Australia warns Israel: Forging passports isn’t an ‘act of a friend’: Haaretz
Australia warned Israel on Thursday that if it was involved in the alleged use of three fraudulent Australian passports in a Dubai assassination it would not be considered the act of a friend, the foreign minister said.
The Canberra government called in Israel’s ambassador after three Australians were named as suspects in the assassination of a Hamas official at a Dubai hotel last month.
Dubai authorities are investigating the use of at least 26 possibly fraudulent passports in connection with the Jan. 19 slaying of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a hotel room in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Australia’s Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said investigations were still under way, but the three Australians were also apparently innocent victims of identity theft.
“I made it crystal clear to the ambassador that if the results of that investigation cause us to come to the conclusion that the abuse of Australian passports was in any way sponsored or condoned by Israeli officials, then Australia would not regard that as an act of a friend,” Smith said.
In an interview with Australian radio, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also emphasized the severity of the situation. “We will not be silent on this matter. It is a matter of deep concern. It really goes to the integrity and fabric of the use of state documents, which passports are, for other purposes,” Rudd told Australian radio.
“Any state that has been complicit in use or abuse of the Australian passport system, let alone for the conduct of an assassination, is treating Australia with contempt and there will therefore be action by the Australian government in response,” said Rudd.
Dubai police say they are near certain that members of Israel’s Mossad spy agency killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his hotel room in January. A list of 11 people suspected in the assassination released last week by Dubai included the names of six British-born Israelis, whose names appeared on forged British passports thought to have been used by the killers.
Dubai on Wednesday identified 15 new suspects in the assassination; Haaretz has learned that 10 of them also share the names of Israelis who hold dual citizenship.
Obvious Role for US Investigators in Dubai Murder Case: Al Jazeera TV
Financial institutions based and incorporated in the United States have now been fingered by Dubai Police as having issued credit cards to some of the now dozens of suspected assassins of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
The fraudulent cards were said to be used to book hotel rooms and pay for air travel.
The firms allegedly involved include Meta Financial Group Inc, based in Storm Lake, Iowa, and Payoneer, a New York-based online payment company that provides pre-paid Mastercards.
Payoneer also has a research and development centre based in Tel Aviv. (I find it mildly amusing that Payoneer is pimped out on the Birthright Israel website).
I also find the Payoneer connection interesting given that its CEO is Yuval Tal, a former Israeli special forces commando. Mr Tal did not exactly conceal his prior affiliations when he appeared on Fox News during the 2006 Lebanon war. He opined then that “this is a war that Israel cannot afford to lose”.
If Tal or his Payoneer firm are in any way involved in the conspiracy to help a foreign intelligence service (like, say providing Mossad operatives with credit cards), he may soon find himself in his own battle with little prospects of winning – in a US courtroom.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the lead agency with statutory authority and responsibilities for investigating foreign espionage activities on US soil. It’s a job they take seriously and with a proven record of not shying away from the numerous instances when America’s special ally played foul.
As an initial inquiry, I imagine case agents will subpoena all financial records associated with the fraudulently issued credit cards. This would include the original credit card applications, which requires such things as a delivery address (to mail the card to), social security numbers, dates of birth, and employment information.
If the applications were made on paper, then the documents may contain all manner of evidence, from handwriting samples to fingerprints. There will be a similar trail to pore over if the applications were made over the phone or electronically via computer.
I also smell money laundering, as the money was supposedly dumped into prepaid accounts to conceal its purpose and origination. So US investigators may even want to tap in on the US treasury department’s crack financial investigator, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN).
Don’t be put off by FINCEN’s location in a Northern Virginia building that resembles a toilet seat. They have all manner of ways of putting a ring around financial transactions and credit reports in all reaches of the world.
There is still no word on whether or not the US has begun co-operating. On paper, there should be no reason why they would not. The Emirates are a friendly country to the United States and a member of INTERPOL. They have also been a key country used by the US administration to apply pressure on Iran, so presumably they want to keep them happy.
It’s not clear if the FBI is silently participating or if its officials are fence-sitting.
If it’s the latter, then they may want to consider the following: if a foreign national was murdered on US soil with the help of credit cards issued in the Emirates, what sort of co-operation would they demand?
Hamas leader’s son ‘spied for Israel’: The Independent
The son of one of the founders of the Hamas militant group was exposed today as a top Israeli informant who helped prevent dozens of suicide bombings and other attacks.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, codenamed “the Green Prince” by his handlers, was one of the Shin Bet security service’s most valuable sources, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said.
His reports led to the arrests of several high-ranking Palestinian figures during the violent uprising that began in 2000, the newspaper said.
Yousef’s father, Sheik Hassan Yousef, was a founding member of the Islamic militant group Hamas in the 1980s. He is currently serving a six-year sentence in an Israeli prison for his political activities.
The younger Yousef converted to Christianity and moved to California in 2007.
The revelation deals another setback to Hamas, which is reeling from the assassination of a leading member in Dubai last month. There have been reports that an insider assisted the killers.
Yousef’s memoir, “Son of Hamas,” is being published next week in the US.
Yousef could not be contacted for comment, but an excerpt from the book on his Facebook page plugs it as “a gripping account of terror, betrayal, political intrigue, and unthinkable choices.” It describes Yousef’s journey as one that “jeopardised Hamas, endangered his family, and threatened his life.”
It also says Yousef’s relationship with the Shin Bet helped thwart an Israeli plan to assassinate his father.
Yousef told the paper Shin Bet agents first approached him in prison in 1996 and proposed he infiltrate the upper echelons of Hamas. He did so successfully and is credited by Israel with saving hundreds of Israeli lives.
Yousef said he hoped to send a message of peace to Israelis, though he remained pessimistic about the prospects for ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He had particularly sharp comments for Hamas, the Iranian-backed movement that seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 and has been branded a terrorist organisation by Israel and the West.
“Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis. That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels,” he said.
EDITOR: While this is written in the specific UK context, it deals with a global phenomenon affecting the ‘western’ nations as a whole, hence also important in the Middle east context. Gaza and Palestine play a central role in European, North American and Global politics, and used to fan the flames of Islamophobia.
This tide of anti-Muslim hatred is a threat to us all: The Guardian
The attempt to drive Islamists and young Asian activists out of the political mainstream is a dangerous folly
If young British Muslims had any doubts that they are singled out for special treatment in the land of their birth, the punishments being meted out to those who took part in last year’s London demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza will have dispelled them. The protests near the Israeli embassy at the height of the onslaught were angry: bottles and stones were thrown, a Starbucks was trashed and the police employed unusually violent tactics, even by the standards of other recent confrontations, such as the G20 protests.
But a year later, it turns out that it’s the sentences that are truly exceptional. Of 119 people arrested, 78 have been charged, all but two of them young Muslims (most between the ages of 16 and 19), according to Manchester University’s Joanna Gilmore, even though such figures in no way reflect the mix of those who took part. In the past few weeks, 15 have been convicted, mostly of violent disorder, and jailed for between eight months and two-and-a-half years – having switched to guilty pleas to avoid heavier terms. Another nine are up to be sentenced tomorrow.
The severity of the charges and sentencing goes far beyond the official response to any other recent anti-war demonstration, or even the violent stop the City protests a decade ago. So do the arrests, many of them carried out months after the event in dawn raids by dozens of police officers, who smashed down doors and handcuffed family members as if they were suspected terrorists. Naturally, none of the more than 30 complaints about police violence were upheld, even where video evidence was available.
