EDITOR: The Clouds Gather Around Israeli Intransigence
It seems not all is going well for Israel’s newish, even more extreme government than the usual one. While they keep expanding the settlements, building the apartheid wall, and killing more and more Palestinians as if there is no tomorrow, some storm clouds have gathered around them, and others are continuously added. It seems clear that the Gaza murderous offensive has clearly changed the stakes for this brutal regime, and that its days of supremacy are numbered.
This should give us no false hopes, though. It is exactly when the failing empires are cornered, that they become totally inscrutable, wild and gung-ho, and dangerous in the extreme to anyone around them, or under their control. The following months are ones of the gravest danger in the Middle East.
Robert Fisk: Hizbollah’s silence over Scuds speaks volumes to Israel: The Independent
Fears of conflict escalate as group refuses to discuss its arsenal with Jerusalem – or the Lebanese government
Friday, 16 April 2010
If Lebanon had a US-style colour-coded “war-fear” alert ranging from white to purple, we are now – courtesy of Israeli president Shimon Peres, the White House spokesman and the head of the Lebanese Hizbollah militia, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah – hovering somewhere between pink and red.
Has Syria given the Hizbollah a set of Scud ground-to-ground missiles to fire at Israel? Can Israeli aircraft attack them if the Hizbollah also possess anti-aircraft missiles? Can the Lebanese army take these weapons from the Hizbollah before the balloon goes up?
It is a long-standing saga, of course, and Israel has been itching to get its own back on the world’s most disciplined guerrilla movement. You can forget al-Qa’ida when it comes to Hizbollah’s effectiveness – after the Israeli army’s lamentable performance in 2006, when it promised to destroy the Hizbollah and ended up, after the usual 1000-plus civilian dead, pleading for a ceasefire. Over the past few months, Mr Nasrallah has been taunting the Israelis to have another go, promising that an Israeli missile attack on Beirut airport will be followed by a Hizbollah rocket attack on Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport.
But over the past week, a warning by Mr Peres that the Hizbollah has received Scud missiles from Damascus – or via Syria from Iran – and a refusal by the Hizbollah to even discuss its own disarmament within a Lebanese “national dialogue” chaired by the Lebanese President, Michel Suleiman, has darkened the spring skies over both Lebanon and Israel. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said this week that the United States has expressed its concern to both the Syrian and Lebanese governments over “the sophisticated weaponry that … is allegedly being transferred”. Mr Peres started the whole thing off a day earlier when he declared that “Syria claims it wants peace while at the same time it delivers Scuds to Hizbollah, whose only goal is to threaten the state of Israel.”
These hootings and trumpetings have always had a strong element of hypocrisy about them. The Scuds – even if Hizbollah has them – are as out-of-date as they are notoriously inaccurate. In the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein’s Scuds caused fewer than a hundred deaths. The more Peres thunders about the danger they represent, the more Hizbollah’s allies in Iran – supposedly trying to build a nuclear weapon – take pride of place in public imagination over the continued and illegal Israeli colonisation of Palestinian land.
As for Mr Nasrallah, he promised only a year ago that Hizbollah’s disarmament could not be discussed by the Lebanese government – only during the so-called “national dialogue”. And now the “national dialogue” has begun, the organisation has made it clear that it has no intention of discussing disarmament with other Lebanese political parties.
The problems are legion. Hizbollah is itself represented in the Lebanese parliament, and under the Doha agreement which followed Hizbollah’s one-day military takeover of west Beirut in May of 2008, it also has an effective veto over majority decisions taken by the Lebanese cabinet. And even if the Shia Muslim Hizbollah’s opponents in the Cabinet – they are largely Sunni Muslim with a prominent Christian contingent – ordered the Lebanese army to take weapons from the militia, they would be unable to do so for one simple reason. At least half the army – possibly two-thirds – are themselves Shia Muslims, and would obviously object to attacking the homes of brothers, sons and fathers in the Hizbollah.
A clue to the seriousness with which everyone now takes the possibility of war is contained in a remark made by an anonymous US spokesman who warned that the transfer of Scud missiles to Hizbollah would represent a “serious risk” to Lebanon. Not to Israel, mark you – but to Lebanon. There is no doubt that this is an allusion to frequent threats from the Israelis themselves that in another war with Hizbollah, the Lebanese government would be held responsible and as a result Lebanon’s infrastructure would be destroyed.
