EDITOR: You Cannot Teach New Tricks to Old Dogs
Zionism. The more it changes, the more it stays the same… While pretending to speak of a ‘two-state solution’, they steam ahead for an ever-greater control of the Ocuppied Territories of Palestine. Waiting for war criminals to reform is never a good policy.
Israel tourism advert featured picture of Occupied Territories: The Independent
Watchdog criticises ‘misleading’ poster showing East Jerusalem
Wednesday, 14 April 2010
A reader complained that the printed advert featured a photograph of East Jerusalem and said it misleadingly implied that it was part of the state of Israel
The Israeli tourist office has been criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for including images of the Palestinian-run West Bank in an advert for a holiday in Israel.
The advert for the Israeli government’s Tourist Office stated that you could “travel the entire length of Israel in six hours”.
Images shown included the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock – the oldest Islamic building in the world, built in the seventh century. The area in East Jerusalem is at the centre of a dispute between Palestinians and Jews, with more than 500,000 Jews living in the disputed territories.
A reader complained that the printed advert featured a photograph of East Jerusalem and said it misleadingly implied that it was part of the state of Israel. The ASA said that the advert featured various landmarks that were in East Jerusalem which were part of the Occupied Territories.
It ruled that the advert breached truthfulness guidelines and ordered that it not be used again, adding: “We told the Israeli Tourist Office not to imply that places in the Occupied Territories were part of the state of Israel.”
It said: “The ASA noted the itinerary image of Jerusalem used in the ad featured the Western Wall of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, which were both in East Jerusalem, a part of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank.
“We noted the ad stated ‘You can travel the entire length of Israel in six hours – imagine what you can experience in four days’, and ‘Visit now for more itineraries in Israel’, and considered that readers were likely to understand that the places featured in the itinerary were all within the state of Israel.
“We understood, however, that the status of the occupied territory of the West Bank was the subject of much international dispute, and, because we considered that the ad implied that the part of East Jerusalem featured in the image was part of the state of Israel, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead.”
Israel’s Ministry of Tourism stated that the advert provided “basic, accurate information to a prospective UK traveller who wanted to know what to expect in Israel”.
It said that it was “entirely accurate to assert that a visitor to Israel could visit Jerusalem as part of a short visit”, adding: “Had the ad omitted a reference to a visit to the city of Jerusalem, it would have been incorrect and potentially misleading.”
In response to the complaint, the ministry said that Israel “took responsibility to support the religious sites of all denominations, a commitment which also formed part of the obligations of an agreement with the Palestinian Authority signed in 1995”. The ministry added that “the agreement placed the upkeep of holy sites and the determination of tourist visiting hours under Israeli jurisdiction”.
The ministry also maintained that the present legal status of Jerusalem had nothing to do with the point at issue.
It said this was “only of relevance if there was an attempt to interpret the straightforward message of the ad in a manner that went beyond what consumers were likely to understand from the ad.”
US officials slam pro-Israeli ads in American media: IOA
United States administration officials have voiced harsh criticism over advertisements in favor of Israel’s position on Jerusalem that appeared in the U.S. press with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s encouragement. The authors of the most recent such advertisements were president of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. “All these advertisements are not a wise move,” one senior American official told Haaretz.
United States administration officials have voiced harsh criticism over advertisements in favor of Israel’s position on Jerusalem that appeared in the U.S. press with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s encouragement. The authors of the most recent such advertisements were president of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. “All these advertisements are not a wise move,” one senior American official told Haaretz.
In the advertisement, Wiesel said that for him as a Jew, “Jerusalem is above politics,” and that “it is mentioned more than 600 times in Scripture – and not a single time in the Koran.” Wiesel called to postpone discussion on Jerusalem until a later date, when there is an atmosphere of security allowing Israeli and Palestinian communities to find ways to live in peace.
The ongoing confrontation with the U.S. administration over construction in East Jerusalem was present in many of the comments made by senior Israeli officials during Independence Day.
