Elite IDF soldier confesses to looting Gaza home during war: Ha’aretz
An elite Israel Defense Forces soldier confessed on Tuesday to stealing a credit card from a home in northern Gaza during the recent offensive against Hamas and using it to withdraw NIS 1,600 in Israel. The soldier, who serves in the Givati infantry unit’s reconnaissance battalion, was arrested last week with one of his comrades. The second soldier was released after his friend confessed.Following the soldier’s confession, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit relayed: “The IDF examines every incident that is not in line with the laws of the state and the principles of the IDF.” The army’s police investigative unit launched a probe into the allegations last month after receiving a complaint. A Palestinian residing in the northern Gaza Strip claimed his credit card was stolen during Operation Cast Lead, the codename for Israel’s offensive against Hamas. A short while later, his credit card statement revealed that a number of products were purchased in Israel. In the statement released Tuesday by the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, the army further said: “In light of the nature of the complaint, the military prosecution ordered the Military Police Investigation unit to open probes in which they would take evidence in order to examine the claims.”
“As is customary,” the unit added, “the investigations are accompanied by prosecutors for operational matters who will check the findings and recommend steps to take, should this be found necessary. “Following these claims two soldiers were arrested for investigation by the Military Police Investigation unit.”
New report: The Electronic Police State
2008 National Rankings
Most of us are aware that our governments monitor nearly every form of electronic communication. We are also aware of private companies doing
the same. This strikes most of us as slightly troubling, but very few of us say or do much about it. There are two primary reasons for this:
1. We really don’t see how it is going to hurt us. Mass surveillance is certainly a new, odd, and perhaps an ominous thing, but we just
don’t see a complete picture or a smoking gun. 2. We are constantly surrounded with messages that say, “Only crazy people complain about the government.”
However, the biggest obstacle to our understanding is this: The usual image of a “police state” includes secret police dragging people out of their homes at night, with scenes out of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR. The problem with these images is that they are horribly outdated. That’s how things worked during your grandfather’s war – that is not how things work now. An electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine. An electronic police state is characterized by this:
State use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens.
The two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these:
1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.
2. It is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions.
In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every
check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long,
long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever
they feel like it – the evidence is already in their database.
The list includes 52 states, and here are the first nine:
Here are the 52 states and their rankings:
1. China
2. North Korea
3. Belarus
4. Russia
5. United Kingdom: England & Wales
6. United States of America
7. Singapore
8. Israel
Surprise, surprise!
UN gets Israeli cluster bomb maps: BBC
Israel has handed over details of where it dropped cluster bombs in Lebanon during the war in 2006, UN peacekeeping forces have confirmed.
The UN says Israel used some four million cluster bomblets on Lebanon, of which about a quarter did not explode. The data will be assessed and then passed on to the Lebanese army. The UN has repeatedly called on Israel to provide information to help speed up the clearance operation and prevent further casualties among civilians. Most of the cluster bomblets were fired in the last 72 hours of the 33-day war with Hezbollah militants in Lebanon in July and August 2006.
According to the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre, about 300 civilians have since been killed or maimed by left-over munitions. The majority of the victims were children, often from rural areas in south Lebanon, who had used the bomblets as toys. Although cluster bombs are not illegal under the laws of war, campaigners say their use in populated areas constitutes an indiscriminate attack on civilians. In a statement the Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora confirmed that he had received a call from the Unfil commander General Claudio Graziano who informed him about the details Israel had provided. Mr Siniora said the maps and locations should have been handed over immediately after the end of hostilities in 2006.
Only took 3 years and over a hundred people killed after the IOF has retreated, having sown those lethal bomblets in a huge area. Of course, they did not want to kill anyone – that is why they dropped over a million of those murderous devices.
Netanyahu ‘asked Pope to condemn Iran’: BBC
Israel’s right-wing new Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, says he has asked Pope Benedict to condemn Iranian threats to destroy his country.
He said he had asked the Pope in Nazareth to speak out against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel’s destruction.
