EDITOR: Happy Passover? For whom exactly?
Well, we all know Passover id supposed to be about freedom. Or so were are told. Now many Jews will sit tonight and sing lovely songs about freedom, end to slavery and suffering, and what not. Most of them will not for a moment think that it is not the Jews today who are in slavery, but the Palestinians; It is not the Jews who will go short on food, medicines, water, housing, gas, electricity, but again, the people of Gaza. It is not the Jews whose children will be taken by the soldiers to the many prisons, but again, the Palestinian children.
So, if there was some humane message in the Passover myth, it is lost on the very people who should know better, who should know that any nations which occupies, brutalizes and oppresses another nation, is not itself free. There no freedom to the occupied, or the occupier.
The plague of darkness has struck modern Israelites: Haaretz
By Akiva Eldar
One of the harshest of the 10 plagues has smitten the children of Israel this Passover, and they are stumbling about in pitch darkness, bumping blindly into anyone in their way as they head toward the edge of the precipice. Warm friends, cool friends, icy enemies: Jordan and Turkey, Brazil and Britain, Germany and Australia – it’s all the same.
And if that’s not enough, the myopic Jewish state also has gone and collided head-on with the ally that offers existential support. Israel has become an environmental hazard and its own greatest threat. For 43 years, Israel has been ruled by people who have refused to see reality. They speak of “united Jerusalem,” knowing that no other country has recognized the annexation of the eastern part of the city. They sent 300,000 people to settle land they know does not belong to them. As early as September 1967, Theodor Meron, then the legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, said there was a categorical prohibition against civilian settlement in occupied territories, under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Meron – who would become the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and is now a member of the Appeals Chamber for both that court and a similar one for Rwanda – wrote to prime minister Levi Eshkol in a top-secret memorandum: “I fear there is great sensitivity in the world today about the whole question of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, and any legal arguments that we try to find will not remove the heavy international pressure, from friendly states as well.”
It is true that for many years, we have managed to grope our way through the dark and keep the pressure at bay. We did so with the assistance of our neighbors, who were afflicted with the same shortsightedness.
On Sunday, however, the Arab League marked the eighth anniversary of its peace proposals, which offer Israel normalization in exchange for an end to the occupation and an agreed solution to the refugee problem, in accordance with UN Resolution 194. But Israel behaves as if it had never heard of this historic initiative. For the last year, it was too busy realizing its dubious right to establish an illegal settlement in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, turning a blind eye to reality, has tried to persuade the world that what applies to Tel Aviv also applies to Sheikh Jarrah. He simply refuses to see that the world is sick of us. It’s easier for him to focus on his similarly nearsighted followers in AIPAC. Tonight they’ll all swear “Next year in rebuilt Jerusalem” – including the construction in Ramat Shlomo, of course.
Hillary Clinton is not Jewish, but it was she who had to remind the AIPAC Jews what demography will do to their favorite Jewish democracy in the Middle East. A few days earlier, she had come back from Moscow, where she took part in one of the Quartet’s most important meetings. Israeli politicians and media were too busy with the cold reception awaiting Netanyahu at the White House. They never gave any thought to the decision by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations to turn Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s state-building plan from a unilateral initiative into an international project.
The Quartet declared that it was backing the plan, proposed in August 2009, to establish a Palestinian state within 24 months. This was an expression of the Palestinians’ serious commitment that the state have a just and proper government and be a responsible neighbor. This means Israel has less than a year and a half to come to an agreement with the Palestinians on the permanent borders, Jerusalem and the refugees. If the Palestinians stick to Fayyad’s path, in August 2011, the international community, led by the United States, can be expected to recognize the West Bank and East Jerusalem as an independent country occupied by a foreign power. Will Netanyahu still be trying to explain that Jerusalem isn’t a settlement?
