Ehud Barak, Israel war criminal of a ‘Defence’ Minister, is now moving into education… Having presided over the murder of over 400 Palestinian children in Gaza, why should we be surprised? Yesterday, he pronounced an illegal college in Ariel, a “university’. Read all about the democracy, in which war criminals make universities overnight:
Barak under fire for granting university status to West Bank college: Haaretz
Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Wednesday ordered a college in the West Bank town of Ariel to be recognized as a “university center,” thereby winning praise from the right but an outraged response from both the political left and many academics.
The move is also likely to grant new momentum to overseas supporters of an academic boycott of Israel, leaders of the campaign against the boycott said. However, they added, it will not change the legal realities that have so far prevented any such boycott from taking effect.
The decision was vehemently opposed by the Council for Higher Education, which oversees all colleges and universities inside the Green Line. But because the Ariel University Center of Samaria is located in the West Bank, it is subordinate to a different, parallel, body, the Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria – which, like all Israeli institutions in the West Bank, is formally subordinate to the Israel Defense Forces’ GOC Central Command, who in turn answers to the defense minister. The CHE-JS approved Ariel’s status upgrade back in 2007, and yesterday, Barak – who is also the Labor chairman – ordered GOC Avi Mizrahi to confirm this.
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Recognition as a university center moves the college closer to full recognition as Israel’s eighth university, and Barak’s approval of this step had been part of the coalition agreement between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and a third coalition member, Yisrael Beiteinu.
Aside from prestige, the main advantage that comes from being a university rather than a college is substantially higher funding. But the CHE, in keeping with its protest over the move, announced that Ariel would continue to receive the same amount from the state that it does now. And since the CHE controls the distribution of state funds to all academic institutions, it has the power to make this decision stick.
Last year, Ariel received NIS 75 million from the state, just under a third of its total budget of NIS 240 million. That, due to its unusually large student body, is more than most colleges get.
Prof. Itzhak Galnoor, a former deputy chairman of the CHE, slammed Barak’s decision. “The term ‘university center’ doesn’t exist in Israel’s law books,” he said. “We’re in an anomalous situation, where a college outside the state’s borders thinks it’s possible to write its own rules. The defense minister would have done better to consult the CHE before exercising his authority over educational matters, about which he understands even less than CHE members understand about security issues.”
Former education minister Prof. Yuli Tamir was also up in arms, saying the CHE should have been given the final word, and its opposition was well-known. Moreover, she charged, the upgrade will allow Ariel to take funding away from existing universities.
Ariel’s president, Prof. Dan Meyerstein, said the college never accepted the argument that the CHE-JS decision to upgrade its status required confirmation by the GOC Central Command, “but now, it seems, that’s happened, too.”
He also stressed that all of Ariel’s study programs are approved first by the CHE-JS, and then by the CHE, and the latter has never yet rejected any program approved by the former. However, he readily agreed that the term “university center” – and how it differs from an ordinary college – is unclear.
Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who chairs the CHE, said he “hoped and expected” that Ariel would receive full university status in the next few years. Other CHE members, however, were less enthusiastic – adding that the council had been promised no such thing would happen without it being consulted.
The upgrade process effectively began in 2005, when the cabinet, led by then prime minister Ariel Sharon, passed a resolution saying it “saw national importance” in converting the college to a university. In late 2006, a subcommittee of the CHE-JS concluded that the college “is effectively functioning as a university in every respect” and recommended giving it the temporary status of a “university center” for three years. In summer 2007, the CHE-JS adopted this recommendation.
The subcommittee was comprised of six senior professors from other universities, including Nobel Prize laureate Yisrael (Robert) Aumann and Israel Prize laureates Daniel Sperber and Yuval Ne’eman. The latter is also a former MK, from the now-defunct Tehiya party. At the time, a member of the CHE said, “They’re all people of the first rank in research, and they’re also all right-wing in their views.”
The CHE, however, flatly refused to recognize the CHE-JS decision, because it “contradicts our decision that as of today, and for the next five years, there is no academic need for another university,” in the words of the council’s powerful Planning and Budgeting Committee.
Yossi Sarid / Barak legitimizes the evils of Israeli occupation: Haaretz
The settlers and their allies should be thanking their God for their good fortune. Ehud Barak, of all people, was appointed defense minister and is doing their dirty work. Anyone else – Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, or even Avigdor Lieberman wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. They wouldn’t have dared.
