EDITOR: Dr. Frankenstein seems worried about his Creature…
The settlers, a creature of the Israeli government, is supposedly beyond and above the law. Of course, this is exactly what they wee made to be – a extra-judicial force of illegal settlers, in illegal settlements, who torture, oppress and kill Palestinians, steal their lands, and never brought to justice. It is really difficult to now turn round (as if anyone was even trying to do this…) and try to speak of the law, and of controlling the settlers, is really bizarre – the IOF kills Palestinians every week for no reason other than their identity, and now they tell us they cannot control the settlers; this is just another turning of the screw on Palestine: “We would have liked to stop those settlers, but unfortunaely they are above the law”.
IDF fears settler violence could spark Palestinian uprising: Haaretz
GOC Central Command tells Kfir Brigade soldiers the IDF does not know of any Palestinian plans for response, but to prepare for possibility.
Extremist settler activity could set the West Bank ablaze, GOC Central Command Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi warned on Monday at a brigade-wide training exercise at the Tze’elim military base in the Negev.
The Kfir Brigade exercise focused on urban warfare – including the capture of a simulated Arab city – and pitted Israeli troops against Palestinian security forces.
Senior officers present at the exercise, the most extensive session the infantry brigade has undergone since it was founded just over four years ago, said Monday there were no indications that Israel would have to fight the security forces.
However, the army said it needs to be prepared for all eventualities.
Mizrahi said he doesn’t expect tensions to rise in the West Bank in the near future.
“I don’t think something will happen anytime soon, unless there’s a very serious incident on the Temple Mount or in the Cave of the Patriarchs,” he said. However, he said he was “very anxious” about an escalation being set off by settler violence.
“Most of the settlement movement is fine, very normal, but a mosque set on fire and another mosque set on fire adds up,” Mizrahi said.
Defense officials are concerned over a series of mosque burnings in the past six months, including a fire that destroyed books and prayer rugs in a mosque near Nablus that firefighters said earlier this month was caused by arson.
Mizrahi said that while the council that officially represents settlers is willing to listen to defense officials, the army is worried about what some of the more radical settlers might do.
“The Yesha Council is sane. Even if they might have become more militant, they understand what’s going on and we can talk to them,” Mizrahi said. “But in Yitzhar, in Maon and in Havat Gilad, they don’t believe in us at all as a state. They want something else, and when someone doesn’t know the limits anymore you don’t know where it will end up.”
Mizrahi said the army and the Palestinian security forces, trained in Jordan by Keith Dayton, an American general, have been cooperating, but that Israeli soldiers still need to know how to fight them if the need should arise.
“This is a trained, equipped, American-educated force,” Mizrahi said. “This means that at the beginning of a battle, we’ll pay a higher price. A force like that can shut down an urban area with four snipers. It’s not the Jenin militants anymore ¬ it’s a proper infantry force facing us and we need to take that into account. They have attack capabilities and we don’t expect them to give up so easily.”
In the training exercise, three battalions went from house to house, where they faced Israel Defense Forces soldiers posing as members of the regular Palestinian security forces, Palestinian civilians or reporters.
Until now, soldiers serving in the brigade have been serving only in the West Bank, but Armored Corps commander Brig. Gen. Agai Yehezkel said the exercises would enable the brigade to fight on the Gaza and Lebanon fronts as well as in the West Bank, if necessary. He said Kfir battalions would be deployed for operational duty within the Green Line as early as next year.
The Kfir Brigade, which was created in December 2005, consists of six battalions whose soldiers man 30 percent of the roadblocks in the West Bank and are responsible for 60 percent of arrests. They have succeeded in decreasing the number of terrorist attacks in the West Bank.
Much of the brigade’s responsibilities have diminished recently, due to the increased activities of the Palestinian security forces.
It should be noted that the main perpetrators of crimes against Palestinians belong to the Kfir Brigade, according to statistics on Military Police investigations, which the Israel Defense Forces provided to the human rights organization Yesh Din.
In 2007 the Military Police opened 351 probes for crimes in the territories, compared to 152 cases in 2006. The Military Police managed to tie the complaints to specific IDF units in only 55 percent of the cases, compared to 78 percent in the previous year.
