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Turkish PM Erdogan says Israel is ‘threat to peace’: BBC
Turkey’s Prime Minister has described Israel as the “main threat to peace” in the Middle East.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan was speaking during a visit to Paris.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded saying he regretted Turkey’s “repeated attacks” on Israel.
Relations between the two countries have been worsening since the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip in 2009, made worse by a recent diplomatic row.
Mr Erdogan was speaking to journalists before meeting the French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
“It is Israel that is the main threat to regional peace,” he said.
“If a country uses disproportionate force, in Palestine, in Gaza, uses phosphorus bombs we are not going to say ‘well done.'”
Both Israel and Hamas, which control the Gaza Strip, have been accused by the UN of war crimes during the 22-day offensive in December 2008 and January 2009.
Humiliation
Mr Netanyahu said he regretted the Turkish prime minister’s comments.
The Turkish envoy was made to sit lower than the Israeli deputy minister
“We are interested in good relations with Turkey and regret that Mr Erdogan chooses time after time to attack Israel,” he told reporters in Israel.
The countries have been allies in the past.
But earlier this week, the Turkish ambassador to Israel was recalled by Ankara, weeks after being humiliated in public by the Israeli deputy foreign minister.
Ambassador Oguz Celikkol was called into the Israeli foreign ministry in January and rebuked over a Turkish television series that showed Israeli intelligence agents kidnapping children.
Mr Celikkol was made to sit on a low chair while being lectured by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
Mr Ayalon later apologised for the rebuke.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared Mr Erdogan to Presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Turkey: World is turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons: Haaretz
Turkey’s prime minister said Sunday that the world is turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear program and that he intends to raise the issue at the nuclear summit in Washington.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan remarked that Iran’s nuclear program is being scrutinized because of its membership in the International Atomic Energy Agency whereas Israel, which has not signed a nonproliferation treaty, is free to do what it wants.
“We are disturbed by this and will say so,” Erdogan told reporters before his departure for Washington on Sunday.
The Israeli government has said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called off his trip to Washington because he believed Turkey and other Muslim nations would make an issue of Israel’s nuclear program.
Israel’s policy is to neither confirm nor deny that it possesses nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday that Israel has much to contribute to this week’s nuclear security summit even though Netanyahu was skipping the Washington conference.
Clinton said the world’s biggest concern on nuclear security is that terrorists will get control of bomb-making material. She said that Israel can do much to help thwart nuclear terror.
Representing Israel at U.S. President Barack Obama’s conference will be Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor.
Clinton’s remarks came in interviews with NBC’s Meet the Press and ABC’s This Week.
On Friday, a top U.S. official said the Obama administration believed Israel’s delegation to the nuclear summit will be “robust,” despite Netanyahu’s decision not to attend.
“We obviously would like to have the prime minister but the deputy prime minister will be leading the delegation and it will be a robust Israeli delegation,” U.S. National Security Adviser General Jim Jones told reporters traveling on Air Force One.
He also said that relationships between the U.S. and Israel are “ongoing, fine and continuous.”
Obama has invited more than 40 countries to the summit, which will deal with preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to terrorist groups.
EDITOR: The Ethnic Cleansing continues
The process of ‘cleansing’ Palestine of its indigenous population, now continuing for 6 decades, is periodically shifting gear, with new actions, regulations and atrocities. The two articles below are examples of this process of ethnic cleansing – a racist, nationalistic and colonial project of Zionism, never fora moment stopped, forever moving forward to dispossess and exile as many Palestinians as possible. The means are a myriad: ‘legal’ confiscation of land, denial of services or access, physical destruction of homes, denial of water, closing off huge areas by the apartheid wall, ‘security closures’ uprooting of fruit trees, prevention of land tilling – all is kosher in order to dislodge Palestine of its people. The West has been systematically silent on all of those counts since 1967, and its only reaction was more support of the Israeli state and its atrocities.
IDF order will enable mass deportation from West Bank: Haaretz
By Amira Hass
A new military order aimed at preventing infiltration will come into force this week, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years.
When the order comes into effect, tens of thousands of Palestinians will automatically become criminal offenders liable to be severely punished.
Given the security authorities’ actions over the past decade, the first Palestinians likely to be targeted under the new rules will be those whose ID cards bear home addresses in the Gaza Strip – people born in Gaza and their West Bank-born children – or those born in the West Bank or abroad who for various reasons lost their residency status. Also likely to be targeted are foreign-born spouses of Palestinians.
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Until now, Israeli civil courts have occasionally prevented the expulsion of these three groups from the West Bank. The new order, however, puts them under the sole jurisdiction of Israeli military courts.
The new order defines anyone who enters the West Bank illegally as an infiltrator, as well as “a person who is present in the area and does not lawfully hold a permit.” The order takes the original 1969 definition of infiltrator to the extreme, as the term originally applied only to those illegally staying in Israel after having passed through countries then classified as enemy states – Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.
The order’s language is both general and ambiguous, stipulating that the term infiltrator will also be applied to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, citizens of countries with which Israel has friendly ties (such as the United States) and Israeli citizens, whether Arab or Jewish. All this depends on the judgment of Israel Defense Forces commanders in the field.
The new guidelines are expected to clamp down on protests in the West Bank.
The Hamoked Center for the Defense of the Individual was the first Israeli human rights to issue warnings against the order, signed six months ago by then-commander of IDF forces in Judea and Samaria Area Gadi Shamni.