But Labor’s chairman – the moderate, balanced man in the cabinet – has no inhibitions about what people will say. Everything, it seems, has already been said about him and his flip-flops and deceit. His skin has grown so tough that arrows of criticism slip off his oily complacency. What difference would another arrow, more or less, make?
Barak is following in the footsteps of Golda, Galili, Dayan and Peres. Begin and Sharon found the work had been done. Labor has always been the great legitimizer of the occupation’s evils. This is the historical mission it has taken on, and no other party could have done it better.
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Now Labor is legitimizing another evil. Having once served as chairman of the Council for Higher Education, I can assert: There is no academic justification for recognizing Ariel College as a university. Nor as a “university center” – a smart-aleck term trying to bypass the rules.
Barak always believes he can build a new career with tricks and ruses but ends up tripping himself with his ploys.
This college, soon to become a university, has not scored any impressive achievement. It is far inferior to other Israeli colleges. Had it not established itself in occupied territory, it wouldn’t have had the slightest chance of upgrading its status. The defense minister’s decision is evidently political. It is taking advantage of a breach in the law. Instead of having the issue examined and determined by an academic authority, as is customary, the military commander of the occupied territory is making the decision. After receiving instructions from the politician in charge of him.
Barak will be remembered – among other things – for his unique contribution to degrading higher education in Israel. Thanks to him, we will have the only university in the free world whose founders and owners are uniformed officers. Now those boycotting Israeli universities have a case – proof of the tightening knot between the occupation, military administration and academe.
No doubt, Barak’s move will raise more calls to boycott Israeli universities and academics.
We can only hope the Council for Higher Education will not cooperate with this outrageous move. Otherwise, it would betray the public’s trust and do irreparable damage to all the universities and colleges under its charge.
TA university scholar to advocate Israel boycott: Jerusalem Post
A Tel Aviv University academic will call for a boycott of Israel, speaking at a London university event next month to commemorate “one year since Israel’s attack” on Gaza.
Dr. Anat Matar of TAU’s Philosophy Department will be speaking on February 17 at London University’s School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) – a campus renowned for anti-Israel activity.
Matar’s talk is to be titled “Supporting the Boycott on Israel: A View from Within.”
She is taking part in a series of events over the coming weeks organized by the Palestinian societies at five University of London campuses – University College London, SOAS, Imperial College, Kings College and Goldsmiths – as well as at the University of Westminster.
In an article in Haaretz in August, Matar accused her own university of being complicit with the “occupation” and questioned Israel’s stance on Palestinian academic freedom and basic education.
A mother of a conscientious objector, on her profile page on the university’s Web site Matar lists her main nonacademic activities as “movements against military service” and the “Israeli Committee for Palestinian Prisoners.”
Dr. David Hirsh, a sociology lecturer at University of London’s Goldsmiths College and editor of Engage, a campaign against the academic boycott call against Israel, strongly criticized such moves, saying they were “delusional” and “dangerous.”
“Israeli anti-Zionists boast that their country carries out the most important and horrific genocides in the world,” he said. “The delusions of grandeur of Israeli anti-Zionists are as puerile as those of the most naive and proud nationalists. But it is dangerous to tell Europeans that the Israelis are a unique evil on the planet, because this lie finds a resonance in the collective memory and it feels plausible to some contemporary Europeans.”
The series of events is titled, “Gaza: Our Guernica,” in reference to the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. The 1937 attack caused widespread destruction and civilian deaths, with 1,650 reportedly killed.
“In April 1937, on a market day, the Nazis attacked Guernica from the air, first with bombs and then with incendiaries. Fighter planes followed the bombers to machine-gun survivors. It was the first time anybody had launched an attack from the air to kill a civilian population. A third of the population was killed or seriously injured in an afternoon,” Hirsh said.
The series of events opened last Thursday with a candlelight vigil at University College London, recently in the headlines after it was discovered that failed Detroit airline bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a former president of the Islamic Society there.
Two other Israelis are taking part in the series. On Monday, journalist Daphna Baram spoke at SOAS in a talk titled, “Besieged in Self-Righteousness: Israeli public discourse after the last invasion of Gaza.”
