So, people in Turkey are at last moving, thanks to Israeli bullying! Soon the war criminals will only be able to visit the US, where war crimes are respected achievements:
Turkish human rights group seeks to prosecute Barak for alleged Gaza war crimes: Haaretz
An Islamic human rights group on Friday petitioned a prosecutor to start legal proceedings against Defense Minister Ehud Barak for alleged crimes committed against Palestinians during the Gaza war.
The demand came two days before the Defense Minister is scheduled to visit Turkey, where he is expected to try and mend strained relations following last year’s war in Gaza and an Israeli official’s humiliation of the Turkish ambassador.
Turkey’s Justice Ministry has previously rejected similar appeals against Israeli officials, and authorities haven’t acted on the petition authored by the Istanbul-based Mazlum-Der group.
Turkey’s relations with Israel have been hurt by the fury that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed about Israel’s war in Gaza a year ago.
Last month, an arrest warrant was issued in Britain against opposition leader and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni on the basis of her alleged war crimes in last year’s Gaza offensive.
Lawyers working with Palestinian activists in recent years have sought the arrest of senior Israeli civilian and military figures under terms of universal jurisdiction. This ill-defined legal concept empowers judges to issue arrest warrants for visiting officials accused of war crimes in a foreign conflict.
Voice in the wilderness – from some rare human beings at Westminster:
We must not renege on war crime laws: The Guardian
Saturday 16 January 2010
We are shocked at suggestions by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister Ivan Lewis and foreign secretary David Miliband that Britain may consider changing its laws to avoid any future attempts to prosecute suspected war criminals, Israeli or otherwise. The UK must not renege on its international treaty obligations, particularly those under the fourth Geneva convention to seek out and prosecute persons suspected of war crimes wherever and whoever they are, whatever their status, rank or influence, against whom good prima facie evidence has been laid. We reject any attempt to undermine the judiciary’s independence and integrity. A judge who finds sufficient evidence of a war crime must have power to order the arrest of a suspect, subject to the usual rights to bail and appeal.
The power to arrest individuals reasonably suspected of war crimes anywhere in the world should they set foot on UK soil is an efficient and necessary resource in the struggle against war crimes, and must not be interfered with (Report, 6 January). Nor should the government succumb to pressure from any foreign power to alter this crucial aspect of the judicial process. We urge the government to state clearly that it will not alter the law on universal jurisdiction and will continue to allow victims of war crimes to seek justice in British courts.
John Austin MP
Katy Clark MP
Frank Cook MP
Jeremy Corbyn MP
Ann Cryer MP
Paul Flynn MP
Neil Gerrard MP
John Hemming MP
Paul Holmes MP
Kelvin HopkinsMP
Brian Iddon MP
Lynne Jones MP
Tom Levitt MP
Martin Linton MP
Bob Marshall-Andrews MP
Gordon Prentice MP
Linda Riordan MP
Terry Rooney MP
Baroness Jenny Tonge
Baroness Lindsay Northover
Bob Russell MP
Clare Short MP
Phyllis Starkey MP
Sir David Steel
Sandra White MSP
Derek Wyatt MP
Tayab Ali, Partner, Irvine Thanvi Natas Solicitors
Sir Geoffrey Bindman
Richard Burgon, solicitor
Daniel Carey, Public Interest Lawyers
Ian Cross, solicitor
Jim Duffy, Public Interest Lawyers
Shauna Gillan, barrister, 1 Pump Court
Andrew Gray, solicitor
Tessa Gregory, Public Interest Lawyers
Beth Handly, Partner, Hickman and Rose solicitors
Michael Hagan, solicitor
Michelle Harris, barrister, 1 Pump Court
Susan Harris, solicitor
Jane Hickman, Partner, Hickman and Rose solicitors
Sam Jacobs, Public Interest Lawyers
Salma Karmi-Ayyoub, barrister
Paul Kaufman, solicitor
Aonghus Kelly, Public Interest Lawyers
Daniel Machover, Chair of Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights
Michael Mansfield QC
Anna Mazzola, Partner, Hickman and Rose solicitors
Sarah McSherry, Partner, Christian Khan solicitors
Clare Mellor, solicitor
Karen Mitchell, solicitor
Simon Natas, Partner, Irvine Thanvi Natas solicitors
Sophie Naftalin, Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights
Mary Nazzal-Batayneh, Human Rights Legal Aid Fund
Henrietta Phillips, solicitor
William Seymour, solicitor
Navya Shekhar, solicitor
Phil Shiner, Public Interest Lawyers
David Thompson, solicitor
Paul Troop, barrister
Mohammed Abdul-Bari, Secretary-General, Muslim Council of Britain
Anas Altikriti, British Muslim Initiative
Lindsey German, Stop the War Campaign
John Hilary, Director, War on Want
Kate Hudson, Chair, CND
Betty Hunter, General Secretary, PalestineSolidarity Campaign
Dan Judelson, Jews for Justice for Palestinians
Hugh Lanning, PCS Deputy General Secretary
John McHugo, Chair, Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine
Gerry Morrissey, General Secretary, BECTU
Tony Woodley, Joint General Secretary, UNITE.
Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK
Jackie Alsaid LLM
Rachel Bowles
Prof Haim Bresheeth
Dale Egee
Sarah El-Guindi
Deborah Fink
David Halpin
Sharif Hamadeh
Samira Hassassian
Professor Ted Honderich
Victor Kattan
Asad Khan
Miriam Margolyes
Professor Nur Masalha
Professor Steven Rose
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead
Andrew Sanger
Dr Aisha Sarwar
Tareq Shrouru
Tony Woodley, UNITE Joint General Secretary
Israeli democracy in action… a freedom of speech to shut up:
Police arrest CEO of Israeli civil rights group in Sheikh Jarrah: Haaretz
Police arrested 15 left-wing protestors in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem on Friday, among them the CEO of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Hagai Elad.