Two weeks ago, Hamoked director Dalia Kerstein sent GOC Central Command Avi Mizrahi a request to delay the order, given “the dramatic change it causes in relation to the human rights of a tremendous number of people.”
According to the provisions, “a person is presumed to be an infiltrator if he is present in the area without a document or permit which attest to his lawful presence in the area without reasonable justification.” Such documentation, it says, must be “issued by the commander of IDF forces in the Judea and Samaria area or someone acting on his behalf.”
The instructions, however, are unclear over whether the permits referred to are those currently in force, or also refer to new permits that military commanders might issue in the future. The provision are also unclear about the status of bearers of West Bank residency cards, and disregards the existence of the Palestinian Authority and the agreements Israel signed with it and the PLO.
The order stipulates that if a commander discovers that an infiltrator has recently entered a given area, he “may order his deportation before 72 hours elapse from the time he is served the written deportation order, provided the infiltrator is deported to the country or area from whence he infiltrated.”
The order also allows for criminal proceedings against suspected infiltrators that could produce sentences of up to seven years. Individuals able to prove that they entered the West Bank legally but without permission to remain there will also be tried, on charges carrying a maximum sentence of three years. (According to current Israeli law, illegal residents typically receive one-year sentences.)
The new provision also allow the IDF commander in the area to require that the infiltrator pay for the cost of his own detention, custody and expulsion, up to a total of NIS 7,500.
Currently, Palestinians need special permits to enter areas near the separation fence, even if their homes are there, and Palestinians have long been barred from the Jordan Valley without special authorization. Until 2009, East Jerusalemites needed permission to enter Area A, territory under full PA control.
The fear that Palestinians with Gaza addresses will be the first to be targeted by this order is based on measures that Israel has taken in recent years to curtail their right to live, work, study or even visit the West Bank. These measures violated the Oslo Accords.
According to a decision by the West Bank commander that was not backed by military legislation, since 2007, Palestinians with Gaza addresses must request a permit to stay in the West Bank. Since 2000, they have been defined as illegal sojourners if they have Gaza addresses, as if they were citizens of a foreign state. Many of them have been deported to Gaza, including those born in the West Bank.
One group expected to be particularly harmed by the new rules are Palestinians who moved to the West Bank under family reunification provisions, which Israel stopped granting for several years.
In 2007, amid a number of Hamoked petitions and as a goodwill gesture to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, tens of thousands of people received Palestinian residency cards. The PA distributed the cards, but Israel had exclusive control over who could receive them. Thousands of Palestinians, however, remained classified as “illegal sojourners,” including many who are not citizens of any other country.
The new order is the latest step by the Israeli government in recent years to require permits that limit the freedom of movement and residency previously conferred by Palestinian ID cards. The new regulations are particularly sweeping, allowing for criminal measures and the mass expulsion of people from their homes.
The IDF Spokesman’s Office said in response, “The amendments to the order on preventing infiltration, signed by GOC Central Command, were issued as part of a series of manifests, orders and appointments in Judea and Samaria, in Hebrew and Arabic as required, and will be posted in the offices of the Civil Administration and military courts’ defense attorneys in Judea and Samaria. The IDF is ready to implement the order, which is not intended to apply to Israelis, but to illegal sojourners in Judea and Samaria.”
Israel’s Negev ‘frontier’: Al Jazeera Online
By Ben White
Palestinian Bedouins are protesting against discrimination by the Israeli government [GETTY]
On this year’s Land Day, tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel marched in Sakhnin, an Israeli city in the Lower Galilee, to protest against past and present systematic discrimination. But with the focus on Israel’s policies of land confiscation, there was significance in a second protest that day.
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In the Negev (referred to as al-Naqab by Palestinian Bedouins), over 3,000 attended a rally at al-Araqib, an ‘unrecognised’ Palestinian Bedouin village whose lands are being targeted by the familiar partnership of the Israeli state and the Jewish National Fund.
The historical context for the crisis facing Palestinian Bedouins today is important, as the Israeli government and Zionist groups try to propagate the idea that the problems, so far as they exist, are ‘humanitarian’ or ‘cultural’.
Even the category of ‘Bedouin’ is historically and politically loaded, with many disputing what they see as an Israeli ‘divide and rule’ strategy towards the Palestinians.
Alienated and ‘unrecognised’
During the Nakba, the vast majority of the Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev – from a pre-1948 population of 65,000 to 100,000 – were expelled. Those who remained were forcibly concentrated by the Israeli military in an area known as the ‘siyag’ (closure).
The military regime experienced by Palestinian citizens until 1966 meant further piecemeal expulsions, expropriation of land, and restrictions on movement. Ultimately, only 19 out of 95 tribes remained.
The defining dynamic between the Israeli state and its Palestinian minority has been the expropriation of Arab land and its transfer to state or Jewish ownership.
Israel refused to recognise the land rights of the Palestinian Bedouins, who today are alienated from almost all of their land through a complex combination of land law and planning boundaries.
An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Palestinian citizens in the Negev live in dozens of ‘unrecognised villages’ – communities that the state refuse to acknowledge exist despite the fact that some pre-date the establishment of Israel and others are the result of the Israeli military’s forced relocation drives.
These shanty towns are refused access to basic infrastructure.
One approach the Israeli state has taken is to create, or ‘legalise’, a small number of towns and villages in the hope that more Palestinians will move into these areas.
Yet even this policy, often presented as a ‘humane’ response to ‘Bedouin’ needs, highlights a disparity: Jewish regional authorities and individual farms enjoy a massively lower population density compared to the space allotted by the state to Palestinian townships, which are ranked among the most deprived communities in the country.