Next Wednesday, Israeli academic Avi Shlaim, professor of International Relations at Oxford University, will speak about “Gaza: Past and Present” at Goldsmiths.
BOYCOTT! Supporting the Cairo Declaration
To the Initiators of the Cairo Declaration,
We, members of BOYCOTT!, would like to express our vote of support for the “Cairo Declaration”, issued by the Gaza Freedom Marchers on January 1st, 2010. We are proud to stand together with fellow responsible citizens of the world and reiterate our shared commitment to demanding human rights for all and respect for International Law.
As citizens and residents of Israel, we understand that acting from within Israel itself to end the criminal policy which is carried out in our name, is not enough. It is vital at this juncture that the international community and its civil society undertake the needed complementary actions of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. It is time to suspend ongoing international normalization with Israeli institutions until they end their complicity in the brutal military occupation of Palestine, in the crime of Apartheid and in daily violations of International Law and basic human rights.
In light of previous baseless attacks on supporters of BDS, it is important to stress that the Palestinian campaign, which we fully support, is neither anti-Semitic nor is it targeting individual Israelis. Rather, it calls on all of us to stop glossing over Israel’s crimes, to cease lending a hand to normalization with those responsible, and instead to actively insist on the promotion of true democracy, equality and respect for human rights in this land, for the benefit of all.
Like the Cairo signers, we, too, believe that the BDS campaign can evolve into a growing international awareness movement, as evidenced by the diversity of the Cairo delegations and their courageous joint declaration. We strongly endorse that declaration along with its goals and methods, and append our signatures as a group and as individuals.
On behalf of
BOYCOTT! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from Within
Neta Golan
Yana Ziferblat
Prof. Yoram Bar-Haim
Yael Lerer
Iris Hefets
Matan Cohen
Dr. David Nir
Ronnen Ben-Arie
Michal Zak
Merav Amir
Elian Weizman
Dr. Dorothy Naor
Yonatan Shapira
Haggai Matar
Marcelo Svirsky
Dr. Anat Matar
Dr. Dalit Baum
Yoav Beirach Barak
Rela Mazali
Ayala Shani
Ofer Neiman
Prof. Rachel Giora
Tirtza Tauber
Nitzan Aviv
Ronnie Barkan
Tal Shapira
Edo Medicks
Kerstin Sodergren
Prof. Uri Davis
Reuven Abergel
Inbar Shimsho
Deb Reich
Israel withholding NGO employees’ work permits: Haaretz
By Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent
The Interior Ministry has stopped granting work permits to foreign nationals working in most international nongovernmental organizations operating in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, Haaretz has learned.
In an apparent overhaul of regulations that have been in place since 1967, the ministry is now granting the NGO employees tourist visas only, which bar them from working.
Organizations affected by the apparent policy change include Oxfam, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders, Terre des Hommes, Handicap International and the Religious Society of Friends (a Quaker organization).
Until recently, the workers would register with the international relations department at the Social Affairs Ministry, which would recommend the Interior Ministry to issue them B1 work permits. Although the foreign nationals are still required to approach the Social Affairs Ministry to receive recommendations to obtain a tourist visa, the Interior Ministry is aiming to make the Ministry of Defense responsible for those international NGOs and also requiring them to register with the coordinator of government activities in the territories (COGAT), which is subordinate to the Ministry of Defense.
Foreign nationals working for NGOs had understood they would receive a stamp or handwritten note alongside their tourist visa, permitting them to work “in the Palestinian Authority.” Israel is refusing work visas to most foreign nationals who state that they wish to work within the Palestinian territories, such as foreign lecturers for Palestinian universities and businessmen.
Israel does not recognize Palestinian Authority rule in East Jerusalem or in Area C, which comprises some 60 percent of the West Bank. The NGO workers say they’ve come to believe that the new policy is intended to force them to close their Jerusalem offices and relocate to West Bank cities. This move would prevent them from working among the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem, defined by the international community as occupied territory.
The organizations fear the new policy will impede their ability to work in Area C, whether because Israel doesn’t see it as part of the Palestinian Authority or because they will eventually be subjected to the restrictions of movement imposed on the Palestinians. Such restrictions include the prohibition to enter East Jerusalem and Gaza via Israel, except with specific and rarely obtained permits; and prohibition to enter areas west of the separation fence, except for village residents who hold special residency permits and Israeli citizens.