Leftist activists have held weekly demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah for the past three months, in protest of the eviction of Palestinians from their homes and their replacement with Jewish families.
According to activists, the protest that took place on Friday was not authorized, unlike previous weeks’ protests. At the onset of the demonstration, police declared it illegal and threatened to arrest its participants. An eye witness reported that police began arresting the main participants, Hagai Elad and a protestor waving a Palestinian flag among them.
In a statement, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel condemned its CEO’s arrest. “We harshly condemn the police’s suppression of the freedom of speech which had no legal grounds. The demonstration was forcefully scattered even though it took place legally, with no provocations or disruptions of public order,” it was written.
Jerusalem police responded, saying it was an illegal protest of anarchists and leftist activists who did not listen to police orders. Regarding the arrest of Elad, the police said that if the CEO of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel allows himself to participate in an illegal protest, he shouldn’t be surprised he got arrested.
British MP: Israel and Egypt’s blockade of Gaza is ‘evil’: Haaretz
Israeli officials who authorized the use of white phosphorous in densely populated Gaza should be tried for war crimes, a British Labour Party legislator said Friday, after entering the Hamas-ruled territory with 60 European parliamentarians.
Human rights groups have alleged that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during Israel’s three-week offensive against Gaza, which ended a year ago. Among other things, Israel was cited for firing white phosphorous flares, which can cause horrific burns.
Israel and Hamas have denied war crimes allegations.
“The lawmakers are visiting Gaza to draw attention to the territory’s evil blockade by Israel and Egypt,” said the Labour legislator, Gerald Kaufman.
Kaufman also spoke in support of attempts by pro-Palestinian groups in Britain to get Israeli politicians and army officers arrested once they step on British soil. Britain has a universal jurisdiction law that allows prosecution of alleged war criminals whose crimes have no direct connection with Britain.
“We have had a fuss in our country about the inability of certain Israeli politicians to visit Britain for fear of being arrested,” said Kaufman, frequently an outspoken critic of Israeli policies. “Anybody who uses white phosphorus should be arrested and should be tried for war crimes.”
“But when we read of an Israeli politician being afraid of being arrested in Britain, we remember that 1.5 million people in Gaza are under arrest every day of their lives by the Israelis, suffering depravation, hunger, lack of satisfactory medical treatment, lack of screws to put school desks together so your children can learn,” Kaufman added.
Last week, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said that aid convoys bound for the Gaza Strip will now be banned from traveling across Egypt after activists led by British MP George Galloway clashed with police.
Last Tuesday clashes erupted between members of the convoy and Egyptian riot police in the Mediterranean port city of El-Arish that left one Egyptian security guard dead and dozens of protesters and police injured.
Aboul Gheit told government newspaper Al-Ahram that members of one convoy led by Galloway committed “criminal” acts on Egyptian soil on their way to Gaza.
The old Newspeak: how in the name of ‘freedom’, US pressure group supports and abets tyranny:
The United States, Israel and the retreat of freedom: The Electronic Intifada
Ali Abunimah, 14 January 2010
Epitomizing freedom: an Israeli soldier aims a gas grenade launcher at a Palestinian demonstrator in the occupied West Bank. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)
The world is suffering from a “freedom recession” according to a new report from the American think tank Freedom House (“Freedom in the World 2010,” 12 January 2010).
Established in 1941, Freedom House markets itself as “an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors the status of freedom around the world, and advocates for democracy and human rights.” Its board of directors, chaired by a former US deputy secretary of defense, is a who’s who of Democratic and Republican former US government officials, prominent neoconservatives and Israel lobby stalwarts such as Tom Dine, former executive director of AIPAC. In 2007, more than two-thirds of its $16 million budget came directly from the United States government.
Not surprisingly then, Freedom House’s report reveals more about the groupthink of the US establishment — especially with respect to its continued efforts to dominate the Middle East and ensure Israel’s supremacy — than it does about the countries surveyed.
Focusing on two categories of “freedom” — “civil liberties” and “political rights” — the report divides the world’s 194 countries into three groups: “free” (89), “partly free” (58), and “not free” (47).
Interestingly, Freedom House records “declines in freedom” in “countries that had registered positive trends in previous years, including Bahrain, Jordan, Kenya and Kyrgyzstan.” Jordan was one of only six countries to move from the “partly free” category to “not free.” What does it say about US “democracy promotion” that Jordan, Bahrain and Kyrgyzstan — major political and military operating bases for the “war on terror” and US-led occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan — have become less free as their dependence on the US has increased?
Sadly, while the report frets that “the most powerful authoritarian regimes [such as Russia and China] have become more repressive, more influential in the international arena, and more uncompromising,” it has nothing at all to say about the US role in restricting freedom and spreading mayhem around the world. Sometimes this is truly absurd as the report points to “continued terrorist and insurgent violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen,” but fails to note that two of these countries are under direct US military occupation (Afghanistan and Iraq) while the US is intervening militarily in the other three. (The report presents a mixed picture for the US-occupied countries; both are “Not Free” but Iraq allegedly became more free during 2009 and Afghanistan less free.)
Rather than offer any introspection on the inverse relationship between US efforts at global domination on the one hand, and the spread of freedom on the other, the report’s overview essay concludes with a call for more vigorous intervention: “The United States and other democracies should take the initiative to meet the authoritarian challenge …”
Freedom House’s approach to Israel provides the starkest example of the abyss into which liberal thinking has fallen on the relationship between colonialism and freedom. Israel, we are told, “remains the only country in the [Middle East] region to hold a Freedom in the World designation of Free.” We are informed euphemistically that “The beginning of the year [2009] was marred by fierce fighting between the Israeli military and the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip.”
