EDITOR: Israeli Apartheid Week
This week, the BDS campaign is at last spreading far and wide across the globe, through the Apartheid Week campaign. It certainly seems to mark the gradual transformation of pubic opinion on this issue, and predicates a likely political change in the future. This is why the tag on anti-semitism has been automatically attached to this activity by Zionist propaganda makers.
Universities across the globe mark Israeli Apartheid Week: Haaretz
LONDON – A filmmaker, anthropologist and economic researcher are among those headlining events marking what pro-Palestinian organizers have declared as “Israeli Apartheid Week” – and all three speakers are Israeli.
University campuses in more than 40 cities around the world are marking the week with lectures, films, multimedia events, cultural performances and demonstrations.
Since they were first launched in 2005, the events have become some of “the most important global events in the Palestine solidarity calendar,” according to its organizers.
Its aim, they state on their Web site, is to “contribute to this chorus of international opposition to Israeli apartheid and to bolster support for the boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) campaign.”
Though many of the details about those events were not being promoted on the Apartheid Week Web site, it did list several events being offered by Israelis.
Among them is Shir Hever, an economic researcher at the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, who is scheduled to give a series of lectures at the University of Amsterdam entitled “Could the Economic Policies of Israel be Considered a Form of Apartheid?”
In addition, Israeli activist and filmmaker Shai Carmeli-Pollak is screening his 2006 documentary “Bil’in Habibti,” about Israel Defense Forces violence, at Boston-area universities.
Jeff Halper, the Israel-based professor of anthropology who is co-founder and coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was scheduled to speak on “Israeli Apartheid: The Case For BDS” at Glasgow University.
The participation of several Israelis in the anti-Zionist events is “atrocious,” said David Katz, a member of Britain’s Jewish Board of Deputies who grew up in South Africa and has long fought the comparison between that country’s racial segregation and Israel’s ethnic divisions.
“They are free to do as they please, but it’s atrocious,” he said of the participating Israelis. “I think they don’t understand the analogy they are making… which is insulting to those who suffered under apartheid.”
“It’s like calling things ‘holocaust’ which are not the Holocaust or terming something ‘genocide’ which is not genocide,” said Katz.
As part of efforts to counter the Apartheid Week events, one Jewish charity brought over Benjamin Pogrund, a South African immigrant to Israel who is the former deputy editor of the Johannesburg-based Rand Daily Mail, to speak to British university students about why Israel is not an apartheid state.
“The game plan of those who seek the destruction of Israel is to equate us with South Africa, a pariah state which had to be subjected to international sanctions,” Pogrund has said. “Israelis coming to take part in this week should know better.”
In Canada, the legislature in the province of Ontario unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid Week, voting for a resolution that denounced the campus events.
“If you’re going to label Israel as Apartheid, then you are also… attacking Canadian values,” Conservative legislator Peter Shurman told Shalom Life, a Toronto-based Jewish Web site.
“The use of the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I’m not certain it doesn’t actually cross over that line,” he said.
No country would accept Netanyahu’s conditions for peace: Haaretz
By Akiva Eldar
The decision to add the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb to the list of historical heritage sites up for renovation was not made with the intention of inflaming tempers and sabotaging efforts to revive final-status talks with the Palestinians. It was merely a routine move by a rightist government, further proof that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “two states” speech at Bar-Ilan University was a milestone on the road to nowhere. The only difference between “the rock of our existence” that launched the Western Wall tunnel violence in 1996 and the 2010 model is that this time Netanyahu is wearing a mask, trying to pass himself off as peace activist Uri Avnery, with the generous help of Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
The prime minister, as we all know, simply can’t wait for renewed final-status talks to get underway, but Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas refuses to back down and is setting “conditions that predetermine the outcome of the negotiations,” as Netanyahu told Haaretz a week ago. Indeed, the Palestinians have made their participation in indirect talks conditional on, in part, a construction freeze during the talks in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem. They have the audacity to claim that it is Netanyahu’s demand to expand settlements during negotiations along with the assertion of Jewish ownership over sensitive sites which are the conditions that predetermine the outcome of the talks.
The Palestinian demand for a total freeze on settlement construction, including that required for natural population growth, is not, in Netanyahu’s words “a condition that no country would accept.” Israel accepted that condition in the road map seven years ago. In an article in the journal of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations in December 2009, Prof. Ruth Lapidoth, recipient of the 2006 Israel Prize for Legal Studies, and Dr. Ofra Friesel write that the Netanyahu government is obligated by the road map, which was ratified by the Sharon government. A former legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, Lapidoth stresses that the 14 remarks (not reservations, as they are usually termed) that Israel appended have no legal validity. And since the U.S. government promised no more than to relate “fully and seriously” to these remarks, they don’t have any diplomatic validity, either.