One NGO worker told Haaretz that the policy was reminiscent of the travel constraints imposed by Burmese authorities on humanitarian organizations, albeit presented in a subtler manner.
NGO workers told Haaretz that they had been informed by the COGAT official that a policy change was forthcoming, as early as July 2009. When a number of them approached the Interior Ministry in August to renew their visas, they found that their applications had been submitted to a “special committee.” They were not told who constituted this committee, and had to make do with a “receipt” confirming that they had submitted the request. The workers said the tourist visas they received differed from each other in duration and travel limitations, and surmised from this that the policy has not been entirely fleshed out.
Latest in a series of steps
A number of NGO workers who spoke with Haaretz voiced deep apprehensions about having to submit to the authority of the Defense Ministry. The groups are committed to the Red Cross code of ethics, and therefore see being subjugated to the ministry directly in charge of the occupation as problematic and contradictory to the very essence of their work.
Between 140 and 150 NGOs operate among the Palestinian population. Haaretz could not obtain the exact number of foreign nationals they employ.
The new limitations do not apply to the 12 organizations that have been active in the West Bank prior to 1967. Those groups, which include the Red Cross and several Christian organizations, were registered with the Jordanian authorities.
The new move by the Interior Ministry is the latest in a series of steps taken in the last few years to constrain the movement of foreign nationals in the West Bank and Gaza, including Palestinians with family and property in the occupied territories. Most of those who have been effected are nationals of countries with which Israel has diplomatic relations, especially Western states. Israel does not apply any similar constraints on citizens of the same countries traveling within Israel and West Bank settlements.
The Interior Ministry said in a statement that the only relevant authority empowered to approve the stay of foreign citizens in the Palestinian Authority is the coordinator of government activities in the territories. “The Interior Ministry is entrusted with granting visas and work permits within the State of Israel. Those staying within both the boundaries of Israel and the Palestinian Authority are required to secure their permits accordingly,” the ministry said.
“Recently, a question was raised on the issue of visas granted to those staying in the Palestinian Authority and in Israel, as it transpired that they spend most of their time in the PA despite having been provided with Israeli work permits,” the statement continued. “The matter is under intense discussions, with the active participation of the relevant military authorities, with a view to finding the right and appropriate solution as soon as possible.”
Prof. Sari Nussiebeh, speaks below in an interview with the Parisian Le Figaro:
Sari Nusseibeh: A Palestinian State Has Become Impossible: IOA
For the pacifist Palestinian Sari Nusseibeh, Israel will soon have no choice but to integrate its Arab population. Sari Nusseibeh, Dean of al-Quds University in Jerusalem and committed Palestinian intellectual, was the author in 2002 of a peace plan co-written with Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli security service.
LE FIGARO – Doesn’t the issue of Jerusalem, which resurfaced in 2009, complicate the resumption of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians?
SARI NUSSEIBEH – Everyone kept putting off the issue of Jerusalem. Suddenly they rediscovered that it is undoubtedly the main problem. And also that the parameters of this problem are no longer the same. While the negotiators were working in their bubble towards a peaceful solution, the city was fundamentally changing: the 1967 state of affairs no longer exists today, and sharing it has become much more difficult.
What are these changes?
Geographically, the area of Jerusalem and its suburbs has grown from 20 sq km to 50 sq km: in the eastern part of this Greater Jerusalem, the Israelis have built 13 new neighborhoods, where 250 000 Jews now live, linked together by freeways. They encircle the Arab areas of East Jerusalem and separate them from one another. The Israelis have also invented the concept of the “holy basin”, which includes the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and the surrounding areas, which form the core of Arab Jerusalem. They are carrying out an active policy of expulsions, destruction and expropriation, making an eventual partition of Jerusalem much more difficult.
And yet the two-state solution is supported by the whole world?
In 1967, one of the first advocates of the two-state solution was Uri Avnery (historic figure on the Israeli pacifist left). He had no support at that time. Four decades later, his ideas have been immensely successful, as they are shared today by the entire world, even Bush. But in the meantime, the possibility of creating two states has faded away. Even if I do not rule out the possibility of a miracle, I do not personally believe anymore that the prospect is achievable.