There is no mention of the deliberate targeting by Israel of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and the resulting massive destruction, and death and injury to thousands of Palestinian civilians. Nothing is said of the denial of fundamental political, civil and human rights, or freedom of movement, association and education to four million Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and siege in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There is no mention of the systematic discrimination, and social and political exclusion faced by 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, nor of the denial of the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees.
There is an acknowledgment that “Hundreds of people were arrested during demonstrations against the Gaza conflict, and the parliamentary elections committee passed a measure banning two political parties from national elections, though the ban was quickly overturned by the Supreme Court.”
Despite this, on the tables accompanying the report, “Israel” receives the highest score of “1” for political rights, and a very respectable “2” for civil liberties — on a par with Italy and Japan. The overall impression is of minor glitches that could occur in any exemplary “Western” democracy.
Then on a separate table of “Disputed Territories” we find “Israeli-occupied territories” and “Palestinian Authority-administered territories” both listed. Both are given the designation “Not Free” and nearly the lowest scores for political rights and civil liberties. There is no narrative to explain who is responsible for this dire state of affairs. This convenient separation allows for all the ugly realities of what “free” Israel does in the occupied territories to be pushed out of sight and ignored.
But in what scheme can Israel be awarded freest of the free status when for two-thirds of its existence, since 1967, it has ruled directly over millions of disenfranchised Palestinians through violence and repression? The idea that the political regime in Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries can be looked at as a “democracy” even while the situation in the occupied territories can be criticized as undemocratic is very widespread among Israelis and American liberals.
Former US President Jimmy Carter has been excoriated (and recently forced to apologize) by the Israel lobby for calling the situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip “apartheid.” Yet even he had simultaneously claimed that within its pre-1967 boundaries, “Israel is a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew.” True, Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote and are accorded civil rights far wider than their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But even Israeli Jews commonly concede that Palestinian citizens suffer systematic and severe disadvantage and total exclusion from key political decisions about the country.
Israeli Jewish leftists (a rapidly dwindling group) and Western liberal sympathizers tend to view Israel within its 1967 boundaries as a flawed democracy — perfectible with a reallocation of resources and less discrimination against non-Jews, even as they remain fully invested in maintaining Israel as a “Jewish state” with a Jewish demographic majority.
They view the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the original sin that corrupted a purer Zionist vision, and thus remain fixated on the chimera of “ending the occupation” through a “two-state solution.” Once this nirvana is reached, so they believe, Israel can resume its destiny as a liberal democratic state among others.
But it is not just the discrimination and limited rights of Palestinian citizens and other non-Jews that undermine the claim that Israel — considered separately from the West Bank and Gaza Strip — is a democracy. Nor is it even that Israeli settler-citizens in the West Bank have full voting rights for the Israeli parliament while Palestinians in the same territory have none. It is that “Israel” and the “occupied territories” are two sides of the same coin.
Israel’s 1948 and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and ongoing repressive rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not exceptional or temporary conditions. They are constitutive of the situation that allows Israeli Jews to currently claim they live in a (flawed) liberal democracy.
To be clear, the argument is not that conditions in Israel and the occupied territories are indistinguishable; rather it is that they form a single interdependent system. Israeli Jews can “freely” elect a Jewish government in Israel only because most Palestinians have already been ethnically cleansed. Thus the maintenance of this “liberal democratic” Jewish space depends directly on the permanent denial of fundamental rights to Palestinians.
Palestinian citizens of Israel — who form 20 percent of the population within Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries — are, as noted, accorded limited liberal rights. This helps boost Israel’s external image as a “wonderful democracy,” but if the exercise of these rights ever threatens Jewish domination, they are curtailed. Examples include the constant legal harassment of Palestinian members of the Knesset, and various legislative projects for loyalty oaths or to ban commemoration of the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians. Overwhelming Israeli Jewish opposition to calls by Palestinians in Israel for the country to be a “state of all its citizens” is an indication that Israeli Jews value their own supremacy over democracy.
Israel has sometimes been described as an “ethnocracy” — a state where one ethnic group dominates and enjoys a wide range of liberal rights which are denied to others. But these liberal rights depend directly on the successful repression of the non-privileged ethnic group(s). As rebellions by the disenfranchised require ever greater levels of repression and violence to control, the repression must also be turned inwards.
In recent days, Israel extended for six months a ban on Sheikh Raed Salah, an Israeli citizen, and leader of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, from traveling to Jerusalem, Israel’s ostensible capital, where he had been exercising his civil rights to campaign against Israeli efforts to “Judaize” the city. (Separately Salah was also sentenced to nine months in prison for allegedly assaulting a police officer during a 2007 demonstration; a conviction condemned as political persecution by other Palestinian leaders inside Israel.)
Such repression does not only affect non-Jews. The United Nations-commissioned Goldstone report noted “that actions of the Israeli government” within Israel, during and after Israel’s invasion of Gaza last winter, “including interrogation of political activists, repression of criticism and sources of potential criticism of Israeli military actions, in particular nongovernmental organizations, have contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent with the government and its actions in the Occupied Territories is not tolerated.”
These means of “internal” repression resemble the movement bans, censorship and other forms of harassment that the South African apartheid regime began to deploy in its late stages against dissenting whites, eroding the “liberal democratic” space they had for so long enjoyed at the expense of the country’s black majority.