This does not sound so bad in Lebanon as it does elsewhere. For in its last Lebanese war – the fifth since 1978 – the Israelis blamed the Lebanese government for Hizbollah’s existence and smashed up the country’s roads, bridges, viaducts, electricity grid and civilian factories, as well as killing well over 1,000 civilians. Israel’s casualties were in the hundreds, most of them soldiers. What worse can Israel do now against the ruthlessness of the Hizbollah, even after the accusations of war crimes levelled against its equally ruthless rabble of an army?
Iran: Bridgeable differences: The Guardian Editorial
Friday 16 April 2010
From every conceivable viewpoint except Tehran’s, the International Atomic Energy Agency is no closer to defusing the crisis over Iran’s continued enrichment of uranium. President Obama’s deadline has come and gone. The offer to process the majority of Iran’s enriched uranium in Russia and France is still on the table, but as Iran does not trust a US-backed process to deliver the reactor fuel it says it needs, it has begun its own production of 20% enriched uranium. This takes it closer to becoming a nuclear break-out state, capable of producing a bomb. The Senate Armed Services Committee heard on Wednesday that Iran could produce enough fuel for one bomb in a year, but would need from two to five years to manufacture a workable warhead.
The US is lumbering towards a new round of sanctions, but with China’s concerns about its future supplies of oil and Shanghai-based companies fulfilling Pakistan’s former role as a supplier of dual-use equipment, it is doubtful how effective sanctions will be. President Hu Jintao said this week he would join negotiations over sanctions, but he did not say he would back them. There is only one sign of progress. Each time US generals talk about the military option, which Israel has pushed for, they are more dismissive of it. And if Centcom really believes that enduring hostilities between Israel and its neighbours represent “distinct challenges” to the US ability to advance its interests in the Middle East, how much truer would that proposition be if you are a US soldier in southern Iraq or Afghanistan, in the aftermath of a strike by Israeli jets on Iran’s nuclear facilities? The crack that has begun to open between Israel and Washington on the stalled peace process would overnight become a canyon.
Two analysts at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) have argued that the international community should accept Iran’s current counter-offer, which is to have the fuel swap (low-enriched uranium for fuel elements) but keep it on Iranian soil. Ivanka Barzashka and Ivan Oelrich say that in haggling over details we are losing sight of the goal, which would be to make it more difficult, not easier, for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. The breakthrough was Iran’s agreement to a fuel swap, not where it should happen. Agreeing to a fuel swap on Iranian soil would be a way of stopping the Iranian nuclear countdown, provided it stopped production of 20% uranium. And if it didn’t, it would be more evidence both of Mr Obama’s commitment, and of Iran’s real intentions. Both would be useful in persuading China and Russia.
There are both political and technical problems with this approach. It would be another concession, another “final” offer, which might well induce Iran to think it could extract more – such as allowing its fuel to be handed over in batches rather than in one go. There would be contingent problems over timing and transparency. However, the longer the current impasse continues, the more it plays into the hands of those who push for extreme solutions. The US and Iran are currently engaged in an international beauty contest. After Mr Obama’s attempts to close down the channels of nuclear proliferation, Iran is to host its own conference on nuclear disarmament, entitled “Nuclear energy for everyone, nuclear arms for no one”. China, Russia, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Oman and Turkmenistan have already confirmed their participation, but it should be interesting to see at what level. The proof of US attempts to isolate Iran should come at the review conference of the non-proliferation treaty next month.
We are back to a familiar game of diplomatic brinkmanship, but one cannot help thinking that if sanity were to break out it would be in a form not too far away from the FAS’s version. The gaps are bridgeable. There is, unfortunately, much that could happen in the Middle East to derail that outcome.
Ahmadinejad: Israel has nukes while Iran banned from nuclear energy: Haaretz
Israel’s nuclear arsenal is safeguarded by the United States, while Iran is prevented from establishing its peaceful nuclear energy program, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at the opening of the First International Conference on Disarmament and Non-Proliferation in Tehran, Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported on Saturday.
The conference, meeting under the slogan “Nuclear Energy for All, Nuclear Weapons for No One,” was kicked off early Saturday, and included 10 foreign ministers, 14 deputy foreign ministers as well as nuclear experts from 60 countries.
China is to be represented at the conference by a low-ranking Foreign Ministry official and Russia by a deputy minister.
The conference is focused on disarmament, but analysts said a main aim would be another effort by Iran to persuade the international community that its nuclear projects are solely for peaceful and civilian purposes.
Referring to Israel’s alleged nuclear program, Ahmadinejad said that “the Zionist regime which has over 200 nuclear warheads and has waged several wars in the region is fully supported by Washington and its allies.”
“This is while other states are prevented from making peaceful use of nuclear energy,” the Iranian president added.
Addressing the conference’s aims, Ahmadinejad said that “wars, aggressions, occupation, threats, nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction and expansionist policies of certain countries have made the prospect of regional and international security as unclear and ambiguous.
