As the Israeli leadership prepares to act violently, not for the first time, it also prepares the media campaign. As usual, Israel blames the Palestinians for the violence is is about to mete out to them. In order to get the focus away from the UN and ‘peace talks’ (sic) they will now find a reason to start large scale violence so as to derail this last limp attempt to restart the talks. You have been told, so do not be surprised… Ron Prosor’s speech in the UN is part of the ground preparation so as to be able to blame Palestine. How many times did this happen before? This cynicism is sickening.
Speaking before the UNSC, Israeli envoy Ron Prosor calls PA bid for recognition ‘march of folly,’ adding that peace must be achieved through direct negotiations.
Support for the Palestinian bid for statehood in the United Nations spells instability and violence for the Middle East, Israel’s UN envoy said in an address before the UN Security Council, adding that the only path to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is through direct negotiations.
Calling the move a “unilateral initiative,” Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor said the initiative would only raise unrealistic expectations that would eventually lead to “instability and potentially, violence.”
“Members of the international community should be clear about their responsibilities: You vote for it, you own it. All those who vote for unilateral recognition will be responsible for its consequences,” Prosor added.
The Israeli envoy also rejected the notion that Israel’s settlement activities were the main obstacle to Mideast peace, saying that “our conflict was raging for nearly a half century before a single settlement sprung up in the West Bank.”
“From 1948 until 1967, the West Bank was part of Jordan, and Gaza was part of Egypt. The Arab World did not lift a finger to create a Palestinian state. And it sought Israel’s annihilation when not a single settlement stood anywhere in the West Bank or Gaza,” he added, saying that “issue of settlements will be worked out over the course of negotiations, but the primary obstacle to peace is not settlements.”
Instead, Prosor suggested the main obstacle for Mideast peace was the “Arab world’s refusal to acknowledge the Jewish People’s ancient connection to the Land of Israel — and the Palestinian’s insistence on the so-called right of return.”
“Today the Palestinian leadership is calling for an independent Palestinian state, but insists that its people return to the Jewish state,” Prosor said, adding that such a “proposition that no one who believes in the right of Israel to exist could accept because the only equation in political science with mathematical certainty is that the so-called right of return equals the destruction of the State of Israel.”
“The idea that Israel will be flooded with millions of Palestinians is a non-starter. The international community knows it. The Palestinian leadership knows it. But the Palestinian people aren’t hearing it. This gap between perception and reality is the major obstacle to peace. The so-called right of return is the major hurdle to achieving peace,” he added.
Consequently, the Israeli UN envoy urged the international community to reject the Palestinian bid for statehood, saying that the only true path to peace had to be direct negotiations, instead of an imposed solution.
“Israel’s peace with Egypt was negotiated, not imposed. Our peace with Jordan was negotiated, not imposed. Israeli-Palestinian peace must be negotiated. It cannot be imposed,” he said, adding that the “Palestinian’s unilateral action at the United Nations is no path to real statehood. It is a march of folly.”
Abdullah’s comments came just as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman severely criticized Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, calling him the “greatest obstacle” to Mideast peace.
“If there is one obstacle that should be removed immediately, it is [Abbas],” he said. “If he were to return the keys and resign, it would not be a threat, but a blessing.”
Gilad Shalit freed in prisoner swap, by Carlos Latuff
Action against officer in charge of army unit that killed Palestinian in Qusra was taken due to ‘a number of incidents’
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
An Israeli soldier fires teargas during the clashes with Palestinians in Qusra on 23 September. Photograph: Nir Elias/Reuters
The commander of an Israeli army unit whose soldiers shot dead a Palestinian protester just hours before president Mahmoud Abbas called on the United Nations to recognise a Palestinian state has been relieved of his post.
The lieutenant in the Haruv battalion, who has not been named, had a history of disciplinary transgressions. The death of 34-year-old Essam Oudah in the West Bank village of Qusra was not thought to be the main factor in the action against him. “The officer was dismissed from his command due to a number of operational and disciplinary incidents,” an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) statement said.
Oudeh was killed after Palestinian men rallied to protect the village from a feared incursion by nearby settlers. The village had formed a defence committee following the vandalising of one of Qusra’s mosques by settlers last month – an attack condemned by the US and European Union.
On 23 September, the day Abbas submitted the Palestinians’ formal request to be admitted as a full state to the UN, warnings were broadcast from Qusra mosques that settlers were approaching.
Hundreds of men and youths streamed to the edge of the village. The Guardian, which was present for the standoff between villagers and settlers, saw no stone throwing or physical confrontation from either side before the Israeli army began firing teargas at the Palestinians.
Later that day, an IDF statement said a “mutual rock hurling incident … incited a violent riot, during which Palestinians hurled rocks at security personnel”. The army opened fire with live bullets, injuring three Palestinians, including Oudeh who subsequently died. The army launched an investigation.
According to a report on the Israeli Ynet news website, the army inquiry concluded the incident was an “operational failure” and that the commander had made an error of judgment in ordering troops to open fire. The officer told investigators his team felt threatened and outnumbered, according to Ynet. The IDF declined to comment beyond a brief statement. The commander is to remain in the IDF, but not in a combat role.
An Israeli settler and his infant son were killed on the same day after Palestinians threw rocks at their car near Hebron, causing it to overturn.
EDITOR: The Fascist speaks out…
Lieberman is an angry man, for many reasons. He was against the deal with Hamas, and would like to start the second Nakba now, as well as nuke Iran, and maybe few other countries. He is a busy man. He has time for bombing everyone, expelling everyone. If he ever gets to the top job in Israel, you will have to go into your nuclear bunker…
FM voices vehement opposition to proposal to free Fatah prisoners as gesture to Palestinian President, adding that anyone who succeeds Abbas would be better for Israel.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Monday called Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas the “greatest obstacle” to regional order, telling reporters in Jerusalem it would be a “blessing” if the Palestinian leader were to resign.
“If there is one obstacle that should be removed immediately, it is [Abbas],” he said. “If he were to return the keys and resign, it would not be a threat, but a blessing.”
“The only thing that interests Abbas is to inscribe himself in the history books as he who brought about the Palestinian state and the reconciliation with Hamas,” Lieberman added. “Anyone who succeeds him would be better for Israel. If Abu Mazen goes, there would be a chance to reignite the peace process.”
Referring to the report in Haaretz earlier Monday regarding the defense establishment’s recommendation that Israel release Fatah prisoners as a gesture to Abbas, Lieberman said he had never heard of such a proposal and would oppose the move vehemently.
“I don’t know of any such recommendation, and I completely oppose every gesture,” he said. “I would not agree in any way if recommendations such as these were brought to cabinet.”
Lieberman added that there are plenty of Palestinians with whom Israel can hold dialogue, besides Abbas. “There is no lack of Palestinians who studied in the West,” he said, ” educated people with Western values with whom we can talk.”
Haaretz reported earlier Monday that the Israel Defense Forces’ General Staff believes Israel should make a series of gestures to the Palestinian Authority to reduce the damage caused to the PA by last week’s deal for the return of Gilad Shalit.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers vehemently oppose the idea, as do several members of his forum of eight senior ministers, arguing that Abbas “should be punished” for his unilateral bid for UN recognition of a Palestinian state.
“We don’t want the Palestinian Authority to collapse,” one adviser said, “but if it happens, it won’t be the end of the world.”
Next month, the IDF will give the government a list of the gestures it recommends, including releasing additional Palestinian prisoners and perhaps transferring additional parts of the West Bank to Palestinian security control. The army considers it necessary to help Abbas regain the upper hand in his ongoing battle with Hamas for control of the territories.
Israel’s intelligence agencies all concur that the Shalit deal, in which Hamas obtained the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one kidnapped soldier, bolstered the Islamic organization at the PA’s expense.
One senior Israeli official told Haaretz that Abbas thinks the deal was deliberately intended to strengthen Hamas and weaken him, in order to punish him for his UN bid.
One of the IDF’s proposals relates to the second stage of the Shalit deal, in which Israel will free another 550 prisoners of its own choosing. While the list has not yet been drawn up, it seems that most will be low-level terrorists belonging to Abbas’ Fatah party, and the army deems the Fatah affiliation critical.
The army also proposes that Israel release additional prisoners beyond these 550 as a gesture to Abbas in honor of Id al-Adha, the Muslim holiday that falls in another two weeks.
Another proposal is to transfer part of what is known as Area B – areas of the West Bank that, according to the Oslo Accords, are under Palestinian civilian control but Israeli security control – to Area A, which is under full Palestinian control. Most of the territory the army favors transferring is in the northern West Bank, between Jenin, Nablus and Tul Karm, as this area has few Israeli settlements.
A fourth idea is returning the bodies of slain terrorists to the PA. That was supposed to have happened a few months ago, but was canceled at the last minute on orders from Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Senior PA officials have said in recent days that the principal gesture they want from Israel is the release of Fatah terrorists who have been imprisoned since before the 1993 Oslo Accords. They also said they have had several discussions with Israel recently about transferring additional territory to Area A, but all have gone nowhere.
In the past, Barak has voiced support for far-reaching gestures toward Abbas. But Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has consistently opposed the idea and Netanyahu is unenthusiastic. Thus, when the army proposed gestures to the PA in the run-up to last month’s UN bid, with the goal of calming the atmosphere and preventing an explosion, the government rejected the proposal.
With the Shalit deal concluded, the IDF is hoping the government will be more amenable. But given Jerusalem’s anger at Abbas’ statehood bid, that seems doubtful.
The issue is further complicated by uncertainty over Abbas’ intentions – a question on which both government officials and intelligence professionals are split. Some believe that Abbas has no interest in resuming negotiations with Israel, preferring to pursue his case at the UN and among the international community in the hope of forcing concessions on Israel. Members of this camp see no point in making any gestures to him.
The IDF, in contrast, thinks Israel must make substantial gestures to bolster Abbas. Minor steps – like dismantling unmanned roadblocks or releasing Palestinian prisoners convicted of crimes other than terrorism – won’t suffice, it argues.
