April 11, 2010

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Turkish PM Erdogan says Israel is ‘threat to peace’: BBC

Turkey’s Prime Minister has described Israel as the “main threat to peace” in the Middle East.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan was speaking during a visit to Paris.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded saying he regretted Turkey’s “repeated attacks” on Israel.
Relations between the two countries have been worsening since the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip in 2009, made worse by a recent diplomatic row.
Mr Erdogan was speaking to journalists before meeting the French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
“It is Israel that is the main threat to regional peace,” he said.
“If a country uses disproportionate force, in Palestine, in Gaza, uses phosphorus bombs we are not going to say ‘well done.'”
Both Israel and Hamas, which control the Gaza Strip, have been accused by the UN of war crimes during the 22-day offensive in December 2008 and January 2009.
Humiliation
Mr Netanyahu said he regretted the Turkish prime minister’s comments.

The Turkish envoy was made to sit lower than the Israeli deputy minister
“We are interested in good relations with Turkey and regret that Mr Erdogan chooses time after time to attack Israel,” he told reporters in Israel.
The countries have been allies in the past.
But earlier this week, the Turkish ambassador to Israel was recalled by Ankara, weeks after being humiliated in public by the Israeli deputy foreign minister.
Ambassador Oguz Celikkol was called into the Israeli foreign ministry in January and rebuked over a Turkish television series that showed Israeli intelligence agents kidnapping children.
Mr Celikkol was made to sit on a low chair while being lectured by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
Mr Ayalon later apologised for the rebuke.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared Mr Erdogan to Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Turkey: World is turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons: Haaretz

Turkey’s prime minister said Sunday that the world is turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear program and that he intends to raise the issue at the nuclear summit in Washington.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan remarked that Iran’s nuclear program is being scrutinized because of its membership in the International Atomic Energy Agency whereas Israel, which has not signed a nonproliferation treaty, is free to do what it wants.

“We are disturbed by this and will say so,” Erdogan told reporters before his departure for Washington on Sunday.
The Israeli government has said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called off his trip to Washington because he believed Turkey and other Muslim nations would make an issue of Israel’s nuclear program.

Israel’s policy is to neither confirm nor deny that it possesses nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday that Israel has much to contribute to this week’s nuclear security summit even though Netanyahu was skipping the Washington conference.
Clinton said the world’s biggest concern on nuclear security is that terrorists will get control of bomb-making material. She said that Israel can do much to help thwart nuclear terror.

Representing Israel at U.S. President Barack Obama’s conference will be Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor.
Clinton’s remarks came in interviews with NBC’s Meet the Press and ABC’s This Week.
On Friday, a top U.S. official said the Obama administration believed Israel’s delegation to the nuclear summit will be “robust,” despite Netanyahu’s decision not to attend.

“We obviously would like to have the prime minister but the deputy prime minister will be leading the delegation and it will be a robust Israeli delegation,” U.S. National Security Adviser General Jim Jones told reporters traveling on Air Force One.
He also said that relationships between the U.S. and Israel are “ongoing, fine and continuous.”
Obama has invited more than 40 countries to the summit, which will deal with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to terrorist groups.

EDITOR: The Ethnic Cleansing continues

The process of ‘cleansing’ Palestine of its indigenous population, now continuing for 6 decades, is periodically shifting gear, with new actions, regulations and atrocities. The two articles below are examples of this process of ethnic cleansing – a racist, nationalistic and colonial project of Zionism, never fora moment stopped, forever moving forward to dispossess and exile as many Palestinians as possible. The means are a myriad: ‘legal’ confiscation of land, denial of services or access, physical destruction of homes, denial of water, closing off huge areas by the apartheid wall, ‘security closures’ uprooting of fruit trees, prevention of land tilling – all is kosher in order to dislodge Palestine of its people. The West has been systematically silent on all of those counts since 1967, and its only reaction was more support of the Israeli state and its atrocities.

IDF order will enable mass deportation from West Bank: Haaretz

By Amira Hass
A new military order aimed at preventing infiltration will come into force this week, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years.

When the order comes into effect, tens of thousands of Palestinians will automatically become criminal offenders liable to be severely punished.

Given the security authorities’ actions over the past decade, the first Palestinians likely to be targeted under the new rules will be those whose ID cards bear home addresses in the Gaza Strip – people born in Gaza and their West Bank-born children – or those born in the West Bank or abroad who for various reasons lost their residency status. Also likely to be targeted are foreign-born spouses of Palestinians.
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Until now, Israeli civil courts have occasionally prevented the expulsion of these three groups from the West Bank. The new order, however, puts them under the sole jurisdiction of Israeli military courts.

The new order defines anyone who enters the West Bank illegally as an infiltrator, as well as “a person who is present in the area and does not lawfully hold a permit.” The order takes the original 1969 definition of infiltrator to the extreme, as the term originally applied only to those illegally staying in Israel after having passed through countries then classified as enemy states – Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.