Mr Netanyahu gave details of their conversation to Israeli TV. He was also quoted by press as saying Israel did not want a Palestinian state which might jeopardise its security. Pope Benedict has repeatedly called for a separate Palestinian state during his tour of the Holy Land, most vocally when he met Palestinian refugees on Wednesday in Bethlehem. Mr Netanyahu has not committed himself to the principle of two states, which past Israeli leaders have accepted. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev Federico Lombardi, said only that Thursday’s talks had “centred on how the peace process can be advanced”. The Pope said the last and largest open-air Mass of his visit in Nazareth, recorded in the Bible as the childhood home of Jesus Christ. He later said a more intimate Mass at the Church of the Annunciation.
Not a bad harvest for few days’ visit! Yesterday, he was given the choice to get more Jews to Israel, today his task is to condemn Iran, and who knows what tomorrow will bring… certainly not bad for someone whose best known picture is in Hitler Jugend uniform! Keep visiting, Benedictus, is what we say. Maybe settle in Bethlehem, by the checkpoint?
A relativist muddle: The Guardian, Thursday 14 May 2009
The portrayal of pre-1948 Zionists as saintly and Israelis today as brutal is a misreading of history
Benny Morris
The story goes like this: before 1948, the Zionists/Israelis were saintly; in more recent times, they have grown brutal (or inefficient). This version of history, as implied by Max Hastings in his essay in the Guardian last Saturday, might accurately reflect the radical mood swings of a disenchanted admirer. Whether it serves up historical truth is another matter.
The simple truth is that since before its inception, the Arab world has laid siege to the Zionist enterprise and tried to destroy or badly weaken it, in war after war and terrorist campaign after terrorist campaign, by continuous political delegitimisation, assault and boycott. And that much that is bad about Israel today – insensitivity toward Palestinian suffering, declining school standards, even the growing power of religious parties – is, directly and indirectly a result of this Arab belligerence. Even today, after two Arab states (Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994) have formally signed peace agreements with the Jewish state, the Arab League – which includes those two countries – is offering Israel a “peace” settlement that must include Israel’s acceptance of a mass refugee return (“a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN general assembly resolution 194”).
That resolution, of 11 December 1948, which the Arabs universally regard as endorsing the 5 million-odd refugees’ right of return, states that “the refugees willing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date”. Flooding Israel, with its 5.7 million Jews and 1.4 million Arabs, with the refugees would instantly turn it into just another Arab-majority state (the world already benefits from 23 such states). And that is the goal of the “moderate” PLO and Palestine Authority: Why else do President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides refuse to recognise Israel as a “Jewish State”? Why else do they endorse a “two-state settlement” – but not “two states for two peoples”? Hamas, which won Palestinian elections in 2006 and took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, is more candid. If its charter of 1988 is to be believed, it simply wants to destroy Israel.
To read the whole prpoopaganda leaflet by Morris, use the link above. Those of us who know his writing and interviews in Hebrew, and know the depth he can sink to, can no longer be surprised by Moriss’ tired and repetetive refrain of the official Israeli propaganda. Whata low position for a historian to take… What is more rnraging than anything is his position of blaming everything under the sun on the Palestinians and Arabs – just look at the sentence I highlighted above! Blame the victim, is the racist last resort.
EU obligated to prosecute war crime suspects: The Electronic Intifada, 14 May 2009
Daniel Machover and Adri Nieuwhof
Over the past year, the European Union and Israel have deepened their relationship. The enhanced partnership that provides for closer political and mutually beneficial trade and investment relations as well as economic, social, financial, civil scientific, technological and cultural cooperation. The EU will pump 14 million euros ($18 million) of taxpayer money into the cooperation over the next seven years. However, talks to upgrade the current association agreement were suspended in January 2009 because of Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip. On 23 April, EU commissioner for external relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner said in a statement that “the EU deeply deplores the loss of life during this conflict, particularly the civilian casualties, and would follow closely investigations into alleged violations of international humanitarian law.” Ferrero-Waldner chastised Israel’s refusal to endorse a Palestinian state. Israel quickly responded, warning the EU to tone down its criticism.