The senior Israeli official said the army’s concerns were on full display at a briefing for Barak last week given by Maj. Gen. Eitan Dangot, the coordinator of government activities in the territories. Dangot, he said, expressed great concern over the messages he has been getting from senior PA officials recently – namely, that Abbas is depressed and threatening to resign in light of the impasse in negotiations, the boost the Shalit deal gave Hamas and the fear that his UN bid will fail even without an American veto, given his difficulties in recruiting the necessary nine votes in the Security Council.
Over the last two weeks, the Israeli official said, several of Abbas’ advisers, including his chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, have urged him to disband the PA and hand responsibility for the territories back to Israel. This has strengthened the army’s view that gestures to bolster Abbas are needed.
Netanyahu’s advisers, however, don’t take Abbas’ resignation threats seriously, noting that such threats tend to recur frequently. “There’s nothing new in this,” said one. “He threatens all the time.”
One prisoner is well known – an Israeli soldier with a name, a picture, a history, a movement behind his release, a whole nation clamoring for his release for long years. On the other side there are ten thousand prisoners, many of them young children and boys, judged by illegal military courts of an illegal and brutal occupation.
On the one hand is the soldier of the occupying army, on the other people fighting for freedom. Why is it that we only know Gilad Shalit’s name? Because this is what the western media wants us to know. You cannot put it more delicately – it would be lying. Hundreds of the jailed Palestinian prisoners are on a hunger strike due to the way they are treated – no danger the western politicians will intervene here…
So, while (almost) the whole of Israel celebrates the return of their soldier, Netanyahu has slipped another clanger – a new town to be built at Givat Hamatos in East Jerusalem, completing the cutting off of the Arab Palestinian population from the rest of the Occupied Territories. Of course, the US, UN and EU have all remonstrated, but that is just hogwash – they will now shut up, like they did every time more houses were announced, and the town will be built with their financial and political support. Nothing new there.
But while the western governments are beholden to Israel’s aggressive interests of stealing more land, and curtaining more Palestinian lives, their populations are becoming ever more supportive of Palestine, having learnt the tricks of their biased governments when it comes to Israel. Only this week such a politician, Liam Fox, was unseated as the full range of his improper actions and relations has been exposed> His close ‘friend’ Adam Werritty, was the darling of the Israeli Lobby in the UK, screwed into the floor of BICOM, and an open advocate of any support for Israel’s policies one can think of. While it good that he and Fox were exposed and gotten rid of, there are tens of others, not just in the Tory party, but in the other two main parties: MPs and ministers who continued to support Israel even as it attacked Gaza in December 2008, who go there on visits funded by BICOM, who get financial support of their campaigns, and who are there to support Israel’s interests when needed. They are for sale, like the US Congress, and they put in a vote or a good word when required. This is how legislation which allowed the temporary arrest of suspected Israeli war criminals was doctored to allow them entry to the UK, for example. If one even so far as mentions the many tentacles of the Israeli Lobby, one is immediately blamed for anti-semitism or called self-hating Jew, but this standard approach has now worn off, is no longer effective, and does not frighten most people. Israel is now understood to be beyond the pail, a pariah state which puts itself above the law, any law, including its own legislation. It may be quite infuriating for the rest of us to see Israel getting off scot-free, whatever brutality it enacts; however, its time is now over, and its extreme acts of disregard for all other people, and especially for the Palestinians under its boot, are evidence of its desperation, not of great strength.
Israeli PM tells families he ‘shares their pain’ but is obliged to bring home every Israeli soldier ‘sent to protect our citizens’
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Activists who support the deal to release Gilad Shalit protest outside the Israeli supreme court as families of victims of the Palestinian prisoners due to be released seek an injunction to delay the exchange. Photograph: Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images
Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has told the families of Israelis killed by some of the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners due to be swapped for the captured soldier Gilad Shalit that he “shares their pain in seeing their loved ones’ murderers freed” but had little choice.
Netanyahu justified the deal with Hamas in a letter delivered shortly before the relatives of victims of suicide bombings and other attacks asked the high court in Jerusalem to block the exchange. Shalit, 25, has been held incommunicado in Gaza for more than five years.
Netanyahu said he knew “the price was very heavy” for relatives of the victims. He added that the decision was among the most difficult he had ever made, because he lost a brother in the conflict with the Palestinians.
But he said he “was faced with the responsibility of the prime minister of Israel to bring home every soldier who is sent to protect our citizens”.
Critics say the agreement with Hamas is not only a concession to terrorists but will encourage the Palestinians to abduct more soldiers. Some say it is little different from a deal opposed by Netanyahu two years ago before he became prime minister.
Palestinians being freed include the founders of Hamas’s armed wing and the organisers of suicide bombings and other attacks in which scores of Israeli civilians, including children and teenagers, were killed. They include the bombings of a Jerusalem pizza restaurant frequented by families, a Tel Aviv nightclub popular with young Russian immigrants and a Netanya hotel.
There were angry scenes inside and outside the high court where the proceedings were repeatedly interrupted by family members yelling objections to the deal with Hamas.
Shvuel Schijveschuurder, who lost his parents and three siblings in a suicide bomb at a Jerusalem pizza restaurant 10 years ago, shouted at Shalit’s father, Noam, telling him to hang a black flag on his home because “this is a day of mourning”.
Schijveschuurder was arrested last week after vandalising the memorial to the assassinated Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who reached the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians. He painted “release Yigal Amir” – the name of the Jewish extremist who murdered Rabin – on the memorial.
Yossi Zur asked the high court to block the release of the Palestinians who killed his son and 16 other people in a suicide attack on a bus in Haifa in 2003 because it would only encourage further attacks..
“From our experience with past deals, and sadly we have a lot of experience, we know how many Israelis will be killed as a result of the release of these terrorists. I am here to protect my children who are still alive,” he told Israeli television.
Shalit’s father said they sympathised with the victims’ pain, but asked the court not to interfere in the agreement. “Not implementing the deal will not return the murdered loved ones while, on the other hand, it would sentence Gilad to death.”
The president of the high court, Dorit Beinisch, said he recognised the government’s agreement with Hamas meant the negation of legal decisions to jail the Palestinian prisoners. “The moral and legal difficulty is laid out before us … we are sitting among our own people. There is no need to explain the painful history and the very difficult dilemmas we face.”
The government told the court that the exchange is a political matter which it is authorised to carry out, as recognised by the failure of legal challenges in similar cases before.
“The court has refused, time after time, to interfere with the release of prisoners as part of a deal reached through political negotiations,” the government told the court.
A ruling was expected on Monday evening. If the court does not block it, the handover will take place in stages. Israel will first release 27 Palestinian women prisoners. Shalit, a corporal who was promoted to sergeant major while in captivity, will then be moved from Gaza in to southern Israel, possibly directly through one of the crossings between the two territories or briefly via Egypt. Israel will then release 450 male prisoners to Gaza and the West Bank, aside from a small number destined for exile in Turkey and other countries in the region.
The remainder of the 1,027 Palestinians are to be freed in the coming weeks.
Netanyahu, his defence minister, Ehud Barak, and senior military officers will greet Shalit at an air force base in the south of the country. He will undergo a medical examination and then be flown to his parents’ home in Mitzpe Hila, near Israel’s border with Lebanon.
Shalit was captured by Palestinians who tunnelled from Gaza into Israel and killed two other members of his tank crew before snatching him.
Pargav set up just before Liam Fox’s charity was closed and paid for the self-styled adviser’s flights and five-star hotel bills
The multimillionaire Australian businessman who gave £104,000 to Liam Fox’s Atlantic Bridge charity and provided office space for his best man Adam Werritty has hosted the new defence secretary, Philip Hammond, at a number of fundraising dinners.
Michael Hintze, a hedge fund owner and major Tory party donor, provided Werritty with free office space at the plush headquarters of his £5bn CQS hedge fund and allowed Fox and Werritty to travel on his private jet.
Hammond lists him on the MPs’ register of interests as a donor several times, although his spokesman yesterday said the hospitality before and after the election had been properly registered, and openly declared.
As the Liberal Democrats indicated they will use Fox’s resignation to speed up the introduction a register of lobbyists, it emerged that the company set up to support Werritty’s jet-set lifestyle was created days before regulators demanded that Atlantic Bridge, which had been paying for Werritty’s flights around the world, suspend all its activities.
The Guardian has discovered Pargav Ltd, which paid for Werritty to travel the world first class and stay at the most exclusive five-star hotels, was founded on 25 June last year – just eight days before the Charity Commission demanded that Atlantic Bridge’s activities “must cease immediately”.
Pargav, which received £147,000 in donations from Tory party supporters and businessmen, was founded at offices of the same accountancy firm that audited the charity.
The revelation raises questions as to whether Atlantic Bridge’s trustees, who were led by Fox until May 2010, set up Pargav after they got wind that the watchdog was about to force the suspension of the charity, which was run by Werritty.
A Charity Commission spokesman said it would have allowed the trustees of Atlantic Bridge to see the details of its report a “couple of weeks” before it was completed on 5 July 2010.
There was a further blow for Werritty last night when the City of London police confirmed that its economic crime unit is considering whether to launch an investigation into allegations that the lobbyist may have committed fraud. Police may decide to investigate whether Fox’s long-term travel companion profited from misrepresenting himself as an official adviser to the former defence secretary. If an investigation is launched it is likely to centre on whether Werritty was gaining pecuniary advantage by misrepresentation by handing out business cards embossed with the logo of House of Commons portcullis and describing him as an “adviser to Rt Hon Dr Liam Fox MP”.
Defence business people who claim they were misled by Werritty, including Dubai-based private equity boss Harvey Boulter, are understood to be pressing police to launch a full-scale investigation. Boulter said he passed on financially sensitive information to Werritty only because he was led to believe Werritty was an official government adviser.
Werritty has been accused of seeking to misrepresent himself to a string of foreign generals, business people and even overseas heads of state.
