for instance, from a recent report by researchers from London, Media Consumption and Public Engagement, which recorded and tracked the media consumption habits of a sample of the public through diaries between February and July 2004. One of the diarists, Samantha, “a beautician living in a run-down part of a southern English city” demonstrates an intense level of concern about her inadequate level of understanding, “commented frequently that she wished she knew more about current events” and is “acutely aware of the limits to the information that she and the general public had available to them”. But “[g]iven her hectic schedule [working up to sixty hours a week], Samantha’s media consumption was understandably aimed at relaxation.” As she writes in her diary:

“we don’t seem to be … aware of everything we need, I don’t think the message is put across. I think we’re sometimes fed what people what you to hear, what people want you to see”;

“why should I have all these unanswered questions, I live in this country and what Tony Blair decides to do does affect me so therefore I should have the information”.

Similarly, the “discussion in her salon provided a context for thinking about public issues, as did media, but insufficient guidance (‘we all seem to know a little bit … but not enough’).” Later on, “[t]owards the end of the diary period her commentary became intense and concerned, even if disturbingly lacking in secure information”. As Samantha recorded during this period:

“Ah, voting week is drawing closer and I still don’t know who to vote for. Very busy at work, so not much time to research therefore relying on TV and radio. I have seen a few broadcasts for the British National Party and quite liked the sound of them, it was simple and got the message across quickly, No to the Euro, No to European government and what a mess the current government have made. All sounds good to me.”

As the authors of the study suggest, the media have a clear agenda-setting effect on the most prominent issues for these diarists, which would seem to include Samantha herself. As she puts it, “[public issues are] just the general day to day, what’s going [on], anything in the world from … the Spanish … bombing to celebrities”. Both her limited access to relevant information and her tapping into (at least some of) the most prominent issues in the media seem to have combined to send Samantha off in an “unpredictable political direction”, quite possibly resulting in support for the BNP.

While it’s often tempting, as Milan Rai has written, to sink into a comfortable elitism at these moments, bemoaning the idiocy of the general public (“Sun-readers” and all), it’s surely an impulse that needs to be resisted. London’s elections no more represent a free and rational choice than would continuing to drink from a water supply that had, unbeknownst to you, been poisoned. Information is integral to the capacity to choose – if the necessary information isn’t there, the choice is unlikely to be meaningful. As the example of Samantha illustrates, ordinary people often demonstrate an acute concern at the lack of much-needed information available to them: it is surely this lack above all which produces such disturbing results.