Maintaining a Jewish-controlled “liberal democratic” regime in Palestine/Israel is incompatible with the exercise of the inalienable rights of Palestinians. It emphatically depends on their permanent violation, especially the right of return. But the exercise of the inalienable rights of Palestinians — an end to discrimination against Palestinian citizens, dismantling the 1967 occupation regime, and the right of return for refugees — is fully compatible with Israeli Jews exercising the human, civil, political and cultural rights to which they are unquestionably entitled.
As a first step toward imagining and creating such a framework, we have to ditch the absurd idea reproduced by Freedom House, that Israeli Jews can epitomize perfect freedom while imposing perfect tyranny and dispossession on a greater number of human beings who belong to the same country.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
Below is some of the new crop of rightwing, racist reaction to the international campaign against the brutalities of Zionism. I normally would refrain from giving such trash wider readership, but am doing so as the Reut institute and Mr. Grinstein who heads it, have become frequent invitees to a number of liberal and left-wing Jewish groups, who seem to no have worked out who and what is behind this shady organisation. Reading this should leave you with few doubts – on its website they say quite clearly: The aim of Reut is to reinforce and support Israeli government planninga nd thinking:
Comment / Israel delegitimizers threaten its existence: Haaretz
By Gidi Grinstein
A year after Operation Cast Lead, it is increasingly clear: Together with the Second Lebanon War in 2006, the Gaza campaign exposed a dire need for Israel to reform its security and foreign policy doctrine.
Many Israelis are frustrated. Over a three-year period, despite overwhelming military, technological and economic superiority, we failed to achieve decisive successes in confrontations with both Hezbollah and Hamas. In 2006, Israel was dragged through a 33-day exchange, with a cost of 133 dead and a trauma to Israeli society that will take years to heal. And in last year’s Gaza operation, our superior military power was offset by an offensive on Israel’s legitimacy that led to a significant setback in our international standing, and will constrain future Israeli military planning and operations as effectively as any Arab army could. This is a scorecard Israel can’t afford to accept.
Israel’s wars are won, or lost, as much on the drawing boards of strategists and planners as on the battlefield. In its first 20 years of existence, Israel had remarkable military successes, but, notwithstanding the bravery of our soldiers, they were primarily the outcome of an intellectual victory in the war of ideas and concepts. David Ben-Gurion’s 1947 “seminar,” by which he prepared himself for leading the nascent state in an existential military confrontation, generated a set of principles for Israeli national security many of which are relevant today. By 1967, it was secure in its borders.
In the more than four decades since then, Israel’s physical existence has been an unchallenged reality, even if at times its citizens have been subjected to terrorism and violence. Arab intentions to destroy Israel were repeatedly frustrated, to a point where any such effort was effectively abandoned, and Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel. Even though Iran may grow into an existential threat, Israel’s successes to date have been truly phenomenal.
Frustrated by Israel’s military might, its adversaries – primarily Iran and its Arab allies in Hezbollah and Hamas – have experimented with politics and violence in their attempt to cap our power and diminish it. Over time, they were able to crystallize a set of ideas that have proven effective. Rather than seeking to conquer Israel, they would aim to bring about its implosion, as with South Africa or the Soviet Union, by attacking its political and economic values. While Israel aims to avoid civilian casualties, they systematically involve civilians on both sides of the frontier. While Israel seeks decisive “victory” in direct confrontations, they value “resistance” and low-intensity conflict.
Turning Israel into a pariah state is central to its adversaries’ efforts. Israel is a geopolitical island. Its survival and prosperity depend on its relations with the world in trade, science, arts and culture – all of which rely on its legitimacy. When the latter is compromised, the former may be severed, with harsh political, social and economic consequences.
The transformative change taking place stems from an unholy alliance with some European elites. The radical, brutal, sometimes-fascist Islamic states and organizations that reject Israel share aims with Europeans that deny the right of Jews to self-determination.
And so, our politicians and military personnel are threatened with lawsuits and arrest when they travel abroad, campaigns to boycott our products gain traction, and our very existence is challenged in academic institutions and intellectual circles. The country is increasingly isolated.
To date, Israel has failed to recognize these trends for the strategically significant, potentially existential, threat they constitute. It has mustered neither resources nor personnel to fight them, and lacks a comprehensive approach to the challenge.
Many frame the problem as one of public relations, as if what’s required is a task force of eloquent speakers that can deliver a three-point punch line in polished English in 30 seconds. This may have been useful in the early days of global news, 20 years ago. Today it is insufficient.
Others say that Israel’s policy is key, and that a genuine and credible commitment to the peace process will decrease both criticism and delegitimization of the country. But the delegitimization effort would continue even if Israel were to sign a comprehensive peace treaty with the PLO: Indeed, the forces that drive this effort are not Palestinian moderates, but rather people who oppose Israel’s very existence. An agreement would only fuel their campaign to converge around the next outstanding issue that comes up between Israel and the Arab world.
Israel’s delegitimacy is propagated in a few global metropolises – such as London, Madrid and the Bay Area – that are hubs of international NGOs, media outlets, academia and multinational corporations. Therefore, an extraordinary effort is required to respond to and isolate Israel’s delegitimizers. We must play offense and not just defense.
The most effective barrier to fundamental delegitimization is personal relationships. In every major country, Israel and its supporters must develop and sustain personal connections with the entire elite in business, politics, arts and culture, science and academia. This requires not only an overhaul of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, and particularly of its larger embassies, by infusing them with significantly larger operating budgets, but also the mobilization of our civil elite in Israel and overseas for the task.
Operation Cast Lead may have ushered in a new era in Israeli national security. The frontiers of our survival have shifted from the battlefields and military to our formal and informal diplomats the world over. This is a struggle that may be less bloody, but is as existentially important.