Hintze was at a Buckingham Palace reception for prominent Australians last Thursday when he learned that further details of his involvement with Werritty were to be made public.
That night, Lord Bell, the PR man who helped Lady Thatcher win three elections, assisted Hintze to leak full details of Werritty’s funding to the media. The next day, Fox resigned as defence secretary.
The sole director of Pargav is Oliver Hylton, one of Hintze’s closest aides and the manager of his charitable foundation that paid the donations to Atlantic Bridge. Hylton has said he was “naive” to sign the documents that allowed Werritty to create Pargav, which also sought donations from private equity boss Jon Moulton and companies linked to the defence industry.
Both Pargav and Atlantic Bridge gave their registered addresses as the offices of accountants Kingston Smith at 60 Goswell Road, central London.
Also registered at that address was Security Futures, a global risk consultancy which counted both Werritty and Hylton on its board until it was wound up last year. The company secretary of Security Futures was Tory MP Iain Aitken Stewart, a close friend of Fox and Werritty.
One of the key donors to Pargav has been Michael Lewis, who is a former vice-chairman of Bicom, an organisation that lobbies on behalf of Israel. He has donated £13,832 to Atlantic Bridge and £5,000 to Fox. Bicom has been linked to Werritty, and paid for the 33-year-old’s flight and hotel bills when he attended a conference in Israel in 2009 to speak about Iran.
Bicom’s former communications chief is Lee Petar, who left the lobby group to set up PR outfit Tetra Strategy a few years ago. Emails seen by the Guardian show Petar had been working to arrange a meeting between Werritty and private equity boss Harvey Boulter in Dubai in June. An invoice seen by the Guardian shows Petar received thousands of pounds from Boulter for help setting up the meeting and for PR advice.
Jon Moulton, the private equity tycoon who bought Reader’s Digest and has donated £400,000 to the Tories, has given £35,000 to Pargav.
He said Fox requested he pay money into the company. “After the election, I was asked by Dr Fox to provide funds to a non-profit group called Pargav involved in security policy analysis and research and after obtaining written assurances as to its activities I provided personal funding to Pargav,” Moulton said.
“Neither I, nor any of my associates, have sought or received a benefit of any form from Pargav. I have not received an account of Pargav’s activities, nor have I been involved at all with Pargav, since funding. I will not be doing this again.
Other donors to Pargav include Tamares Real Estate – an investment company owned by Tory donor and Bicom chairman Poju Zabludowicz – and the Good Governance Group (G3), a private investigations company staffed by former MI6 officers and founded by Andries Pienaar, a South African who once worked for the security giant Kroll.
The concerns over Werritty’s funding come as the Guardian reveals that ministers held meetings with corporate officials on more than 1,500 occasions in the first 10 months of the coalition government.
The Charity Commission’s report into the Atlantic Bridge, published on 26 July last year, said the primary objective of the charity, which was supported by George Osborne, William Hague and Michael Gove, appeared to be “promoting a political policy [that] is closely associated with the Conservative party”.
It said “current activities must cease immediately” because “the activities of the charity have not furthered any of its other charitable purposes in any way”. The Atlantic Bridge was finally dissolved last month.
Kingston Smith accountants did not respond to requests for comment.
Like in the Russia of the 1880’s, a climate of hatred and fear is building up across Israel, with the burning of mosques, racist graffiti, racist attacks and a multitude of racist events. The government is quite cool about all this, as they stand behind the phenomenon – not behind each nasty racist event, but behind the nasty climate of fear and loathing towards the Palestinian Arabs, either in Israel or in the Occupied Territories. Israel has become what South Africa once was – a society geared up to disable any opposition to its racist rule, and to spread hatred towards the ‘other’, being, like in South Africa, the native of the land, the indigenous population.
That this cancerous growth is spreading at the same time that the ‘tent protest’ is waning is also not an accident. While the tent protesters were careful to avoid any reference to the greatest injustice Israel has ever created, in their fight for justice, it would have been more difficult to spawn this campaign of hate during the ascendancy of the tent protest. Now it is much easier. After a ‘summer of hope’, follows the winter of racism.
Hate-graffiti reported across Israel after Tuba-Zangaria mosque arson last week; Police Commissioner meets with Muslim, Christian community leaders after tense weekend in Jaffa.
Jaffa was quiet on Sunday following a tense weekend in which vandals spray-painted slogans such as “Death to Arabs” in two cemeteries – one Muslim and one Christian – and hurled a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue.
Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino sought an urgent meeting with the leaders of Jaffa’s Muslim and Christian communities on Sunday, and the meeting was quickly set for that evening in Jaffa. By the time it occurred, police had also learned about similar graffiti in nearby Bat Yam, along with new slogans such as “There will be no Arabs on Maccabi Haifa” (a soccer team) and “Death to Russians.” But Bat Yam residents say this graffiti is more than two weeks old.
Graffiti reading “We don’t want Arabs on Maccabi Haifa” in Bat Yam, October 9, 2011. Photo by: Daniel Bar-On
Police said that ever since last week’s torching of a mosque in Tuba-Zangaria, in northern Israel, they have been receiving reports of hate-graffiti from all over the country.
Prior to their meeting with Danino, Jaffa leaders met among themselves to formulate a list of demands they planned to present to him with the goal of bolstering security in the city. They agreed that the city’s Arabs felt threatened, and some even said they feared Arabs would soon be attacked en route to prayers at local mosques.
Danino prepared by receiving a briefing on the investigation from Tel Aviv and Jaffa police officers. The police’s current thinking is that even though one of the spray-painted slogans was “price tag,” a phrase usually associated with right-wing extremists, the vandalism was not ideologically motivated, but was rather the work of local hoodlums, possibly soccer fans.
Danino opened his meeting with Jaffa’s leaders by telling them, “I was born in Jaffa and spent much time there as a child. I’m very familiar with the city’s coexistence and fabric of life.”
He then said the force has have recently been working to “bolster policing and service in Arab communities.”
“We view the incident that took place here as a grave one,” he said. “The incident will be dealt with at the highest level; we’ll make every effort to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice. Our top people will be devoted to this matter. I ask the community to continue to aspire to coexistence and a shared life while upholding law and order.”
The community leaders said afterward that they would prefer less talk and more action.
Earlier yesterday, Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai also met with leaders of Jaffa’s Arab community and denounced the cemetery vandalism harshly.
“I expect the hands of those who commit such acts to be chopped off,” he said, speaking figuratively. “But our job as public figures is to sit together and resolve the issues, as we have invested enormous efforts in recent years in maintaining life as usual here. The Jaffa public was always more mature than all the extremists, and we’ll find a way to return to normal, despite the provocations.”
Sheikh Saliman Setel, who heads the Islamic Movement in Jaffa, termed the meeting with Huldai positive and pledged to do his best to calm tempers in the city.
“For now, the situation is calm; there’s nothing special happening,” he said. “We don’t want this to be temporary. Such things happen every year or two, and it’s not acceptable to anyone. We live in coexistence; we don’t want problems. Just as we respect everyone’s holy sites, we want others to respect our holy sites.”
The problem in Jaffa is not that some kids scrawled ‘Death to the Arabs’ on a grave, but the racist treatment Arabs receive on a daily basis; Israel’s Arab minority is treated as an enemy.
Desecrated graves in a Jaffa cemetery, Oct. 8, 2011. Photo by: Daniel Bar-On
A meeting between the head of the Israel Police and a group of Arab notables is never something that sounds good. I come to the well-kept community center in the Arab Ajami neighborhood in Jaffa where the meeting is to take place. A Christian notable with a huge gold cross comes through the door while a correspondent for the British newspaper The Guardian checks with the tall reporter from the Ynet website as to what exactly is going on.
Then in comes Israel Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino, with an entourage of other senior police officials. As Danino smiles, spokesman’s office staff try to get the reporters and cameramen out of the room. “I came for a private talk. No media,” the police commissioner announces, as if the substance of this whole meeting isn’t media-related.
Ahmed Abu-Kutub, who is the event operations director at the Tel Aviv Hilton hotel and has worked there for 30 years, stands outside. He came to the community center for his son, who is a reporter for an Arabic language website called Yaffa48.com. “How will this help?” the Hilton employee asks, referring to Danino’s visit. He was offended by the graffiti discovered on Muslim and Christian graves in Jaffa over the weekend, calling it a serious matter.
“We grew up with Jews. To me, you’re a human being. That’s how we were taught at home. A person has died. What do you write on his grave? All kinds of nonsense?” Abu-Kutub remarked.
“It’s all racism. That’s the government and the police,” Abu-Kutub’s son, the reporter, says but Ahmed responds: “How are the police guilty?”
I make my way to the Jaffa protest tent encampment, which is one of the most impressive institutions to come out of this summer’s protests. It was exciting to see how important it was to the Arab and Jewish leadership of the Jaffa encampment to be in touch with leadership from the Hatikvah quarter protest camp. It’s the beginning of solidarity as great as the social protest struggle itself.
I seek out someone to interview there and am referred to Samer Kassem, who was photographed on video being beaten by police in a clip that provided shocking Internet footage a few days ago. His story never made headlines because people are more shocked by symbols than people whose ribs police fracture. The incident occurred while police were evicting Kassem from an abandoned house in which he was squatting with his sister.
“When they came to evict us from there, I started packing. I knew [the house] was just a temporary solution. I asked the officer one question. ‘Do you have an eviction order?’ Then he called over the Yassam [special forces police] and said: ‘Take care of him.'”
Samer works in home remodeling and sees the irony in his situation. “I make homes beautiful, but I have no place to live,” he says.
I ask him how he can work with broken fingers. His ribs hurt him a lot more, he replies.
The real problem in Jaffa is not that a few kids scrawled “Death to the Arabs” on a grave, but rather the racist treatment accorded the Arabs on a daily basis. It’s a fact that this minority here is related to by the media and the state as the enemy. The Israeli establishment simply relates to Arabs here with violence and racism, even if it is elegantly concealed to a greater or lesser extent.