Netanyahu argues that Sharon reached an oral agreement with George W. Bush that the construction freeze would not apply to the “settlement blocs” and that the United States would take into account natural-growth requirements. The prime minister therefore expects the Palestinians to honor not only formal agreements to which they were a party, but also informal understandings reached behind their backs between Israel and America. Yet when the Palestinians demand an acknowledgment of understandings they reached with the Olmert government on a number of final-status principles, Netanyahu says this is a “precondition that predetermines the outcome of negotiations.”
The prime minister also contemptuously rejects the Palestinian demand that the talks be resumed where they were halted in December 2008. He is not prepared to even listen to the parameters for a final-status agreement proposed by Bill Clinton in December 2000. Netanyahu insists he has the right to start negotiations from square one, ignoring every agreement already reached with the Palestinians. He has even forgotten the Wye River Memorandum of 1998, under which he undertook, in Clinton’s presence, to transfer 13 percent of Area C to the Palestinians.
Netanyahu sticks only to those clauses in the interim agreement (Oslo 2) that removed responsibility for the Palestinians’ welfare from Israel’s hands and left Israel in control of Area C (60 percent of the West Bank). And of course, Netanyahu is totally committed to those clauses that require the Palestinians to combat terrorist infrastructure and incitement and refrain from asking the United Nations to condemn the injustices of the occupation.
Netanyahu is setting conditions for negotiations that no country would accept. His opposition to a settlement freeze and his refusal to resume talks where they left off expose his Bar-Ilan declarations as a cunning diversionary tactic. As his chief spokesman, President Shimon Peres, is wont to declare, “You have to tell the people the truth.” The dismal truth is that, behind the mask, Netanyahu is still the same old Bibi.
EDITOR: The Dubai murder story that will not die down
The murder of one Palestinian in Dubai refuses to disappear from the front pages. Is it possible that Israel has gone too far for the general public sensibilities this time? We should not be celebrating too soon. After all, it certainly did go too far during the 22 days of the carnage in Gaza? While the public revulsion aroused by each wave of brutalities seems to subside after some time has passed, there is also a public memory which keeps building up, a memory of the systemic nature of Israeli Zionist methods and means, and to this end the Apartheid Week is crucial. Thus, this growth of the rejection of Israel’s impunity is also important, even, as now, it is only played on a formalistic level.
Australia police expected in Israel to probe Dubai hit passports: Haaretz
Australian investigators are expected in Israel in the coming days to question several dual nationals whose names have been connected to the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month.
Israel agreed to allow two to three Australian police officers to question the dual citizens, after Australia’s Foreign Ministry on Sunday requested approval from the Israeli envoy in Canberra to dispatch the investigators.
Mabhouh was found dead in his Dubai hotel room on January 20 in what police say they are almost certain was a hit by Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Australia last week said it was not satisfied with the Israeli envoy’s explanation about the use of fraudulent Australian passports in the killing, after three people holding Australian passports were listed among 15 new suspects.
Dubai authorities have named 26 alleged members of the team that tracked and killed the Palestinian and said they operated in disguise and used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports.
Media reports last week said that Australian authorities had approached Israel in the 1990s to seek assurances that its passports would not be used in Mossad activities after it was feared Israel had doctored New Zealand passports.
During that meeting, the reports claimed, the Israelis said they condoned such identity theft, with Australian participants describing their response as “enraged self-righteousness.”
On Saturday, investigators from Britain’s Serious Organized Crimes Agency arrived in Israel to interview dual nationals whose names were used on British forged passports tied to the killing.
‘Two suspected Dubai assassins traveled to the U.S. after the hit’
At least two of the 26 suspected members of the team that tracked and killed Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month traveled to the U.S. shortly after his death, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Records show one of the suspects entered the U.S. on January 21 using an Irish passport and another arrived in the U.S. February 14 using a British passport, reported the Wall Street Journal, quoting “a person familiar with the situation.”
Investigators are uncertain whether the two are still in the U.S. Police suspect the alleged hit squad members used fraudulently issued passports, and that the two may have left the U.S. using different travel documents.
Spokesmen for the U.S. State Department and Interpol both declined to comment on the Wall Street Journal report.
People with the same names as many of the suspects live in Israel and say their identities were stolen. The passport abuse has drawn criticism from the European Union, and some of the governments involved have summoned the Israeli ambassadors to their countries to protest.
Israel has not denied or confirmed it played any role but Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has said there was nothing to link Israel to the killing.
Dubai police have also identified two U.S. financial companies they believe issued several of the credit cards used by at least 14 suspects in the alleged killing.