The Iranian president also criticized the performance of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), saying that the UN nuclear watchdog has been turned to a tool for exerting pressure on those countries which have no nuclear weapons.
“Expecting those countries which have the veto right and are big sellers of weapons in the world to establish security and to disarm other states is illogical,” Ahmadinejad said according to IRNA, suggesting the formation of a new group that would supervise global nuclear disarmament.
“[That] group should suspend membership of those countries possessing, using and threatening use of nuclear weapons at the IAEA and its Board of Governors,” the Iranian President said.
Also Saturday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Islam forbade the use of nuclear weapons, saying that while the United States urged the reduction of the worldwide nuclear arsenal, it had taken no real steps toward achieving that aim.
In a statement read by aides at the opening of the nuclear disarmament conference headed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Khamenei said that United States was still the only nation to commit what he called “atomic crimes.”
Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeid Jalili, also criticized the United States for its double-standard approach to nuclear disarmament.
“The U.S. is itself guilty of having used atomic weapons in Japan and can, therefore, not be a supervisor of countries using peaceful nuclear technology,” said Jalili, who is also secretary of Iran’s National Security Council. “The world should not allow nuclear criminals to have a supervising role.”
Jalili blamed the U.S. and its allies for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and insisted that all nuclear projects by Iran were in line with the treaty and IAEA regulations.
On Friday, Iranian IRNA news agency quoted Lebanon’s Foreign Minister Ali Shami International sa sayig that the pressure exerted by the international community on Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program” could have “drastic impacts on the Middle East peace.”
According to the IRNA report, Shami added that “contrary to Israel which has many nuclear arsenals, Iran seeks a peaceful nuclear program.”
Syria FM: Israel’s nukes are Mideast’s gravest threat
Israel’s nuclear warheads are the Middle East’s biggest threat, IRNA quoted Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid Al-Muallem as saying at the onset the nuclear disarmament conference in Tehran on Saturday.
Speaking to reporters, Al-Muallem said that Israel was the biggest nuclear threat in the Middle East, alleging that the “Zionist regime” had “been stockpiling nuclear warheads.”
The Syria FM called the Terhan conference a “very good opportunity for countries to try to bring to life the mottos on the disarmament issue,” adding he hoped “the meeting will create a firm will in the world on nuclear disarmament.”
Also commenting on the subject of Israel’s supposed nuclear program Saturday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari called for inspecting Israeli nuclear installations by international bodies.
“Iraq is the victim of the past policies and ignoring international commitments,” Zebari told IRNA, adding that “Baghdad condemns making use of weapons of mass destruction and believes in combating nuclear weapons.”
The Iraqi FM reiterated that the “Iraqi government is interested in a Mideast free from nuclear weapons and calls for annihilation of weapons of mass destruction.”
On Friday, IRNA quoted Lebanon’s Foreign Minister Ali Shami International sa sayig that the pressure exerted by the international community on Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program” could have “drastic impacts on the Middle East peace.”
According to the IRNA report, Shami added that “contrary to Israel which has many nuclear arsenals, Iran seeks a peaceful nuclear program.”
The Lebanon FM urged the international community to force the United Nations Security Council to pressure Israel to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, adding that Lebanon accepted “Tehran’s invitation and will attend the highly important conference which will focus on nuclear disarmament worldwide.”
The Palestinian Authority’s skin-deep makeover: The Guardian CiF
The Palestinian government’s latest PR drive looks like little more than a tactical attempt to dispel its ‘collaborator’ image
Rachel Shabi, Saturday 17 April 2010
It looks as though the Palestinian Authority (PA), sick of being slated as an Israeli puppet, is trying to reinvent itself as the People’s Authority.
The PA has upped support for some models of “popular resistance”, with increasing numbers of officials turning up to demonstrate at various events such as at the weekly anti-wall protests in the West Bank villages of Bil’in and Na’alin. Of course, Fatah officials have been attending weekly village protests at Bil’in for several years – but the authority as a body seems to be making its commitment more vocal of late.
Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Fatah-controlled West Bank, appeared at Qarawat Bani Hassan village, near Qalqilya, for the recent Land Day commemorations and photogenically worked a horse-drawn plough – intended as a statement in an area that is under Israeli control according to Oslo rules.
He will be one of the speakers at Bil’in’s fifth annual conference on popular resistance next week.