Gidi Grinstein is founder and president of the Reut Institute.
Twilight Zone / Waltz in Batir: Haaretz
By Gideon Levy
Reader Nidal Zeghayer, 22, sent me an e-mail. He’d read what I wrote about Highway 443 and wanted to tell me about the other separation roads Israel is paving around his village of Batir, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. “Will you come see?” he asked. Something about his writing style led me to accept his offer. When we arrived in his village, he was waiting outside, wearing stained clothing: He’s in the midst of helping his father paint their house.
Zeghayer is a fourth-year sociology student. His father works as a guard at the clinic in Beit Sahur. The separation roads were immediately forgotten when Nidal and his father Khatem began to talk. Waltz in Batir – a dizzying dance.
In a tiny and meagerly furnished attic, Nidal sits and dreams of the revolution, reading works of philosophy and writing plays, scripts and short stories; he is conversant with the works of history’s great philosophers and freedom fighters. While many young men his age look up to soccer players, singers and celebrities, he admires Simon Bolivar and Edward Said. By age 12, he’d read Mao and Trotsky in Arabic translation. Meet a young Palestinian of a different kind – Nidal Zeghayer. He is accomplishing all that his father dreamed of being (and doing), but couldn’t.
“He’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to be what he is, but it didn’t work out. I feel that he has extraordinary abilities,” says Khatem in fluent Hebrew. Nidal speaks English well. “My Hebrew ruined whatever English I knew,” admits Khatem, who was also a big reader as a youth and used to hide his books in a hole in the yard, to keep them safe from Israeli soldiers who might want to confiscate them. He follows Israeli radio and television programs, likes Yaron Vilensky on Army Radio, admires Benny Begin’s eloquence and is up-to-date on Israeli current events.
Khatem studied in Jordan to become a laboratory technician, but life under the occupation led him to work in renovation projects in Israel. He also spent about a year in an Israeli prison. He says his son might get into trouble if his intellectual leanings are misconstrued: “As a father, I worry a lot. Everything he says puts him in danger. There are a lot of informants, people who don’t understand what he’s saying and just pass it on.”
The attractive new stone house stands near the main road in Batir. Five minutes from Jerusalem, but the separation fence prevents movement between them. The last time the two were in Israel was 10 years ago. Nidal’s younger brother has never seen the sea, though Tel Aviv is just an hour away. Since that day, there was never an unarmed Israeli in their home.
Nidal is completing his B.A. at Bethlehem University, has already attended several universities abroad and is seeking a scholarship to help him continue; Khatem is investing all his savings in his son’s education. “If he has any chance, it will be abroad,” he says. Nidal would actually prefer to stay here, but in a big city.
Nidal loved the movie “Waltz with Bashir.” He saw it three times, in England. Every morning he reads The Guardian, The Independent, Al-Quds al-Arabi, and Haaretz English edition, online.
“Anarchism is the closest thing to humanism,” he says, beginning to describe his fascinating worldview, and looking younger than his 22 years. “Anarchism is certainly more humane than fascism or Zionism. In this part of the world, anarchism is preferable. Your state and the state we seek are not a solution. Two states is the most foolish solution. This will lead to separation and separation leads to chauvinism and nationalism. In separation there are always two groups, the weak and the strong. Separation reinforces the strong and weakens the weak. A single, secular state that will also include the return of the refugees is the only solution. In the long term, this is what will happen, if both peoples fight for it. I love what Homi Bhabha [an Indian-American intellectual – G.L.], a friend of Noam Chomsky, said: that every people invents its own narrative. Zionism has its narrative, the ‘Chosen People.’ Narratives always lead to chauvinism and nationalism. Not that national rights should be ignored, but it always leads to fascism.”
Asked what will happen to the Palestinian refugees, Nidal says: “It’s not necessary to return to the same places. What’s important are equality and justice. It’s a dream and it’s not possible in the short term. First there must be a secular, just and socialist society.”
Nidal also likes to cook, and likes what Chilean author Isabel Allende wrote about the connection between food and love: “the two things that make the world a better place.”
When he was young, Nidal says, he was impressed with Stalin. “I thought that was the way, until I found Mao. Then I started reading Trotsky. I was 12. As a Palestinian, and as a person, I learned a lot from Mao. ‘Cast aside illusions and prepare to fight.’ Everyone fights in his own way, and my way is through writing.”
Nidal is currently at work on a screenplay: a love story between a laborer from Gaza and a new immigrant from Russia. “He works in a garage in Tel Aviv, and their relationship goes through ups and downs until they finally part, a very painful parting, because of the chasm between them. He tries to scrape by and survive and she gets all kinds of benefits because she’s a new immigrant. An unequal relationship that creates conflict between them. Something between psychological analysis and sociological conflict. The script needs to be developed more so it can become a historical document. I want to write it in such a way so that 100 years from now people will understand what it was like here, and it’s complicated.”
“When did Yeshayahu Leibowitz die?” the father asks suddenly. “People in the village were always saying to me: ‘Why do you listen to Hebrew all day? It’s always Hebrew with you.’ But I liked Leibowitz very much.” Then he adds: “Nidal drives me crazy with that Edward Said of his.”
Indeed, when asked who has most influenced him, Nidal says Said and Frantz Fanon. Said’s Orientalism? “Not so interesting, rather what he wrote about culture and imperialism, and intellectualism.”
Khatem: “When he was in school the teachers and the principal didn’t understand him. They said he was a troublemaker. He didn’t fit in. He hardly ever goes out, only to visit his grandmother and to the university. He doesn’t have a lot of friends because they don’t understand what he’s talking about.”