Sixty-six of the investigations opened in 2007 were against Kfir soldiers, compared to 35 in 2006; 52 were against the paratroopers brigade (19 in 2006); 14 against Nahal (only one in 2006); 10 against Givati (one in 2006); six against the tank corps (none in 2006); and five each against Golani and the West Bank division.
The Kfir brigade is posted in the West Bank permanently, which means it spends several more months a year there than any other brigade. It also has more regiments than other infantry brigades.
The Military Police is investigating a variety of crimes in the territories, from the killing of Palestinians and the illegal use of firearms to abuse and plunder.
The perils of prattle: Haaretz
By Akiva Eldar
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares that Israel will not be able to restrain itself from responding to Syria’s transfer of long-range missiles to Hezbollah, the Israeli embassy in Madrid goes on the alert. The diplomats there know that by the next day there will be a hysterical directive from Jerusalem to ask Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos to relay a reassuring message to Damascus.
And when Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatens to wipe out the Assad clan, ministry officials assume there must have been a development in the criminal investigation against Lieberman. The problem is that the Arabs just don’t get the Israelis: They take our ministers’ twaddle more seriously than we do.
It seems that Netanyahu and Lieberman want to scare us and put the peace genie back in the bottle. But how to convince the Arabs that their scaremongering is aimed at diverting our attention from the destruction the government is wreaking on Israel’s foreign relations? Barak Ravid reported in Haaretz last week that Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said, on his return from Beirut, that there was total panic in Lebanon over the possibility of an Israeli offensive there. It turns out that when Israeli officials try to scare us about the menace of the Scud missiles that Syria has given Hezbollah, it is the Arabs who get frightened.
According to articles appearing recently in the Arab press, the Syrians think that in the absence of permission from the United States to launch an offensive against Iran’s nuclear installations, Israel will strike in Iran’s front yard by attacking Hezbollah’s missiles and dragging Syria into a confrontation. In an atmosphere of panic, a local incident would be enough to start a major flare-up. Hassan Nasrallah said after the last war that he had not correctly assessed the action Israel would take. The Hezbollah leader implied that he had not been interested in a conflict of such high intensity.
In 2006, it ended with missiles landing on the outskirts of Hadera and 1 million refugees who fled from the north. According to the head of the Military Intelligence research division, Brig. Gen. Yossi Baidatz, if the Syrians err in their assessment of Israel’s intentions in 2010, the missiles will land in Tel Aviv and even further south. He recently told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Hezbollah’s military capabilities had developed greatly since the Second Lebanon War and that it now has thousands of rockets of all kinds and ranges, as well as long-range solid-fuel missiles that are highly accurate.
No less important, the “national appraiser” pointed out that Hezbollah is regarded by the Syrians as “part of their own defense entity” – and this comes at a time when the U.S. defense establishment does not see an Israel ruled by a right-wing government as part of the American defense entity. The checks and balances through which the peace process with Syria has contributed to a state of calm have worn thin. Baidatz said the Syrians are still interested in a peace deal with Israel for the return of the Golan Heights and American involvement. Military Intelligence believes that in exchange for this, “Syria will alter its role in the radical axis.” For Syrian President Bashar Assad, however, progress in the diplomatic process with the current Israeli government is of no import.
As long as Israel is not ready to pay the territorial price for peace with Syria, deterrence is a legitimate, and even vital, means of avoiding a military confrontation. Deterrence, according to the accepted definition in the Israel Defense Forces, consists of “an action or process of threatening that prevents the enemy from taking action because of a fear of its repercussions.”
Deterrence creates an atmosphere of the existence of a credible threat that decision makers believe could lead to an outcome that they cannot or do not wish to countenance. What would happen if the decision makers in Damascus decide that Israel is determined this summer to carry out its threat to attack, no matter what? When its life is threatened, even a pet cat unsheathes its claws.
We can only hope that our neighbors begin taking the blathering of Israeli leaders as seriously as most Israelis do. Otherwise, it could end in disaster.