‘Developing the Negev’
The Israeli government, meanwhile, along with agencies like the Jewish National Fund and Jewish Agency, are preoccupied with the idea of ‘developing the Negev’, and boosting its population.
In March, the ‘Negev 2010′ conference was held in Beir al-Saba’ (Beersheva), drawing hundreds of politicians and business people, with the focus being attracting 300,000 new residents to the area.
Speakers included Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, Silvan Shalom, the Negev and Galilee development minister, and Ariel Atias, the housing minister.
Last year, Shalom held a joint press conference with religious Zionist rabbis to outline plans for increasing the south’s population, with one of the rabbis stressing the need for a “Jewish majority” in the region.
Atias, for his part, has previously expressed his belief that it is “a national duty to prevent the spread” of Palestinian citizens.
It is not, therefore, hard to read between the lines when Israeli policy makers and Zionist officials from organisations like the Jewish National Fund talk about ‘developing the Negev’.
Zionist frontier
The Negev is the location for classic, unfiltered Zionist frontier discourse.
The Jewish National Fund in the UK talks about supporting “the pioneers who are bringing the desert to life”, while an article in the Zionist magazine B’Nai B’Rith called the Negev “the closest thing to the tabula rasa many of Israel’s pre-state pioneers found when they first came to the Holy Land”.
The idea of the ’empty’ land sits uncomfortably alongside another important emphasis – ‘protection’ or ‘redemption’.
As the Jewish National Fund’s US chief executive put it in January 2009, “if we don’t get 500,000 people to move to the Negev in the next five years, we’re going to lose it”. To who, he did not need to say.
There were no illusions about the meaning of this discourse, and its consequences, at a February conference which brought together academics and experts specialising in issues facing the Bedouins of the Negev.
Through the seminars and discussions, one theme clearly came through: The relationship between the Palestinian Bedouins and the Israeli state was rapidly deteriorating.
A number of the organisers of, and speakers at, ‘Rethinking the Paradigms: Negev Bedouin Research 2000+’ were themselves from the Negev, where overcrowding, home demolitions, and dispossession are features of everyday life for Palestinians.
The conference was one of the first of its kind in the UK, sponsored by the British Academy and Exeter University’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and Politics Department.
Excluded from discourse
Western media coverage of the structural discrimination and discriminatory land and housing policies experienced by Palestinian Bedouins has generally been poor.
In a discourse shaped by Zionist and Orientalist tropes, the Negev is a vast, wild, desert; a frontier to be civilised. The ‘Bedouin’, meanwhile, are either invisible or exotic savages, objects of benevolent philanthropy.
Furthermore, the international ‘peace process’ has meant that the question of Palestine has become the story of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian citizens of Israel have been left out, a situation exacerbated by the media mentality of ‘if it bleeds it leads’. Core issues facing Palestinian Bedouins – land control, zoning, bureaucratic and physical boundaries of exclusion – are not considered suitable fare.
This nonexistent or weak coverage is regrettable, particularly as Israel’s policies in the Negev towards the Palestinian Bedouin minority are highly illuminating for understanding the state’s position vis-à-vis the Palestinians in a more general sense.
Moreover, tension is building in the Negev over Israel’s continued apartheid-like policies. Palestinian Bedouins continue to resist the strategies of the Israeli state and Zionist agencies, through legal battles, and grassroots organisation, like the Regional Council for the Unrecognised Villages.
Perhaps one of the main kinds of resistance being offered by the Palestinians in the Negev is their determination to stay. This steadfastness is a direct refusal of a strategy of home demolitions, dispossession and Judaisation.
The recent protest in al-Araqib could only be a foretaste of things to come, as Palestinian Bedouins demand equality from a state seemingly unwilling to change.
Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer specialising in Palestine/Israel. His articles have appeared in publications like the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’, New Statesman, Electronic Intifada, Middle East International, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and others. His first book, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, was published in 2009 by Pluto Press.
A new political option for confronting Israel: The Electronic Intifada
Hasan Abu Nimah, 9 April 2010
As more people recognize that the “peace process” has come to an unbridgeable impasse, there is debate. Some, especially those who prospered from the path of failed negotiations, argue that there is no alternative to continuing with the US-brokered “peace process.” Others intimate that a third intifada might be the solution and there have even been warnings of regional war. Others still suggest the Arab states should withdraw their eight-year old Arab Peace Initiative.
Neither war, nor an intifada — in the sense of a violent Palestinian response to Israel’s unrelenting violent aggression — are the only alternatives. Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, recognized by foreign powers as the head of the Palestinian Authority, has constantly expressed strong opposition to any armed resistance against the occupier, and has frequently condemned and ridiculed resistance. And, after ignoring them for years, Abbas and his colleagues have lately started to endorse and even associate themselves with the nonviolent struggle of Palestinians in the West Bank, which are always met with Israeli aggression and brutality.
This however is not the only kind of nonviolence I see as a possible alternative: there is also a political option. It is important to recognize first that all efforts to settle the century-old conflict caused by the Zionist invasion of Palestine have failed because they were unjust, arbitrary, distant from legality, and did nothing to right fundamental wrongs.
A new political strategy would involve recognizing this basic shortcoming and demand a return to legality, in effect a return to the days before the 1991 Madrid Conference which launched the past two decades of futile “negotiations” and accelerated Israeli colonization.
