Ameer Makhoul’s Political Detention Extended: The Alternative Information Center
A video report produced by The Alternative Information Center – 14 May 2010
On the 12th of May 2010, an Israeli Magistrates Court extended the political detentions of Palestinian civil society activists Dr. Omar Said and Ameer Makhoul by 4 and 5 days, respectively. The extensions were issued in closed door hearings in which Said and Makhoul were not permitted to meet their legal representatives.
Rupert Cornwell: A war that nobody wants: The Independent
Thursday, 13 May 2010
You don’t have to be a fan of Dr Strangelove to recognise that wars can start by accident – that if the tinder is properly laid, a small spark can set off an uncontrollable blaze. First comes the miscalculation, a relatively small aggression that provokes a far larger retaliation. Then the concern not to lose face takes over, the refusal by either side to be seen to be backing down. Before you know it, a skirmish has spiralled into full-scale conflict.
The tinder, and not for the first time, is perfectly in place along Israel’s northern border. The actors are familiar. The protagonists are an Israel determined to defend its territory from attack, and the militant Islamic group Hizbollah, based in Lebanon and also a potent force in that country’s politics. Aligned behind Hizbollah are its two patrons, Syria and Iran, each concerned to advance its own interests in the most combustible region on earth. Israel and Hizbollah went to war four summers ago, and a lot of people now worry that the old script is poised for a repeat. And what makes it even more worrying is that none of the parties involved seems to want a war.
Israel of course would like nothing better than to eliminate the military threat from Hizbollah once and for all. But it well remembers what happened in 2006. In response to Hizbollah rocket attacks, and then the kidnap of two of its soldiers, it invaded southern Lebanon and bombed Beirut. The war lasted a month, a thousand people died and swathes of Lebanon were laid waste. But not only was the Israeli response judged grossly disproportionate, costing it dear in the court of world opinion, the mere fact that, despite the onslaught, Hizbollah lived to fight another day meant that Israel was deemed the loser. Why run the risk of a similar outcome now? To avoid sending the wrong signals, Israel has scaled back recent military exercises in the north and publicly assured Syria that war is the last thing on its mind.
Nor are its adversaries spoiling for a re-match. Certainly not Lebanon, which stands only to be devastated once again. Probably not Hizbollah either, whatever the boost to its prestige in the Arab world for actually daring to take on overwhelmingly powerful Israel. Syria too would seem to have little interest in letting itself be dragged into a hot war with Israel that it is bound to lose – and at a moment when it is trying to mend fences with the US, Israel’s key ally, and re-insert itself into Middle East peace negotiations now flickering back into life with “proximity talks” between Israelis and Palestinians.
And even Iran, for all its belligerent rhetoric, does not look to be spoiling for a real fight. After all, it is doing quite nicely as it is, pushing ahead with its nuclear programme while the West fails to agree on sanctions, and daring Israel and/or the US to attack its nuclear installations, and risk unleashing a regional war in which even the Lebanese front would probably be a sideshow.
But to call the stand-off uneasy is an understatement. Let us hope that the old Roman adage of, “if you want peace, prepare for war” still holds good in the Middle East. Thanks to reported deliveries of Scud missiles as well as nimbler and less detectable M-600 rockets from Syria, Hizbollah is now better armed than in 2006.
Both Israel and the Americans have told Syria to stop, and the US has delayed sending a new ambassador to Damascus to underline its displeasure. But apparently to no avail. The arms flow continues, even though Lebanon says the deliveries are no more real than Saddam Hussein’s imaginary WMDs. So the question becomes, how long will Israel put up with it?
And Hizbollah’s rearmament is just one possible casus belli. Another is a Hizbollah strike against an Israeli target outside Israel, perhaps in revenge for the 2008 killing of its then military commander Imad Mugniyah, which it blames on Israel. Then of course there is the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran. But on one thing Hizbollah and Israel do agree: if war were to come, 2006 would look like a warm-up in comparison. Back then, President Bush (backed by Tony Blair) ignored international calls for a ceasefire for as long as he could, to allow Israel a chance to finish the job, and Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, even described the war as the “birth pangs of the new Middle East”. Next time around, “death throes” might be a better choice of phrase.
No one wants a new war – but then no one wanted the First World War in the form it ultimately took. President Obama is now being urged to present his own comprehensive plan for a Middle East settlement. The tension on Israel’s northern border is one very good reason why.
Will anyone be Obama’s soulmate?
Mention of Barack Obama, and the arrival of David Cameron in the job once held by Tony Blair, prompts a separate thought. For all his global popularity, The Washington Post wondered recently, does the US President have any real mates among other foreign leaders? Gordon Brown wasn’t one. Nor, as far as can be judged, are either Nicolas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel, or China’s President Hu for that matter. Despite the cloying show of amity in Washington yesterday, Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai certainly isn’t one. Nor is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. The closest thing to an Obama confidant, wrote the Post, might be Dimtri Medvedev – which given Russia was America’s arch foe in the Cold War, would be quite a turnaround.