Nidal smiles, which makes him look younger than ever. His father has an Israeli friend, activist Shlomo Vazana from the Sephardi Democratic Rainbow. “When I have a phone card I call him sometimes,” says Khatem.
Have you ever met Israelis, I ask Nidal. “Only when I worked in Israel as a painter. I generally refuse to meet them. I can’t sit with a settler. It’s out of the question.” What does he think of the Israeli peace activists? “They’re not bad, but don’t compare [their activities] to other events in history. For example, the Algerian liberation movement. They fought very seriously there – Sartre, de Beauvoir and Fanon. Here they help with milk and bread, but that’s not what Palestinians really need. And they’re also not changing much on your side. Theirs is the voice of a good conscience. They create another image of Israel, they punch holes in the accepted narrative, but it’s not enough. A few writers in Haaretz contribute more than all their activity.
“The Palestinians don’t have a real organization fighting for their rights and they can’t expect others to fight for them … No revolution in history was ever led by a government or a bureaucracy. We’ve became an agency of Israel and of the United States. You can’t lead a revolution and fly to America. Our leaders are too fluid in their views. A revolution requires toughness, not flexibility. In music, you can be flexible, but not when you’re leading a revolution.”
What about armed struggle? “I like what Nelson Mandela said, that colonialism came with violence and the struggle against it is violent. When there’s a genuine opportunity for peace, it must be exploited. I favor all means of struggle; try them all until the best way is found.”
Khatem interjects: “This is what makes me worry. People are liable to misunderstand what he’s saying. I want to see him succeed. Even though I like what he says, as a father it makes me very worried.”
Back to the revolution: Nidal says he’s a “communist in my Palestinian life”: “I like what Sartre said in 1954: ‘Anyone who is anti-communist is a pig.'”
He does not envision himself marrying in accordance with Arab tradition. “I’m against marriage. With us it’s not marriage – it’s an agreement among groups, among families. It’s slavery. The idea of a traditional wedding is unacceptable to me. I’ll marry in the future, but not this way. If you love someone, you need to live with her. I don’t need a show of power with a wedding with the whole village. There is no equality between men and women with us, but nor is there in the West. Even in Germany, where there is no occupation, there is no equality.”
Khatem: “I always tell him: With your thinking, you cannot live here. You need to find a different world.”
Nidal replies: “I have a British friend who says our dreams are not for here or now, but let’s keep on dreaming.”
We go up to the attic, to look out at the roads and settlements that are hemming in the village from every direction, the original point of our visit. An electric bicycle lays abandoned on the roof. Nidal received it from his father’s former Israeli boss, who later didn’t pay his wages for two months. “Maybe I’ll take them and write a bicycle diary – like Che Guevara’s motorcycle diaries.”
We enter his room. A wool blanket on the bed. Che and lots of books: “The Meaning of Sarkozy” by Alain Badiou; “Towards a New Cold War” by Chomsky; “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” by Ilan Pappe; “The Great War for Civilization” by Robert Fisk; books on Rosa Luxemburg and Fidel Castro. A photo album with pictures of Nidal as a young boy, and photos of his father’s old hiding place for his books, which are obscured in the event that soldiers might come and leaf through the incriminating album.
Jonathan Cook: The Iron Dome: IOA online
Israel unveiled “Iron Dome” last week, a missile-defence system that is designed to strike a knock-out blow against short-range rockets of the variety fired into Israel by Hamas and Hizbullah. In the short term, Iron Dome is supposed to herald the demise of the rocket threat to Israeli communities near Gaza four years after Hamas won the Palestinian elections.
The period in-between has been marked by a series of inconclusive moves by both sides: Israel’s crippling siege of Gaza has yet to break the will of Gazans; negotiations for the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas more than three years ago, have gone nowhere; reconciliation talks between rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah have borne no fruit; and even the savage offensive against Gaza last year, Operation Cast Lead, achieved little in strategic gains for Israel.
Now Israel says it has a winning card in its hand. From May, the first batteries of Iron Dome — developed at a cost of $200 million — will be installed around Gaza, foiling the efforts of militant factions to continue their struggle against a policy that denies the enclave’s inhabitants all but the most essential humanitarian items.
Militant groups in Gaza have done their best to remain defiant. A spokesman for Islamic Jihad declared last week to Maan, a Palestinian news agency, that the rocket defence system “cannot stop the projectiles of the resistance”, as it launched sustained volleys of rockets and shells into Israel for the first time since Cast Lead. Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, has accused Hamas of turning a blind eye to this activity.
Certainly, several big question marks hang over the Israeli project, despite the large claims being made by Israeli officials.
Analyst Reuven Pedatzur noted today in the Haaretz newspaper that Israel was peddling “deceptions and half-truths” over Iron Dome. He pointed out that the flight time of a few seconds for rockets fired at Israeli communities close to Gaza, such as Sderot, is far shorter than the time needed by Iron Dome to calculate an interception.
Even more significantly, what economic sense does it make for Israel to try to destroy home-made rockets when each interceptor missile costs an estimated $100,000?
Military analysts reckon that, in addition, Israel will be forced to spend $1 billion on 20 batteries needed to protect Israeli communities next to Gaza and more in the north that are currently in the line of Hizbollah’s fire from Lebanon. That cost will rise rapidly as Hamas and Hizbollah extend the reach of their arsenals. Another system, Magic Wand, can reportedly shoot down medium-range missiles, but each interception costs close to $1 million. And then there are additional costs to be factored in when groups in the West Bank begin launching rockets, too.