The Arab States, including the Palestinians, could demand full implementation of Security Council Resolution 242 in the same manner as it was implemented on the Egyptian side leading to the total evacuation of all the Egyptian occupied territories including the removal of all illegally-built settlements on Egyptian soil. This significant precedent should apply to Syria’s occupied lands as well.
All the dubious formulas of Oslo, the Quartet, the Roadmap, Annapolis and the many other understandings should be dropped. The two-state solution should be dropped, too. Once the occupation ends and the Palestinians recover their territory they have the right then to establish their state on it independently from any Israeli or other foreign intervention. A Palestinian state on part of their historic homeland is not an Israeli gift. It is a right Palestinians alone can decide to exercise, if they so choose.
The Arab states should insist on a comprehensive deal ending the struggle along such lines in its entirety. What applied to Sinai should exactly apply to the Syrian Golan Heights the West Bank including Jerusalem as the situation exactly was before the Israeli invasion on 5 June 1967. And as all Israeli settlements were removed from Sinai and Gaza they should be removed from the West Bank and the Golan Heights if international law is to be applied.
The Arab States should not withdraw their peace offer. They should only amend it in accordance with the exact requirements of international law. They should not declare war on Israel but they should instead unite in demanding international justice in the United Nations — not the Quartet — in accordance with the relevant United Nations resolutions. They should not negotiate with Israel except through the United Nations apparatus. They should suspend any dealings with Israel until Israel complies with international legality and until justice is realized.
The same should apply to the issue of Palestinian refugees, whom Israel bars from returning home in defiance of international law, justice and common practice because of its totally illegal and immoral position that they are not Jews. International law does not permit such blatant racist discrimination, and Arabs are within their rights to demand it end in accordance with the law.
Under the prevailing circumstances all this may sound unrealistic. Perhaps so, but it seems that achieving Palestinian rights via the path of endless, unprincipled negotiations, or working with the occupation itself, has proven even more unrealistic and counterproductive. If the total closure of the road towards peace is not going to turn into uncontrollable violence this should be seriously considered.
Continuing to negotiate with no purpose and no hope of progress with an intransigent Israel only leads to the degradation of the Palestinian and consequently Arab standing and dignity. It also provides a convenient cover for continued Israeli colonization and judaization of Palestinian and Arab lands.
It is high time to admit that the peace process is dead; that Israel has so far manipulated it to consolidate the gains of its aggression; that exploiting Palestinian weakness and official Arab incompetence can only deepen the mistrust and the radicalization of Arab masses; and that the continued neutralization of the UN system is a recipe for growing violence and terror worldwide.
Arabs should offer Israel a choice of either becoming part of the region by respecting international law and implementing UN resolutions — which would also guarantee whatever legitimate rights and concerns Israelis have — or continuing in isolation if it chooses rejection, racism and intransigence.
Of course such Arab positions would be labeled as “radical” and “hard line.” The answer to that is simple: it is Israel’s insistence on its racist character and its defiance of the law that is radical, hardline and aggressive. Palestinian and Arab insistence on the implementation of UN resolutions that reflect a world consensus and universal rights could not be more moderate or reasonable.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and is republished with the author’s permission.
EDITOR: The Anat Kam Story continues
As Kam faces 15 years in jail, while the murderers and those who ordered them walk free and unmolested, and Blau languishes in London, frightened of returning to Israel, or of Mossad snatching him like they did with Vanunu, Haaretz newpapper bosses try to come to some agreement with the state. There is little chance of that, of course. Not only is the paper in danger, but so is the little freedom still enjoyed by the Israeli press.
Haaretz answers four key questions on the Anat Kam case: Haaretz Editorial
1. Does Haaretz’s insistence on protecting its reporter and his sources in the Anat Kam affair endanger state security?
Of course not. All the reports Uri Blau published in Haaretz based on his documents were submitted to the military censor and approved by her before publication, as required by law. In fact, in one case Haaretz’s editors decided not to publish one of Blau’s stories after it had gone to press, after senior defense officials changed their minds and requested that it not be released.
The state’s security depends not only on upholding the censor’s regulations, which Haaretz has done and continues to do, but also on upholding Israel’s democratic values, including a free press. The agreement signed between Blau and the Shin Bet security service proves that the Shin Bet understands this as well.
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2. Does Blau possess classified documents and why doesn’t he give them to the Shin Bet?
Blau left on vacation abroad with no classified documents in his possession. But like any investigative journalist, he has documents on which he bases his articles. These include, for example, the documents that led him to expose that Itay Ashkenazi, the chief of staff’s son, was employed in companies that do business with the Israel Defense Forces – or documents he used for the report on Knesset Constitution Committee chairman David Rotem’s involvement in the purchase of lands in Beit El with false papers. This is also the case with documents detailing money transfers to Ehud Barak Ltd., the company controlled by the defense minister’s daughters.
Haaretz, therefore, believes that it cannot pass on all the documents Blau has to the defense establishment because its senior officials may use them to trace his sources.
The agreement between Blau and the Shin Bet sets down the criteria for choosing the documents to be given to the Shin Bet, and Blau believes he acted according to the agreement. He passed on dozens of classified documents adhering to these criteria, and the defense establishment had no complaint about the choice of documents. Months later, the Shin Bet claimed that Anat Kam, who is suspected of giving the documents to Blau, gave him 2,000 documents. In the meantime, this number has been reduced to 700 documents classified “secret” and above.
Blau gave the Shin Bet not only dozens of printouts, but also his personal computer, which was destroyed in his presence. There is no telling how many documents were in the computer, and the Shin Bet cannot say which documents are still missing.