In the midst of the Gaza invasion, numerous experts pointed out that Israel was committing severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law. The Hague regulations and Geneva conventions specifically mention the illegality of collective punishment, targeting civilians during wartime and rules on military necessity and proportionality. Israel did not allow journalists and international monitors to enter Gaza during the invasion, and these opinions were based on limited eyewitness and media reports. In order to come to a full understanding of the operations and assess the harm done, human rights organizations, UN bodies and the Arab League have undertaken fact-finding missions and investigations. As the conclusions from these various investigations are released, it is now apparent that Israel does indeed have a case to answer to on many alleged war crimes.
As High Contracting Parties to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, EU countries are obligated to bring the legal duties of the Fourth Geneva Convention into their law. The basic starting point is enacting any legislation necessary to provide effective penal sanctions for persons committing or ordering any of the grave breaches of the convention (i.e., war crimes). The following grave breaches mentioned in the convention seem relevant to the assault on Gaza:
“[W]illful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, if committed against persons or property protected by the Convention.”
Lieberman’s party proposes ban on Arab Nakba: Ha’artez
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s party wants to ban Israeli Arabs from marking the anniversary of what they term “the Catastrophe” or Nakba, when in 1948 some 700,000 Arabs lost their homes in the war that led to the establishment of the state of Israel. The ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party said it would propose legislation next week for a ban on the practice and a jail term of up to three years for violators. “The draft law is intended to strengthen unity in the state of Israel and to ban marking Independence Day as a day of mourning,” said party spokesman Tal Nahum. The initiative could fuel racial tensions stoked by Lieberman’s February election campaign call to make voting or the holding of public office in Israel contingent on pledging loyalty to the Jewish state. Arabs, who make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, said the allegiance demand was aimed at them and accused Lieberman of racism.
Israel celebrated its Independence Day this year on April 29, in accordance with the Hebrew lunar calendar. Palestinian refugees around the world and Israel’s Arab citizens mark the Nakba on May 15, the day after the British mandate over Palestine ended in 1948. Ceremonies in the West Bank were held a day early this year because May 15 falls on Friday, the Muslim day of rest. In Ramallah, hundreds of Palestinians, some holding large wooden keys to symbolize the keys of homes from which they fled in 1948, took part in a rally. “I came here to show that we believe that one day we will return. If not me, then my son,” said Mohammad Hassan, 79. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, on a visit to Syria, was to make a televised address later in the day to mark the Nakba. The right-leaning government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which Lieberman’s party is a key ally, has not endorsed the Western and Arab-backed goal of Palestinian statehood. It also firmly opposes the division of Jerusalem and the right of return of Palestinian refugees, and Netanyahu recently introduced a demand that Palestinians, as part of any future peace agreement, recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”.
Very good. A last, we get the picture, loud and clear – the Nazis are marching, and in their wake, there will be no Nakba, no memory, no history. This ends the preliminaries, and leads us into the next stage – they prepare the second Nakba, so we cannot speak of the first, which has never ended. Read below a detailed report from Jewish Peace News
Banning of memory! The Nakba is Verbotten!
On May 14, the annual day for commemorating the Nakba, the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians with the establishment of the state of Israel, Ha’aretz announced the proposal of a new law in Israel banning all commemorations of the Nakba. The law was proposed by Yisrael Beiteinu, the political party of Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman. The proposed legislation threatens three years imprisonment for anyone who commemorates the Nakba. (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1085588.html)
Yisrael Beiteinu’s party spokesman is quoted as saying that the law intends “to strengthen unity in the state of Israel.” That statement, and this proposed law, should set off anti-fascism alarms. In the name of “unity,” here is a proposal to criminalize acts of memory, collective identity, and cultural and political expression. In the name of Israel’s majority group, this proposal seeks to criminalize memory and memory-makers, effectively criminalizing the group-identity of Israel’s largest minority population. The very existence of a culture relies on its memory, which comprises the stories a culture tells about itself. This law would threaten the existence of Palestinians as a remembering, culture-producing, history-bearing people, and would prevent the possibility of Israel becoming a truly pluralistic society where every group’s history can be told. And by forbidding the remembering of the Nakba, the law aims to erase the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians – including the
destruction of more than 400 villages, multiple massacres and the creation of more than 700,00 refugees, and the confiscation of thousands of acres of land – even as this same political party’s platform threatens another form of dispossession, that is, removing citizenship from Palestinian citizens (http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/2009/02/growing-trend-toward-fascism.html).