Meanwhile, the PA has launched a campaign to boycott settlement goods – “Your Conscience, Your Choice,” read the billboard ads – estimated by the Palestinian economics minister to represent between $200m and $500m (£130m-£325m) in West Bank sales. The authority has drafted laws to prevent Palestinian employment in those same illegal Israeli settlements. And it has just prohibited the sale of Israeli mobile SIMs and top-up cards, because the phone networks plant signal towers in West Bank settlements.
Could these recent measures earn the PA a surge of popular support? Many do praise the PA’s campaigns as positive, necessary steps – and the nonviolent direct action campaigners I spoke with welcomed the endorsement.
But at the same time, there’s a worry that this is just a tactic, not a strategy – and one likely to be pursued only as long as negotiations with Israel are at an impasse.
“For us, nonviolent direct action is a way of life,” says Bethlehem campaigner Ahmed al-Azah. “It is not just a trend that the PA can back now, and then put pressure on us later when the Americans persuade them to resume negotiations.”
Also, the PA’s appetite for protest seems picky: it was PA forces, for instance, that recently helped to disperse demonstrations in Bethlehem.
The PA has definite ideas about the right kind of protest – nothing that might be construed as support for Hamas, for instance, which explains why demonstrations against Israeli’s assault on Gaza last year were dispersed by PA forces.
But even this prescribed list of support-worthy demonstrations is too much for Israel, which has already asked the PA to drop support for popular protest and voiced concern over a “Fayyad intifada”.
Meanwhile, the campaign to ban settlement products is popular but some wonder: why stop there? “We should boycott all Israeli goods, just as they already boycott our products by not allowing them to pass, not even to Palestinian Jerusalem,” says Stop the Wall campaign coordinator Jamal Juma. Israeli and Palestinian authorities are bound by Oslo-era treaties that guarantee the free-flow of trade – but in practice that’s a one-way system: Israeli goods flood the Palestinian market, while Palestinian exports are blocked by checkpoints, closures and other restrictions.
Time and again, Palestinians have said that what they most want from the PA is for it to form a unity government with Hamas. They urge the PA not to honour asymmetrically past agreements with Israel, since that manifestly has not created statehood or any sense of freedom for Palestinians. And they repeatedly question why the PA should comply with Israel’s security demands when the Israeli army can still violate the PA’s scope by routinely raiding the West Bank and rounding up Palestinians.
“People don’t want just food or economic prosperity,” says one Palestinian campaigner, of the trade-off the PA appears to have made. “They want security – and the main threat is Israel.”
But the PA continues to accept the restraints that bind it, unable or unwilling to break them. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why the graffiti in Nablus urges resistance to the “fake, American-imposed government”. By opting to be the preferred government of the Middle East quartet and Israel, by complying with all those accompanying, belittling and disempowering demands, the PA is backed into a corner – and it will take more than small tactical shifts to clean up its contaminated image.
As a democracy, how can Israel censor citizens’ right to know?: Haaretz
By Akiva Eldar
Yes, said attorney Floyd Abrams immediately. Of course the Anat Kamm-Haaretz affair reminds me of the Pentagon Papers-New York Times affair. The well-known American lawyer was only 35 when a federal injunction was issued to his client – the most important newspaper in the world – to cease publication of classified documents that revealed the lies told by the Pentagon to justify an escalation of its involvement in the Vietnam War. The source of that information also believed he was working on behalf of his country’s real security interests; the Times, too, protected its source. However, unlike the secret army order to execute Palestinian suspects, the Pentagon papers were published without any need for permission from a military censor.
In the United States, as in most enlightened and democratic countries, there is no military censorship. The Pentagon Papers affair erupted in 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg, an employee of the RAND Corporation, a research institute, leaked to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan scores of secret documents showing that top officials in the American administration were sending more and more soldiers to their death in a war they knew was futile. After the Times refused to stop publication of a series of articles on the subject of its own volition, president Richard Nixon ordered attorney general John Mitchell to issue a federal injunction prohibiting their continued publication, on the grounds that the stories were causing serious harm to national security. However, the Supreme Court accepted the newspaper’s appeal and allowed publication of the documents in full. Two years later, a court acquitted Ellsberg of charges of espionage and theft of government documents.
Eight years ago, in an interview he gave on the occasion of the publication of his book, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,” Ellsberg said that if people “have documents indicating that the [government] is lying the public into such a war, they should take those documents to the Congress and to the press, and tell the truth – even if it costs them their clearance, their job, their career, even if puts them in prison.” Floyd Abrams, who still handles First Amendment cases for the Times and who is married to an Israeli, is very familiar with the Israeli reality.
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“Security can be defended in a variety of ways,” he explained in a telephone interview with Haaretz. “Armed force is one essential way, especially for a surrounded and threatened nation such as Israel. But no less important is the security that comes from an informed public, one that is both free enough and knowledgeable enough to challenge the behavior of its own government. Democratic nations such as Israel require both sorts of protection, and must take care not to sacrifice either.”