Man detained within hours of the incident, which police believe may have been a ‘price tag’ attack carried out by extreme right-wing Jews; suspect denies involvement.
Local residents inspecting the arson damage to a Ramallah-area mosque. Photo by: David Bachar
Israel Police have arrested a man suspected of involvement in the torching of an Upper Galilee mosque earlier this week, it emerged on Thursday.
The suspect arrested just hours after the attack, but a gag order was slapped on all investigation details immediately following the incident. The suspect was brought before the court for a hearing on his remand Thursday, where an attorney representing the suspect said his client disavowed any link to the incident.
Legal representation to the suspect is provided by the Hanenu organization, which provides legal counseling to those prosecuted over acts committed during military service in the West Bank and as part of right-wing political activity.
The mosque in the village of Tuba-Zanghariyya, a Bedouin town of some 5,500 people two kilometers east of Rosh Pina, was attacked at about 2:30 A.M. on Monday morning. The mosque’s interior was seriously damaged, and many holy books were destroyed by the blaze.
Police suspect that extreme right-wing Jews carried out the arson as a “price tag” operation, referring to vandalism and revenge actions initiated by activists, usually against Palestinians, following terror attacks or state demolitions in settlements or outposts.
On Wednesday, the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Yated Ne’eman condemned the arsonists who torched the Tuba-Zangariya mosque, saying said the “din rodef” law applied to them, meaning it is permitted to kill them to prevent them from endangering others.
“Jews don’t burn mosques, period,” the newspaper’s editorial said. “…no shadow of justification can be found for harming a Muslim mosque. This is an insane, dangerous act.”
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine launched hunger strike on September 27 to protest isolation of senior Palestinian prisoners.
Security prisoners in all Israeli prisons plan to announce on Monday that they are joining the hunger strike declared by jailed activists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the hundreds of other prisoners who have identified with them, including Israeli Arab security prisoners.
The hunger strike was launched on September 27 to protest the isolation of several senior Palestinian prisoners, among them the PFLP’s general secretary, Ahmad Saadat.
An announcement released on Sunday by inmates in the Gilboa Prison said that security prisoners had decided to join the strike until their demands were met, among them a halt to the policy of solitary confinement and the upholding of prisoners’ rights, which they said had been won after a difficult struggle that took place over many years.
The Israel Prison Service has been conducting talks with prisoner leaders in every prison in an effort to prevent any collective decision. The IPS said that the policy on solitary confinement is set by the political echelons, but that one suggestion – that all prisoners in solitary confinement be kept in the same guarded area of the prison – may be acceptable to the prisoners.
The prisoners’ demands have started to garner support outside the prisons. There are solidarity marches scheduled for tomorrow in several cities in the West Bank and Gaza, and the Solidarity Committee for Prisoners has declared Friday to be a day of solidarity with the hunger strikers.
EDITOR: The US is making sure there is no Two States solution
As if the two-state solution was still a faint possibility, the US has stepped in in order to make sure it cannot ever take place… by depriving the PA of its income, it makes sense for the PA to end the show, and to return the keys to Israel. Now Israel can look after the territories, and also pay for it. To continue to play the US/Israel game is a crime, and does no longer fool the Palestinian people or anyone else.
In the meantime, It has become safer for war criminals to travel to Britain. And why not? A country itself involved in so many war crimes, is the natural place for war criminals to visit safely.
RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — All projects by the US international assistance agency in the Palestinian territories funded under its 2011 budget have been halted, the minister of economy in the West Bank said Friday.
Hasan Abu Libdeh said funding for USAID projects stopped after the US Congress blocked transfer of some $200 million in funds in August. Implementation will continue for a few weeks until the funds run dry, he said.
The project freeze relates to funding for infrastructure work, specifically for “roads, water, health and other projects related to building the capacities (of the Palestinian Authority),” Abu Libdeh told Ma’an.
Dozens have already lost their jobs related to projects earmarked for blocked funds, he said.
US lawmakers put a hold on the aid in September after President Mahmoud Abbas went ahead with his bid for membership of the UN despite US and Israeli opposition.
A US official told Ma’an that USAID had not halted its programs.
“We are working with the Congress to remove Congressional holds with respect to the release of (the 2011 financial year’s) assistance for the Palestinians,” the official said.
“The lifting of the holds is necessary for programs to continue as planned. Ongoing programs will continue until funds are exhausted.”
US officials are in “frequent contact with our Palestinian partners to explain the holds on our assistance and their implications for our programs in the West Bank and Gaza,” the official added.
The Obama administration is exerting huge efforts to overturn the freeze on funds, officials say, and Israel has also warned that it supports continued aid to the Ramallah-based Palestinian government.
“We think it is money that is not only in the interest of the Palestinians, it is in US interest and it is also in Israeli interest and we would like to see it go forward,” State Dept. spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.
Abu Libdeh, the minister, said he was officially informed of Congress’ move by a senior USAID delegate, and that it was unclear whether there will be US government funding for Palestinian projects in 2012.
The PA, which exercises limited rule in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has often failed to pay its 150,000 employees on time and in full and remains reliant on foreign aid to fill a deficit projected at $900 million this year.
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank say that financial problems threaten the state-building program overseen by Salam Fayyad, the prime minister in the West Bank.
The 27-member European Union, the PA’s single biggest funder, has said that it will continue funding the West Bank government.
Militant Jewish settlers smash tombs and spray stones with graffiti on Yom Kippur and firebomb is thrown at synagogue
Jaffa, south of central Tel Aviv, where graves were desecrated on Yom Kippur. Photograph: Gil Cohen Magen / Reuters/Reuters
Dozens of gravestones have been desecrated at Muslim and Christian cemeteries and a firebomb thrown at a synagogue in Jaffa, Israel, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.
At least five tombs were smashed and around 20 others sprayed with Hebrew graffiti, including ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘Price Tag’ – a slogan used by militant Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and their supporters.
The “price-taggers” have vowed to avenge any move by Israel to uproot West Bank settlement outposts built without Israeli government permission, and have set fire to mosques and vandalised both Israeli and Palestinian property.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said a firebomb thrown on to the roof of a synagogue in the Jaffa area caused no damage or casualties. He said an investigation had been launched and that patrols had been stepped up.
A few dozen Israelis and Palestinians turned out in a show of protest against the attacks and a local councillor blamed settlers. Jaffa is the ancient part of Tel Aviv, with a mixed Jewish and Arab population, including Christians and Muslims.
“All these extreme settlers are doing different activities and they are not paying a price for anything,” said Sami Abu-Shehadi, a member of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality council. “Settlers have been saying that they want to bring the conflict inside [Israel] and this is exactly what they are doing now,” he said.
Rosenfeld said there was no initial indication the suspects were settlers or settler supporters, and that there was also a possibility that they might be football hooligans.
Israeli president Shimon Peres condemned the vandalism. “The desecration of graves is a forbidden and criminal act that defames our honour and is contrary to the moral values of Israeli society,” he said.
On Monday, a mosque in a Bedouin village in northern Israel was set on fire and graffiti sprayed on its walls in an attack authorities have blamed on hardline Jewish settlers. The attacks have drawn broad condemnation from Peres and other Israeli leaders, and the country’s chief rabbis visited the scene in a bid to calm tensions.
In 2005 a Jewish couple were charged for throwing a pig’s head into a Tel Aviv mosque in an attempt to derail Israel’s pullout from Gaza, which went ahead in August of that year.
In 2008 riots erupted in the coastal city of Acre in northern Israel when Jews accosted an Arab man who drove his car into a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood during Yom Kippur when all traffic halts and the country shuts down for 24 hours.
Sleep easy, war criminals
Britain’s insulting new rules on arrest warrants will only encourage Israel’s view of itself as above international law
Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor who saw three of his children and a niece killed when Israeli shells smashed into his home in Gaza. Photograph: Khalil Hamra/Associated Press
Israel has violated innumerable UN resolutions and international laws over the past 50 years without any sanction being incurred – whether legal, economic, political or military. Most blatant is its disregard for the overwhelming opinion of the international court of justice in The Hague, which in 2004 declared the erection of a wall through the occupied territories to be unlawful. If you add the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, continued extension of illegal settlements, forced evictions and house demolitions, requisition of water resources, Gaza blockade and illicit use of cloned passports to facilitate an assassination outside Israel, anyone might be think that this is a state that regards itself as above the law.
The creation of international crimes with universal jurisdiction was accomplished after years of negotiation and careful deliberation for one purpose: to ensure there could be no hiding place or safe haven for the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes against humanity. In practical terms it means that no matter where the offence took place, nor who the victims were, nor who carried out the acts, a judicial process could be invoked to prosecute those responsible. Examples of such cases are genocide, war crimes and torture.
The ICJ itself made clear in the wall case that the obligation to prosecute is the concern of all states. The problem is that no state has been willing to take on this task vis-a-vis Israel other than on a very muted diplomatic level. Lawyers acting for individuals in Palestine have been forced to do so themselves.
In 2009 Westminster magistrates court issued an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister at the time of Operation Cast Lead, which caused an estimated death toll of 1,400 in Gaza. Britain’s Labour government hierarchy fell over itself rushing to the Israeli authorities, not about the deaths but to apologise for the warrant.
A dramatic incident occurred as Livni was about to appear on Israeli television during the invasion. The interviewer Shlomi Eldar recognised a name that appeared on his mobile – Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor who had courageously and steadfastly given services without fear or favour equally to Israelis and Palestinians. “They shelled my house. They killed my daughters. What have we done? Shlomi, I wanted to save them but there are dead. They were hit in the head. They died on the spot. Allah, what have we done to them?” Three of his daughters and his niece had just been killed by Israeli forces. The call was broadcast and transmitted round the world. The whole story of the operation as the doctor witnessed it is told in his acclaimed book I Shall Not Hate.