Israel’s siege of Gaza could quickly be matched by a war of attrition by Hamas and Hizbullah against Israel’s defence budget — at a time when Israel is pondering expensive military adventures further afield, such as in Iran.
Nonetheless, signs of unease have become apparent in Gaza over the past week. Militant groups have again risked engaging in serious clashes with Israel. On Sunday, Israel claimed that more than 20 rockets and mortar shells had been fired out of Gaza in a few days, while Palestinian sources said at least eight Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, had been killed in Israeli air strikes.
But even if Iron Dome is little more than a new development in Israel’s programme of psychological warfare against Gaza, the pressure is most definitely building on Hamas on several fronts. Israel has significantly tightened its chokehold on the enclave over the past year.
One of Israel’s most significant moves has been forcing Palestinians to abandon productive rural land in Gaza, much of it situated just inside the fence that surrounds the Strip.
According to Palestinian officials, Gaza once produced half of its own food, with one-quarter of its 1.5 million inhabitants dependent on agriculture. Today, about half of this land is no longer usable. Some of it was destroyed by the Israeli army during Cast Lead. Other areas, according to Italian researchers last week, have been contaminated with a cocktail of toxic metals from Israeli munitions. And yet more land is off limits because it falls within a buffer zone of 300 metres Israel has declared inside the perimeter fence, as a leaflet drop last week by the Israeli air force reminded Gazans. Farmers say in practice the zone often extends much deeper into the enclave.
As Gaza’s chief means of subsistence has been steadily eroded, the lifeline provided by hundreds of smuggling tunnels from Egypt into Rafah, under the one border not controlled by Israel, has come under imminent danger of being severed, too.
Sealing the Rafah border was one of the main goals of Operation Cast Lead, but Israeli aerial bombardments only had limited success in destroying the tunnels there. Instead, Egypt is building a steel wall underground in an attempt to foil the smugglers. Although Cairo is taking the flak for the wall’s construction, and has its own interests in punishing Hamas, the driving forces behind the scheme are almost certainly Israel and the United States. US engineers are reported to be providing the technical expertise to make the wall as effective as possible.
Another wall, this one to be built by Israel along the border with Egypt immediately south of Gaza, was announced this week. Although chiefly intended to stop the flow of refugees and illegal immigrants reaching Israel, it is also aimed “to turn the screws on Hamas” by blocking the only way into Israel for terror attacks, Yaakov Katz, an analyst with the Jerusalem Post newspaper, argued yesterday.
The increasing isolation of Gaza — and the ratcheting up of pressure — is designed to send a message to Gaza: that Hamas has nothing to gain, and everything to lose, from resisting Israel’s occupation, and that ordinary Gazans should turn their back on the Islamic movement.
But there is also a message for Hamas’s rivals in the West Bank. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and his Fatah supporters are being daily reminded that their own chances of extracting significant concessions from Israel — through a policy of quietism — are even more anaemic than Hamas’s.
The hope in Israel is that sooner or later Mr Abbas, or his successor, will realise there is no choice but to sign up to whatever territorial crumbs of the West Bank Israel is prepared to concede as a Palestinian state.
A shorter version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
For Israel, a reckoning: New Statesman
John Pilger
Published 14 January 2010
A new global movement is challenging Israel’s violations of international law with the same strategies that were used against apartheid
The farce of the climate summit in Copenhagen affirmed a world war waged by the rich against most of humanity. It also illuminated a resistance growing perhaps as never before: an internationalism linking justice for the planet with universal human rights, and criminal justice for those who invade and dispossess with impunity. And the best news comes from Palestine.
The Palestinians’ resistance to the theft of their country reached a critical moment in 2001 when a UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, identified Israel as an apartheid state. To Nelson Mandela, justice for the Palestinians is “the greatest moral issue of the age”. The Palestinian civil society call for boycott, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS) was issued on 9 July 2005, in effect reconvening the great, non-violent movement that swept the world and brought the scaffolding of African apartheid crashing down.
“Through decades of occupation and dispossession,” wrote Mustafa Barghouti, a wise voice of Palestinian politics, “90 per cent of the Palestinian struggle has been non-violent . . . A new generation of Palestinian leaders [now speaks] to the world precisely as Martin Luther King did. The same world that rejects all use of Palestinian violence, even clear self-defence, surely ought not begrudge us the non-violence employed by men such as King and Gandhi.”
No more a taboo
In the United States and Europe, trade unions, mainstream churches and academic associations have brought back the strategies that were used against apartheid South Africa. In a resolution adopted by 431 votes to 62, the US Presbyterian Church voted for a process of “phased, selective disinvestment” in multinational corporations doing business with Israel. This followed the opinion of the International Court of Justice that Israel’s wall and its “settler” colonies were illegal. A similar declaration by the court in 1971, denouncing South Africa’s occupation of Namibia, ignited the international boycott.
Like the South Africa campaign, the issue of law is central. No state is allowed to flout international law as wilfully as Israel. In 1990, a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Saddam Hussein get out of Kuwait was the same, almost word for word, as the one demanding that Israel get out of the West Bank. Iraq was driven out while Israel has been repeatedly rewarded. On 11 December, Barack Obama announced $2.8bn in “aid” for Israel, part of the $30bn US taxpayers will gift from their stricken economy during this decade.
The hypocrisy is now well understood in the US. A “Stolen Beauty” campaign pursues Ahava cosmetics, which are made in illegal West Bank “settlements”; last autumn it forced the firm to drop its “ambassador” Kristin Davis, a star of Sex and the City. In Britain, Sainsbury’s and Tesco are under pressure to identify “settlement” products, whose sale contravenes human rights provisions in the European Union’s trade agreement with Israel.