The documents Blau handed over to the Shin Bet included the protocols of the meeting in which the chief of staff and Shin Bet heads decided to carry out apparently illegal acts in the territories. A short time after Blau handed over the documents, the Shin Bet arrested Kam on suspicion that she gave them to him. This raised Haaretz’s suspicions that the documents Blau handed over may have assisted in the arrest, even though the agreement between Blau and the Shin Bet precluded any such use of them. Given this, Haaretz instructed Blau not to submit any further documents while his sources’ protection was not guaranteed.
3. Why isn’t Blau returning to Israel to explain all this?
Uri Blau went on a three-month private vacation in the Far East with his fiancee. During his holiday, the Shin Bet arrested Anat Kam and told Haaretz it was reneging on its agreement, which assures the immunity of Blau’s sources, first and foremost Kam, and that he would not be questioned.
Blau’s return to Israel in these circumstances may strengthen the charges against Kam. The witnesses for the prosecution listed in the charge sheet against her already include one journalist – Yedioth Ahronoth reporter Yossi Yehoshua.
The Shin Bet announced that it intends to question Blau on arrival, put him through a lie-detector test, have his entire document archive inspected and arrest him unless he doesn’t reply to all the lie-detector questions about his news sources. At this point Haaretz decided to instruct Blau to remain abroad until the end of the negotiations, which are intended to ensure that the agreement between Haaretz and the Shin Bet is upheld.
4. Is it impossible, as far as Haaretz is concerned, to safeguard state security without revealing your news sources?
This is certainly possible. This combination has worked and will keep working, and it’s important to ensure that it continues to exist. This is why Haaretz passed on another suggestion, intended to guarantee that the required classified documents are returned to the Shin Bet without endangering the sources who gave Uri Blau those documents.
IDF: Uri Blau’s allegations of army misconduct ‘outrageous’: Haaretz
Allegations put forth in a 2008 Haaretz article, alleging that Israel Defense Forces conduct in the West Bank was in breach of High Court rulings, are misinformed and misleading, the IDF Spokesman’s office said Sunday.
The IDF statement was referring to a story written by Haaretz writer Uri Blau, who recently became embroiled in an indictment of an ex-soldier Anat Kam who stands accused of stealing classified military documents and leaking them to Haaretz..
Among the materials Kam allegedly transferred to Blau were files suggesting that high-ranking IDF officers had approved targeted assassinations of wanted Palestinians in cases where detaining them would have been possible – authorization that violates a High Court ruling against killing suspects when arrests can be made.
The material gathered in these documents allegedly formed the basis for an article Blau published in the Haaretz Magazine in November 2008.
In the statement released Sunday, the IDF spokesman’s office said the allegations specified in Blau’s report were “outrageous and misleading,” saying the piece was based on a partial understating of the situation and a misunderstanding of the limitations set by the High Court.”
The IDF bolstered its rejection of Blau’s allegations with the ruling of former Attorney General Menachem Mazuz who responded to an appeal to criminally investigate IDF officials by saying that he found “no basis to the claim that IDF forces acted illegally or in violation of the High Court ruling.”
Earlier Sunday, Haaretz learned that Kam’s defense attorney already began negotiating with the prosecution for a plea bargain after the state has decided to prosecute Kam for the most serious crimes of espionage: passing on classified information with the intent of harming state security.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Kam faces other charges, including gathering and possessing classified materials with intent to harm state security, which carries a maximum 15-year prison sentence.
Israel’s criminal code contains a number of other statutes that Kam could have been charged with violating for her alleged actions, that carry significantly less harsh punishments than the ones she has been charged with.
World without nukes is still only a dream for Obama: The Observer
States such as India and Israel must be persuaded to give up their nuclear weapons
North Korean nuclear tests in May 2009. Although the US and Russia have signed a treaty, other countries will not be following suit. Photograph by AFP/Getty Images
How realistic is the prospect of a nuclear-free world? The question is asked because of several events that took place last week that speak to the possibility of further moves towards disarmament and the hurdles ahead.
The first event, actually a pair of events, has been the unveiling of President Barack Obama’s new Nuclear Posture Review and the signing, in Prague, of a new nuclear treaty between the US and Russia, cutting strategic weapons stockpiles. Baby steps both, they progress the world a little further towards Obama’s goal of a nuclear-free planet, but in the interim leave it still heavily armed.
The Posture Review is probably the more significant. While disappointing those disarmament campaigners who had hoped for a US declaration of no first use, it sets out a significant new nuclear doctrine. Where once the US reserved the right to use nuclear weapons to respond to an attack against it or its allies by any weapons of mass destruction, now it has been refined to being a deterrent against nuclear attack. This has been a demand of states seeking a commitment from the US explicitly to rule out nuclear weapons use against non-nuclear states as a quid pro quo.
Which brings us to last week’s second significant event: not the signing of the new US-Russian treaty, but Friday’s announcement by the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, that he will not attend Obama’s 47-country nuclear proliferation conference in Washington this week. He fears that Israel would come under pressure over its own nuclear arsenal from Egypt and Turkey.
And there is the nuclear disarmament conundrum in a nutshell. For while the handful of powers that once held a monopoly on nuclear arms retention come to realise these weapons are a problem not an answer, irrelevant in the post-Cold War world, that position is not understood by others. Notably Israel, North Korea, India, Pakistan and arguably Iran, who see the issue of nuclear weapons retention not just as one of prestige but as serving a regionally deterrent function.