Nothing quite like this has happened, in fact, since 2001, when young Asian Muslims rioted against extreme rightwing racist groups in Bradford and other northern English towns and were subjected to heavily disproportionate prison terms. In the Gaza protest cases, the judge has explicitly relied on the Bradford precedent and repeatedly stated that the sentences he is handing down are intended as a deterrent.
For many in the Muslim community, the point will be clear: not only that these are political sentences, but that different rules apply to Muslims, who take part in democratic protest at their peril. It’s a dangerous message, especially given the threat from a tiny minority that is drawn towards indiscriminate violence in response to Britain’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and rejects any truck with mainstream politics.
But it’s one that is constantly reinforced by politicians and parts of the media, who have increasingly blurred the distinction between violent and non- violent groups, demonised Islamism as an alien threat and branded as extremist any Muslim leader who dares to campaign against western foreign policy in the Muslim world. That’s reflected in the government’s targeting of “nonviolent extremism” and lavish funding of anti-Islamist groups, as well as in Tory plans to ban the nonviolent Hizb ut-Tahrir and crack down ever harder on “extremist written material and speech”.
In the media, it takes the form of relentless attempts to expose Muslims involved in wider politics as secret fanatics and sympathisers with terrorism. Next week, Channel 4 Dispatches plans to broadcast the latest in a series of undercover documentaries aimed at revealing the ugly underside of British Muslim political life. In this case, the target is the predominantly British-Bangladeshi Islamic Forum of Europe. From material sent out in advance, the aim appears to be to show the IFE is an “entryist” group in legitimate east London politics – and unashamedly Islamist to boot.
As recent research co-authored by the former head of the Metropolitan police special branch’s Muslim contact unit, Bob Lambert, has shown, such ubiquitous portrayals of Muslim activists as “terrorists, sympathisers and subversives” (all the while underpinned by a drumbeat campaign against the nonexistent Afghan “burka”) are one factor in the alarming growth of British Islamophobia and the rising tide of anti-Muslim violence and hate crimes that stem from it.
Last month’s British Social Attitudes survey found that most people now regard Britain as “deeply divided along religious lines”, with hostility to Muslims and Islam far outstripping such attitudes to any other religious group. On the ground that has translated into murders, assaults and attacks on mosques and Muslim institutions – with shamefully little response in politics or the media. Last year, five mosques in Britain were firebombed, from Bishop’s Stortford to Cradley Heath, though barely reported in the national press, let alone visited by a government minister to show solidarity.
And now there is a street movement, the English Defence League, directly adopting the officially sanctioned targets of “Islamists” and “extremists” – as well as the “Taliban” and the threat of a “takeover of Islam” – to intimidate and threaten Muslim communities across the country, following the success of the British National party in baiting Muslims above all other ethnic and religious communities.
Of course, anti-Muslim bigotry, the last socially acceptable racism, is often explained away by the London bombings of 2005 and the continuing threat of terror attacks, even though by far the greatest number of what the authorities call “terrorist incidents” in the UK take place in Northern Ireland, while Europol figures show that more than 99% of terrorist attacks in Europe over the past three years were carried out by non-Muslims. And in the last nine months, two of the most serious bomb plot convictions were of far right racists, Neil Lewington and Terence Gavan, who were planning to kill Muslims.
Meanwhile, in the runup to the general election, expect some ugly dog whistles from Westminster politicians keen to capitalise on Islamophobic sentiment. With few winnable Muslim votes, the Tories seem especially up for it. Earlier this month, Conservative frontbencher Michael Gove came out against the building of a mosque in his Surrey constituency, while Welsh Tory MP David Davies blamed a rape case on the “medieval and barbaric” attitudes of some migrant communities.
As long as British governments back wars and occupations in the Middle East and Muslim world, there will continue to be a risk of violence in Britain. But attempts to drive British Muslims out of normal political activity, and the refusal to confront anti-Muslim hatred, can only ratchet up the danger and threaten us all.
Palestine’s catastrophe foreshadowed: The Guardian
Israeli writer Alon Hilu’s acclaimed historical novel tackles the most sensitive of Zionist taboos head-on
Alon Hilu chooses his words with the sort of forensic care you would expect from a man whose day job is as an intellectual property lawyer. Even so, the Israeli writer never imagined the political storm he would unleash with his best-selling novel, The House of Rajani.
Hailed as one of his country’s rising literary talents, Hilu came under fire when the book was first published in Hebrew two years ago — not because of its stylistic merits or otherwise but because of what some saw as its provocatively pro-Palestinian slant.
Condemned bluntly by another Israeli novelist as “anti-Zionist,” it won the prestigious Sapir prize last summer, though it was quickly withdrawn amid accusations of bias by the judges. “I feel as if the author is using language as a weapon against us,” complained one Jewish reader. “Disgusting,” thundered another. “How low will you stoop?”
Hilu, now promoting the English translation of The House of Rajani, makes no apology for what he calls his “narrative of the other,” which foreshadows the nakbah – the dispossession and flight of the Palestinians during Israel’s 1948 war of independence.
“If I was a Palestinian author I’d try to explain the significance of the Holocaust, but since I am a Jew I write about the suffering of the Palestinians – without necessarily comparing the two,” explains Hilu, 38. “Our history can be told in a different way.”
Older Israeli writers such as AB Yehoshua, Amos Oz and David Grossman have tackled different aspects of the conflict. But Hilu goes right back to the beginnings of what he identifies as an unmistakably colonialist enterprise, framed by the encounter between a young Arab and a Jewish immigrant in the first years of Zionist settlement in Ottoman Palestine.
The year is 1895, the location Jaffa. The Polish-born hero – Isaac Luminsky – is a handsome agronomist who is sharply aware of the fertile soil of the promised land – and of the Arab peasants who till it. (In two years’ time Theodor Herzl will convene the first Zionist congress in his native Vienna). Salah Rajani is a sensitive Muslim boy who lives with his beautiful mother in a dilapidated mansion surrounded by orange groves. Luminsky covets – and conquers – both the woman and the land.
Salah suffers from disturbing, apocalyptic visions about a disaster which is set to befall his people. He “sees” one man with a black eyepatch, another who is handsome and black-bearded, and a mannish woman, easily recognisable as Moshe Dayan, Herzl, and Golda Meir – Zionist and Israeli heroes who came to haunt the Palestinians. He sees a century or more into the future how the family estate has been stolen to build one of the icons of the modern Tel Aviv skyline, the glittering Azrieli Towers.
Edward Said’s Orientalism has been invoked by some to deconstruct the book’s themes of sexual and colonial domination. But it is the menacing shadow of future catastrophe – the unique experience of the Palestinian nakbah – that gives the story both its dramatic force and contemporary relevance: moves are under way in Israel to stop official funding for nakbah commemoration.
Politics apart, Hilu was widely praised for his recreation of an archaic Hebrew idiom in the early years of its revival from a language of liturgy to a spoken vernacular. The English translation has a Dickensian quality, and differs slightly from the original: Lubinsky is based on a real Jewish land agent whose litigious descendants disliked the negative way he was portrayed; Salah’s “real” surname is that of a leading Palestinian family. A more striking omission is a map showing today’s Tel Aviv, stripped back to the late 19th century sand dunes, Arab hamlets and orange groves that lie buried under the high-rise office blocks, hotels and parking lots of a 21st century metropolis, Israel’s Manhattan-on-the-Med.