Is that because of the Israeli policy of settlement?
The Israelis have applied the same policy to the West Bank as to Jerusalem. This extraordinary colonial ingenuity was carried out at the expense of the people. The Zionists have succeeded in terms of concrete and tarmac; in this respect, they exist. But in terms of flesh and blood, they remain outsiders. The more they succeed in laying concrete, the less they manage to create a real democracy and have it take root in the region.
What will happen to the Palestinians without a state?
We are still there, and that’s the paradox: in 1948, the Israelis wanted to create a state without Palestinians, and they almost succeeded in driving them out. In 1967, their victory reunited the refugees with those who had remained in Israel. We were scattered, they brought us back together. The Israelis are sowing their own failure by their success. The colonization of Jerusalem and the West Bank, which makes impossible a two-state solution, will force Israel to live with a sizable Arab population and to reconsider its democratic system.
Why have the Palestinians failed?
We failed, it is true, partly because of our inability to negotiate or to understand negotiating, and partly because of our corruption. Still worse, while playing politics, while running after a state, we allowed the living conditions of our people to deteriorate significantly. Twenty years ago, Palestinians in Gaza had no political rights, but they could travel to the West Bank, or even to Tel Aviv, to work there, go to the beach, to the restaurant. But we also failed because of the other party, which didn’t want to give us anything. Today, the Israeli dynamic goes against any concession. They no longer see the need for a compromise. The Israelis think more than ever in a Machiavellian way, believing that force is the only thing that matters, that it is the only guarantee of survival. Why would they be interested in negotiations?
Is the peace plan you drew up with Uri Avnery still possible?
I have proposed several of them! The best was undoubtedly the one I proposed in the 1980s, calling for Israel to annex outright the Palestinian Territories. Instead, they took the land, but left us without rights. So I worked with Ami Ayalon on the two-state solution. We reached agreement around six principles, which we chose from among the most painful concessions, so that everybody could see them clearly and governments would be forced to accept them. Jerusalem was one of those issues. It was then that Mahmoud Abbas signed the road map in 2003. I already thought it was a mistake.
What do you recommend today?
The latest plan I have proposed is a letter I sent six months ago to Obama and George Mitchell. I suggested they should immediately stop the negotiations, which have become useless; all the issues have been more or less settled, only the unsolvable points remain. Instead, the United States should propose its own solution to the remaining problems. Each side would put forward this plan to its own people in a referendum. The vote would take place on the same day, and the result would be conditional upon the acceptance of the other party.
What prospect is there for the Palestinians?
My next proposal will be to ask Israel to annex us, accepting us as third class citizens. The Palestinians would enjoy basic rights, movement, work, health, education, but would have no political rights. We would not be citizens, only subjects.
Muslim cemetery in West Bank vandalized hours after Jews seen in area: Haaretz
A Muslim cemetery near the West Bank town of Nablus was vandalized on Tuesday just hours after Jewish worshippers were seen in the vicinity.
Food remnants were left on a number of graves, three tombstones were damaged, and anti-Arab graffiti was spray-painted elsewhere in the Muslim cemetery in the Palestinian town of Awarta.
The discovery was made hours after Israel Defense Forces soldiers, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Israeli settlers were seen entering the cemetery.
Some Jewish scholars believe that Ithamar and Eleazar, two sons of Aaron the High Priest, and Pinhas, Eleazar’s son, are interred at the Awarta cemetery.
Israelis are forbidden from entering Awarta, although the IDF occasionally organizes group trips for which it provides security. On Tuesday a large contingent of Orthodox Jews and Israeli settlers made a pilgrimage to the site under the protection of IDF troops.
Awarta residents were startled to discover Wednesday morning that the Muslim tombstones alongside the Jewish gravesites were desecrated. A fact-finder with B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, interviewed local residents and photographed the damage left behind at the cemetery.
One section featured graffiti written in Russian, which said: “Arabs are gay. I f—ed your mother and your father and your donkey.”
Israel’s compassion in Haiti can’t hide our ugly face in Gaza: Haaretz
By Akiva Eldar
Who said we are shut up inside our Tel Aviv bubble? How many small nations surrounded by enemies set up field hospitals on the other side of the world? Give us an earthquake in Haiti, a tsunami in Thailand or a terror attack in Kenya, and the IDF Spokesman’s Office will triumph. A cargo plane can always be found to fly in military journalists to report on our fine young men from the Home Front Command.