In Australia, a consortium led by Veolia lost its bid for a billion-dollar desalination plant following a campaign highlighting a plan, involving the French firm, to build a light rail connecting Jerusalem to the “settlements”. In Norway, the government pension fund has withdrawn its investment in the Israeli hi-tech company Elbit Systems, which helped build the wall across Palestine. This is the first official boycott by a western country.
In 2005, Britain’s Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions complicit in the oppression of Palestinians. The AUT was forced to retreat when the Israel lobby unleashed a blizzard of character assassination and charges of anti-Semitism. The writer and activist Omar Barghouti called this “intellectual terror”: a perversion of morality and logic that says to be against racism towards Palestinians makes one anti-Semitic. However, the Israeli assault on Gaza on 27 December 2008 changed almost everything. The US Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel was formed, with Desmond Tutu on its advisory board. In 2009, Britain’s Trade Union Congress voted for a consumer boycott. The “Israel taboo” is no more.
Crimes against humanity
Complementing this is the rapid development of international criminal law since the Pinochet case of 1998-99, when the former Chilean dictator was placed under house arrest in Britain. Israeli warmongers now face similar prosecution in countries that have “universal jurisdiction” laws. In Britain, the Geneva Conventions Act 1957 is fortified by the UN report on Gaza by Justice Richard Goldstone, which in December obliged a London magistrate to issue a warrant for the arrest of Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister wanted for crimes against humanity. And in September, only contrived diplomatic immunity rescued Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister during the assault on Gaza, from arrest by Scotland Yard.
Just over a year ago, 1,400 defenceless people in Gaza were murdered by the Israelis. On 29 December, Mohamed Jassier became the 367th Gazan to die because even those needing life-saving medical treatment are not allowed free passage out. Keep that in mind when you next watch the BBC “balance” such suffering with the weasel protestations of the oppressors.
There is a clear momentum now. To mark the first anniversary of the Gaza atrocity, a humanitarian procession from 42 countries – Muslims, Jews, Christians, atheists, old and young, trade unionists, writers, artists, musicians and those leading convoys of food and medicine – converged on Egypt. And even though the US-bribed dictatorship in Cairo prevented most from proceeding to Gaza, the people in that open prison knew they were not alone, and children climbed on walls and raised the Palestinian flag. And this is just a beginning.
The spider, the road and the occupation: Haaretz
By Yitzhak Laor
Even if the farce staged by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his deputy Danny Ayalon to make the Turkish ambassador feel small is forgotten, Route 443 is a better example of the wide gap between Israelis’ self-image and the value of Israel and its arguments in the eyes of the international community. No propaganda campaign based on the cry “Gevalt, they’re killing us” can save the occupation from the understanding that this is not a dispute about Jewish existence. Either way, Israel does not know how to defend this existence without groaning that “the spider of the settlements is proving burdensome, please help us handle it so we can continue settling everywhere, including in East Jerusalem.”
What does Israeli logic say about Route 443 and barring Palestinians from using it for years, in the best traditions of apartheid? (Which is flourishing here but which we are not permitted to call by that name.) Logic dictates that we need this road because it shortens the distance to Jerusalem and eases congestion on Highway 1. But because this efficient road passes through occupied territory, and has done so for 42 years – a temporary occupation, of course (here, in the script, the Supreme Court justices call for a wink) – it endangers the lives of Israelis. This is because the inhabitants of the occupied territory don’t like the idea of their land being used without their permission.
Therefore, for our convenience, we have to prevent Palestinian drivers from using the road. Here, too, the Israeli argument ranges from arrogant fury, as in “Who are you tell us how to defend the lives of our children?” to “After all, we do want to see two states for two peoples, etc.” And as always, an examination of the argument reveals that what the Israelis call security, even when they are speaking absolutely sincerely, is not security but ownership of land cleansed of Arabs.
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Even when security reasons were not used in the usual demagogic manner, the removal of Arabs from territories inhabited by Israelis has always been described as “security.” Anyone who carefully reads the debates about the military government in Arab-populated areas in the 1950s and ’60s will see that even in the most penetrating documents written in its defense, security arguments are linked to preventing Arab farmers from entering the land in question. (This is why the military government in Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, Ramle and Lod, in which Jews were settled, was abolished quickly, and the Arabs there bunched together in remote neighborhoods, whereas in the rural areas the military government was retained until 1967.)
Whatever the nature of the solution, from the Israeli point of view it always entails the removal of Arabs from areas where Jews live.
Over the years, Israelis have learned to see any territory in which there are Arabs as endangering their security. To guard against them it is permitted to remove them, or fence them in, or settle in their midst, and then to protect the settlers from the danger to their security, namely the Arabs around them. Thus the barbaric wall that runs “almost” along the Green Line is perceived by Israelis as a security need; it’s there to protect the security of Hashmonaim C, Maccabim D, Modi’in Ilit or Beit El. And for their convenience why should we care about the plight of the subjects of the occupation in Bil’in, Na’alin or Bani Saleh?
As the moment of truth approaches, as Israel’s role in Western politics becomes less important, Israel and its leaders are depicted as a nuisance when they maintain that this old land dispute is an issue of security. It’s not a matter of security, but of a desire for convenience, for more land, more water. Our domestic consensus makes no sense to anyone outside Israel; it’s seen merely as a national inability to see the sand running out in the hourglass.
This is how we have arrived at the ludicrous conduct of the Netanyahu-Barak government toward the Palestinian Authority. The two-state solution was a gift the Palestinians offered Israel in the spirit of what Israel has always demanded: “You over there, we over here.” But that’s not what Israel really wants. Because if you have already conceded that, why shouldn’t you concede more and more until you disappear completely behind the walls of your ghetto?