Hilu says his own taboo-breaking views were partly moulded by his background: parents who immigrated to Israel from Syria and who did not share the dominant Ashkenazi (European Jewish) experience, with its emphasis on the Holocaust, and with no affinity for Arab life, language and culture. He also sees a link to the work of Israel’s “new” historians who have de-bunked the old “David versus Goliath” narrative in recent years. This extraordinary book is set in the distant past but forms part of a red-hot contemporary debate, in Israel and beyond, about the origins and meaning of the world’s most intractable conflict.
Iconoclast he may be, but Hilu ponders carefully before answering his critics: “Zionism does have a colonialist character and Jews did behave in condescending ways towards Arabs,” he says. “I am angry at our founding fathers for the damage that they did.”
Yet there are limits to his critique: “I don’t define myself as an anti-Zionist,” he insists. “I believe that facing up to the Palestinian past of Tel Aviv and of the Land of Israel in general and awareness of the Palestinian narrative actually strengthens Zionism because that’s the only way to make peace with the Palestinians and our other Arab neighbours.”
Egyptian opposition grows against government’s Gaza barrier: The Electronic Intifada
Adam Morrow and Khaled al-Omrani, 24 February 2010
CAIRO (IPS) – Activists and opposition groups are stepping up pressure on the Egyptian government to stop constructing a barrier along the border with the Gaza Strip. Officials say the barrier will prevent cross-border smuggling, but critics say it will seal the fate of the people on the Gaza Strip.
“The Egyptian border was the only opening left to the Gazans — their only means of staying alive,” Gamal Fahmi, political analyst and managing editor of opposition weekly al-Arabi al-Nassiri, told IPS.
On 13 February, hundreds of activists from across the political spectrum convened in downtown Cairo to protest construction of the barrier. Demonstrators held banners reading: “The wall of shame must come down” and “No to sponsoring Israeli crimes.” The same day also saw anti-wall demonstrations in Lebanese capital Beirut.
Ever since news of the barrier was first reported by Israeli daily Haaretz late last year, officials have attempted to justify it by citing Egypt’s right to protect its national sovereignty and security.
“Egypt has the right to take whatever measures necessary to protect its borders in accordance with prerequisites of Egyptian national security,” presidential spokesman Suleiman Awad said late December. “The sovereignty of Egyptian territories is sacred.”
On 25 January, President Hosni Mubarak declared that the barrier was intended to “protect our nation from terrorist plots.” Despite widespread criticism of the barrier, both domestic and international, construction has reportedly continued apace.
On 14 February, independent Egyptian daily al-Masry al-Youm quoted a worker at the construction site as saying that the barrier’s iron panels had been adjoined with steel connections. They were in the process of being sunk into the ground to a depth of 18 to 25 meters, he added.
On the following day, another independent daily al-Dustour reported that Egypt was also building an anchorage for patrol boats on its sea border with the Gaza Strip. The new anchorage, a north Sinai security source was quoted as saying, would “enhance the work of the Egyptian patrol boats on the sea border with Gaza and prevent any attempts at smuggling by sea.”
According to Hamdi Hasan, parliamentarian for the Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement, the United States, Israel and the North American Treaty Organization alliance are already monitoring the Egypt-Gaza maritime border “with a mandate to intercept any boats carrying aid to Gaza. “This,” said Hasan, “is well known.”
The border barrier and anchorage are only the most recent additions to a longstanding, internationally sanctioned siege of the Gaza Strip.
After Palestinian resistance group Hamas swept democratically-held Palestinian legislative elections in early 2006, Israel sealed its six border crossings with the territory. When Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in a preemptive coup the following year, Egypt followed suit by sealing its own 14-km border with the coastal enclave.
In line with the US and Israeli demands, Egyptian officials claimed the closure was aimed at stanching the flow of arms smuggled into the Hamas-run territory.
With Israel long in control of the Gaza Strip’s air space and territorial waters, the move served to hermetically seal the enclave’s 1.5 million inhabitants off from the rest of the world. Since then, the lack of badly needed food, medicines and fuel has brought the territory to the verge of humanitarian disaster.
Egypt’s border policy came in for particularly vehement condemnation — both at home and abroad — during Israel’s “Cast Lead” assault on the Gaza Strip in late 2008/early 2009. For three long weeks — with the Palestinian death toll rising by the hundreds — Egypt maintained its strict border closure, forbidding any movement of the desperately needed humanitarian supplies.
Critics of Egypt’s border policy warn that the new barrier will represent the final nail in the embattled territory’s coffin.
“With the completion of the new border barrier, the siege on the Gaza Strip will be made airtight,” said Fahmi. “The territory will literally become the biggest open-air prison in the world.”
“Construction of this wall, which will seal the fate of the Gazan people, represents a historical crime committed by the Egyptian regime,” said Hasan. “By agreeing to build the wall, the government has signed on to US-Israeli designs for the region.”
Hamas spokesman Mushir al-Masri, speaking late last month, said the barrier “has killed the last lifeline keeping the Gaza Strip alive after two-and-a-half years of siege.” Al-Masri added that the wall “does not serve the interests of any Arab party” and that it “only benefits the Israeli occupation.”
Critics, meanwhile, remain unconvinced by government attempts to justify the project by appealing to Egyptian “sovereignty” and “security.”
“Egypt could protect its sovereignty on the border by simply operating the Rafah border crossing, in which case the Gazans would not have to resort to smuggling tunnels,” said Fahmi. “Control of the border doesn’t need a barrier, it simply needs intelligent security procedures.”
“The government now says the wall is meant to stop weapons being smuggled into Egypt from Gaza,” Fahmi went on to point out. “But before the barrier was announced, all official statements were about arms being smuggled from Egypt to Gaza — not the other way around.”
“The government is fond of talking about Egypt’s ‘sovereignty,'” said Hasan. “But when the Israeli navy detained a Lebanese ship in Egyptian waters last summer, Egypt didn’t say a word about its vaunted sovereignty.”
Egypt’s construction of the barrier also has a political dimension. Within the last year tremendous pressure has been brought to bear on Hamas to sign an Egypt-proposed “reconciliation agreement” with the US-backed Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Hamas has until now refused to sign the agreement, which includes commitments to recognize Israel and renounce armed resistance — both of which run counter to the group’s founding principles. Egyptian officials, for their part, say the border will remain sealed until Hamas signs the proposal without preconditions.
“Egypt is building the wall to punish Hamas politically for refusing to sign Egypt’s reconciliation agreement,” Emad Gad, expert on Israeli affairs at the semi-official al-Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies, told IPS.
Late last month, Palestinian Parliamentary Speaker Aziz al-Duweik said that inter-Palestinian reconciliation could not be forced through “unjust conditions.” Reconciliation, he said, could not be achieved through “an atrocious war on Gaza, nor by starving the Palestinian people through siege and a policy of slow death.”
“Neither can it be achieved,” he added, “by a steel wall that increases the brutality of hunger and siege.”
Dispersing white phosphorous clouds over Gaza: Haaretz
By Gideon Levy
If you have a moment or are bored or depressed, if you suspected there might be some truth in the criticism of Israel, or if you just feel like laughing out loud, just enter the Information and Diaspora Ministry’s Web site.