Netanyahu himself said in an interview to ABC that freezing construction in the east of the city was an impossible demand, and refused to answer questions on the Israeli response to demands from Washington. Instead, he called on Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas to return to the negotiating table without preconditions.
Foreign Minister Lieberman, meanwhile, made Jerusalem the focal point of his speech in a festive reception for the diplomatic corps at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem. President Shimon Peres spoke first, calling for progress in the diplomatic process. Lieberman, who took the podium immediately after Peres, made diametrically opposed statements in his speech, stressing that the Palestinian Authority is no partner for peace.
“Jerusalem is our eternal capital and will not be divided,” Lieberman said. Many of the ambassadors in the audience left feeling stunned and confused, some of them told Haaretz. “The gap between Peres and Lieberman is inconceivable,” one of them said. “We couldn’t comprehend how Lieberman can say all that in front of all the international community delegates.”
Speaking at the torch-lighting ceremony on Mount Herzl on Monday, Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin said that there was “an attack on Jerusalem” and that Israel “will not apologize for the building of Jerusalem, our capital.”
The diplomatic freeze and crisis with the Americans fueled a heated meeting of Labor Party ministers on Sunday. Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Isaac Herzog and Avishay Braverman told Defense Minister and party chairman Ehud Barak that unless there was some movement on the diplomatic front within weeks, the Labor Party should consider leaving the government or working to bring in Kadima.
Senior Labor officials, who declined to be named, said this was the first time the diplomatic freeze was being discussed between Labor ministers. “They main message coming from this discussion is that things can’t go on like this,” one senior Labor official told Haaretz. “The Labor ministers told Barak that we will be approaching a moment of political decision within weeks.”
Barak tried to calm the ministers, saying he was concerned by the state of Israeli-American relations and will travel to Washington next week for talks on the peace process. Barak appears to be set to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, special U.S. envoy George Mitchell and national security advisor General Jim Jones.
EDITOR: Who Will Free Israel from the Occupation?
Bradley Burston is asking to be freed from the occupation, quite rightly, and also does something about it. Unfortunately, he and his friends demonstrating every week in Sheikh Jarrah, are not enough to achieve this. It will take the international community itself, like it did in South Africa, to really achive this.
Declare Independence. Free Israel. End the Occupation: Haaretz
By Bradley Burston
Shimon the Tzadik, the righteous, the just, the saintly, was one of the last of the Great Knesset. He used to say: The world continues to exist because of three things: Torah, Worship, and Acts of Lovingkindness.
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Talmud, Pirkeh Avot
SHEIKH JARRAH, East Jerusalem – It’s taken us years and years, but we’ve finally realized the dream of every Israeli.
It was my wife who noticed. “I really like this,” she said one Friday as we left the house, “getting out and going to a foreign country every weekend.”
Our fellow Israeli Jews, inveterate world travelers that they are, literally go out of their way to avoid this place, which is called East Jerusalem. Some steer clear because it scares them, others simply because it feels so, well, foreign.
In the end, what they miss out on, is the view from here. If just once they’d make the trip. On a clear day, they could see their own future.
This is not just any neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Just as the settlers here, with their Baruch Goldstein celebrants, are not just any settlers, nor the anti-settlement protest held here each Friday, a demonstration like any other.
More than any other area of the Holy Land, this is the place where Israelis gather regularly to declare their independence from Occupation.
Here, because Sheikh Jarrah is where the settlement movement has come to die. The settlement named for Shimon the Just, is where the Occupation has begun to write its own ending.
Even the pro-settlement right has begun to realize that there is something different and dangerous here. That the circumstances of the creation of this settlement not only have the effect of turning all of Jerusalem into the status of a settlement, but of turning all of Israel into the status of Occupied Territory.
“The entrance of Jews to Sheikh Jarrah is a crazy and irresponsible act,” rightist Jerusalem City Councilman Yakir Segev was quoted as telling a Hebrew University panel discussion last week.