Everyone is truly doing a wonderful job: the rescuers, searching for survivors; the physicians, saving lives; and the reporters, too, who are rightfully patting them all on the back. After Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon became the face we show the world, the entire international community can now see Israel’s good side.
But the remarkable identification with the victims of the terrible tragedy in distant Haiti only underscores the indifference to the ongoing suffering of the people of Gaza. Only a little more than an hour’s drive from the offices of Israel’s major newspapers, 1.5 million people have been besieged on a desert island for two and a half years. Who cares that 80 percent of the men, women and children living in such proximity to us have fallen under the poverty line? How many Israelis know that half of all Gazans are dependent on charity, that Operation Cast Lead created hundreds of amputees, that raw sewage flows from the streets into the sea?
The Israeli newspaper reader knows about the baby pulled from the wreckage in Port-au-Prince. Few have heard about the infants who sleep in the ruins of their families’ homes in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces prohibition of reporters entering the Gaza Strip is an excellent excuse for burying our heads in the sand of Tel Aviv’s beaches; on a good day, the sobering reports compiled by human rights organizations such as B’Tselem, Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel on the situation in Gaza are pushed to the newspapers’ back pages. To get an idea of what life is like in the world’s largest prison, one must forgo “Big Brother” and switch to one of the foreign networks.
The disaster in Haiti is a natural one; the one in Gaza is the unproud handiwork of man. Our handiwork. The IDF does not send cargo planes stuffed with medicines and medical equipment to Gaza. The missiles that Israel Air Force combat aircraft fired there a year ago hit nearly 60,000 homes and factories, turning 3,500 of them into rubble. Since then, 10,000 people have been living without running water, 40,000 without electricity. Ninety-seven percent of Gaza’s factories are idle due to Israeli government restrictions on the import of raw materials for industry. Soon it will be one year since the international community pledged, at the emergency conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, to donate $4.5 billion for Gaza’s reconstruction. Israel’s ban on bringing in building materials is causing that money to lose its value.
A few days before Israeli physicians rushed to save the lives of injured Haitians, the authorities at the Erez checkpoint prevented 17 people from passing through in order to get to a Ramallah hospital for urgent corneal transplant surgery. Perhaps they voted for Hamas. At the same time that Israeli psychologists are treating Haiti’s orphans with devotion, Israeli inspectors are making sure no one is attempting to plant a doll, a notebook or a bar of chocolate in a container bringing essential goods into Gaza. So what if the Goldstone Commission demanded that Israel lift the blockade on the Strip and end the collective punishment of its inhabitants? Only those who hate Israel could use frontier justice against the first country to set up a field hospital in Haiti.
True, Haiti’s militias are not firing rockets at Israel. But the siege on Gaza has not stopped the Qassams from coming. The prohibition of cilantro, vinegar and ginger being brought into the Strip since June 2007 was intended to expedite the release of Gilad Shalit and facilitate the fall of the Hamas regime. As everyone knows, even though neither mission has been particularly successful, and despite international criticism, Israel continues to keep the gates of Gaza locked. Even the images of our excellent doctors in Haiti cannot blur our ugly face in the Strip.
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.
Israel jails Palestinian peace activists: The Electronic Intifada
Mel Frykberg , 19 January 2010
RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) – Israel has long argued that Palestinians should pursue their political objectives in a nonviolent way. However, several prominent Palestinian peace activists have recently been arrested and jailed for doing just that.
Abdallah Abu Rahmah, 39, the coordinator of the Bilin Popular Committee, which has challenged Israel’s illegal expropriation of Palestinian land both in an Israeli court and a Canadian one, has been charged with “illegal arms possession, stone throwing and incitement.”
The “illegal arms possession” charge relates largely to a protest exhibition Abu Rahmah had made out of spent tear-gas canisters and plastic-coated rubber bullets, shot by Israeli soldiers, and assembled to form a large peace sign.
The canisters and bullets had been aimed at unarmed demonstrators protesting Israel’s wall which divides Bilin villagers from their agricultural land.
Bilin, a small village near Ramallah, has lost about half of its agricultural land to the wall, depriving farmers of their livelihoods.