There you’ll find an innovation of global proportions – propaganda intended to mislead propagandists and public relations to deceive PR experts, rather than the target audience. Nicolae Ceausescu couldn’t have phrased it better, and the Cairo radio station that broadcast threats in pidgin Hebrew before the Six-Day War never sounded as ludicrous. The Information Ministry presents: an insult to intelligence, contempt of reason – not only to the intelligence of “people overseas,” to whom this cheap propaganda is geared, but to us, self-declared Israeli “ambassadors.”
If this is the official message from Israel then we’re really in trouble. If these are our arguments, then all our critics are right. Information and propaganda ministries exist, but in the third world. Welcome, Israel. Sex, lies and videotape? There’s not much sex on this site, but plenty of all the rest – mixed with trivia, tastelessness and embarrassing parochialism.
How shall we begin our “information” quest? Perhaps with the list of achievements – 15 million bags of Bamba produced a month – 1,000 bags a minute of that peanut-butter-flavored children’s snack. We’re also a rising Krembo power – 50 million a season of that chocolate-coated marshmallow treat. The heart swells with pride. There’s nothing like it in the world. A land of milk, Krembo and Bamba.
So why don’t you visit us for the Krembo? Maybe you’ll end up liking us for the Bamba. The actress Ayelet Zurer is doing well in Hollywood, and another Israeli is the world’s cotton-growing champion. And an epilator that “makes women happy all over the world” was invented in Israel.
Let’s move past “the typical Israeli warmth,” “our tremendous national achievements” and our date produce (182 kilos a tree) – all intended to open our critics’ and haters’ minds. In propaganda as in propaganda, Goldstone is not mentioned, the occupation has disappeared. The Golan is “a land of water streams,” the Palestinians are “refugees who invaded from Arab countries,” the Galilee is Tuscany and the Dead Sea is a world wonder, all ours. The television broadcasts accompanying this delusional trip tell us the world thinks we ride camels (because we haven’t heard of cars), eat barbecued meat (because we have no electric power) and shoot each other (because that’s the way we are).
Well, there’s not a bit of truth to it. How easy it is to refute the camel and barbecue lies, because who still believes this is what Israel is like? Ask any tea grower in Sri Lanka or banana farmer in Cameroon and they’ll tell you that Israel is seen as a global weapons provider, a political and economic power, an occupying and oppressing state. We can only wish they thought of us as camel riders and barbecuers. We’d be so much better off. But these lies are easy to disprove, so let’s go with them – otherwise we might get entangled in allegations of war crimes and human-rights violations. Confuting those is a much harder feat, almost impossible.
Actually, not quite. The Israeli propaganda ministry has “tips” for such problems as well. Its doomsday weapon: “Body language is no less important than content.” Maintain eye contact, relaxed hands, smile only when you mean it, and try to keep a gentle expression. Then the white phosphorous clouds over Gaza will disperse.
Now seriously, despite this propaganda nonsense, Israeli PR is a resounding success story. The world accepts all our quirks and whims. The great Russia was forced to retreat from Georgia, but not Israel from the territories. Gilad Shalit has gained a global reputation as though there are no other prisoners of war in the world, and even the hysteria over Iran is made in Israel.
So what do we need all the Bamba and camel stories for? Let’s keep doing our thing – occupying, bombing, shelling, building settlements, usurping and exploiting. At worst, we could always whip out Ayelet Zurer, Krembo and the Israeli-made epilator, for we indeed are the chosen people.
Henry Siegman: For Israel, defiance comes at the cost of legitimacy: Financial Times
The Middle East peace process and its quest for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that got under way nearly 20 years ago with the Oslo accords has undergone two fundamental transformations. It is now on the brink of a third.
The first was the crossing of a threshold by Israel’s settlement project in the West Bank; there is no longer any prospect of its removal by this or any future Israeli government, which was the precise goal of the settlements’ relentless expansion all along. The previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who declared that a peace accord requires Israel to withdraw “from most, if not all” of the occupied territories, “including East Jerusalem,” was unable even to remove any of the 20 hilltop outposts Israel had solemnly promised to dismantle.
A two-state solution could therefore come about only if Israel were compelled to withdraw to the pre-1967 border by an outside power whose wishes an Israeli government could not defy – the US. The assumption has always been that at the point where Israel’s colonial ambitions collide with critical US national interests, an American president would draw on the massive credit the US has accumulated with Israel to insist it dismantle its illegal settlements, which successive US administrations held to be the main obstacle to a peace accord.
The second transformation resulted from the shattering of that assumption when President Barack Obama – who took a more forceful stand against Israel’s settlements than any of his predecessors, and did so at a time when the damage this unending conflict was causing American interests could not have been more obvious – backed off ignominiously in the face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of his demand. This left prospects for a two-state accord dead in the water.
The disappearance of the two-state solution is triggering a third transformation, which is turning Israel from a democracy into an apartheid state. The democracy Israel provides for its (mostly) Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. A democracy reserved for privileged citizens while all others are denied individual and national rights and kept behind checkpoints, barbed wire fences and separation walls manned by Israel’s military, is not democracy.
At first, the collapse of the assumptions on which hopes for a fair and just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict rested triggered much despair. But that despair has begun to turn to anger, and options for resolving the conflict, previously dismissed by the international community as unrealistic, are being looked at anew. That anger is also spawning a new global challenge to Israel’s legitimacy.
Anti-Semitic opponents of Israel will undoubtedly celebrate this emerging challenge to Israel’s incipient apartheid regime. But Israel will have only its own misguided policies to blame for its empowerment of this racist fringe. Such participation will no more detract from the inherent legitimacy of that challenge than Israel’s collaboration (on the development of atomic nuclear weapons) with a racist South African regime in the 1970s and 1980s provided democratic sanction for South Africa’s apartheid.
Mr Netanyahu’s government has hardly been indifferent to the seriousness of this challenge. A study by one of Israel’s leading policy institutes warning of this looming global threat to the country’s legitimacy was taken up by Israel’s cabinet, and described by its members as constituting as grave a danger to the country’s existence as the nuclear threat from Iran. Unfortunately – if predictably – the government’s response has been to mount a campaign to discredit critics as anti-Semitic enemies of Israel, rather than abandoning the policies that are transforming it into an apartheid state.
No country is as obsessed with the issue of its own legitimacy as Israel; ironically, that obsession may yet be its salvation. An international community angered and frustrated by Israel’s disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people, and determined to prevent their relegation to an apartheid existence, may well decide to have the United Nations General Assembly accept a Palestinian declaration of statehood within the pre-1967 borders, without the mutually agreed border changes that a peace accord might have produced. Nothing would challenge Israel’s legitimacy more than its defiance of such an international decision.
Prospects for such international action may serve as the only remaining inducement for Israel to accept a two-state solution. Not only its legitimacy but its survival as a Jewish and democratic state depends on it.
The writer is president of the US/Middle East Project and a visiting professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Programme at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies
Gaza: Treading on Shards: The Nation
by SARA ROY, February 17, 2010
“Do you know what it’s like living in Gaza?” a friend of mine asked. “It is like walking on broken glass tearing at your feet.”
On January 21, fifty-four House Democrats signed a letter to President Obama asking him to dramatically ease, if not end, the siege of Gaza. They wrote:
The people of Gaza have suffered enormously since the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt following Hamas’s coup, and particularly following Operation Cast Lead…. The unabated suffering of Gazan civilians highlights the urgency of reaching a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we ask you to press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza as an urgent component of your broader Middle East peace efforts…. Despite ad hoc easing of the blockade, there has been no significant improvement in the quantity and scope of goods allowed into Gaza…. The crisis has devastated livelihoods, entrenched a poverty rate of over 70%, increased dependence on erratic international aid, allowed the deterioration of public infrastructure, and led to the marked decline of the accessibility of essential services.