Mordechai Vanunu’s cruel treatment: Guardian Letters
On 11 May the nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was sentenced to a further three months in prison, to start on 23 May. This latest sentence follows his objection to doing community service in West Jerusalem, where he reasonably feared for his safety. He was quite prepared to work in East Jerusalem, but this compromise was denied him by the supreme court. This most recent court hearing arose because Vanunu had been charged with breaking the draconian restrictions imposed on him ever since his release, in 2004, from his 18-year prison sentence – 11½ of which were spent in solitary confinement. These cruel and arbitrary restrictions forbade Vanunu freedom of movement, expression and association, in complete contravention of international law and his human rights. The continuing and outrageous harassment of Vanunu, for telling the world the truth of Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, all of 24 years ago, comes right at the start of the 2010 negotiations, at the United Nations in New York, to strengthen not only the international ban on nuclear weapons but also the 1968 non-proliferation treaty. This cynical treatment of Vanunu is a clear indication, once again, that Israel cares nothing for human rights legislation, nor any attempts to limit the possession, development and general spread of nuclear weapons.
Tony Benn, Ben Birnberg, Jeremy Dear, Bruce Kent, Jenny Morgan, Susannah York and Ernest Rodker
Chomsky refused entry into West Bank: Haaretz
By Donald Macintyre
Monday, 17 May 2010
Noam Chomsky, the internationally renowned philosopher and leading dissident US intellectual, was yesterday stopped by Israeli immigration officials from entering the West Bank to deliver a lecture.
The 81-year-old Jewish professor, an often mordant critic of the Israeli government who had been due to lecture at Birzeit University and the Institute for Palestine Studies, was refused entry at the Allenby Bridge across the river Jordan.
The bar was described by Professor Chomsky’s host, the Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti, as a “fascist action, amounting to suppression of freedom of expression”.
Professor Chomsky told Reuters from Amman, where he had returned from the crossing, that officials had refused him permission to enter the West Bank, adding: “They apparently didn’t like the fact that I was due to lecture at a Palestinian university and not in Israel.”
But the Israeli Ministry of Interior said last night that the bar had been a “mistake” by a member of the staff on the spot and that the Ministry had no objection to Professor Chomsky making the crossing if he was travelling directly to Ramallah, as distinct from visiting or passing through Israel.
Asked how a staff member at the crossing could have erred, an official said that the person may have wrongly responded to information held on a computer database.
Professor Chomsky, widely recognised as a giant of 20th-century linguistic philosophy as well as a prominent critic of US and Western foreign policy over decades, said that he was on a speaking tour of the region and that his schedule was too tight to attempt another entry into the West Bank.
Israel denies US academic Chomsky West Bank entry: BBC
Israel says the denial may be a misunderstanding
Renowned US scholar Noam Chomsky has been denied entry to the West Bank by Israeli immigration officials.
Prof Chomsky, renowned for his work on linguistics and philosophy, was planning to deliver a lecture at Birzeit University.
Prof Chomsky, 82, had been trying to enter from Jordan.
An Israeli interior ministry spokeswoman said it was to trying to clear the matter up and allow Prof Chomsky to enter.
Prof Chomsky said the officials were very polite but he was denied entry because “the government did not like the kinds of things I say and they did not like that I was only talking at Birzeit and not at an Israeli university too.”
He added: “I asked them if they could find any government in the world that likes the things I say.”
Prof Chomsky’s Palestinian host for the visit, Mustafa al-Barghouti, told Reuters: “This decision is a fascist action, amounting to suppression of freedom of expression.”
The interior ministry spokeswoman, Sabine Hadad, said: “We are trying to contact the military to clear things up and if they have no objection we see no reason why he should not be allowed in.”
Prof Chomsky has frequently spoken out against Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
After denied entry to West Bank, Chomsky likens Israel to ‘Stalinist regime’: Haaretz
Linguist Noam Chomsky was scheduled to lecture at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, meet PA Prime Minister Fayyad.
By Amira Hass
Tags: Israel news West Bank Noam Chomsky
The Interior Ministry refused to let linguist Noam Chomsky into Israel and the West Bank on Sunday. Chomsky, who aligns himself with the radical left, had been scheduled to lecture at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, and visit Bil’in and Hebron, as well as meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and various Palestinian activists.
In a telephone conversation last night from Amman, Chomsky told Haaretz that he concluded from the questions of the Israeli official that the fact that he came to lecture at a Palestinian and not an Israeli university led to the decision to deny him entry.