The order’s language is both general and ambiguous, stipulating that the term infiltrator will also be applied to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, citizens of countries with which Israel has friendly ties (such as the United States) and Israeli citizens, whether Arab or Jewish. All this depends on the judgment of Israel Defense Forces commanders in the field.

The new guidelines are expected to clamp down on protests in the West Bank.

The Hamoked Center for the Defense of the Individual was the first Israeli human rights to issue warnings against the order, signed six months ago by then-commander of IDF forces in Judea and Samaria Area Gadi Shamni.

Two weeks ago, Hamoked director Dalia Kerstein sent GOC Central Command Avi Mizrahi a request to delay the order, given “the dramatic change it causes in relation to the human rights of a tremendous number of people.”

According to the provisions, “a person is presumed to be an infiltrator if he is present in the area without a document or permit which attest to his lawful presence in the area without reasonable justification.” Such documentation, it says, must be “issued by the commander of IDF forces in the Judea and Samaria area or someone acting on his behalf.”

The instructions, however, are unclear over whether the permits referred to are those currently in force, or also refer to new permits that military commanders might issue in the future. The provision are also unclear about the status of bearers of West Bank residency cards, and disregards the existence of the Palestinian Authority and the agreements Israel signed with it and the PLO.

The order stipulates that if a commander discovers that an infiltrator has recently entered a given area, he “may order his deportation before 72 hours elapse from the time he is served the written deportation order, provided the infiltrator is deported to the country or area from whence he infiltrated.”

The order also allows for criminal proceedings against suspected infiltrators that could produce sentences of up to seven years. Individuals able to prove that they entered the West Bank legally but without permission to remain there will also be tried, on charges carrying a maximum sentence of three years. (According to current Israeli law, illegal residents typically receive one-year sentences.)

The new provision also allow the IDF commander in the area to require that the infiltrator pay for the cost of his own detention, custody and expulsion, up to a total of NIS 7,500.

Currently, Palestinians need special permits to enter areas near the separation fence, even if their homes are there, and Palestinians have long been barred from the Jordan Valley without special authorization. Until 2009, East Jerusalemites needed permission to enter Area A, territory under full PA control.

The fear that Palestinians with Gaza addresses will be the first to be targeted by this order is based on measures that Israel has taken in recent years to curtail their right to live, work, study or even visit the West Bank. These measures violated the Oslo Accords.

According to a decision by the West Bank commander that was not backed by military legislation, since 2007, Palestinians with Gaza addresses must request a permit to stay in the West Bank. Since 2000, they have been defined as illegal sojourners if they have Gaza addresses, as if they were citizens of a foreign state. Many of them have been deported to Gaza, including those born in the West Bank.

One group expected to be particularly harmed by the new rules are Palestinians who moved to the West Bank under family reunification provisions, which Israel stopped granting for several years.

In 2007, amid a number of Hamoked petitions and as a goodwill gesture to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, tens of thousands of people received Palestinian residency cards. The PA distributed the cards, but Israel had exclusive control over who could receive them. Thousands of Palestinians, however, remained classified as “illegal sojourners,” including many who are not citizens of any other country.

The new order is the latest step by the Israeli government in recent years to require permits that limit the freedom of movement and residency previously conferred by Palestinian ID cards. The new regulations are particularly sweeping, allowing for criminal measures and the mass expulsion of people from their homes.

The IDF Spokesman’s Office said in response, “The amendments to the order on preventing infiltration, signed by GOC Central Command, were issued as part of a series of manifests, orders and appointments in Judea and Samaria, in Hebrew and Arabic as required, and will be posted in the offices of the Civil Administration and military courts’ defense attorneys in Judea and Samaria. The IDF is ready to implement the order, which is not intended to apply to Israelis, but to illegal sojourners in Judea and Samaria.”

Israel’s Negev ‘frontier’: Al Jazeera Online

By Ben White

Palestinian Bedouins are protesting against discrimination by the Israeli government [GETTY]
On this year’s Land Day, tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel marched in Sakhnin, an Israeli city in the Lower Galilee, to protest against past and present systematic discrimination. But with the focus on Israel’s policies of land confiscation, there was significance in a second protest that day.

”]In the Negev (referred to as al-Naqab by Palestinian Bedouins), over 3,000 attended a rally at al-Araqib, an ‘unrecognised’ Palestinian Bedouin village whose lands are being targeted by the familiar partnership of the Israeli state and the Jewish National Fund.

The historical context for the crisis facing Palestinian Bedouins today is important, as the Israeli government and Zionist groups try to propagate the idea that the problems, so far as they exist, are ‘humanitarian’ or ‘cultural’.

Even the category of ‘Bedouin’ is historically and politically loaded, with many disputing what they see as an Israeli ‘divide and rule’ strategy towards the Palestinians.

Alienated and ‘unrecognised’
During the Nakba, the vast majority of the Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev – from a pre-1948 population of 65,000 to 100,000 – were expelled. Those who remained were forcibly concentrated by the Israeli military in an area known as the ‘siyag’ (closure).