This letter is remarkable not only because it directly challenges the policy of the Israel lobby–a challenge no doubt borne of the extreme crisis confronting Palestinians, in which the United States has played an extremely damaging role–but also because it links Israeli security to Palestinian well-being. The letter concludes, “The people of Gaza, along with all the peoples of the region, must see that the United States is dedicated to addressing the legitimate security needs of the State of Israel and to ensuring that the legitimate needs of the Palestinian population are met.”
I was last in Gaza in August, my first trip since Israel’s war on the territory one year ago. I was overwhelmed by what I saw in a place I have known intimately for nearly a quarter of a century: a land ripped apart and scarred, the lives of its people blighted. Gaza is decaying under the weight of continued devastation, unable to function normally. The resulting void is filled with vacancy and despair that subdues even those acts of resilience and optimism that still find some expression. What struck me most was the innocence of these people, over half of them children, and the indecency and criminality of their continued punishment.
The decline and disablement of Gaza’s economy and society have been deliberate, the result of state policy–consciously planned, implemented and enforced. Although Israel bears the greatest responsibility, the United States and the European Union, among others, are also culpable, as is the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. All are complicit in the ruination of this gentle place. And just as Gaza’s demise has been consciously orchestrated, so have the obstacles preventing its recovery.
Gaza has a long history of subjection that assumed new dimensions after Hamas’s January 2006 electoral victory. Immediately after those elections, Israel and certain donor countries suspended contacts with the PA, which was soon followed by the suspension of direct aid and the subsequent imposition of an international financial boycott of the PA. By this time Israel had already been withholding monthly tax revenues and custom duties collected on behalf of the Authority, had effectively ended Gazan employment inside Israel and had drastically reduced Gaza’s external trade.
With escalating Palestinian-Israeli violence, which led to the killing of two Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit in June 2006, Israel sealed Gaza’s borders, allowing for the entry of humanitarian goods only, which marked the beginning of the siege, now in its fourth year. Shalit’s abduction precipitated a massive Israeli military assault against Gaza at the end of June, known as Operation Summer Rains, which initially targeted Gaza’s infrastructure and later focused on destabilizing the Hamas-led government through intensified strikes on PA ministries and further reductions in fuel, electricity, water delivery and sewage treatment. This near daily ground operation did not end until October 2006.
In June 2007, after Hamas’s seizure of power in the Strip (which followed months of internecine violence and an attempted coup by Fatah against Hamas) and the dissolution of the national unity government, the PA effectively split in two: a de facto Hamas-led government–rejected by Israel and the West–was formed in Gaza, and the officially recognized government headed by President Mahmoud Abbas was established in the West Bank. The boycott was lifted against the West Bank PA but was intensified against Gaza.
Adding to Gaza’s misery was the decision by the Israeli security cabinet on September 19, 2007, to declare the Strip an “enemy entity” controlled by a “terrorist organization.” After this decision Israel imposed further sanctions that include an almost complete ban on trade and no freedom of movement for the majority of Gazans, including the labor force. In the fall of 2008 a ban on fuel imports into Gaza was imposed. These policies have contributed to transforming Gazans from a people with political and national rights into a humanitarian problem–paupers and charity cases who are now the responsibility of the international community.
Not only have key international donors, most critically the United States and European Union, participated in the sanctions regime against Gaza, they have privileged the West Bank in their programmatic work. Donor strategies now support and strengthen the fragmentation and isolation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip–an Israeli policy goal of the Oslo process–and divide Palestinians into two distinct entities, offering largesse to one side while criminalizing and depriving the other. This behavior among key donor countries reflects a critical shift in their approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from one that opposes Israeli occupation to one that, in effect, recognizes it. This can be seen in their largely unchallenged acceptance of Israel’s settlement policy and the deepening separation of the West Bank and Gaza and isolation of the latter. This shift in donor thinking can also be seen in their unwillingness to confront Israel’s de facto annexation of Palestinian lands and Israel’s reshaping of the conflict to center on Gaza alone, which is now identified solely with Hamas and therefore as alien.
Hence, within the annexation (West Bank)/alien (Gaza Strip) paradigm, any resistance by Palestinians, be they in the West Bank or Gaza, to Israel’s repressive occupation, including attempts at meaningful economic empowerment, are now considered by Israel and certain donors to be illegitimate and unlawful. This is the context in which the sanctions regime against Gaza has been justified, a regime that has not mitigated since the end of the war. Normal trade (upon which Gaza’s tiny economy is desperately dependent) continues to be prohibited; traditional imports and exports have almost disappeared from Gaza. In fact, with certain limited exceptions, no construction materials or raw materials have been allowed to enter the Strip since June 14, 2007. Indeed, according to Amnesty International, only forty-one truckloads of construction materials were allowed to enter Gaza between the end of the Israeli offensive in mid-January 2009 and December 2009, although Gaza’s industrial sector presently requires 55,000 truckloads of raw materials for needed reconstruction. Furthermore, in the year since they were banned, imports of diesel and petrol from Israel into Gaza for private or commercial use were allowed in small amounts only four times (although the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, periodically receives diesel and petrol supplies). By this past August, 90 percent of Gaza’s total population was subject to scheduled electricity cuts of four to eight hours per day, while the remaining 10 percent had no access to any electricity, a reality that has remained largely unchanged.
Gaza’s protracted blockade has resulted in the near total collapse of the private sector. At least 95 percent of Gaza’s industrial establishments (3,750 enterprises) were either forced to close or were destroyed over the past four years, resulting in a loss of between 100,000 and 120,000 jobs. The remaining 5 percent operate at 20-50 percent of their capacity. The vast restrictions on trade have also contributed to the continued erosion of Gaza’s agricultural sector, which was exacerbated by the destruction of 5,000 acres of agricultural land and 305 agricultural wells during the war. These losses also include the destruction of 140,965 olive trees, 136,217 citrus trees, 22,745 fruit trees, 10,365 date trees and 8,822 other trees.
Lands previously irrigated are now dry, while effluent from sewage seeps into the groundwater and the sea, making much of the land unusable. Many attempts by Gazan farmers to replant over the past year have failed because of the depletion and contamination of the water and the high level of nitrates in the soil. Gaza’s agricultural sector has been further undermined by the buffer zone imposed by Israel on Gaza’s northern and eastern perimeters (and by Egypt on Gaza’s southern border), which contains some of the Strip’s most fertile land. The zone is officially 300 meters wide and 55 kilometers long, but according to the UN, farmers entering within 1,000 meters of the border have sometimes been fired upon by the IDF. Approximately 30-40 percent of Gaza’s total agricultural land is contained in the buffer zone. This has effectively forced the collapse of Gaza’s agricultural sector.
These profound distortions in Gaza’s economy and society will–even under the best of conditions–take decades to reverse. The economy is now largely dependent on public-sector employment, relief aid and smuggling, illustrating the growing informalization of the economy. Even before the war, the World Bank had already observed a redistribution of wealth from the formal private sector toward black market operators.