There could be no question that this admired physician was associated with Hamas or terrorism, or even a hostile thought. Only two possibilities make sense: a deliberate attack, or an indiscriminate one that did not afford proper protection for civilians. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict found that the Israelis – and Hamas – had committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. While the leader of the mission had second thoughts about part of the conclusions in April this year, the other three distinguished members of the panel did not, and the Foreign Office maintained its support for the report and did not wish to see it withdrawn. In any event none of this relates to a failure to accord civilians proper protection.
In September the British government changed the ground rules by providing the director of public prosecutions with the power of veto over private applications for arrest warrants (in the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act). It is an insult to the courts to insinuate that they cannot be trusted to assess the requisite threshold for issuing a warrant. In 10 years only two out of 10 such applications had been granted. We are dealing here with arrest, not charge.
The DPP made clear in January that he would consult the attorney general if approached for approval. The attorney would then decide whether it was in the public interest to prosecute. Such a decision would normally not arise until all relevant evidence had been assembled so that an overview could be made on the twofold test of evidential adequacy and public interest. To essentially assess that there is no reasonable prospect of a conviction at the start is to pre-empt the whole process and makes a mockery of the concept of universal jurisdiction.
It is therefore highly unlikely that any prosecutions of consequence will ensue either at the instigation of the government itself or of an individual – as Livni’s meeting with William Hague in London this week demonstrated. Given the British government’s lacklustre performance in this field when it comes to nations or individuals who are seen to be unacceptable (eg Pinochet, where it took a Spanish magistrate to act), those in positions of command and responsibility at times when war crimes are committed can now rest easily in their beds.
Application to arrest Tzipi Livni was being considered before the decision was made that she was on a ‘special mission’. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP
Foreign Office declares that the Israeli opposition leader enjoys temporary diplomatic immunity as she is on a ‘special mission’
The Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni has avoided the possibility of prosecution in a British court for war crimes after the Foreign Office declared that she enjoys temporary diplomatic immunity.
A private application for a warrant to arrest the former foreign minister during her visit to London was made on Tuesday and had been under consideration by the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC.
But the announcement that the Foreign Office had issued a rarely heard of certificate that she was on a “special mission” infuriated Palestinian activists and human rights groups.
Legislation passed earlier this year requires the DPP to give his consent to any private prosecution for war crimes launched in courts in England and Wales to prevent politically motivated cases and to ensure that there was “solid evidence”. Under what is known as universal jurisdiction, war crimes committed anywhere in the world can be tried in UK courts.
The arrival of Livni was a significant test case. In late 2009, an arrest warrant was issued for Livni on the grounds she had been a member of the Israeli war cabinet that sanctioned the assault on Gaza in which more than a thousand Palestinians were killed. On that occasion she cancelled her visit.
In a detailed statement, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) revealed that it had received a fresh application for an arrest warrant on Tuesday. “No concluded view has been reached on whether there is sufficient evidence to support a realistic prospect of conviction against Ms Livni.”
On Thursday, it added, the CPS had been served with a certificate by the foreign secretary, William Hague, declaring the Foreign Office “has consented to the visit to the UK of Ms Livni as a special mission”.
“Special mission” immunity status, the CPS said, could not be challenged.
The private prosecution application had been brought on behalf of an unnamed Palestinian police officer whose brother, also a police officer, was killed during the first day of the attack on Gaza in 2008.
The case was handled in London by Daniel Machover of the solicitors Hickman and Rose. A joint statement with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said: “The DPP … has been blocked from any arrest decision … but not on the basis of a lack of evidence. The only reason given by the DPP is the retrospective grant of diplomatic immunity to Ms Livni by the British foreign secretary on the basis of a ‘special mission’.
“The government has abused the law in order to ensure that Ms Livni escapes accountability. Ms Livni is not a member of the Israeli government, but the leader of the opposition. This action exhibits a serious and worrying disregard for the rule of law, and appears to be in violation of the UK’s international obligations.”
Hague said: “It was an appalling situation when political abuse of our legal procedures prevented people like Ms Livni from travelling legitimately to the UK. We have dealt with this urgently as we promised to on coming to office.
“The UK will continue to honour our international obligations and make sure that people who have committed some of the most awful crimes – wherever in the world they took place – can be brought to justice in our courts.”
EDITOR: US Congress vies with racist settlers to harm Palestinians
While the Israeli fascists are burning mosques, the US Congress is climbing allover itself with measures to harm Palestine. Cutting funding for essential services – that will help a lot; cutting funds for the UN for dealing with the Palestinian vote – that will really be useful. They are thinking up new schemes daily.
This must be the signs of the American decline and fall – financial, political, cultural and moral, all mixed up. For those of us who tried to persuade the Palestinians to avoid building on US positions, this is sad reminder of the folly of the Fatah positions, and their hopes based on US pressure. It was never real, and now m ore than ever such futile hopes are a travesty and and offence against the people of Palestine. The US has always been a devoted partner of Zionism, and to wait for it to become an ‘honest broker’ is to wait for a messiah which is not coming. The Palestinian leadership, such as it is, should learn to confront the US, rather than to whimper before it. Nothing good will come out of this servility.
Arson attack on mosque in Arab village of Tuba-Zangaria believed to have been ‘price tag’ strike by Israeli settlers
A woman inspects the damage after the mosque arson attack. Photograph: Ancho Gosh/AFP/Getty Images
Vandals have set fire to a mosque in an Arab village in northern Israel, provoking protests and clashes with police. Graffiti spraypainted on the walls of the building suggested Jewish radicals were involved.
About 200 residents of the village of Tuba-Zangaria, Arab citizens of Israel, marched to a major junction nearby with the intention of blocking roads in protest, Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, said.
Some of the demonstrators set tyres on fire and threw stones at police officers, who dispersed the crowd using teargas, Rosenfeld said. No one was injured.
Police were mobilised to prevent further disturbances and were meeting village leaders in an attempt to defuse tensions, he added.
Rosenfeld said a carpet in the mosque was set on fire, damaging interior walls. Copies of the Qu’ran were burned, Israeli media reported.
Rosenfeld said the words “price tag” had been spraypainted on the building – a reference to a settler practice of attacking Palestinians and their property in retaliation for Palestinian attacks and government operations against settlements.
Several weeks ago, the government destroyed structures in an unauthorised Jewish settlement in the West Bank. The operation was immediately followed by an arson attack on a mosque.
Army Radio reported that the family name of a settler and his infant son who were killed in a car crash near the West Bank town of Hebron last week was also scrawled on a wall.
Israeli police said rocks were thrown at the man by Palestinians, hitting him around the head and causing him to lose control of the car.
Rosenfeld said security was heightened across northern Israel following the attack. Large numbers of Israeli Arabs live in northern Israel.
The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, denounced the mosque attack and ordered the Shin Bet internal security agency to act quickly to locate the attackers. A message from his office said he was “fuming” when he saw the pictures, and said the attack “ran counter to the values of the state of Israel”.
Palestinian Authority accuses Congress of holding back funds to punish Mahmoud Abbas’ bid for UN statehood
The Palestinian Authority has accused the US of “collective punishment”, after the US Congress blocked $200m (£128m) in aid in response to President Mahmoud Abbas’ bid for UN statehood.
The decision to freeze the payments was reportedly made by three congressional committees on 18 August, before Abbas’ planned bid for statehood recognition at the UN the following month.
The funds, intended for food aid, health care, and infrastructure projects, were supposed to have been transferred within the US financial year, which ends today. The Obama administration is reportedly negotiating with congressional leaders to unlock the aid.
“It is another kind of collective punishment which is going to harm the needs of the public without making any positive contribution,” Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib told the Independent.
“It is ironic to be punished for going to the United Nations.”
USAid has already started scaling back its aid operations in the West Bank and Gaza, and there are fears it may be forced to end all humanitarian work and distribution of financial support to the Palestinian Authority by January.
There are also fears the move could lead to a security crisis in the Palestinian territories.
“Security co-operation with the Palestinians is excellent at the moment and we do not want to jeopardise that,” a senior Israeli military official official told the Independent.
Democrat Gary Ackerman, member of the House sub-committee on the Middle East and South Asia, told a meeting of representatives and leaders of Jewish organisations outside the UN headquarters on Monday that “there may need to be a total cut-off of all aid to the Palestinians for pursuing this course of action which is very dangerous and ill advised.”
Former president Bill Clinton recently warned Congress to leave the issue of aid to the Obama administration. He said: “Everybody knows the US Congress is the most pro-Israel parliamentary body in the world. They don’t have to demonstrate that.”
A UN security council panel on admitting new members to the UN met to discuss the Palestinian bid for the first time on Friday. After the meeting, Lebanese UN ambassador Nawaf Salam said the committee unanimously agreed to hold further meetings next week.
5 OCTOBER 2011
As Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike enters its second week, international solidarity is needed now, more than ever. Prisoners are being sent to isolation in increasing numbers, family visits are being denied, families threatened and identity cards conficated, lawyer visits denied, and belongings and clothing confiscated.
International solidarity to support Palestinian hunger strikers is also growing:
éirígí, an Irish republican socialist political party, has called for a vigil at the Israeli embassy in Dublin on October 5 to support hunger strikers; the Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa’adat encourages all to attend!
The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network has issued a strong call for solidarity with the Palestinian hunger strikers, and the striking prisoners in California, including a highlight of the case of Ahmad Sa’adat. We encourage all to sign on.
A number of international organizations, including the Platform in Solidarity with Palestine, the Irish Republican Socialist Committees, and others, have issued statements and calls in solidarity with the prisoners.
The website mobilizing solidarity with the California prison hunger strike – where prisoners have also been denied legal visits, lawyers threatened, and retaliation used against prisoners – has also provided information in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners. We urge people to follow the California strike and provide support and solidarity!
There is a new Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa’adat flyer for download and distribution – download the flyer here and distribute it in your community, at a protest at the Israeli embassy and at local events.