And until states such as India and Israel can be persuaded to give up their nukes, Obama’s dream of a nuclear-free world are remote indeed.
Shin Bet urges removal of Israeli Arab worker from Olmert’s gym: Haaretz
The Shin Bet has requested that an Israeli Arab man working as part of the cleaning staff in former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s gym be transferred from the premises to a different workplace due to security sensitivities, Haaretz learned on Sunday.
The man, 20, a resident of Kfar Kassem, was employed by the Tel Aviv gym for several months before the Shin Bet preformed background checks on the employees in the compound and advised the owner to transfer him to a workplace with less “security sensitivity,” gym owner Dror Paz told Haaretz.
The reason for the request, according to the Shin Bet, was based on the fact that one of the man’s relatives was sentenced to jail in the past over security related offenses. The lack of a security guard at the entrance to the gym was also mentioned as a reason for the request, despite 24-hour security surveillance at the entrance to the residential building.
As former prime minister, Olmert has 24-hour security surveillance and the Shin Bet often perform background checks on staff working in his vicinity.
“The worker in question has been working for us over the last few months, he is an Israeli citizen with a blue ID card, and has all the credentials to work in any institution in Israel,” Paz told Haaretz.
“I don’t believe this is about a specific problem with this particular employee, because if that was the case he would have been removed from his job a lot sooner,” Paz added.
Olmert’s associates said “we know nothing on the topic, and you need to ask the Shin Bet for information.”
The Shin Bet said in response that “according to our security guidelines, and in light of relevant security information in the Shin Bet’s possession, the worker’s employer was advised to transfer him to a different work place.”
Deir Yassin’s inextinguishable fire: The Electronic Intifafda
Dina Elmuti writing from Deir Yassin, Palestine, Live from Palestine, 9 April 2010
“They will not criminalize us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticize us, churn us out as systemized, institutionalized, decent law-abiding robots. We refuse to lie here in dishonor!”
– Bobby Sands, Provisional Irish Republican Army
It’s as if the very moment I passed by Bab al-Amud or Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City, I was transported back in time to a forbidden place, a place I was forced to feel as though I was illegally trespassing through just by gazing at it, a place now belonging to others. “This place you talk about no longer exists. It’s been long gone.” That’s what they continue to say with such impunity and disregard, but those sentiments of deterrence wouldn’t stop me. They never had before, and they wouldn’t stand a chance now. I was determined to go back, to see it all again with my own eyes, to capture every sight so the memories would be engraved in my head forever, despite any and all pretentious constructions that would be made without our permission. Despite all the renovations and reconstructions to make it “their own,” it would always be Deir Yassin to me.
“Deir Yassin,” she says with a sadness, a sense of loss in her eyes each time she speaks of the atrocious day she lost her home. “Deir Yassin,” she says with a childlike innocence in her voice as she recalls sweet memories before her entire world was completely denatured by evil. “Deir Yassin,” the imperishable words of my grandmother continue to resonate with me each day for she made me promise to never forget, and that’s a promise I intend to keep to her.
I followed the imperiously-placed road signs leading to Givat Shaul until the memories began flooding back, one by one. With no place to park, I took the chance of leaving the yellow-plated car on the side of the road, near the abandoned blue fence so I would be able to step back in time on foot. In the cool breeze of that afternoon, standing on the ledge overlooking the Har HaMenuchot cemetery in scenic view of the Jewish Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, I inhaled deeply and digested the view of what was now known as Givat Shaul. As I stood there taking in the surreal surroundings of Mount Herzl and Yad Vashem, I was overcome by emotions as the tales of my grandmother soon came to life right before my very eyes.
“See right there,” she pointed behind me, “that was my father’s stone quarry, and there’s the grain mill.” For as long as I live, I’ll never forget the look on her face, the way her lips quivered, the way she tapped her tired fingers on her chest with such pride, and the high pitch in her voice as she spoke with such nostalgia. As a little girl, she played house with her friends at the nearby monastery surrounded by fig, almond and apple trees, just as any child would do, oblivious to the tragedy that awaited them. At eight years old though, her childhood was no longer one free of trauma and injustice. In less than a day, she was forced to leave everything she had ever known behind, taking nothing with her but the clothes on her back. Sixty-two years ago, she had once called this place home. This was home, and without her knowledge, her permission, or her right, it was all taken away. Someone else callously decided it was no longer hers to claim. The thought of that still makes me feel as though I’ve been kicked repeatedly in the stomach.
It’s difficult to return to Deir Yassin without suddenly becoming transfixed by the blatant ethnic cleansing and hypocrisy lying on the very ground once belonging to the native Palestinians who called this very ground home less than seven decades ago. Chilling tales and memories have allowed Deir Yassin to live on in the hearts and minds of countless worldwide, allowing it to be deemed as so much more than just a name associated with death, destruction and pillaging. Deir Yassin will continue to resonate as a lesson of resilience and determination to never forget.
Before walking back to the car and bidding my farewell to Deir Yassin once again, I stood on the ledge overlooking Mount Herzl with the hope of trying to absorb and digest all that I had seen that day. Standing there captivated by all that I had taken notice of this time, I couldn’t help but feel as though my blood began to boil. Looking onto the grand, monumental view of Yad Vashem erected to honor those who so unjustly lost their lives in the Holocaust, I stood on the land where my own family too lost their livelihoods and lives so unjustly without so much as a marker to honor them. A mile away from Deir Yassin sits a memorial to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, to remind the world of the inhumanity that took place with such impunity. Today, it continues to remind the world of the atrocities that took place with a timeless, ubiquitous message of “never to forget man’s inhumanity to man.”