The Israelis also allege Abu Rahmah was in possession of M16 bullets.
On hearing the charge, Abu Rahmah’s Israeli lawyer Gaby Lasky, asked, “What’s next? Charging protesters money for the bullets shot at them?”
“We have evidence to challenge the Israel Defense Force’s version of events. A number of Palestinian youngsters were pressured by the military into making false confessions after they were arrested at night, blindfolded and handcuffed,” Lasky told IPS.
Abu Rahmah’s supporters include South African Nobel Peace Prize winner and former anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu as well as former US president Jimmy Carter and former Irish president Mary Robinson. Ex-Norwegian prime minister Gro Brundtland has also expressed support for Abu Rahmah’s activities.
In 2008 Abu Rahmah was awarded the Carl Von Ossietzky Medal for outstanding service in the pursuit of human rights by the board of trustees of the International League for Human Rights.
Israel banned him from traveling to Germany to attend last December’s award ceremony. Shortly before he was arrested IPS spoke with Abu Rahmah, a school teacher, on the phone as he had gone into hiding and was unable to attend a pre-arranged interview.
“The Israeli soldiers have been targeting my home regularly. They break down doors and burst in at night, leaving my wife and young children traumatized by the continual raids. They have also been targeting the village as a whole arresting and assaulting people,” he told IPS from an undisclosed location.
“I didn’t expect them to target me because I have always been very open about my peaceful, anti-occupation activities and have done nothing illegal,” added Abu Rahmah.
The Israeli authorities have for some time expressed frustration at their inability to crush the civil resistance organized by the Bilin Popular Committee even with the excessive use of military force.
The Israeli military informed Lasky that they would seek legal means to stop the weekly protests, during which a number of Palestinians lost their lives and several internationals and Israelis sustained serious injuries, against the separation wall.
Abu Rahmah’s involvement in the protest marches led to Israel’s vague and blanket charge of “incitement.” Abu Rahmah’s Popular Committee also successfully challenged the route the separation barrier had taken through Bilin land, with an Israeli court ordering its rerouting.
The Israeli military to date has refused to implement the court’s ruling but this has not lessened the moral victory achieved. The International Court of Justice at the Hague also ruled the separation wall illegal.
The Bilin Popular Committee has also taken the Israeli authorities to court in Canada over the involvement of two Canadian companies in illegal settlement building on Bilin land.
However, Abu Rahmah is not the only peaceful activist to be targeted by the Israelis as they continue their crackdown on other Palestinian dissenters.
Muhammad Othman, 33, from Jayyus village in the northern West Bank, was also held in administrative detention, or without charge, since September last year until he was recently released. Othman has been heavily involved in the Anti-Apartheid Wall campaign.
Like Bilin, Jayyus has lost land to Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank. An Israeli court also ruled that the wall cutting through Jayyus land had to be rerouted.
Last year Othman had traveled to Norway where he met with senior Norwegian officials to explain human rights abuses in the West Bank.
Norway’s national Pension Fund has subsequently divested from Elbit, the Israeli company which provides Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and other military technology to the Israeli military in addition to security systems for the wall and settlements.
Despite being abused during interrogation his interrogators were unable to charge Othman with anything, so they resorted to the administrative detention procedure which allows mostly Palestinian prisoners to be held without trial for months at a time.
Administrative detention orders can be renewed regularly and some prisoners have been detained for several years.
Jerusalem resident Jamal Juma’, 47, the coordinator of the “Stop the Wall” Campaign was also arrested and held without access to his lawyer. Juma’s work has included addressing numerous civil society and UN conferences as well as writing a number of articles critical of Israel. He was released several days ago.
It is doubtful that Israel’s crackdown on the activists will work. “I visited Abdallah recently in prison. He is neither afraid nor bowed and has vowed to continue his activities whatever Israel does,” Abu Rahmah’s wife Majida told IPS.
All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service (2010). Total or partial publication, retransmission or sale forbidden.