In Canada, Voice of Palestine Radio will feature an interview with a prisoner support activist live from Ramallah. The show will air at 8-9 PM Pacific Standard Time and can be heard on Vancouver Cooperative Radio (CFRO) 102.7 FM live at that time for people in Vancouver, Canada. People outside of Vancouver can listen to the show live on the Internet http://www.coopradio.org/content/listen.
Palestinian prisoners in several prisons, including Nafha prison, have reported in the past few days that they were threatened that family visits would be denied in retaliation for their participation in the hunger strike. Israeli prison officials told the prisoners that for each day they spent on hunger strike, they would be banned from family visitation for 1 month.
In addition, women prisoners participating in the hunger strike, Sumoud Kharajeh, Linan Abu Ghoulmeh, Duaa Jayyousi and Wuroud Kassem, were moved into isolation and solitary confinement, Linan Abu Ghoulmeh while under arbitrary administrative detention.
The Israeli occupation prison service also transfered prisoners from Departments 13 and 14 in the Nafha prison to other prisons; their location remains unknown. Two prisoners in Nafha, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who were abducted from Jericho prison with Ahmad Sa’adat have also been placed in isolation, Hamdi Qur’an and Basil al-Asmar.
During a family visit, Israeli occupation prison authorities confiscated the identity cards of the families of Palestinian prisoners Mahmoud Abu Wahdan and Raed Sayel. The families were told that because their imprisoned relatives refused to break their hunger strike, they were not allowed to visit them.
In the Ofer prison, Israeli authorities placed 9 detainees – members of the PFLP – in solitary confinement and confiscated all their personal effects, clothing and other belongings.
In Asqelan Prison, the Israeli prison administration prevented lawyers from visiting detainees. A lawyer who came to Asqelan to visit prisoners Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh, Allam Al-Kaabi, and Shadi Sharafa was banned from visiting the prisoners and informed that these three and all prisoners from the PFLP who are on hunger strike are prohibited from receiving lawyer visits.
The hunger strike has been growing as well. Earlier in the day 20 prisoners from the Fateh party joined the open hunger strike, including the oldest Palestinian prisoner, Fakhri Barghouti, who entered his 34th year in Israeli prisons, and Akram Mansour, who has been imprisoned for 33 years and is quite ill with cancer. Additional prisoners also plan to announce their joining the hunger strike in the next few days. In the Negev prison, Anas Al-Shanti was placed in solitary confinement. In Ramon prison, prisoner Basem Al-Khandaqjy, a member of Central Committee of the People’s Party, joined the hunger strike.
TAKE ACTION TO SUPPORT AHMAD SA’ADAT AND ALL PALESTINIAN PRISONERS!
1. Picket, protest or call the Israeli embassy or consulate in your location and demand the immediate freedom of Ahmad Sa’adat and all Palestinian political prisoners. Make it clear that you support the demands of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike! Send us reports of your protests at Israeli embassies and consulates.
2. Distribute the free downloadable Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa’adat flyer in your community at local events.
3. Write to the International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights organizations to exercise their responsibilities and act swiftly to demand that the Israelis ensure that Ahmad Sa’adat and all Palestinian prisoners are freed from punitive isolation. Email the ICRC, whose humanitarian mission includes monitoring the conditions of prisoners, at jerusalem.jer@icrc.org, and inform them about the urgent situation of Ahmad Sa’adat.
4. Email the Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa’adat at info@freeahmadsaadat.org with announcements, reports and information about your local events, activities and flyer distributions.
Bin Laden’s killing aside, his foreign policy has all been waffle, dither and drift – with a trail of acts of dismaying expediency
Simon Tisdall
Candidates run on hope. Incumbents run on their record. But Barack Obama, lining up for a second term at the White House next year, has little to offer on either score. The heady optimism of 2008 has dissipated. At home, Obama is primarily associated with hard times: only 34% of voters approve of his handling of the economy, according to a recent poll. Abroad, his presidency has come to stand for impotence and incompetence. He promised new beginnings; what he has delivered, for the most part, is waffle, dither and drift.
If this verdict seems harsh, take a quick tour round the globe. Everywhere the pillars of American superpower are crumbling. The old habit of hegemony, formed in the postwar decades and confirmed in 1989 as Soviet power imploded, is fading as fast as a Honolulu sunset.
Part of the explanation is faltering industrial and financial clout, reflecting the rapid rise of rivals like China and India. But that is compounded by another central element: Obama’s persistent failure to stand up, in practical, substantive ways, for the values, beliefs and interests he so eloquently espouses.
Obama’s early, anguished indecision over keeping his promise to close Guantánamo Bay now looks like a grim portent. So, too, does his administration’s failure to support the Iranian students whose “green revolution” was so cruelly suppressed in Tehran in 2009. When the Arab spring took hold this year, the man who in Cairo had preached the pre-eminence of the democratic ideal took fright. Tunisia did not matter much. But when he faced accusations of becoming the president who “lost” Egypt, Obama’s dither default setting was triggered anew.
In the event he achieved the worst of all worlds. Hosni Mubarak, that staunch, unlovely friend of the west, was deposed with Washington’s belated blessing – to the lasting mortification of another key American ally, Saudi Arabia. Now the army-led, supposedly caretaker regime that replaced him appears equally unappealing. Egypt may soon require a second revolution, and next time the Islamists may not act so coy. For its part, Riyadh absorbed the lesson of US unreliability and took matters into its own hands by crushing dissent in Bahrain.
In Libya, as elsewhere, Obama talked the good fight from the sidelines. Speaking about Syria in August, he condemned President Bashar al-Assad’s “imprisoning, torturing and slaughtering” of pro-democracy demonstrators and demanded he step aside immediately. The call came after months of White House debate about the consequences of supporting change in Damascus. Assad, meanwhile, contemptuously ignores US mouthings, and a fracturing Syria accelerates towards the abyss.
Obama’s handling of his legacy wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – provides little to crow about on the stump. The Afghan troop surge has not brought about the looked-for breakthrough. Instead, casualties are up, while the Taliban, in contrast, have increasingly resorted to targeted terror tactics – such as last month’s assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president and head of the high peace council.
Any examination of whether Obama and his diplomats and commanders want a negotiated Afghan peace settlement finds President Dither at his most infuriating. Speaking at the end of Ramadan, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, clearly signalled interest in pursuing talks to create a new political order acceptable to all Afghans. But Washington seems more intent on threatening Pakistan than ensuring a peaceful transition in Afghanistan after 2014. Much the same may be said of Iraq, where US concerns focus less on the stability of a country it so massively destabilised than on how Iran may exploit the US withdrawal.
Obama’s foreign policy under-achievement leaves a global trail. He spoke out forcefully in Prague about the necessary inevitability of a nuclear bomb-free world. But his carrots and sticks have had little impact on North Korea’s or Iran’s ambitions, while the Libyan war delivered a clear message: if Muammar Gaddafi had not abandoned his nuclear weapons programme in 2003 he might still be in power now.
As a candidate Obama condemned Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgian territory. But as president he offered Vladimir Putin’s regime a “reset” of relations amounting to a reward for bad behaviour. Along the Pacific rim, meanwhile, widely shared perceptions of a lack of political resolve in the face of China’s military expansionism are fuelling an arms race from Taiwan and Malaysia to Vietnam and Australia.
Amid multiple disappointments, one dismaying act of expediency stands out: Obama’s open-ended threat to veto UN recognition of a Palestinian state. After the three-year runaround handed out by Israel’s last-ditcher, “no surrender” prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, Obama had the chance to deliver a symbolic blow for peace, something surely right up his street. But with a wary eye on the 2012 campaign, he just couldn’t do it. Under Obama, the empire does not strike back. It strikes out.
If Obama is re-elected it won’t be due to his international achievements – unless you think killing Osama bin Laden is worth another four years.
Defence secretary Leon Panetta says Israel needs to focus on diplomacy as well as security as he travels to Middle East
US defence secretary Leon Panetta says Israel needs to focus on diplomacy as well as security as he travels to Middle East Link to this video
The US has warned that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated in the Middle East, and said the country’s leaders must restart negotiations with the Palestinians and work to restore relations with Egypt and Turkey.
In a blunt assessment made by Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, as he was travelling to Israel, he said the ongoing upheaval in the Middle East made it critical for the Israelis to find ways to communicate with other nations in the region in order to have stability.
“There’s not much question in my mind that they maintain that [military] edge,” Panetta told reporters travelling with him. “But the question you have to ask: is it enough to maintain a military edge if you’re isolating yourself in the diplomatic arena? Real security can only be achieved by both a strong diplomatic effort as well as a strong effort to project your military strength.”
Panetta is scheduled to meet Israeli and Palestinian leaders this week, and then travel to a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels. His visit comes as negotiators push for a peace deal by the end of next year, increasing pressure for the resumption of long-stalled talks.
The Pentagon chief said Israel risks eroding its own security if it does not reach out to its neighbours. “It’s pretty clear that at this dramatic time in the Middle East, when there have been so many changes, that it is not a good situation for Israel to become increasingly isolated. And that’s what’s happening,” he said.
Panetta said the most important thing was for Israel and its neighbours “to try to develop better relationships so in the very least they can communicate with each other rather than taking these issues to the streets”.
His visit comes at a particularly critical and fragile time. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has asked the UN to recognise an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, areas captured by Israel in the 1967 six-day war. The US opposed the UN bid, saying there is no substitute for direct peace negotiations. But with Israel continuing to build settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Abbas says there is no point in talking.
About 500,000 Jewish settlers now live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
The US, Britain, France and other UN security council members are likely to try to hold up consideration of the application while they press for a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, diplomats said.
Negotiators for the Quartet (UN, US, EU and Russia), are asking the Israelis and the Palestinians to produce comprehensive proposals on territory and security within three months. Israeli officials have welcomed parts of the proposal, but have also expressed concerns about the timetable for some discussions. They also have refused to endorse the 1967 prewar borders as a basis for the future Palestinian state – something President Barack Obama has endorsed.