These are, of course, early days. Obama’s been in office barely 15 months, and he’s had more than enough on his plate at home. But the question is not an idle one. Leadership is a desperately lonely business, which only other leaders can fully understand. Most presidents find a soulmate or two. But not yet, it would seem, Obama. Might this be an opening for our Dave?
EDITOR: Israel prepares for war
And just to prove the point made above, an article from someone quite clearly not on the left, published on the same day, castigating officers who shoot their mouth. “If you are going to shoot, shoot! Don’t talk”, is the motto of Yoel Markus, and it seems, of Israel. This war mongering will not stop at the Middle East; the west, which aided and abetted it, playing a role written in Jerusalem, will suffer the consequences. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Thus spoke the dairy farmer: Haaretz
By Yoel Marcus
Many years ago, the incumbent chief of staff spoke at a prestigious club that used to host a prominent government figure every Friday. Mostly, reporters were also invited, and if there were no scoops to be had, at least they got a nice free lunch. I was present at that luncheon, and the CoS spoke such a lot of nonsense that I wrote a critical piece about his speech. Astonishingly, the military censor blue-penciled the whole article. The editor of Haaretz at that time, Gershom Schocken, taken aback at the deletion of an article about a public speech, called the censor, who came up with reasoning that sounded like a joke: The writer depicted the CoS as a fool, and that harmed security. Stunned by this reply, Schocken decided to go ahead and publish the piece, and the next day the paper received a substantial fine.
What has reminded me of this now? Well, Moshe “Bogey” Ya’alon, the deputy prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, and a former CoS himself, has threatened, plain and simple, to attack Iran. “There is no doubt that the technological resources that Israel has developed in recent years have improved the range and capabilities of aerial refueling,” he stated in a speech at the Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies in Herzliya. “From my point of view, all that remains is the best possible form of defense. And our capabilities are applicable in distant wars in such places as Iran.”
It is hard to believe that a man who served as head of Military Intelligence and ended up as CoS (although he did chatter himself into career suicide by saying that the grass around the IDF HQ is full of snakes ) would speak as if he were a lecturer at the university of Timbuktu. Is it conceivable that a deputy premier and a member of the seven-minister inner cabinet, a man who single-handedly can not only damage Israel’s cherished ambiguity policy but also cause the country to come under the inspection of the International Atomic Energy Agency, should let his tongue run free like this?
Moshe Vered, a former Defense Ministry official, has written a research paper, published by Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center, in which he posits that if we were to attack Iran, it would not take it lying down but would respond with all the weaponry at its disposal. Perhaps. But when Ya’alon declares that Israel is warming up its engines, he reminds me of Eli Wallach’s immortal line in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”: “When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.”
With this kind of threat, we fit well into this part of the world, where everyone threatens everyone else. It’s a pity that we’ve sunk this low. David Ben-Gurion never threatened. The chattering proves that this government is disorderly. It is inconceivable that every minister can threaten to attack Iran or build Jewish housing in East Jerusalem. If we face a strategic threat, Ya’alon himself embodies it with his big mouth. Defense Minister Ehud Barak was right when he told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Israel was facing erosion in its international standing, but he nevertheless did not think there was a concrete threat to its position of nuclear ambiguity, despite the tension with the American government.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week made it clear that Israel did not intend to attack its neighbors. But it’s a pity that Bibi doesn’t rebuke his deputy. As the old saw goes, seven wise men won’t be able to extricate a stone that an idiot has dropped into a well. Nowadays, when the head of Military Intelligence’s research division, Brig.-Gen Yossi Baidatz, says that Hezbollah has received accurate rockets with half-ton warheads from Syria and Iran, it is clearly advisable to speak less and act to calm the neighborhood down.
The proximity talks are still looking like a bizarre move. They are like a wedding canopy which both the bride and the groom are reluctant to step under. What did the sides speak and agree about in the protracted talks they have had – to start indirect talks now? To start everything from scratch again? After all, the problems are well known, all the transcripts are filed away on the shelves. President Obama’s determined stance is also well known, and if he doesn’t apply pressure now, it’ll come after the mid-term elections at the end of the year. Whether the president takes a body blow in the House of Representatives or wins a victory, he will focus on a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a strategic move toward neutralizing the Axis of Evil, something that is also in our interest. Netanyahu’s cabinet is the biggest ever, and he enjoys optimal conditions for moving toward a solution: both a big government and a solid parliamentary majority with Kadima, which would support a solution. And there is a U.S. government that is committed to Israel’s security.