I can’t help but feel as though the overwhelming irony is shamelessly mocking me as I stand there on the other side of Yad Vashem in Deir Yassin, where a massacre took place 62 years ago. I stood there honoring those whose names don’t appear in a museum, whose voices are rarely, if ever, heard in the media, and whose legacies are insolently ignored and omitted from textbooks and classrooms, rendering them invisible to so many in the world. Standing there, I wonder if those who visit the museum look over to the other side and even know what occurred there some 60 years ago, whether or not they question what happened, and whether or not they feel any sympathy like they do for their own. Deir Yassin carries with it such magnitude, for it is not just the story of a massacre, but the story of two peoples — the victims and the victims of those victims — whose fates allowed them to be conjoined on stolen land.
Wiped off the post-1948 maps of Israel, Deir Yassin can never and will never be wiped out of the minds of Palestinians worldwide, those under occupation and those in the diaspora. No matter how the maps and signs are altered, I will always find a way back to Deir Yassin, because it is my moral responsibility to return and keep its legacy alive. This is where I come from. This is where my family, who are still alive and well to remember, suffered. This is where injustice took place, and I will never forget. After all, it was Simon Wiesenthal who said that “hope lives when people remember,” when observing the suffering of the Jews at the hands of injustice. Likewise, the suffering of the Palestinians deserves to be dignified as well. As any people who have been subjugated and oppressed, Palestinians too will hold on to their relentless refusal to concede and forget.
Despite all the agony, anguish and traumatizing memories that have echoed with her throughout her life, my grandmother’s eyes still light up just at the sound of hearing Deir Yassin. Today, this place that’s been associated with such pain and suffering to so many continues to instill such pride and joy in her. I’ve never known such strength and resilience, but I hope to learn from it every single day.
So, today, I commemorate the 62nd anniversary of the Deir Yassin Massacre. Commemorating Deir Yassin is not to create a sadistic exploitation of the suffering of a people. It is a reminder to us all that injustice did take place there, and that it is our responsibility to remember that the atrocities and intolerance we see and hear about today had their inception with Deir Yassin. Deir Yassin, which catapulted the Nakba, our catastrophe, is an undeniable marker of unabashed injustice, and it will continue to deter any prevarication and the notion that “ignorance is bliss.” Deir Yassin signifies that Palestinians existed and still exist, and we will never give up without a fight.
David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was mistaken when he arrogantly asserted that “the old will die and the young will forget,” for he underestimated the indomitable will of the Palestinian people. Despite heartache, pain and suffering, we will never relinquish a dream so imbedded in our hearts and minds. Yes, the old may die, but the young will never able to forget, and to paraphrase Bobby Sands, “our revenge will be the laughter of our children,” those who will carry on this dream and fight for justice. This dream will live on in the hearts of generation after generation; it is an inextinguishable fire burning inside our hearts, and what we say today will be our lifelong commitment to it.
Dina Elmuti is a graduate student in the Masters in Social Work program at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
NYT Bronner Tries A Less Biased Path to Reporting on Palestine –and Trips Up: The Only DEmocracy?
April 9th, 2010, by Carol Sanders
As the New York Times long-standing Jerusalem bureau chief, with primary responsibility for reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Ethan Bronner has endured bruising criticism for pro-Israeli bias, recently exacerbated by charges of conflict of interest upon the revelation that his son has been inducted into the Israeli army.
So Bronner craned his journalistic neck to peek at things from another perspective with a front-page story called “Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance,” and you know right away from that headline that he’s got it wrong.
Bronner makes several big mistakes. First, he ignores the long history of Palestinian nonviolent struggle against colonization, beginning in the 1930’s, and characterizes current nonviolent protest against the Occupation in the West Bank as a “new approach.” And second, he credits the movement entirely to the efforts of Fatah political leadership and the business community:
Something is stirring in the West Bank. With both diplomacy and armed struggle out of favor for having failed to end the Israeli occupation, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, joined by the business community, is trying to forge a third way: to rouse popular passions while avoiding violence. The idea, as Fatah struggles to revitalize its leadership, is to build a virtual state and body politic through acts of popular resistance
The facts are the opposite–Fatah officials are Johnny-come-latelies to the grassroots nonviolent movement in the West Bank that began with construction of the Wall in 2002, led not by politicians but by popular committees.
Finally, Bronner declares:
Nonviolence has never caught on here, and Israel’s military says the new approach is hardly nonviolent.
Now Bronner is back in known territory — where Israel’s military gets to define what violent is, and Bronner gets to make pronouncements about Palestinian intransigence, without attribution or analysis or any other basis for his conclusions.
In his post in Mondoweiss on Bronner’s article, Alex Kane makes reference to several books that could have educated Bronner about the facts of nonviolent resistance in Palestine, including Rashid Khalidi’s “The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood”, and Neve Gordon’s “Israel’s Occupation.” To this I would add Mary Elizabeth King’s “A Quiet Revolution,” and Professor Joel Beinin’s article in The Nation, ”Building a Different Middle East”, for an overview of the expanding nonviolent movement in villages throughout the West Bank, and the participation of Israeli and International activists in that struggle.
Here’s hoping Mr. Bronner continues down the path of telling the Palestinian side of the story to the American people, this time armed with facts and a more open mind.