There are many illustrations, but one that is particularly startling concerns changes in the banking sector. A few days after Gaza was declared an enemy entity, Israel’s banks announced their intention to end all direct transactions with Gaza-based banks and deal only with their parent institutions in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Accordingly, the Ramallah-based banks became responsible for currency transfers to their branches in the Gaza Strip. However, Israeli regulations prohibit the transfer of large amounts of currency without the approval of the Defense Ministry and other Israeli security forces. Consequently, over the past two years Gaza’s banking sector has had serious problems in meeting the cash demands of its customers. This in turn has given rise to an informal banking sector, which is now controlled largely by people affiliated with the Hamas-led government, making Hamas Gaza’s key financial middleman. Consequently, moneychangers, who can easily generate capital, are now arguably stronger than the formal banking system in Gaza, which cannot.
Another example of Gaza’s growing economic informality is the tunnel economy, which emerged long ago in response to the siege, providing a vital lifeline for an imprisoned population. According to local economists, around two-thirds of economic activity in Gaza is presently devoted just to smuggling goods into (but not out of) Gaza. Even this lifeline may soon be diminished, as Egypt, apparently assisted by US government engineers, has begun building an impenetrable underground steel wall along its border with Gaza in an attempt to reduce smuggling and control the movement of people. At its completion the wall will be six to seven miles long and fifty-five feet deep.
The tunnels, which Israel tolerates in order to keep the siege intact, have also become an important source of income for the Hamas government and its affiliated enterprises, effectively weakening traditional and formal businesses and the rehabilitation of a viable business sector. In this way, the siege on Gaza has led to the slow but steady replacement of the formal business sector by a new, largely black-market sector that rejects registration, regulation or transparency and, tragically, has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
At least two new economic classes have emerged in Gaza, a phenomenon with precedents in the Oslo period: one has grown extremely wealthy from the black-market tunnel economy; the other consists of certain public-sector employees who are paid not to work (for the Hamas government) by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Hence, not only have many Gazan workers been forced to stop producing by external pressures, there is now a category of people who are being rewarded for their lack of productivity–a stark illustration of Gaza’s increasingly distorted reality. This in turn has led to economic disparities between the haves and have-nots that are enormous and visible, as seen in the almost perverse consumerism in restaurants and shops that are the domain of the wealthy.
Gaza’s economy is largely devoid of productive activity in favor of a desperate kind of consumption among the poor and the rich, but it is the former who are unable to meet their needs. Billions in international aid pledges have yet to materialize, so the overwhelming majority of Gazans remain impoverished. The combination of a withering private sector and stagnating economy has led to high unemployment, which ranges from 31.6 percent in Gaza City to 44.1 percent in Khan Younis. According to the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce, the de facto unemployment rate is closer to 65 percent. At least 75 percent of Gaza’s 1.5 million people now require humanitarian aid to meet their basic food needs, compared with around 30 percent ten years ago. The UN further reports that the number of Gazans living in abject poverty–meaning those who are totally unable to feed their families–has tripled to 300,000, or approximately 20 percent of the population.
Access to adequate amounts of food continues to be a critical problem, and appears to have grown more acute after the cessation of hostilities a year ago. Internal data from September 2009 through the beginning of January 2010, for example, reveal that Israel allows Gazans no more (and at times less) than 25 percent of needed food supplies, with levels having fallen as low as 16 percent. During the last two weeks of January, these levels declined even more. Between January 16 and January 29 an average of 24.5 trucks of food and supplies per day entered Gaza, or 171.5 trucks per week. Given that Gaza requires 400 trucks of food alone daily to sustain the population, Israel allowed in no more than 6 percent of needed food supplies during this two-week period. Because Gaza needs approximately 240,000 truckloads of food and supplies per year to “meet the needs of the population and the reconstruction effort,” according to the Palestinian Federation of Industries, current levels are, in a word, obscene. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program, “The evidence shows that the population is being sustained at the most basic or minimum humanitarian standard.” This has likely contributed to the prevalence of stunting (low height for age), an indicator of chronic malnutrition, which has been pronounced among Gaza’s children younger than 5, increasing from 8.2 percent in 1996 to 13.2 percent in 2006.
Gaza’s agony does not end there. According to Amnesty International, 90-95 percent of the water supplied by Gaza’s aquifer is “unfit for drinking.” The majority of Gaza’s groundwater supplies are contaminated with nitrates well above the acceptable WHO standard–in some areas six times that standard–or too salinated to use. Gaza no longer has any source of regular clean water. According to one donor account, “Nowhere else in the world has such a large number of people been exposed to such high levels of nitrates for such a long period of time. There is no precedent, and no studies to help us understand what happens to people over the course of years of nitrate poisoning,” which is especially threatening to children. According to Desmond Travers, a co-author of the Goldstone Report, “If these issues are not addressed, Gaza may not even be habitable by World Health Organization norms.”
It is possible that high nitrate levels have contributed to some shocking changes in the infant mortality rate (IMR) among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. IMR, widely used as an indicator of population health, has stalled among Palestinians since the 1990s and now shows signs of increasing. This is because the leading causes of infant mortality have changed from infectious and diarrheal diseases to prematurity, low birth weight and congenital malformations. These trends are alarming (and rare in the region), because infant mortality rates have been declining in almost all developing countries, including Iraq.
The people of Gaza know they have been abandoned. Some told me the only time they felt hope was when they were being bombed, because at least then the world was paying attention. Gaza is now a place where poverty masquerades as livelihood and charity as business. Yet, despite attempts by Israel and the West to caricature Gaza as a terrorist haven, Gazans still resist. Perhaps what they resist most is surrender: not to Israel, not to Hamas, but to hate. So many people still speak of peace, of wanting to resolve the conflict and live a normal life. Yet, in Gaza today, this is not a reason for optimism but despair.
EDITOR: Israel – leader in the development of war technologies
It is well known that the Israeli army is the fourth (some experts say fifth) strongest army in the world; in recent years, it has also become a leading force in the development of the technologies of warfare. It leads the world in the development of drones and battleground robots; this is hardly surprising… So the new robots which Israel now develops, will be even more robotic than the Israeli soldiers – something you can value when viewing any video clips of Israeli soldiers facing Palestinians. You can immediately see where their interest in robots comes from! All war crimes will be the work of robots, with no one to blame… The next article discusses the implications of such developments.
News Hub: Israel’s Robotic Warriors: Wall Street Journal
WSJ’s Charles Levinson reports from Jerusalem to discuss Israel’s development of robotic, unmanned combat systems. He tells Simon Constable on the News Hub how they are deploying unmanned boats, ground vehicles and aerial vehicles.
To view the clip use link above
Israeli Robots Remake Battlefield: Wall Street Journal
Nation Forges Ahead in Deploying Unmanned Military Vehicles by Air, Sea and Land
By CHARLES LEVINSON
TEL AVIV, Israel – Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare.
Sixty years of near-constant war, a low tolerance for enduring casualties in conflict, and its high-tech industry have long made Israel one of the world’s leading innovators of military robotics.
WSJ’s Charles Levinson reports from Jerusalem to discuss Israel’s development of robotic, unmanned combat systems. He tells Simon Constable on the News Hub how they are deploying unmanned boats, ground vehicles and aerial vehicles.
“We’re trying to get to unmanned vehicles everywhere on the battlefield for each platoon in the field,” says Lt. Col. Oren Berebbi, head of the Israel Defense Forces’ technology branch. “We can do more and more missions without putting a soldier at risk.”
In 10 to 15 years, one-third of Israel’s military machines will be unmanned, predicts Giora Katz, vice president of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., one of Israel’s leading weapons manufacturers.