For 43 years, the Israeli public – schoolchildren, TV viewers, Knesset members and Supreme Court judges – have been living in the darkness of the occupation, which some call liberation. The school system and its textbooks, the army and its maps, the language and the “heritage” have all been mobilized to help keep Israelis blind to the truth. Luckily, the Gentiles clearly see the connection between the menace of Iranian control spreading across the Middle East and the curse of Israeli control over Islamic holy places.
Monday night, when we read the Passover Haggadah, we should note the plague that follows darkness. That may open our eyes.
Barak: Hamas will pay for shaking equilibrium on Gaza border: Haaretz
Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Monday warned that Hamas that Israel would react harshly to any escalation along its border with the Gaza Strip.
“The enemy in the Gaza Strip has paid and will continue to pay a heavy price if it tries to shake the equilibrium along the border,” Barak said.
His comments as he visited troops from the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani Brigade who took part in an exchange of fire that killed two of their comrades at the border this weekend.
Likud minister Gilad Erdan Also called for Israel to react strongly to the incident.
“There must be a clear and decisive response, although at this stage there is not a need for a wide-ranging operation on the scale of Cast Lead,” Erdan told Israel radio on Monday, refering to Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza last year, in which some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued his own warning on Sunday, saying Israel would retaliate against any attack on its citizens or soldiers and that Hamas would be made to be held accountable for actions.
The two deaths in Gaza clashes on Friday have increased concern in the IDF that Hamas is trying to alter the situation along the Gaza Strip border fence, possibly by targeting of Israeli patrols.
“Israel’s policy of retaliation is forceful and decisive,” Netanyahu said during the weekly government meeting in Jerusalem, asserting that Israel would “retaliate decisively against any attack on our citizens and soldiers.”
“This policy is well-known and will continue. Hamas and the other terror organizations need to know that they are the ones that are responsible for their own actions,” Netanyahu said.
UK tabloid: Israel “forged thousands of IDs”: Y Net
MI6 suspects that airline staff working for Mossad may have copied passports of Britons flying to Israel, News of the World reports, adding authorities also concerned about security searches carried out on British officials attending terrorism conference in country last September
The British secret intelligence service (MI6) suspects that airline staff working for the Israeli secret service Mossad may have copied thousands of British passports, some of which were used in the assassination of senior Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, the News of the World tabloid reported Sunday.
According to the report, British authorities are also concerned about security searches carried out on British officials attending a terrorism conference in Israel last September.
MI6 believe that Britons flying to Israel have been targeted for months and their documents have been cloned, the newspaper said, adding that the Foreign Office held top level talks last week on whether to issue a warning against travelling with certain airlines.
The forging method was already revealed last week in a statement made by the British government to the parliament after the use of British citizens’ identities in the Dubai assassination was revealed. According to the statement, 12 passports used by the assassins were cloned in different airports while the British nationals were on their way to Israel. They were taken away for “examinations” which lasted 20 minutes each.
In addition to the investigation into the falsification of British passports, the United Kingdom authorities are also checking whether Israeli intelligence elements took advantage of a visit to Israel by British security officials in order to clone their passports.
British police sources said the officials had undergone strict security checks upon arriving in Israel.
“It was said to be routine but the searches did not apply to all nations,” a source told the newspaper. “There is now a real concern that some of these high-ranking officers and officials have also had documents cloned.”
The UK expressed its discontent after Dubai authorities revealed that British identities were used in the assassination and launched an investigation into the matter. One of the moves taken against Israel was the decision to expel an Israeli diplomat serving in the kingdom, which was said to be the Mossad representative in London.
It was also reported that Israel would not be allowed to replace its Mossad representative in London should it not provide Britain with a public assurance that UK citizens’ passports will never be used again for secret operations.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told lawmakers last week that Israel’s actions had put British nationals at risk and showed a “profound disregard” for Britain’s sovereignty. He said the fact that Israel is a longtime ally with close business, personal and political ties to Britain “adds insult to injury” in this case.
Miliband noted that a thorough British investigation concluded that Israel was behind the forging of British passports used by the alleged assassins in Dubai.