Abrams does not sound surprised that public discourse here is focusing on the messengers, rather than on substance. The 73-year-old Jewish attorney dubs the storm raging in the political and military establishment today around the Kamm-Blau affair “the Goldstone effect.” He understands that revelations about inappropriate behavior by military forces in the territories touch especially sensitive nerves in the establishment.
“Israel has always lived under a regime which involves a level of censorship,” he says, “and it is especially important to use the power to censor only in situations of genuine harm to national security, and not in a situation of particular embarrassment to the country or the government. In this case, I think the government’s train has run off the tracks in enforcing the censorship that we have seen here, in the manner that they did. I would say that what we have seen is that the nature of censorship is that it leads to more censorship. Keeping information secret and suppressing the publication of it, even when it is known to a newspaper, leads to more of the same and even less information being made available to the public.”
The lawyer proposes making a clear distinction between the way the security authorities should deal with Anat Kamm herself, and the way they should deal with the information she revealed. Abrams insists information is legitimate even if it has been obtained in illegitimate ways – unless it indeed deals with matters of highest national security.
“I think that someone who is aware of significant wrongdoing,” he explains, “ought to come forward and try to stop it and the most obvious way is by revealing it: like Daniel Ellsberg.”
According to Abrams, the information Kamm disclosed “is a good example of something that the public should know about. If there’s a violation of rulings of the Supreme Court embodied in orders to Israel Defense Forces soldiers – that is the sort of info that ought to be exposed to the public.”
Nevertheless, Abrams, considered one of the ultimate liberal authorities on freedom of speech, says that from the legal perspective, “A soldier who reveals information should not be in the army, and should be subject to punishment for violating her obligations as a soldier.”
According to him, American law would not have protected soldier Kamm after she decided to break the law. However, laws regarding espionage in the United States take into account the leaker’s intentions: The prosecution has to prove that he or she intended to harm his country or aid a foreign country.
Judith Miller case
Abrams also represented New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was sent to prison for three months in 2005 after she refused to reveal the source of secret information that came into her hands. And he agrees that when it comes to protecting journalists’ sources, the United States has little that it can teach Israel. Even in Britain, where the media generally enjoy less protection than in the United States, a journalist is entitled to prove that concealing the source serves the public better than revealing that person’s identity.
Congress is currently discussing legislation that would provide journalists greater protection from having to reveal their sources. In the Pentagon Papers affair, the Times refused to return to the authorities the 22 classified volumes of papers it had, since Ellsberg had left his fingerprints on them, Abrams notes: “We were fortunate that we had a creative judge, who worked out a compromise, so that we could simply disclose the identity of the documents without turning them over.”
Since that landmark affair, no U.S. administration (except once in a case during the Carter administration involving an article about how to make a hydrogen bomb) has tried to prevent publication of classified material.
“The lesson has been learned by people left and right,” Abrams says. “But it was a legal lesson, which was that it isn’t worth it to go to court to suppress newspaper articles.”
When told about the prevalent reactions on the Israeli street in the wake of the Kamm affair, it is clear that he is familiar with the situation. He is convinced that public opinion polls in his country would find that in “security cases” – and he cites the example of the illegal wiretappings by the Bush administration that were revealed by the Times – most of the public prefers not to know the truth.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Abrams said in an interview with a reporter for his client, the Times: “Hard times for the First Amendment tend to come at very hard times for the country. When we feel threatened, when we feel at peril, the First Amendment or First Amendment values are sometimes subordinated to other interests.”
“The unfortunate side of the event you are undergoing now,” observes Abrams, “is that the same government that made the decision to engage in the policy described in the Haaretz article [i.e., that written by reporter Uri Blau, who received his information from Kamm] is passing judgment on the propriety of the publication.”
The Zeira case
More than six years ago, three former top officials in Israel’s intelligence community gave the new attorney general at the time, Menachem Mazuz, an unusual letter. The three – former Mossad chief Zvi Zamir, Amos Gilboa, who was then head of the research division in the IDF Intelligence Directorate and Yossi Langotsky, a former senior intelligence officer – demanded that Mazuz open an investigation of former Military Intelligence head Eli Zeira, on suspicion of having leaked one of the deepest security secrets in the history of the country.
The officials claimed that Zeira, who was head of MI in the Yom Kippur War, had revealed the name of Mossad source Dr. Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian officer who had spied for Israel beginning in the late 1960s. On October 4, 1973, Marwan met with Zamir in London and informed him that the next day war would break out. Marwan, who was late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s son-in-law, was considered the top Egyptian agent handled by Israel during those years. Three years ago Marwan was found dead in the street after he fell, or was pushed, from the balcony of the apartment where he lived in central London.