“We are moving into the robotic era,” says Mr. Katz.
Over 40 countries have military-robotics programs today. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world is betting big on the role of aerial drones: Even Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite guerrilla force in Lebanon, flew four Iranian-made drones against Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War.
When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, it had just a handful of drones. Today, U.S. forces have around 7,000 unmanned vehicles in the air and an additional 12,000 on the ground, used for tasks including reconnaissance, airstrikes and bomb disposal.
In 2009, for the first time, the U.S. Air Force trained more “pilots” for unmanned aircraft than for manned fighters and bombers.
U.S. and Japanese robotics programs rival Israel’s technological know-how, but Israel has shown it can move quickly to develop and deploy new devices, to meet battlefield needs, military officials say.
“The Israelis do it differently, not because they’re more clever than we are, but because they live in a tough neighborhood and need to respond fast to operational issues,” says Thomas Tate, a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who now oversees defense cooperation between the U.S. and Israel.
Among the recently deployed technologies that set Israel ahead of the curve is the Guardium unmanned ground vehicle, which now drives itself along the Gaza and Lebanese borders. The Guardium was deployed to patrol for infiltrators in the wake of the abduction of soldiers doing the same job in 2006. The Guardium, developed by G-nius Ltd., is essentially an armored off-road golf cart with a suite of optical sensors and surveillance gear. It was put into the field for the first time 10 months ago.
In the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli soldiers took a beating opening supply routes and ferrying food and ammunition through hostile territory to the front lines. In the Gaza conflict in January 2009, Israel unveiled remote-controlled bulldozers to help address that issue.
Israel pioneered the use of aerial drones like the Heron, under construction, above, at Israeli Aerospace Industries.
Within the next year, Israeli engineers expect to deploy the voice-commanded, six-wheeled Rex robot, capable of carrying 550 pounds of gear alongside advancing infantry.
After bomb-laden fishing boats tried to take out an Israeli Navy frigate off the coast off Gaza in 2002, Rafael designed the Protector SV, an unmanned, heavily armed speedboat that today makes up a growing part of the Israeli naval fleet. The Singapore Navy has also purchased the boat and is using it in patrols in the Persian Gulf.
After Syrian missile batteries in Lebanon took a heavy toll on Israeli fighter jets in the 1973 war, Israel developed the first modern unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV.
When Israel next invaded Lebanon in 1981, the real-time images provided by those unmanned aircraft helped Israel wipe out Syrian air defenses, without a single downed pilot. The world, including the U.S., took notice.
The Pentagon set aside its long-held skepticism about the advantages of unmanned aircraft and, in the early 1980s, bought a prototype designed by former Israeli Air Force engineer Abraham Karem. That prototype morphed into the modern-day Predator, which is made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.
Unlike the U.S. and other militaries, where UAVs are flown by certified, costly-to-train fighter pilots, Israeli defense companies have recently built their UAVs to allow an average 18-year-old recruit with just a few months’ training to pilot them.
Military analysts say unmanned fighting vehicles could have a far-reaching strategic impact on the sort of asymmetrical conflicts the U.S. is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and that Israel faces against enemies such as Hezbollah and Hamas.
In such conflicts, robotic vehicles will allow modern conventional armies to minimize the advantages guerrilla opponents gain by their increased willingness to sacrifice their lives in order to inflict casualties on the enemy.
However, there are also fears that when countries no longer fear losing soldiers’ lives in combat thanks to the ability to wage war with unmanned vehicles, they may prove more willing to initiate conflict.
In coming years, engineers say unmanned air, sea and ground vehicles will increasingly work together without any human involvement. Israel and the U.S. have already faced backlash over civilian deaths caused by drone-fired missiles in Gaza, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those ethical dilemmas could increase as robots become more independent of their human masters.
Obama Is Pushing Israel Toward War: Wall Street Journal
President Obama can’t outsource matters of war and peace to another state.
By BRET STEPHENS
Events are fast pushing Israel toward a pre-emptive military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, probably by next spring. That strike could well fail. Or it could succeed at the price of oil at $300 a barrel, a Middle East war, and American servicemen caught in between. So why is the Obama administration doing everything it can to speed the war process along?
At July’s G-8 summit in Italy, Iran was given a September deadline to start negotiations over its nuclear programs. Last week, Iran gave its answer: No.
Instead, what Tehran offered was a five-page document that was the diplomatic equivalent of a giant kiss-off. It begins by lamenting the “ungodly ways of thinking prevailing in global relations” and proceeds to offer comprehensive talks on a variety of subjects: democracy, human rights, disarmament, terrorism, “respect for the rights of nations,” and other areas where Iran is a paragon. Conspicuously absent from the document is any mention of Iran’s nuclear program, now at the so-called breakout point, which both Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his boss Ali Khamenei insist is not up for discussion.
What’s an American president to do in the face of this nonstarter of a document? What else, but pretend it isn’t a nonstarter. Talks begin Oct. 1.
All this only helps persuade Israel’s skittish leadership that when President Obama calls a nuclear-armed Iran “unacceptable,” he means it approximately in the same way a parent does when fecklessly reprimanding his misbehaving teenager. That impression is strengthened by Mr. Obama’s decision to drop Iran from the agenda when he chairs a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Sept. 24; by Defense Secretary Robert Gates publicly opposing military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities; and by Russia’s announcement that it will not support any further sanctions on Iran.
In sum, the conclusion among Israelis is that the Obama administration won’t lift a finger to stop Iran, much less will the “international community.” So Israel has pursued a different strategy, in effect seeking to goad the U.S. into stopping, or at least delaying, an Israeli attack by imposing stiff sanctions and perhaps even launching military strikes of its own.
Thus, unlike Israel’s air strike against Iraq’s reactor in 1981 or Syria’s in 2007, both of which were planned in the utmost secrecy, the Israelis have gone out of their way to advertise their fears, purposes and capabilities. They have sent warships through the Suez Canal in broad daylight and conducted widely publicized air-combat exercises at long range. They have also been unusually forthcoming in their briefings with reporters, expressing confidence at every turn that Israel can get the job done.
The problem, however, is that the administration isn’t taking the bait, and one has to wonder why. Perhaps it thinks its diplomacy will work, or that it has the luxury of time, or that it can talk the Israelis out of attacking. Alternatively, it might actually want Israel to attack without inviting the perception that it has colluded with it. Or maybe it isn’t really paying attention.
But Israel is paying attention. And the longer the U.S. delays playing hardball with Iran, the sooner Israel is likely to strike. A report published today by the Bipartisan Policy Center, and signed by Democrat Chuck Robb, Republican Dan Coats, and retired Gen. Charles Ward, notes that by next year Iran will “be able to produce a weapon’s worth of highly enriched uranium . . . in less than two months.” No less critical in determining Israel’s timetable is the anticipated delivery to Iran of Russian S-300 anti-aircraft batteries: Israel will almost certainly strike before those deliveries are made, no matter whether an Iranian bomb is two months or two years away.
Such a strike may well be in Israel’s best interests, though that depends entirely on whether the strike succeeds. It is certainly in America’s supreme interest that Iran not acquire a genuine nuclear capability, whether of the actual or break-out variety. That goes also for the Middle East generally, which doesn’t need the nuclear arms race an Iranian capability would inevitably provoke.