“It’s a terrible and crazy idea to open the question of ownership of properties from before 1948. It may open up a Pandora’s box,” Segev told Ynet, referring to the fact that Palestinians – even the families expelled to make way for the Sheikh Jarrah settlers – could reasonably ask courts to return them to land they owned until 1948 and had to flee, to homes which are now the homes of Jews in places like Jaffa and West Jerusalem.
“There are very wide-reaching repercussions and a reverse precedent may be set.”
Occupation is an ugly word. That is why people who support the idea of a Jewish state should use the term, and use it often. Because, on this, Israel’s 62nd independence day, the Occupation has to be identified for what it has become: Israel’s worst enemy.
Not Iran. Not Hamas or Hezbollah. All three would like to see Israel cease to exist. But our government has tools to fight them. Against the Occupation, though, the government is powerless.
For much of the last decade, this city was engulfed in fire. The pro-settlement right – let us, for once, call it what it is: the Movement for a Permanent Occupation – taught anyone who would listen, that it is peace moves that provoke terrorism; that it is the peace process that has led us, time and again, to war; that to question the act of settlement is to be anti-Israeli.
No more. This is where it has to stop. There is a name for the systematic burning of our bridges with the world, with our friends, with the majority of world Jewry, all for the sake of the settlements, all for the sake of permanent Occupation: Suicide.
Years past on Independence Day, I used to wonder if my generation would survive the Occupation.
Now I wonder if Israel will.
This is perhaps Israel’s most dismal Independence Day in memory. Not because of war. Nor terrorism, nor economic crisis.
In a country where polls show that nearly two-thirds of the population would cede the West Bank under a future peace deal, Israelis are hostages to the nightmare scenario of permanent Occupation.
Today, after 62 years of furious effort, Israelis and Palestinians are in many respects farther from true independence than ever before. The reason becomes clearer by the year. Both peoples are prisoners of the Occupation.
These people, my friends, the Israelis, now face the most difficult challenge in the history of their country. Their country is still young as nations go, but is aging dangerously with every passing year that the Occupation terrorizes us, invades us, roots itself, spreads, poisons the spirit and the soul.
Most of all, the Occupation has blinded smart people to its own dangers. The Occupation exploits our fears even as it magnifies the real threats against us. The Occupation feeds and fosters those who hate us. It is their secret weapon. It is our Achilles heel.
We know now that our government, our prime minister and defense minister, are prisoners of the Occupation as well, unable or unwilling to do what they know they must to safeguard Israel’s future.
That is why individual Israelis are going to have to do what they do best: Take action on their own.
It is not a large group that demonstrates here. But it is persistent, and growing. There are no speeches, and no hurled rocks. Only something which, thanks to the Occupation, is all but gone everywhere else in Israel: hope.
Will a serious battle against Occupation cause a deep rift in the Jewish People? Will it drive a wedge between all those who believe that the Jews, like other peoples, deserve a state of their own?
Too late. The Occupation has already been there, and done precisely that.
The Occupation has become the greatest single threat to the social fabric of the Jewish state. The Occupation causes division, strife, tension and alienation in Jewish families and Jewish communities the world over.
Nothing causes Israel more diplomatic damage than the Occupation, and its outrider, the siege of Gaza.
Nothing delegitimizes Israel more in the eyes of the world – and in the eyes of many Jews – than the nation’s unwillingness or inability to dismantle and end the Occupation.
You don’t have to take the short jaunt to Sheikh Jarrah to understand that Israelis must put an end to the Occupation before the Occupation puts an end to Israel.
What will permanent occupation mean for Israel? Not only that the nation will cease to be a democratic state, disenfranchising millions of Palestinians. In the end, permanent Occupation will see to it that Israel will cease to be a Jewish state as well. Israel will have delegitimized itself out of existence.