“I find it hard to think of a similar case, in which entry to a person is denied because he is not lecturing in Tel Aviv. Perhaps only in Stalinist regimes,” Chomsky told Haaretz.
Sabine Haddad, a spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, confirmed to Haaretz that the officials at the border were from the ministry.
“Because he entered the Palestinian Authority territory only, his entry is the responsibility of the Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories at the Defense Ministry. There was a misunderstanding on our side, and the matter was not brought to the attention of the COGAT.”
Haddad told Haaretz that “the minute the COGAT says that they do not object, Chomsky’s entry would have been permitted.”
Chomsky, a Jewish professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had spent several months at Kibbutz Hazore’a during the 1950s and had considered a longer stay in Israel. He had been invited by the Department of Philosophy at Bir Zeit.
He planned to spend four days in the West Bank and give two lectures.
On Sunday, at about 1:30 P.M. he came to the Israeli side of the border with Jordan. After three hours of questioning, during which the border officer repeatedly called the Interior Ministry for instructions, Chomsky’s passport was stamped with “Denied Entry.”
With Chomsky, 81, were his daughter Aviva, and a couple of old friends of his and his late wife.
Entry was also denied to his daughter.
Their friends, one of whom is a Palestinian who grew up in Beirut, were allowed in, but they opted to return with Chomsky to Amman.
Chomsky told Haaretz that it was clear that his arrival had been known to the authorities, because the minute he entered the passport control room the official told him that he was honored to see him and that he had read his works.
The professor concluded that the officer was a student, and said he looked embarrassed at the task at hand, especially when he began reading from text the questions that had been dictated to him, and which were also told to him later by telephone.
Chomsky told Haaretz about the questions.
“The official asked me why I was lecturing only at Bir Zeit and not an Israeli university,” Chomsky recalled. “I told him that I have lectured a great deal in Israel. The official read the following statement: ‘Israel does not like what you say.'”
Chomsky replied: “Find one government in the world which does.”
“The young man asked me whether I had ever been denied entry into other countries. I told him that once, to Czechoslovakia, after the Soviet invasion in 1968,” he said, adding that he had gone to visit ousted Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek, whose reforms the Soviets crushed.
In response to the official’s question, Chomsky said that the subjects of his lectures were “America and the world,” and “America at home.”
The official asked him whether he would speak on Israel and Chomsky said that because he would talk of U.S. policy he would also comment on Israel and its policies.
He was then told by the official: “You have spoken with [Hassan] Nasrallah.”
“True,” Chomsky told him. “When I was in Lebanon [prior to the war in 2006] I spoke with people from the entire political spectrum there, as in Israel I also spoke with people on the right.”
“At the time I read reports of my visit in the Israeli press, and the articles in the Israeli press had no connection with reality,” Chomsky told the border official.
The official asked Chomsky why he did not have an Israeli passport.
“I replied I am an American citizen,” Chomsky said.
Chomsky said that he asked the man at border control for an official written explanation for the reason his entry was denied and that “it would help the Interior Ministry because this way my version will not be the only one given to the media.”
The official called the ministry and then told Chomsky that he would be able to find the official statement at the U.S. Embassy.
The last time Chomsky visited Israel and the West Bank was in 1997, when he lectured on both sides of the Green Line. He had also planned a visit to the Gaza strip, but because the Palestinian Authority insisted that he be escorted by Palestinian guards, he canceled that part of the visit.
To Haaretz, Chomsky said Sunday that preventing him entry is tantamount to boycotting Bir Zeit University. Chomsky is known to oppose a general boycott on Israel. “I was against a boycott of apartheid South Africa as well. If we are going to boycott, why not the United States, whose record is even worse? I’m in favor of boycotting American companies which collaborate with the occupation,” he said. “But if we are to boycott Tel Aviv University, why not MIT?”
Chomsky told Haaretz that he supports a two-state solution, but not the solution proposed by Jerusalem, “pieces of land that will be called a state.”
He said that Israel’s behavior today reminds him of that of South Africa in the 1960s, when it realized that it was already considered a pariah, but thought that it would resolve the problem with better public relations.