Singling out Israel is the right thing to do: The Berkeley Daily Planet
By Yaman Salahi
Thursday April 08, 2010
Two weeks ago, UC Berkeley’s student senate made a historic 16-4 decision to divest from General Electric and United Technologies, two American companies that profit from the Israeli occupation. A week later, the student body president vetoed the bill, citing its “focus on a specific country,” Israel. His veto echoed identical claims by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, that “in a world filled with human rights abuses across Africa, Asia and the Americas, the UC Berkeley students vote to single out Israel for censure is hypocritical.”
As the international movement calling for Palestinian freedom and urging boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel grows, this particular defense will likely become more pronounced. Thus, it merits a response so that its troubling implications for people who organize for justice and human rights can be cast aside once and for all. So: what does it mean to “single out Israel,” and is it really “hypocritical” to do so?
Under one meaning, it is unclear how anyone could ever do, say, or think anything pertaining to Israel without necessarily “singling out” Israel. Anytime one talks about Israel one must, by definition, “single out” Israel — whether cognitively or linguistically. In that sense, “singling out” means focusing in some way on its actions. For example, for decades the US Congress “singled out” Israel to receive the largest share of the United States’ foreign aid budget, amounting over the past half-century to more than all aid to sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean combined. [1]
Under another meaning, the critic might be claiming that divestment “singles out” Israel unfairly. In order to assess that claim, one must look at the merits of criticisms toward Israeli policy to see if they are fair. What are these criticisms? Namely, that Israel repeatedly engages in gross violations of human rights and international law. The evidence for such claims comes from sources as numerous, varied, and reputable as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee on the Red Cross, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, B’Tselem, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, the Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights, Reporters Without Borders, the European Union, and finally, the United Nations General Assembly. In the face of such evidence, any claim that there is no basis on which to fairly “single out” Israel requires a remarkable amount of self-delusion or deliberate ignorance.
Under a third meaning, the critic could be saying that “singling out” Israel for criticism is unfair because while Israel is under scrutiny, other human rights violators are off the hook. But is it really true that those who report on Israel never hold other violators to task for their actions? In addition to extensive documentation of Israeli human rights abuses, every single organization above, without exception, has also documented and investigated claims about other parties. Some even have reports about nearly every country in the world. These organizations are not above criticism or scrutiny, but they also do not have reputations for dishonesty. While these organizations are routinely cited when discussing human rights violations in Darfur, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Burma, Russia, and China, just to name a few – it is only their criticism of Israel that is deemed “unfair,” “biased,” or “one-sided.” Who, then, is “singling out” Israel, and why?
There are certainly anti-Semites who criticize Israel because they are racist, but these marginal people simply do not characterize those organizations mentioned above, the Palestinian people, or those of us in the international movement to boycott Israel for its long-standing human rights abuses. Indeed, refusing to address fair claims because of the occasional unfair accuser removes the anti-Semites from the margins and sacrifices the entire system of rights and the majority who support it at their altar.
Under a final meaning, the critic could be claiming that “singling out” Israel for divestment is unfair, because divestment does not target every other country that also violates human rights. This argument is disingenuous. On its face, it appears to advocate for greater action on more human rights issues. In practice, however, it is deployed in order to silence those who would call for greater action in the face of Israeli war crimes and other violations of Palestinian rights under international law. Indeed, many of those who argue that divestment “singles out” Israel have no similar reservations when applying economic and political pressure to other countries and conflicts, such as Darfur.
As Naomi Klein has written, divestment is not a dogma: it’s a tactic. Up against powerful state and corporate actors, civil society must focus its energies for collective actions such as boycott or divestment to succeed. Such was the case when companies that enabled the South African apartheid regime were targeted for divestment. A similar campaign succeeded regarding Darfur, and today another campaign is underway against Sri Lanka for its continuing oppression of the Tamil people. In all three cases those nations were or are singled out for divestment while at the same time other injustices loomed in the world. To do so made tactical sense while re-inforcing the principle that companies are legitimate targets for boycott and divestment wherever they are integral actors in a system of oppression. When all other measures fail, consumers and investors have one last recourse: to chose to spend and invest their money elsewhere. For many around the world, this is the best way to intervene against Israel’s systematized racism and oppression of the Palestinian people.
Those who believe that confronting Israel is unfair are themselves relying on an unacceptable double standard, “singling out” Israel, so to speak, as the one country expressly permitted to wantonly attack and persecute its minority citizens and subjects while the rest of the world passively watches. However, there can be only one universal standard of human rights. Privileging one state or actor over all others to remove it from accountability creates double standards that undermine the integrity of social justice activism all over the world. No one who chooses to engage in war crimes, colonization or human rights violations should expect the complicity of people around the world. Today, more than ever, is the time to single out Israel for criticism and boycott – not because it is the only purveyor of injustice in the world, or even necessarily the worst – but because no other international institution has succeeded in stopping the injustices against the Palestinians that continue to unfold before our eyes and in the full light of history.
[1]“In fact, from 1949 through 1997, the total of U.S. aid to all of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean combined was $64,127,500,000—considerably less than the $71,077,600,000 Israel received in the same 1949 through 1997 time period. According to the Population Reference Bureau of Washington, DC, in mid-1999 the sub-Saharan and Latin American and Caribbean countries have a combined population of 1.142 billion people, while Israel’s mid-1999 population is 6.1 million people.“ Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
Yaman Salahi, a UC Berkeley alumnus and member of Students for Justice in Palestine, is currently a student at Yale Law School.