It will have knowingly opted for and adopted apartheid, and, in the end, either through democracy or through fire, and, thanks to the Occupation, the world community will see to it that an Arab-ruled Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River will finally come into existence.
That, in the end, may explain why the demonstrations here in Sheikh Jarrah, which are not massive in scale, have managed to set in motion a chain of events which has not only affected Washington’s view of settlement in the Holy City, but – in the manner of the settlers’ disproportionate leverage over the rest of us – has managed to paralyze, at least for now, the inroads of militant settlers into several points across East Jerusalem.
After our most recent visit to the foreign country that may one day be called Palestine, I’ve refined my goals as far as the future is concerned. This, then, is my mission statement for this Independence Day:
Let the Occupation end with me.
May it end here. Let it end soon.
May Jews and Arabs become again what they once were: Neighbors. True cousins.
May this be the generation that outlives the Occupation.
May we find ways to cripple it, take it apart. End it.
This is Independence Day. Free Israel. End the Occupation.
Addendum. As I was writing this, the Im Tirtzu organization, which promotes the Occupation through division, libel and graphic and verbal obscenity, distributed pamphlets in synagogues aimed at changing the Yizkor memorial prayer for fallen soldiers on Memorial Day, to include an attack on leftist Israelis. I will respond at length to this next week, but suffice it to say that the corrupting effect of the Occupation on the concepts of Torah, Worship, and Lovingkindness, has never been more evident.
Bradley Burston, Sgt., res., IDF Serial #3369089.
Chris Hedges: Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’: IOA
By Chris Hedges, TruthDig.com – 19 April 2010
Chris Hedges
Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”
“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”
“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”
“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”
Chomsky has, more than any other American intellectual, charted the downward spiral of the American political and economic system, in works such as “On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures,” “Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture,” “A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West,” “Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky,” “Manufacturing Consent” and “Letters From Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda.” He reminds us that genuine intellectual inquiry is always subversive. It challenges cultural and political assumptions. It critiques structures. It is relentlessly self-critical. It implodes the self-indulgent myths and stereotypes we use to elevate ourselves and ignore our complicity in acts of violence and oppression. And it makes the powerful, as well as their liberal apologists, deeply uncomfortable.
Chomsky reserves his fiercest venom for the liberal elite in the press, the universities and the political system who serve as a smoke screen for the cruelty of unchecked capitalism and imperial war. He exposes their moral and intellectual posturing as a fraud. And this is why Chomsky is hated, and perhaps feared, more among liberal elites than among the right wing he also excoriates. When Christopher Hitchens decided to become a windup doll for the Bush administration after the attacks of 9/11, one of the first things he did was write a vicious article attacking Chomsky. Hitchens, unlike most of those he served, knew which intellectual in America mattered. [Editor’s note: To see some of the articles in the 2001 exchanges between Hitchens and Chomsky, click here, here, here and here.]
“I don’t bother writing about Fox News,” Chomsky said. “It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.”
Chomsky, because he steps outside of every group and eschews all ideologies, has been crucial to American discourse for decades, from his work on the Vietnam War to his criticisms of the Obama administration. He stubbornly maintains his position as an iconoclast, one who distrusts power in any form.
“Most intellectuals have a self-understanding of themselves as the conscience of humanity,” said the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. “They revel in and admire someone like Vaclav Havel. Chomsky is contemptuous of Havel. Chomsky embraces the Julien Benda view of the world. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.”
“Some of Chomsky’s books will consist of things like analyzing the misrepresentations of the Arias plan in Central America, and he will devote 200 pages to it,” Finkelstein said. “And two years later, who will have heard of Oscar Arias? It causes you to wonder would Chomsky have been wiser to write things on a grander scale, things with a more enduring quality so that you read them forty or sixty years later. This is what Russell did in books like ‘Marriage and Morals.’ Can you even read any longer what Chomsky wrote on Vietnam and Central America? The answer has to often be no. This tells you something about him. He is not writing for ego. If he were writing for ego he would have written in a grand style that would have buttressed his legacy. He is writing because he wants to effect political change. He cares about the lives of people and there the details count. He is trying to refute the daily lies spewed out by the establishment media. He could have devoted his time to writing philosophical treatises that would have endured like Kant or Russell. But he invested in the tiny details which make a difference to win a political battle.”