Then again, it is not in the U.S. interest that Israel be the instrument of Iran’s disarmament. For starters, its ability to do so is iffy: Israeli strategists are quietly putting it about that even a successful attack may have to be repeated a few years down the road as Iran reconstitutes its capacity. For another thing, Iran could respond to such a strike not only against Israel itself, but also U.S targets in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.
But most importantly, it is an abdication of a superpower’s responsibility to outsource matters of war and peace to another state, however closely allied. President Obama has now ceded the driver’s seat on Iran policy to Prime Minister Netanyahu. He would do better to take the wheel again, keeping in mind that Iran is beyond the reach of his eloquence, and keeping in mind, too, that very useful Roman adage, Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Palestinians clash in Sheikh Jarrah: Haaretz
Clashes erupted Wednesday between Palestinian residents and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
A Palestinian woman and child were hurt in the incident and taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.
About 20 ultra-Orthodox Jews arrived to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim at one of the houses in the neighborhood.
According to Palestinians, the ultra-Orthodox group began harassing them, which led to a confrontation that was dispersed by police with clubs and tear gas.
France: Dubai assassins stole French identities: Haaretz
The suspected killers of Hamas strongman Mahmud al-Mabhuh last month in Dubai used forged French passports, effectively stealing the identity of French citizens, the French AFP agency reported on Thursday.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero told reporters that the documents were “clearly forged,” allowing the “impersonation of French citizens.”
The three passports referred to were among the fifteen new ones announced Wednesday by Dubai police, who have claimed they were nearly certain that members of Israel’s Mossad spy agency killed Mabhouh in his hotel room in January.
“Three passports mentioned in this announcement by the Emirates appear to be clearly forged and there was impersonation of French citizens,” Valero told AFP.
Besides the three French passports, Dubai police claimed to have found six British passports, as well as the three French allegedly forged, three Irish and three from Australia.
Earlier THursday, Australia warned Israel that if it was involved in the alleged use of three forged Australian passports in the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai, it would not be considered the act of a friend.
The Canberra government called in Israel’s ambassador after three people holding Australian passports were Wednesday listed among 15 new suspects in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Dubai authorities are investigating the use of at least 26 possibly fake passports in connection with the killing.
Dubai police say they are near certain that members of Israel’s Mossad spy agency killed Mabhouh in his hotel room in January. The emirate Wednesday identified 15 new suspects in the assassination; Haaretz has learned that 10 of them share the names of Israelis who hold dual citizenship.
A list of 11 people suspected in the assassination released last week by Dubai also included the names of six British-born Israelis, whose names appeared on forged British passports thought to have been used by the killers.
Australia warned Israel on Thursday that if it was involved in the alleged use of three forged Australian passports in the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai, it would not be considered the act of a friend.
The Canberra government called in Israel’s ambassador after three people holding Australian passports were Wednesday listed among 15 new suspects in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Dubai authorities are investigating the use of at least 26 possibly fake passports in connection with the killing.
Dubai police say they are near certain that members of Israel’s Mossad spy agency killed Mabhouh in his hotel room in January. The emirate Wednesday identified 15 new suspects in the assassination; Haaretz has learned that 10 of them share the names of Israelis who hold dual citizenship.
A list of 11 people suspected in the assassination released last week by Dubai also included the names of six British-born Israelis, whose names appeared on forged British passports thought to have been used by the killers.
Australia’s Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said investigations were still under way, but the three Australians were also apparently innocent victims of identity theft.
“I made it crystal clear to the ambassador that if the results of that investigation cause us to come to the conclusion that the abuse of Australian passports was in any way sponsored or condoned by Israeli officials, then Australia would not regard that as an act of a friend,” Smith said.
In an interview with Australian radio, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also emphasized the severity of the situation. “We will not be silent on this matter. It is a matter of deep concern. It really goes to the integrity and fabric of the use of state documents, which passports are, for other purposes,” Rudd told Australian radio.
“Any state that has been complicit in use or abuse of the Australian passport system, let alone for the conduct of an assassination, is treating Australia with contempt and there will therefore be action by the Australian government in response,” said Rudd.
The three using Australian passports have been identified as Daniel Bruce, Nicole Sandra McCabe and Adam Korman. The other new suspects also include Daniel Marc Schnur, Gabriella Barney, Roy Allan Cannon, Stephen Keith Drake, Mark Sklur and Philip Carr, traveling on British passports; Ivy Brinton, Anna Shauna Clasby and Chester Halvey, on Irish passports; and David Bernard LaPierre, Melenie Heard and Eric Rassineux, on French passports.
The suspected killers’ use of passports from countries including Britain and France has drawn criticism from the European Union that diplomats said was aimed at Israel. Some of the countries involved have summoned the Israeli ambassadors.
“Friendly nations who have been assisting in this investigation have indicated to the police in Dubai that the passports were issued in an illegal and fraudulent manner,” the Dubai government said.
Israel has not denied or confirmed it played any role but Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said there was nothing to link it to the killing. The United States, Israel’s main ally, has kept silent about the affair.
EU: West Bank goods aren’t Israeli: Haaretz
In a ruling touching on the status of the West Bank, the European Union high court said Thursday the disputed area is not part of Israel and Israeli goods made there are subject to EU import duties.
The ruling has no immediate bearing on the Mideast peace process.
But for trade purposes, it argues Israel has no standing in the area where it has built settlements and where its companies make such products as cookies, pretzels, wines, cosmetics and computer equipment.
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The ruling opens the door to EU import duties on Israeli goods from the West Bank rendering those products less competitive.
The EU has accords with both Israel and the Palestinians that end customs duties.
The court said the EU deal with Israel “applies to the territory of the State of Israel” and the Palestinian one to “the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”
Each of those two association agreements has its own territorial scope,” it said, adding Israeli goods made in the West Bank cannot enjoy duty-free access to the vast EU market.
A source in the Foreign Ministry told Army Radio that the EU ruling “surprised no one,” adding that “Israel regrets a decision which authorizes the persecution of Israeli products made in Judea and Samaria and a constitution of the European political campaign against the settlements.”
But it is likely to stir Israel, whose military maintains control over the area, its Israeli settlements and Israeli companies there.
The latter can benefit from cheaper labor in the West Bank.
Many of the settlements there use Palestinian workers, who earn less than their counterparts in Israel.
But since Palestinians are largely barred from working in Israel and have few job opportunities in the Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank, jobs in settlement factories are sought after.
Pro-Palestinian groups in Europe are likely to be pleased by Thursday’s ruling because they regularly protest in European supermarkets to complain about Israeli labels on farm products from the West Bank.
Israel continues to build settlements there that are widely seen as illegal under international law and a hindrance to the search for peace with the Palestinians.
Thursday’s ruling stems from a German case filed by Brita GmbH, a German company that imports drink-makers for sparkling water and fruit syrups from Soda-Club Ltd., an Israeli company in Mishor Adumim, one of 10 Israeli industrial areas in the West Bank.
Brita told German customs authorities its imports came from Israel and were therefore exempt from import duties.
Suspecting they came from the West bank, German authorities asked Israel to clarify matters.
Israeli customs only confirmed the goods originated in an area under Israeli responsibility and said nothing about the West Bank.
That led Germany to impose customs duties. On appeal, a Hamburg appeal court asked the Court of Justice of the European Union for its opinion.
The Palestinian Authority cannot lose rights to trade benefits to an EU-Israel deal and Israeli goods can only get preferential treatment if they have been manufactured in Israel proper, the court said