The Palestinians, meanwhile, have said they will not return to talks unless Israel freezes settlement building and accepts the pre-1967 war frontier as a baseline for talks. The Quartet is urging both sides to avoid “provocative actions”. Last week, Israel approved the construction of 1,100 new housing units in an area of Jerusalem built on land captured in 1967, a move that drew widespread international condemnation.
Panetta said he wanted to stress to both sides that instead of setting conditions or pursuing other approaches, “the most important thing they can do is go to the negotiating table. That would be a tremendous signal to the world that both the Israelis and the Palestinians want to try to find a solution to these problems. I don’t think they really lose anything by getting into negotiations.”
Panetta is scheduled to meet the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, and the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, as well as Abbas and the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad.
His visit to Israel comes six months after his predecessor, Robert Gates, travelled to the region to meet Israeli leaders and make a journey to the West Bank to talk to Fayyad.
The US has said it would veto the Palestinians’ UN request, despite the high political cost in the Arab world. However, Washington would not need to use its veto if the Palestinians fail to get the support of at least nine of 15 council members. Palestinian officials have said they believe they have eight yes votes, and are lobbying for more support.
Membership request in UN cultural agency seen as test case for support for Palestinian statehood; U.S. warns will cut funding to agency if bid successful.
Palestinians cleared their first hurdle Wednesday to full membership in the UN cultural agency, an official said, as they expand and accelerate their push for international recognition, despite opposition from the United States and Israel.
In response to the news, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said that the Palestinian request for membership to UNESCO is a “rejection of the path of negotiations, as well as of the Quartet plan to continue with the political process.”
What do you think of the Palestinian application for UNESCO membership? Visit Haaretz.com on Facebook and share your views.
“This move negates the efforts of the international community to advance the political process. A decision like this will not advance the Palestinians in their aspirations to statehood,” the ministry said.
Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO, Nimrod Barkan, told Haaretz the U.S. has clearly indicated that if the motion passes and the Palestinians become full members, it will stop paying its dues to the organization. This, in turn, will cripple UNESCO, as the U.S. pays 22 percent of the entire budget.
“The tragedy is that this hampers UNESCO from doing its real job,” he added to the Associated Press, noting that the agency’s board has taken up five Israel-related issues in recent days and none regarding Syria or Libya.” “A relatively small minority is hijacking the organization for other purposes,” he said.
With peace talks stalled and landmark efforts to get Palestine recognized at the United Nations inching along a labyrinthine path, Palestinian diplomats are pursuing other, potentially faster avenues toward getting the world to consider their territories a nation.
One is in Paris-based UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, where the executive board agreed Wednesday to send the Palestinians’ request to a vote of the body’s members.
The Palestinians are also seeking a foothold in the World Trade Organization and won partnership status this week in the Council of Europe, the continent’s leading human rights body.
None of this will solve the conflicts with Israel over security, violence and borders that for decades have prevented a Palestinian state from coming into existence. But it may up the pressure at UN headquarters and weigh on fresh efforts to resuscitate peace talks.
The UNESCO request is being seen as a test case indicating the breadth of support for the Palestinian push.
The Palestinian delegation, which has had observer status at UNESCO since 1974, presented a draft resolution to the agency’s executive board on Wednesday, according to diplomats there.
A UNESCO official later confirmed that the board voted overwhelmingly to send it to a vote of the body’s 193 members, two-thirds of whom must approve any request for full membership.
The vote has not been scheduled, but will take place at UNESCO’s General Conference, which runs from Oct. 25 to Nov. 10. The diplomats and the official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
The question is highly divisive, and may rekindle tensions between Arab and Western governments just as democratic uprisings in the Arab world have brought them closer together.
The Palestinians have sought UNESCO membership before, to no avail. This year, UNESCO diplomats said, they are using a different method for the request, via a draft resolution. They may have more momentum now, after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas took his people’s quest for independence to UN headquarters in a landmark move last month.
Israeli diplomats are trying to persuade leading governments “not to politicize UNESCO and leave this subject to New York,” Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO, Nimrod Barkan, told The Associated Press.
“The tragedy is that this hampers UNESCO from doing its real job,” he said, noting that the agency’s board has taken up five Israel-related issues in recent days and none regarding Syria or Libya. “A relatively small minority is hijacking the organization for other purposes,” he said.
Ismail Tilawi, the representative of UNESCO in the Palestinian territories, says that since the formation of the Palestinian Authority in the mid-1990s, a request for Palestinian membership has been on the agenda of every UNESCO General Conference, which convenes every two years.
The chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, called for a cutoff of U.S. funds to UNESCO if the Palestinian effort succeeds this time.
“Feeling that their efforts at the UN Security Council will fail, the Palestinian leadership is shopping around the UN system for recognition,” Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, said in a statement. “It is deeply disappointing to see UNESCO, which has reformed itself in
recent years, poised to support this dangerous Palestinian scheme. The U.S. must strongly oppose this move.”
In fact, a U.S. law prohibits Washington from funding a UN organization that grants full membership to any group “that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood.”
Since the U.S. makes significant contributions to UNESCO, the membership bid, if successful, could result in a major drop-off in funding for the agency.
The U.S.¬ withdrew from UNESCO in 1984 to protest a resolution adopted years earlier that had equated Zionism with racism and did not rejoin for nearly 20 years.
France is worried the Palestinian bid at UNESCO will derail efforts to resuscitate peace talks.
UNESCO is “not the appropriate place” and its meeting later this month “is not the right moment” to seek recognition, a French diplomat said. The diplomat was not authorized to be named speaking about closed-door UNESCO discussions.
The UNESCO meeting in Paris comes amid a new effort by the so-called Quartet of Mideast negotiators to revive peace talks. The Obama administration’s special Mideast peace envoy, David Hale, is coming to Paris this week ahead of a meeting in Brussels of the Quartet – the U.S., European Union, Russia and UN.
In addition to advancing the Palestinians’ push for recognition, UNESCO membership could offer the Palestinians a key bargaining chip by allowing them to seek protected U.N. status for disputed cultural heritage sites.
At UN headquarters in New York, the Security Council committee that reviews membership applications is considering the Palestinians’ request. The committee is seeking to determine if the request meets the criteria of the UN.
In response to the news, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said that the Palestinian request for membership to UNESCO is a “rejection of the path of negotiations, as well as of the Quartet plan to continue with the political process.”
“This move negates the efforts of the international community to advance the political process. A decision like this will not advance the Palestinians in their aspirations to statehood,” the ministry said.
Ameer Makhoul Gilboa Prison 5 October 2011
The recent wave of protests in Israel, which pretend to call for social justice, is one of the most powerful and massive mobilization to ever happen in the country. An unprecedented character of this movement, one should add, is its pretension to create an open space for groups, as well as individuals.
The people demand social justice! But for all? (Oren Ziv / ActiveStills )
The dynamics that guard these protests are that of a social movement. However, the content of the demonstrators’ demands should be subjected to a serious discussion and critique. One of the major contradictory aspects of this movement is the exclusive understanding of the value of social justice. Social justice is a universal value, but for the protesters in Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, it is limited only to the internal dynamics of Israeli society.
On Rothschild Blvd., the root cause of the social injustices Israelis face are a taboo — that is, the occupation, colonial racism, militarization of all life’s aspects and the prevailing, aggressive neoliberal thought and system. These issues are deeply related to the Israeli state-building process.
The Israeli social protests should be seen in light of two major border-crossing developments: the Arab peoples’ uprisings, an example of how when the people move, nothing is impossible; and second, the growth of the international and globalized social movement. The latter, day by day, is gaining a popular character that is challenging the world’s neoliberal elites in what we know as the “wealthy” nations and their current crisis, impacting the entire world.
The recent protests are indicative of the growing strength of the Israeli social movement.
Furthermore, it partially challenges the current system of power division, attempting to redefine it on new principles in order to meet the agenda of the Israeli middle class, out of which the movement was initiated and is now led by. But Israel’s poorest classes are excluded by the leadership of this movement and its discourse.
Israel’s middle class losing power
Israel’s strong middle class, on the other hand, mobilized by the sense of losing its power — an outcome of the neoliberal hegemony in Israel that is represented not only by Prime Minister Netanyahu, but also the new elites in the country and their reproduction of the state’s new ideology. Neoliberalism became the joint ideology of those in power of the executive authorities and capital of the state.
During the recent years, Israeli society became more aware of the growing socioeconomic gaps. In the meantime, the Israeli state has witnessed the recreation of the tycoons. Very limited in number and running a small number of economic enterprises and businesses according to explicit and implicit cartel agreements, the new Israeli tycoons become the true rulers of the economy and the allocation of public funds.
On the level of government, on the other hand, the tycoons’ neoliberal thought shapes the decision-making process through the implementation of privatization policies that also include natural resources, such as Dead Sea minerals and the recently discovered gas and oil reserves on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. These natural resources were granted to the tycoons by Netanyahu’s government, arguing that the former is the true engine of economic growth. The Israeli middle class, however, argues the opposite: the middle class is the base for economic flourish; the resources are to serve, in addition to the state’s income, the community as a whole.
Additionally, the acceptance of Israel to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in May 2010 had a contradictory result of contributing to the social protests. Israelis became more aware of the existing gaps of income in the state.
Israel’s “miracle” economy in question
As often happens, the neoliberal policy legalizes corruption in a structural manner within the state. The transfer of natural and public resources to the tycoons is smoothly carried out by new regulations and new laws, and the judicial branch is complicit with the interests of the tycoons. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s government is proud to tell the world about the “miracle” of the Israeli economy, which overcame the worldwide financial crises.
On the ground, and as a direct consequence of the magic Netanyahu speaks of, the number of people in Israel who live in poverty is growing. While according to Netanyahu’s magical statistics unemployment is being reduced, but the number of people who work with lack of dignity is growing. The current social protests, therefore, came to raise the question of who is paying the price for Israel’s apparent economic flourish. Hence it is the middle class, not Israel’s poorer classes, that is the core of this movement. Furthermore, the middle class’ voice is easily raised high by the media, for it is where most of the Israeli elite come from.