“I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions,” Chomsky said when asked about his goals. “Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask who is the international community? India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do work. It is the same on issue after issue.”
Chomsky’s courage to speak on behalf of those, such as the Palestinians, whose suffering is often minimized or ignored in mass culture, holds up the possibility of the moral life. And, perhaps even more than his scholarship, his example of intellectual and moral independence sustains all who defy the cant of the crowd to speak the truth.
“I cannot tell you how many people, myself included, and this is not hyperbole, whose lives were changed by him,” said Finkelstein, who has been driven out of several university posts for his intellectual courage and independence. “Were it not for Chomsky I would have long ago succumbed. I was beaten and battered in my professional life. It was only the knowledge that one of the greatest minds in human history has faith in me that compensates for this constant, relentless and vicious battering. There are many people who are considered nonentities, the so-called little people of this world, who suddenly get an e-mail from Noam Chomsky. It breathes new life into you. Chomsky has stirred many, many people to realize a level of their potential that would forever been lost.”
How will Netanyahu respond to Obama’s ultimatum?: Haaretz
By Aluf Benn
The holidays are over and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a problem. He has to respond to U.S. President Barack Obama’s ultimatum, the gist of which is the demand to freeze construction in East Jerusalem and the numbers of Jews moving there. Netanyahu would have been glad to dismiss Obama’s demands, but he understands that he can’t, so he’s waging a PR campaign in the United States to soften the administration’s position.
Netanyahu has been saying for many years now that the president is not an autocrat and that American foreign policy is influenced by Congress, public opinion, the media and think tanks. Now his theory is being put to the test. Over the past three weeks the administration has been flooded with letters by U.S. representatives and senators, ads of support by Ron Lauder and Elie Wiesel, editorials and columns, television interviews with the prime minister and e-mails from Jewish supporters of Israel. They all warn, at various levels of bluntness and harshness, that Obama is abandoning Israel in the face of threats from Iran’s nuclear program and Palestinian terror.
Obama’s pressures have called Netanyahu’s bluff: It’s not Iran that is Netanyahu’s top priority, as he claimed before he was elected, but rather the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The fact is, the prime minister did not call on Elie Wiesel and members of congress to warn against the “second Holocaust” that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is plotting, but to prevent construction plans at the Shepherd Hotel, Silwan and Ramat Shlomo from shutting down, which would cost the prime minister his right-wing coalition.
From Netanyahu’s point of view, Obama misled him. The prime minister wanted only one thing: not to come out looking like a sucker. To him, statecraft consists of give and take, of “if they give they’ll get,” while Obama wants only to take – he opposes a surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and is hardening his demands on the Palestinian issue. It started with the acceptance of the two-state principle, continued with a construction freeze in the settlements, and has now arrived in East Jerusalem, in the shadow of a threat to force a solution that will take Israel out of the West Bank and to the 1967 lines.
Netanyahu is coming out a super-sucker: He gave and gave and got nothing. Netanyahu expected that in return for his gestures to the Palestinians, Obama would harden his position on Iran and come closer to the threshold of conflict (“paralyzing sanctions”). But the president is not playing along. His feeble moves signal that the Americans are coming to terms with the Iranian nuclear program. Instead of pressuring Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, he is pressuring Netanyahu to get out of the territories and hinting that Israel might embroil America in a very bloody and costly war.
Obama-haters are using Israel to goad the president for “hurting allies,” and this is driving the White House even crazier. Netanyahu is torn between his political supporters at home and in the United States who are pushing him toward a direct conflict with a hostile administration, and his understanding that the rainy day will come when Israel needs Obama’s help.