Zamir accused Zeira publicly of a leak that caused grave security damage to Israel’s security. Justice Theodor Or, former vice president of the Supreme Court, was appointed to mediate in a libel suit Zeira subsequently filed against Zamir. At the beginning of 2007, Justice Or ruled that Zeira had indeed been responsible for the leak. After Marwan’s mysterious death, Zamir said he had no doubt the man had killed himself because Zeira had revealed his connections with the Mossad. Zeira was never arrested, however, and to this day, the State Prosecutor’s Office has not ordered the opening of an investigation against the 82-year-old Zeira.
This week I submitted a question to the new attorney general, Yehuda Weinstein, as to whether it was reasonable that more than six years later, the state had still not made a decision with respect to a serious leak by a former top IDF general. I reminded him that the Prosecutor’s Office had been swift to file an indictment against soldier Anat Kamm for leaking documents, even though the real harm of that act to the state is in doubt.
The office of the Justice Ministry spokesman replied in response that the decision to begin an investigation of Zeira was made only after completion of the civil proceeding between the sides, following the mediator’s ruling in 2007 (that is to say, nearly two and a half years ago). According to the spokesman, this was “in the wake of the request to open a complex and comprehensive investigation, accompanied by constraints connected to gathering information from individuals who were abroad. We hope a decision will be made as expeditiously as possible.”
The spokesman added: “The comparison between the two cases is not appropriate, because the cases are different from each other in many respects we cannot specify in this context.”
Lebensraum in the West Bank: Al Ahram
Israel’s latest scheme is ethnic cleansing by any other name, reports Khaled Amayreh from Ramallah
n a new provocative measure aimed at narrowing Palestinian horizons and consolidating the Israeli grip on the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel has issued new military orders that would enable the Israeli occupation army to deport thousands of Palestinians from their homes and places of residence in the West Bank.
The new orders define as “infiltrator” any Palestinian or non-Palestinian living in the West Bank but not bearing an Israeli-issued identity card or special permit issued by the Israeli occupation army.
Thus, even Palestinians who were born in the West Bank and have been living there all their lives, but are not in possession of Israeli documents, would be viewed as “infiltrators” who could be deported at a moment’s notice.
Moreover, under the new rules, violators could face immediate expulsion or be sentenced to up to seven years in prison.
A report on the new rules in the Israeli press this week pointed out that Israel would be able to deport tens of thousands of Palestinians. However, the report didn’t reveal the destination to which the prospective expellees would be deported.
In the past, Israel deported many Palestinians to Jordan and Lebanon. However, conditions have become considerably tougher for Israel to do it again, given the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty and the delicate situation on the Israeli-Lebanese borders especially since the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah.
The military order, which has gone into effect on Tuesday, will primarily target thousands of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip who have resided in the West Bank.
It also targets Palestinian returnees, many of whom are married to local spouses, who have returned to the occupied territory following the Oslo process and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Furthermore, it might target foreign peace activists who arrive in the West Bank to monitor Israeli violations of international law and encourage non-violent resistance against the Israeli occupation.
So far, Israeli government officials have refrained from commenting on the new rules and confirming or denying their existence. This silence, observers notice, may be intended to test Palestinian, Arab and international reactions before formally adopting the draconian measures on the ground.
Predictably, the new harsh rules have been strongly condemned by Palestinian and Arab officials as well as by human rights groups.
Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic resistance group, called the measure a “continuation of the systematic ethnic cleansing of our people which started in 1948”.
“At a time when Jews are commemorating the German holocaust, Israel is committing a silent holocaust against the Palestinian people,” said one Hamas spokesman in the West Bank, who did not want his identity to be known, apparently for fear that he might be arrested either by the Israelis or the PA regime.
Both Hamas and Fatah vowed to resist the new measures “proactively”, saying that deporting Palestinians from their ancestral homeland was tantamount to “ethnic cleansing”.
Salam Fayyad, the Western-favoured p rime minister of the PA government said the new measures contradicted international law as well as UN Security Council decisions which condemn forced deportations. “It is clear that with these measures Israel is trying to deepen the hold of its occupation in the West Bank and facilitating more Israeli land grabs.”
PA official Saeb Ereikat labelled the Israeli move “an assault on ordinary Palestinians, and an affront to the most fundamental principles of human rights. “The Palestinians have been morphed into criminals in their own homes.”