As prime minister, Bibi has ideal conditions – the best there have ever been, including public opinion – to set Israel’s permanent borders, as well as the support of most of the public for forcible action against the extremist settlers who would lift the banner of rebellion. The law of the secular government is the law, says the Talmud, and it supersedes any religious objections. Listen to what the majority of the nation wants, and not the declarations of the former dairy farmer from Kibbutz Grofit, Lt. Gen. (Res. ) Ya’alon.
Human Rights Watch say destruction in Gaza ‘unlawful’: BBC
Human Rights Watch say the laws of war may have been broken
The Israeli army unlawfully destroyed civilian property in its 22-day offensive in Gaza in 2008 and 2009, a report by Human Rights Watch says.
Israeli forces destroyed buildings that had “no military significance”, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Conventions, the report said.
The New-York based group have documented 12 cases that they say must be investigated.
The IDF denies the charges and says it has investigated the incursion already.
Palestinians and rights groups say more than 1,400 Gazans died in the conflict, known as Operation Cast Lead, but Israel puts the figure at 1,166. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were killed.
‘IDF control’
Human Rights Watch documented the complete destruction of 189 buildings, including 11 factories, 8 warehouses and 170 residential buildings, leaving at least 971 people homeless during the operation which began in December 2008.
The 12 incidents documented in the report account for roughly 5% of the homes, factories and warehouses destroyed in Gaza during the operation the report said.
“These cases describe instances in which Israeli forces caused extensive destruction of homes, factories, farms and greenhouses in areas under IDF control without any evident military purpose,” the report said.
“These cases occurred when there was no fighting in these areas; in many cases, the destruction was carried out during the final days of the campaign when an Israeli withdrawal was imminent.”
The group obtained satellite pictures of Gaza during and after the conflict.
A Human Rights Watch researcher interviewed 94 people in Gaza about their experiences as they fled Israeli forces.
Majid al-Athamna who lived in the town of Izbt Abd Rabbo in the north of the Gaza Strip, told HRW that when he was allowed to return, he found his home demolished.
“There are still four Hamas houses standing on Zimmo Street, but mine is destroyed. Were my cars launching rockets? Why did they destroy them?” he said.
The other interviewees had similar stories.
Violations
Human Rights Watch say they discounted any case in which a military action occurred nearby.
The report stops short of saying outright that war crimes were committed by the Israeli Defense Forces.
But, it said, “the report examines incidents of destruction that suggested violation of the laws-of-war prohibition of wanton destruction” – the term used to describe extensive destruction of civilian property not lawfully justified by military necessity.
“Such destruction would be a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949, which is applicable in Gaza. Individuals responsible for committing or ordering such destruction should be prosecuted for war crimes,” the report said.
‘Carefully checked’
In an IDF report published in July into Operation Cast Lead, the military says that every consideration to protect civilians was made before opening fire.
“While Hamas deliberately sought to harm civilians by launching rockets and mortars on towns in Southern Israel, and even boasted about directing their attacks at civilian populations, the IDF carefully checked and cross-checked targets — using best available real-time intelligence — to make sure they were being used for combat or terrorist activities, and not instead solely for civilian use,” the report said.
In a written response to HRW, included in their report, an IDF spokesman said “The level of damage to the infrastructure was proportional, and did not deviate from that which was required to fulfil the operational requirements.”
Any fresh cases not covered by the July report would be investigated, the spokesman said.
Last year, a report produced by a UN team led by former war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone accused both sides of war crimes during the Israeli military offensive
Human Rights Watch: IDF wantonly destroyed homes during Gaza war: Haaretz
IDF formulating response to report which claims property was sometimes damaged even without military necessity.
Human Rights Watch said Thursday it had evidence of cases from a 2008-09 conflict in which the Israeli army wantonly destroyed civilian property in the Gaza Strip, even if there was no military necessity.
Israel should investigate the alleged cases of destruction during the 2008-2009 Gaza war, and those who committed or ordered them should be prosecuted for war crimes, the international human rights organization said.
The New York-headquartered group criticized Hamas and other Palestinian groups for firing rockets from populated areas, noting that, in such cases, property damage caused by Israeli counterstrikes “may have been lawful ‘collateral damage.'”
But in a 116-page report published Thursday, titled “‘I lost everything’: Israel’s Unlawful Destruction of Property in the Gaza conflict,” the group described 12 cases in which troops destroyed homes, factories and orchards “without any lawful military purpose.”
In those cases, HRW said it found no indication of nearby fighting at the time of the destruction. In all cases, the fighting in the area had stopped and, in most, Israeli bulldozers destroyed the property after Israeli soldiers had dispersed Palestinian militants in the area and consolidated control, said the group.
HRW said it documented the complete destruction of 190 buildings, including 11 factories, 8 warehouses and 170 residential buildings – which it said was roughly 5 per cent of the total property destroyed in Gaza – leaving at least 971 Palestinians homeless.