The question is, can such a movement provide equal opportunity for everyone to enter its space and to take part in it? The answer is simply no, because freedom of expression does not simply mean the equal opportunity to impact and exert influence.
Even though this movement is forming a new social force by challenging the sacred cows of the Israeli ruling establishment, such as “Israeli security,” it is also questioning the traditional opposition and the aged trade union, the Histadrut. Such a questioning of the entire ruling elites can only happen when the people are sharing a feeling that they can make change.
An apolitical protest?
However, the contradictory nature of “social justice,” as this universal value is understood on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Blvd., silences all issues of injustice related to the Palestinian people. I am not just speaking of Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and in exile, but also those who are Israeli citizens, who suffer daily from land confiscation, racist legislation, the non-recognition of their villages by the state and the Judaization of the Naqab (Negev) and the Galilee.
According to this movement’s discourse, these issues are “political,” not “social,” and are therefore not included in the movement’s understanding of social justice. By considering themselves apolitical, the protesters ignore the occupation, the blockade on Gaza and state’s racist system against Palestinian citizens. (Or the protesters consider racism only in cases of Jewish Ethiopians and East Asian foreign workers, but even then solely on an individual basis.)
According to Israeli terminology, being apolitical allows the inclusiveness of groups from colonial settlements in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan, which are being invited to take part of in the protests. This creates an ethical contradiction, and of course a political one. The values of the Israeli social movement, in other words, are only limited to Israelis.
Palestinians, on the other hand, are excluded from any justice. According to the Israeli social movement, the 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners do not deserve social justice. Furthermore, neither do Palestinian refugees and the internally displaced. Israel’s wall in the West Bank and the Gaza blockade are also not worthy issues to be dealt with by a movement that pretends to provide an open space.
Colonizing settlers are welcome, not the Palestinian families that are victims of the wall erected by the Israeli law; not the solidarity movements for a just peace; not the peoples around the words who are victims of the bloody regimes with close military and intelligence cooperation with the State of Israel.
Envisioning a more kind system of injustice
The Israeli social movements, abiding to the Israeli national consensus, ignore the rights of the “other” for social justice. By not dealing with the root causes of the unjust system in Israel, the Israeli social movement wishes to make things less unjust rather than to change the system and the regime.
By not dealing with the colonial, racist Zionist ideology and the nature of the Israeli state, some are choosing to consider the Israeli social movement as “post-Zionist.” However, as we know very well, post-Zionism means neither anti-Zionism nor the de-Zionization of Israel. But I still believe that this movement can lead to changes in the direction of re-establishing the welfare capitalist state that existed in Israel. Such a state can meet the interests of a wider majority of Israeli citizens, including those of Palestinian citizens of Israel. However, the Israeli social movement cannot bring historical justice to the Palestinians in Israel. While some Palestinian organizations are participating in the social mobilization, they are fully aware that its demands do not wholly cover the Palestinians’ social and political agenda.
Of the Palestinians groups that are participating in the social protests are the Palestinian Bedouins of al-Araqib, a village in the Naqab that is unrecognized by the Israeli state and has been demolished 28 times by government bulldozers. However, despite their participation, the injustices caused by the state to the Bedouins were not included in the social protests’ leadership’s list of demands.
While the social movement’s discourse is not racist, it does not raise issues of racism. Justice does not only concern those who speak for it, but also others. A social movement is not a structural body; on the contrary, it is made of values, norms and the belief in equality for all. On this question, the Israeli social movement does not pass the exam.
By way of conclusion, I ask you to be aware that I am still behind the bars of Israeli prison. I can only learn about the recent developments through television, radio or the newspapers allowed in. However, I speak from the position as an activist, though it is difficult to get a feel of what goes on on the ground. I am one of 7,000 political prisoners who believe that injustice will fail, while liberation, freedom and human dignity will be fulfilled.
Ameer Makhoul is a Palestinian civil society leader and political prisoner at Gilboa Prison.
25 SEPTEMBER 2011
By Harriet Sherwood The quest for Palestinian statehood at the UN has worsened a climate of fear on the ground in the West Bank
The settlers come down the hill from the outpost, mostly on foot, but occasionally on horseback or in tractors or 4x4s. They carry Israeli flags, and sometimes bring guns, shovels and dogs. There may be as few as three or as many as 40. They taunt the local villagers and sometimes attack them. Often the Israeli army arrives and trains its weapons on the villagers.
In Qusra, deep among the terraced hills of the West Bank, fear is on the rise. “The settlers are provoking us continuously,” said Hani Abu Reidi, head of the village council. “They uproot olive trees, kill our sheep, burn our mosques and curse our prophet. They want to drag us into the sphere of violence. We do not want to go there.”
As the Palestinian quest for statehood looks set to be mired in diplomatic back rooms for weeks or months, tension on the ground is mounting. Both Palestinian villagers and Jewish settlers say each other is responsible for a spike in attacks over the past fortnight; mostly small-scale incidents such as throwing stones, molotov cocktails and insults. Both sides claim the other is preparing to invade their communities and attack their people. It has created an edgy climate of fear and menace, and is a forewarning of potential battles to come if the struggle for the land moves up a gear with impending Palestinian statehood.
The request by the Palestinians to be admitted to the United Nations as a full member state, formally submitted on Friday, will now be considered by the security council for an undefined period, during which efforts to get both sides back to the negotiating table will intensify.
If no progress is made, the Palestinians will press for a vote at the security council, a move the US has pledged to veto. The Palestinians would then have the option of asking the 193-member general assembly for enhanced status, albeit short of full statehood. As this process inches forward, anger on the ground is rising.
On Friday, violence between settlers from the outpost of Esh Kodesh and around 300 Qusra villagers ended in a haze of teargas and bullets fired at the villagers by Israeli troops, two of which struck Issam Odeh, 33, killing the father-of-eight.
Qusra set up a defence committee earlier this month after one of the village’s four mosques was vandalised in a settler attack condemned by the US and the European Union. Up to 20 unarmed men patrol the mosques from 8pm to 6am every night, and Abu Reidi claims they have already foiled at least one attack. Other Palestinian villages have followed suit.
On the hilltops, preparations for clashes have also been under way for weeks. Security around settlements and outposts has been reinforced with extra barbed wire, CCTV cameras, security guards and dogs. And the settlers themselves are armed and primed in anticipation of what they believe will be incursions by Palestinians intent on making their hoped-for state a reality on the ground.
This week, photographs were published on a pro-settler news website, Arutz Sheva, showing women from Pnei Kedem, an outpost south of Bethlehem, learning to shoot. In Shimon Hatzadik, a Jewish enclave in the midst of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, in east Jerusalem, settlers are preparing to invoke a law allowing self-defence against intruders. “We are talking about shooting at their legs and if that doesn’t work, and our lives are in danger, we won’t be afraid to shoot straight at them. Most of the residents here are armed,” spokesman Yehonatan Yosef told parliamentarians two weeks ago.
Activists in the settlement of Qiryat Arba, on the edge of Hebron, have distributed clubs, helmets and teargas to nearby outposts. “They’ve been given all of the tools we could provide for them in order to protect themselves,” Bentzi Gopstein, a member of Qiryat Arba’s council, told the Ynet news website. “But we must remember that the best defence is offence. We can’t stay close to our fences. If the Arabs can come to us, they must learn we can come to them.”
The settlers believe Israeli soldiers will be hampered by restraints imposed by commanders fearful of negative publicity. “They are not receiving the right orders,” said radical activist Itamar Ben-Gvir from Qiryat Arba. “There’s no state in the world that would allow the enemy to cross its lines and enter its communities. If the IDF will not act properly, we will have to defend ourselves.”
Women and children would take part in defensive action, he said. “We want to present an equation: women against women; children against children. The Arabs are intending to use their children and we will not sit still.”
Shaul Goldstein, mayor of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of Bethlehem, expects the focus in the coming weeks to “move from hypothetical issues in New York to practical terror here in Judaea and Samaria [the biblical term for the West Bank]“. Gush Etzion had a comparatively good relationship with its Palestinian neighbours, he said. “We are trying to talk to them to reduce friction and tension. But if the Palestinians march towards the settlements, there is a red line. If they try to cross, to penetrate our communities, it will be a big problem.”
As well as fighting on the ground, many settlers believe they must also wage a political battle against the Israeli government. “Netanyahu is a weak leader, not standing for the values he was elected for,” said Goldstein. “The [settlement] construction freeze was the first in history – and this from a rightwinger. So we have to push him, to press him, to keep him to hold the line.”
The settlers are not just fighting to hold on to the land they already occupy; they intend to expand and grow – as they see it, reclaiming the land that has been willed to them by God.
“Our purpose is to build new towns and communities, new outposts in Judaea and Samaria,” said veteran activist Daniella Weiss. “It’s our role as Jews to build the land of the Jews.”
In Qusra, Abu Reidi agreed the land is at the heart of confrontations between Jewish settlers and Palestinian villagers. “Their ultimate goal is to drive us from our land,” he said. “Defending the land is a holy task. If we let them succeed, they will take more and more.”
Erdogan’s comment, another sign of deteriorating Israel-Turkey ties, comes during trip to South Africa.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Israel is a threat to the Middle East region for having a nuclear weapon.
Erdogan spoke during a trip to South Africa. His comments were carried by Turkey’s Anatolia news agency.
Israel refuses to confirm whether it has a nuclear weapon, following a policy it terms “nuclear ambiguity,” but it is widely considered to be the Middle East’s only nuclear power.
Israeli-Turkish ties have deteriorated over Israel’s refusal to apologize for the deaths of nine Turkish activists in a raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship last year, prompting Turkey to downgrade relations.
Israel says its troops acted in self-defense.
Erdogan recently told TIME magazine that sanctions imposed by the United Nations on Israel would have resolved the issue of Mideast peace long ago, adding that he felt the Quartet on the Middle East was not genuinely seeking to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