Mahmoud Abbas, the increasingly reticent PA president, has so far remained silent, ostensibly opting to raise the issue with the international community through diplomatic channels.
The Obama administration and the European Union have not reacted to the new Israeli provocations in the West Bank.
A Jordanian government spokesman said this week that Israel had assured Jordan that the new rule wouldn’t go into effect. However, there has been no confirmation of the veracity of the Jordanian spokesman’s statement either by Israel or the PA.
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa has also condemned the new Israeli measures, saying that “it is hard to establish peace in the region due to Israeli behaviour. We reject such measure and we call on the international community to bear responsibility.” Moussa said that an Arab League meeting will discuss the situation.
Last month, the Arab League held a summit meeting in Sirte, Libya, which focussed on the Palestinian cause and Israeli provocations, including the Judaising of East Jerusalem and the continued expansion of Jewish settlements. However, the outcome of the meeting was widely viewed as mediocre and generally ineffective, as a number of US regional allies pressed participants for mild resolutions that would allow for the continuation of the “peace process” under American auspices.
The stringent Israeli measure, which human rights activists say amounts to a declaration of war on Palestinian demography, has also been denounced by 10 Israeli civic and human rights groups which urged Defence Minister Ehud Barak to rescind the new rules.
The groups said the military orders in question were so vague and sweeping that virtually all West Bank inhabitants were potentially at risk. The groups argued that the military instructions didn’t define what permits were required to shield against deportation.
The new threatened spate of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in the West Bank coincides with the holocaust commemoration anniversary in Israel, an annual ritual meant to extort world sympathy and especially divert attention from Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, such as last year’s brutal onslaught against the Gaza Strip.
Some of Israel’s critics have compared the Israeli approach against the Palestinians, including the policy of deportation, with Nazi Germany’s notorious lebensraum policy (German for “living space”), a doctrine which prevailed in Germany in the early 20th century teaching that the country needed new land to expand in, especially towards the east.
Lebensraum became a major motivation for German territorial aggression after 1937. Israel increasingly refers to the West Bank, which the Israeli army occupied in 1967, as Eretz Yisrael (land of Israel). Sometime the same term is applied to Jordan which some Jewish leaders call “the eastern land of Israel”. (see p.6)
EDITOR: The Aant Kamm case reverberates around the world
When Alan Dershowitz has something to say against Israeli governemnt policy or actions, you can safely assume they are in deep trouble, so rare is this event…
Publish the truth, ask questions later: Haaretz
By Alan Dershowitz
When I first learned about this difficult case, the analogy that came to mind was the Pentagon Papers. I was a lawyer in the Pentagon Papers trial – I represented a U.S. senator and the publishing house that published the book version of the Pentagon Papers. I sided completely with the rights of The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish the papers even though they were classified.
The difference is that the material that was published by the Times and the Post raised no national security problems for the United States. It was historical material and went back to the origins of the great mistake that we call the Vietnam War. The government had lied when it told the court that publication would cost American lives. Governments often lie in situations of conflict. Governments often abuse national security claims and classification systems to protect themselves rather than the national security of the country.
Regarding the current case – I don’t know enough about what was disclosed. But it seems that it involves some real-time material that could have affected national security. The other difference is that in the United States there is no mechanism of national security censorship. The Times had to make its own judgments, without the benefit of a national/military censorship system.
In Israel, the important gate-keeping function is performed by the military censor, which – as I understand it – approved everything that was published by Haaretz. And in fact, another story had gone through the censor, which gave authorization for publication, when Haaretz subsequently received a phone call saying the censor had made a mistake, the paper didn’t publish the story. That should end any liability on the part of Haaretz, as the paper completely complied with its obligations.
With regard to its refusal to disclose its sources, I think Haaretz is also acting properly. The real question comes up in Haaretz’s decision to encourage Uri Blau not to return to the country. Under U.S. law, there is real controversy about whether it’s proper to urge somebody to remain out of the country. As a lawyer I would be concerned that advising a client to remain out of the country might step over the line and become an obstruction of justice.
Even if there was a probability that the person would be arrested on his or her return, many U.S. lawyers would deem it improper to advise a client to remain outside of the country. Also of relevance is whether the individual is technically a fugitive from justice. There are legal mechanisms by which Israel could seek Blau’s return from the United Kingdom, and I suggest that the only thing Haaretz may have done wrong wrong was in encouraging him to remain abroad. This, I believe, is the only vulnerability that Haaretz has.
Newspapers are right to protect confidentiality and promises to sources. Haaretz is acting properly in protecting its sources.