Santana: Don’t entertain Israeli apartheid!: The Electronic Intifada
Open letter, Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, 20 January 2010
The following open letter to the musician Santana was issued by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel on 19 January 2010:
Dear Santana,
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was deeply disturbed to learn that that you are scheduled to perform in Israel this coming summer. We call upon you, as a prominent and influential artist, and, more importantly, as a well-known activist on issues of social justice and equality, not to perform in Israel, a state that maintains a cruel system of occupation, colonization and apartheid against the Palestinian people and has been widely accused by UN experts and leading human rights organizations of committing war crimes and grave violations of human rights. Your gig in Israel will be a clear contribution to Israel’s well-oiled campaign to whitewash its persistent violations of international law and basic Palestinian rights through “re-branding” itself as an enlightened and cultured country.
We draw your attention to the fact that performing in Israel would violate the almost unanimously endorsed Palestinian civil society Call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. This Call is directed particularly towards international activists, academics, and artists of conscience, such as yourself. We also urge you to heed the call of Latino human rights activists in the United States who have issued an appeal urging you to cancel your “concert of shame.”
As a public figure, you have used your influence to work towards promoting civil rights and social causes. In this light, your planned performance in Israel flies in the face of all the admirable work you have done. Your fans worldwide not only appreciate you as a distinguished virtuoso in the music world; they also deeply admire your commitment to social agendas, such as your role in 1998 in establishing the Milagro Foundation, an organization that “benefits underserved and vulnerable children around the world.” It is this particular angle in your luminous biography that makes us wonder how you can ignore the plight of millions of Palestinian children living in exile and prevented from returning to their homes from which their grandparents were ethnically cleansed in 1948. How is it possible for you to reconcile your moral principles with Israel’s 43-year-old occupation, including its illegal wall and colonies, which have deprived Palestinians in general and children in particular of their basic rights to unimpeded access to education, proper health care, freedom of movement and, often, the right to life itself?
In a recent report, Defence for Children International documents “the widespread ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli army and police force.” The report documents how child prisoners are “painfully shackled for hours on end, kicked, beaten and threatened, some with death, until they provide confessions, some written in Hebrew, a language they do not speak or understand … [T]hese illegally obtained confessions are routinely used as evidence in the military courts to convict around 700 Palestinian children every year.” We are confident that you will not willingly lend your support, through performing in Israel, to a state that violates the most basic rights of Palestinians, whether they are children or adults.
Your planned summer performance in Israel would come a year and a half after Israel’s bloody military assault against the occupied Gaza Strip which left over 1,440 Palestinians dead, of whom 431 were children, and 5,380 injured. The 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees, were subjected to three weeks of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reducing whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and partially destroying Gaza’s leading university and scores of schools, including several run by the UN, where civilians, including children, were taking shelter. This criminal assault came after months of a crippling and ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza which has shattered all spheres of life, prompting the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, Richard Falk, to describe it as “a prelude to genocide.”
The UN Fact-Finding Mission into allegations of war crimes, headed by the highly respected South African judge, Richard Goldstone, found Israel guilty of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, as did respected international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Goldstone concluded that Israel’s war on Gaza was “designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
The harm done to children has been documented in many reports; the Goldstone report found that “the three weeks of intense bombardment and military ground action added new, serious psychological traumas, especially noticeable in children.” The Guardian reported that “Some children no longer look on their homes as a place of safety, security and comfort. Others don’t even have a home to go to. The Israeli bombardment damaged or destroyed more than 20,000 houses, forcing some families into tents and others into crowding in with relatives.” In an exhaustive study by Amnesty International on Israel’s control of Palestinian water, it was found that the pollution and contamination of water in the Gaza Strip will very likely result in a blood disease in children known as methemoglobinemia, or “blue babies,” that results in “signs of blueness around the mouth, hands and feet,” as a result of “higher than normal levels of methemoglobin, a form of haemoglobin that does not bind oxygen,” and which may lead to “convulsions and death” when methemoglobin levels are high.
South African Nobel Laureate and celebrated anti-apartheid activist, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, remarked that “the end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure — in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s … a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation.” He concluded that “if apartheid ended, so can this occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined.”
We urge you to heed the words of Archbishop Tutu, and to honor the Palestinian Call, which has been endorsed by a majority of Palestinian civil society. Your performance in Israel would be tantamount to having performed in Sun City during South Africa’s apartheid era, in violation of the international boycott unanimously endorsed by the oppressed South Africans.
We call upon you, as an advocate of basic human rights and the rights of children, not to entertain Israeli apartheid!