But Netanyahu’s problem is much deeper and more serious than the coalition’s makeup. Replacing Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu and Habayit Hayehudi with Tzipi Livni would soften Israel’s aggressive tone toward “the world” but not really change the situation. No Israeli government would risk rockets on Tel Aviv, a civil war with the settlers and a political rupture in the Israel Defense Forces just to satisfy Obama.
An Israel that is preparing for conflict with Iran and that does not trust American support will not move an inch in the territories. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak will try to wear Obama and his people out with empty discussions until a decision is made on whether to go to war. Netanyahu and Barak know that the extent of Israel’s concessions in the territories will determine the extent of American help in stopping the Iranian nuclear program. Itamar in exchange for Natanz.
Netanyahu managed to rouse public discourse in the United States about Israel, and Obama got the message. His statement on Independence Day was enthusiastic and warm, speaking about Israel as the historic homeland of the Jewish people and assuring continued efforts to work for a two-state solution and “to counter the forces that threaten Israel, the United States, and the world” (that is, Iran). Now that the fireworks are over, it will become clear whether the president’s message was mere lip service to quiet the criticism at home, or whether it signals intent to forge a deal with Netanyahu.
UN Special Raporteur: Israeli Military Orders “in breach of international human right law”: IOA
UN Office at Geneva, News & Media – 19 April 2010
www.unog.ch/unog/website/news_media.nsf/%28httpNewsByYear_en%29/5E8B8CEF12412AE8C125770A0032BB78?OpenDocument
GENEVA – The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Richard Falk, warned Monday that two Israeli Defense Forces Military Orders* may be in breach of the fourth Geneva Convention and violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Mr. Falk noted that “a wide range of violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law could be linked to actions carried out by the Government of Israel under these Orders, with particular gravity in the event that young persons become victims of their application.”
“The Orders appear to enable Israel to detain, prosecute, imprison and/or deport any and all persons present in the West Bank,” noted the Special Rapporteur, basing his concern on Israel’s new definition of the term ‘infiltrator:’ “A person who entered the Area unlawfully following the effective date, or a person who is present in the Area and does not lawfully hold a permit.”
“Even if this open-ended definition is not used to imprison or deport vast numbers of people, it causes unacceptable distress,” the UN independent expert said. Mr. Falk further noted that “it is not at all clear what permit, if any, will satisfy this Order.”
“Illustrative of the potential for cruel abuse,” he said, “is a provision of the Order requiring the person deported to pay the costs of his or her deportation, and suffer confiscations of property if unable to pay.”
Mr. Falk warned that deportations under the two new Orders could take place without judicial review, and that detained persons can be imprisoned for 7 years, unless able to prove that their entry was lawful, in which case they would be imprisoned for 3 years.
The UN Special Rapporteur recalled that Israel is party to the fourth Geneva Convention, which outlines its obligations as the Occupying Power in the West Bank. Article 49 of this Convention states that “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”
Mr. Falk also noted that, despite the fact that Israel is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, “the Orders establish a system that allows Israel to deport people without having their right to judicial review properly fulfilled, or possibly not reviewed at all.” He stressed that “the Orders do not even ensure that detainees will be informed in their own language that a deportation order has been issued against them.”
The independent expert, who is mandated by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor the situation of human rights and international humanitarian law in Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, also expressed his serious concern regarding “whether a military committee, as the one established by one of the Orders, is the kind of mechanism appropriate to satisfy requirements of judicial review, in the case that detained persons are not deported before having their situation reviewed.”
(*) Israel Defense Forces, Order No. 1650, Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (Amendment No. 2) (13 October 2009); and Israel Defense Forces, Order No. 1649, Order regarding Security Provisions (Amendment No. 112) (13 October 2009).
In 2008, the UN Human Rights Council designated Richard Falk (United States of America) as the fifth Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The mandate was originally established in 1993 by the then UN Human Rights Council.