I don’t know whether or not Kamm has any legal defense. Her role is akin to that of Daniel Ellsberg’s. That’s not the important and interesting issue in the case, however. In a democracy, the important issue is the right of the media to publish what they have been given, even if someone did something wrong in obtaining it. The paper is not the police, and the media’s goal is to report the news, which can include confidential material that, in Israel’s case, has passed through military censorship.
I cannot be critical of Haaretz’s decision to publish the article, and I think it served democracy and the notion of free press.
Matter of timing
Ultimately in a democracy, nothing should be suppressed forever, but everything turns on timing. Assume you have a case in which a general gives an order for a military action that goes against regulations. If you publish information at the moment before something is about to happen, you endanger Israeli troops. So, the question is when, and of balancing the right of the public to know and the right of the government to protect national security.
Most militaries do not operate properly, and if the whole truth of military actions, about the way in which wars are waged, were to be disclosed, clearly, imperfections would be revealed. The press has an important role, as it promotes accountability. It is part of the system of checks and balances: Maintaining accountability, even in a democracy at war, is more important than avoiding embarrassment.
The gag order [on this case] was removed, so that’s a positive story. Israel has a system which is almost the same as the United Kingdom, which has dealt with similar problems. The United States also had similar problems related to over-use of classification. It is important to apply a single standard to everyone. Many Israelis are upset by the governmental intrusion of censorship, which is understandable, but in a situation of ongoing war, there have to be some guidelines. Israel, at its worst, is better than most democracies in the world, and the best of all democracies facing real-time threats.
The United States during World War II imposed far more stringent rules of censorship on reports of battles in the South Pacific, as did England. All democracies try to cover up mistakes through classification. Israel should be judged not by a standard of perfection, but by the reality of how countries deal with these challenges.
Government role
The government ought to pursue those who improperly accessed the material, and be extremely sensitive to the role of the press. Haaretz is in a difficult position as it is the most critical newspaper of the government, so the government has to be extremely sensitive with regard to it, and avoid taking it out on Haaretz because it disagrees with its political views, as I often do.
Haaretz is a jewel in the Middle East, due its right to publish such critical material, and this must be preserved. Of course, secrecy of military actions is important to preserve. There is room for postponing of publication until people are safe. Journalists define common sense differently from generals. There is a need for a neutral auditor making decisions on how to define sekhel [Hebrew for “common sense”] in times of ongoing military threats and [to] balance that with the need to inform the public. Haaretz does not necessarily have the sekhel alone to make the right decision. The public has the right to a balanced decision that reflects both the concerns of the country and the ultimate needs of the society.
I hope in the end the truth and the whole truth comes out, and that generally the truth can emerge without affecting national security.
Prof. Alan Dershowitz spoke to Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar by phone from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Report: Obama to push Israel to renew peace talks: YNet
Al-Sharq al-Awsat quotes Israeli sources in Paris as saying US president told French counterpart he does not plan to ease pressure on Israel to resume peace negotiations – even at cost of Congress elections
US President Barack Obama informed his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy that he plans to continue to pressure the Israeli government to resume peace talks with the Palestinians – even if this costs him in elections to Congress in November, al-Sharq al-Awsat quoted Israeli sources in Paris as saying.
The sources cited a western diplomat as saying the conversation between Obama and Sarkozy took place during the two’s meeting on the sidelines of the Washington nuclear summit earlier this week.
It was further reported that the two leaders spoke extensively of the standstill in peace negotiations, and that Sarkozy said he does not understand the cause of the ongoing conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis, especially since both parties’ stances have grown significantly close in recent years.
According to the report, Obama and Sarkozy agreed that the Israeli stance is what is causing failures in the peace process. At this point, Obama reportedly said, he is determined to invest all his efforts into restarting negotiations.
The Israeli sources quoted by the paper said Obama spoke of the US opposition’s position on the matter, which encourages Israel to reject his efforts. He also addressed attempts by opposition elements to pressure the White House and democratic Congress members via pro-Israel bodies in the US, implying that American pressure on the Israeli government may cost the party in the upcoming elections.
The al-Sharq al-Awsat report stressed that Obama is determined to push forward with his efforts to renew talks, at all costs.
The paper reported that, according to its sources, Obama told Sarkozy: “Myself, and the entire American administration and all of Israel’s friends around the world, are convinced that peace is an Israeli and Palestinian interest. But this is also in the interest of US security and the entire free world.”
Recently, increasing calls have been heard in Washington urging Obama to soften his attitude towards Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After 327 members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, demanding the crisis with Israel be resolved, earlier this week, 76 senators signed a letter to Clinton in which they urged her to “reaffirm the unbreakable bonds that tie the United States and Israel together and to diligently work to defuse current tensions.”