Reports of the proposed law say it will punish anyone who commemorates the Nakba, not just Palestinians. In this way, the proposed law signals other recent developments in Israel, whereby Israeli Jews are being targeted in campaigns aiming to silence their protest, similar to ways in which Palestinians – both inside of Israel and in the occupied Territories – are also targeted for silencing. (For more on this targeting and the recent persecution of the Israeli Jewish group New Profile, see here: http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/2009/05/rela-mazali-israels-war-against-youth.html).
The threat to imprison anyone who commemorates the Nakba is also a reminder that everyone engaged with the state of Israel has an obligation to know and remember the Nakba. A good source for information and commemoration is the Israeli organization “Zochrot,” which offers extensive education on the Nakba, both on their website (http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?lang=english) and in actual tours of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. Zochrot’s “links” page also offers many different sources of information, maps, and testimonies on the Nakba (http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=379). Norma Musih of Zochrot writes, “Awareness and recognition of the Nakba by Jewish-Israeli people, and taking responsibility for this tragedy, are essential to ending the struggle and starting a process of reconciliation between the people of Palestine-Israel.” (http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=642) As an American Jew, I think it’s just as important for Americans, and for Jews, to recognize the tragedy
of the Nakba, so that we, too, can understand what Palestinians have suffered and what is at stake for them in this conflict.
Sarah Anne Minkin – Jewish Peace News
Those who continue to balme any opponent of Zionism and its barbarities an antisemite, may well be interested in this article on Israeli antisemitism. Gideon Levy at his best.
Anti-Semitism is rearing its head in Tel Aviv: Ha’aretz
By Gideon Levy
Anti-Semitism is raising its head. Not in Warsaw, Munich or Paris, and there’s no need for the Anti-Defamation League to wave the evidence around. It’s right here, in our own home, in verdant Ramat Aviv, the most enlightened suburb of Tel Aviv, our most enlightened city. The entry of a handful of ultra-Orthodox Jews to this lovely, modest and tranquil neighborhood has provoked an unlovely wave of racism, tearing the thin veil of openness and liberality from this seemingly left-wing community. If anyone were to behave this way toward Israeli Arabs, the residents might raise a hue and cry, but when it comes to Haredim the gloves are off because attacking the “blacks” is the fashion.
They stand on street corners – God help us – offering men the opportunity to don tefillin: the scandal. They’ve rented a few apartments to sleep in, and perhaps even to teach Torah: a disaster. A handful among the neighborhood’s secular inhabitants: a takeover, the very image of Beit Shemesh. The jargon of the neighborhood’s “action committee” recalls days best forgotten. Its Web site speaks of finding “apartments rented to Haredim in order to apply pressure on landlords.”
What kind of pressure, exactly? Why, for God’s sake? Why the fear? Don’t Haredim, like any minority, have the right to live in the neighborhood? No, not when it comes to Haredim, the punching bag of the left. What nationalist Israelis do to the Arabs, the left does to the ultra-Orthodox. There’s no difference. Demonization, dehumanization, scare tactics and the sowing of hatred.
Livni: Bi-national state idea is a strategic threat: Ha’aretz
Opposition leader Tzipi Livni on Thursday warned that time was running out on achieving a peace deal with the Palestinians, saying that the idea of a bi-national state for both peoples is “a strategic threat, no less menacing than any other threat.”
“Time is not working in favor of those who want to retain Israel’s Jewish identity, and time is not in favor of moderate powers in the region and therefore we mustn’t drag our feet and delay the inevitable with a useless diplomatic process,” Livni declared at a conference of the Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies in Herzliya. Ahead of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip to Washington, scheduled for next week, the former foreign minister addressed Iran’s controversial nuclear program, saying that “the strength of the civilian public is a central component of our national strength, and these are important to consider in the decision making process. We mustn’t arrive at a place that will harm our national strength. The use of terms like ‘holocaust’ in regard to threats is problematic in this case.”