The military regime experienced by Palestinian citizens until 1966 meant further piecemeal expulsions, expropriation of land, and restrictions on movement. Ultimately, only 19 out of 95 tribes remained.

The defining dynamic between the Israeli state and its Palestinian minority has been the expropriation of Arab land and its transfer to state or Jewish ownership.

Israel refused to recognise the land rights of the Palestinian Bedouins, who today are alienated from almost all of their land through a complex combination of land law and planning boundaries.

An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Palestinian citizens in the Negev live in dozens of ‘unrecognised villages’ – communities that the state refuse to acknowledge exist despite the fact that some pre-date the establishment of Israel and others are the result of the Israeli military’s forced relocation drives.

These shanty towns are refused access to basic infrastructure.

One approach the Israeli state has taken is to create, or ‘legalise’, a small number of towns and villages in the hope that more Palestinians will move into these areas.

Yet even this policy, often presented as a ‘humane’ response to ‘Bedouin’ needs, highlights a disparity: Jewish regional authorities and individual farms enjoy a massively lower population density compared to the space allotted by the state to Palestinian townships, which are ranked among the most deprived communities in the country.

‘Developing the Negev’
The Israeli government, meanwhile, along with agencies like the Jewish National Fund and Jewish Agency, are preoccupied with the idea of ‘developing the Negev’, and boosting its population.

In March, the ‘Negev 2010′ conference was held in Beir al-Saba’ (Beersheva), drawing hundreds of politicians and business people, with the focus being attracting 300,000 new residents to the area.

Speakers included Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, Silvan Shalom, the Negev and Galilee development minister, and Ariel Atias, the housing minister.

Last year, Shalom held a joint press conference with religious Zionist rabbis to outline plans for increasing the south’s population, with one of the rabbis stressing the need for a “Jewish majority” in the region.

Atias, for his part, has previously expressed his belief that it is “a national duty to prevent the spread” of Palestinian citizens.

It is not, therefore, hard to read between the lines when Israeli policy makers and Zionist officials from organisations like the Jewish National Fund talk about ‘developing the Negev’.

Zionist frontier

The Negev is the location for classic, unfiltered Zionist frontier discourse.
The Jewish National Fund in the UK talks about supporting “the pioneers who are bringing the desert to life”, while an article in the Zionist magazine B’Nai B’Rith called the Negev “the closest thing to the tabula rasa many of Israel’s pre-state pioneers found when they first came to the Holy Land”.

The idea of the ’empty’ land sits uncomfortably alongside another important emphasis – ‘protection’ or ‘redemption’.

As the Jewish National Fund’s US chief executive put it in January 2009, “if we don’t get 500,000 people to move to the Negev in the next five years, we’re going to lose it”. To who, he did not need to say.

There were no illusions about the meaning of this discourse, and its consequences, at a February conference which brought together academics and experts specialising in issues facing the Bedouins of the Negev.

Through the seminars and discussions, one theme clearly came through: The relationship between the Palestinian Bedouins and the Israeli state was rapidly deteriorating.

A number of the organisers of, and speakers at, ‘Rethinking the Paradigms: Negev Bedouin Research 2000+’ were themselves from the Negev, where overcrowding, home demolitions, and dispossession are features of everyday life for Palestinians.

The conference was one of the first of its kind in the UK, sponsored by the British Academy and Exeter University’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and Politics Department.

Excluded from discourse
Western media coverage of the structural discrimination and discriminatory land and housing policies experienced by Palestinian Bedouins has generally been poor.

In a discourse shaped by Zionist and Orientalist tropes, the Negev is a vast, wild, desert; a frontier to be civilised. The ‘Bedouin’, meanwhile, are either invisible or exotic savages, objects of benevolent philanthropy.

Furthermore, the international ‘peace process’ has meant that the question of Palestine has become the story of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian citizens of Israel have been left out, a situation exacerbated by the media mentality of ‘if it bleeds it leads’. Core issues facing Palestinian Bedouins – land control, zoning, bureaucratic and physical boundaries of exclusion – are not considered suitable fare.

This nonexistent or weak coverage is regrettable, particularly as Israel’s policies in the Negev towards the Palestinian Bedouin minority are highly illuminating for understanding the state’s position vis-à-vis the Palestinians in a more general sense.

Moreover, tension is building in the Negev over Israel’s continued apartheid-like policies. Palestinian Bedouins continue to resist the strategies of the Israeli state and Zionist agencies, through legal battles, and grassroots organisation, like the Regional Council for the Unrecognised Villages.

Perhaps one of the main kinds of resistance being offered by the Palestinians in the Negev is their determination to stay. This steadfastness is a direct refusal of a strategy of home demolitions, dispossession and Judaisation.

The recent protest in al-Araqib could only be a foretaste of things to come, as Palestinian Bedouins demand equality from a state seemingly unwilling to change.

Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer specialising in Palestine/Israel. His articles have appeared in publications like the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’, New Statesman, Electronic Intifada, Middle East International, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and others. His first book, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, was published in 2009 by Pluto Press.

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