It also condemned Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza as illegal collective punishment, which prevented proper reconstruction. In this, it also held Egypt responsible.
Although Israel had “valid” security concerns that Hamas could use cement to build or strengthen military bunkers and weapons smuggling tunnels, Israel should “urgently” create a mechanism to independently monitor the use of cement for civilian reconstruction, it said.
“The United States, the European Union and other states should urgently call upon Israel and Egypt to open Gaza’s borders to reconstruction materials and other supplies essential for the civilian population,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director at HRW.
An Israel Defense Forces spokesman in Jerusalem said the army was formulating a response to the report.
‘We want to live’: Al Ahram
Salam Fayyad’s plans for Palestine and the Palestinians are nought but a contrived folk festival where the occupied bow to their oppressors, writes Azmi Bishara
Congratulating Israel on its “independence”, or creation, if you will, is equivalent to congratulating it on the success of its armed robbery of Palestine and systematic expulsion of the Palestinian people. So we might say when the congratulations are extended by the US president, France or the Ivory Coast. But when an Arab head of state congratulates the Israeli head of state “on the day of its founding” silence is the only policy. Not a contemplative silence, I hasten to add, but rather an impotent silence, because in this instance one is at a total loss for words. Our language, they say, is a country common to us all, but evidently it is a land in which (Al-Mutanabbi flies to the rescue again) “Arab youth is a stranger in face, hand and tongue.”
Not that this is the first time such congratulations have been offered and it probably will not be the last, as much as one might hope. Nor should the phenomenon surprise us. In fact, what would be surprising is to be surprised. Still, things have really gone overboard this year. The majority of the inhabitants of Gaza are among the refugees who were driven out of their homes in 1948, which means that congratulations have been extended to their evictor turned jailor of the world’s largest prison. There is something very close and stifling about the phenomenon this time, making the suffocating Gaza tunnels through which people crawl for a gasp of life seem more spacious than the tunnels of Arab politics.
One of these dark political tunnels led to an interview granted by the appointed president of the appointed Palestinian government in Haaretz on 2 April 2010. In it he uttered statements of the sort: “I don’t have a problem with people who believe that Israel is the land of the Bible… But there’s a lot of uninhabited hills and spaces in it. Why don’t you build there and give us a chance to get on with our lives?” He also said, “The chief dispute in the region is not between us, but between moderates and extremists,” and “We are building to receive the refugees in the Palestinian state.” This is the language of the Israelis. Some phrases even echo the lexicon of the settlers who claim that they are building “on uninhabited hills”. One is reminded of those Arab officials who boast that they understand the language of the Americans, after which we realise that this means that they will do whatever Washington asks without question (which, of course, is a prerequisite for certain types of “understanding”).
With consummate ease, the former World Bank official and current employee of the “international community” has reduced the concept of statehood to “inhabited areas” that need to be equipped with the wherewithal to survive. How seamlessly this jives with the Israeli notion of a Palestinian state in the densely populated patches of the Palestinian territories. All he had to do next was to add the whispered aside that this was necessary in order to forestall the growth of terrorist elements and to give it to be understood that the Palestinian right of return only meant that Palestinian refugees would have the right to return to that patchwork Palestinian state.
An elaborate Western-financed optical illusion is in the works. It is intended to pass off life in overcrowded Palestinian enclaves as ordinary, to make the artificial look normal, to impose calm while the Palestinian Authority (PA) builds government buildings with elegant façades, to organise a giant game of make-believe under occupation.
The idea of Palestinian Bantustans started as a theory. Then some people came along and took the theory seriously. As part of the process of advocating it they attempted to demonstrate that the theory sounds worse than when applied in practice. Those who have experienced it elsewhere found that it offers a relatively comfortable way of life, they say, adding that it looks better and better when you compare it, chronologically, to the chaos of the popular armed struggle of the recent past and, spatially, to the fate of those under the blockade in Gaza who reject it. Naturally, they make no reference to the Palestinian national cause.
The man who uttered those ideas that were so remote from the Palestinian national discourse was appointed head of the PA in the aftermath of a coup against an elected government. In those elections, he won one per cent of the popular vote. Not long before that he was the minister of finance imposed by Washington on Yasser Arafat when Arafat was under siege in Ramallah. The Israeli press has dubbed him the “Palestinian Ben- Gurion”. Can you imagine? Recently he was ranked tenth on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most important persons in the world. Whatever for? One of the perks of imperialism is its power to peg us in its categories (such as moderate or extremist), to rank us according to its grades and hierarchies, and to bestow upon us awards and honours.
The aforementioned Haaretz interview led me to take a look at interviews granted by Palestinian officials to the Israeli press in recent years. It was a painful and stressful endeavour, and after two days of mind- numbing reading I threw in the towel, albeit with the certainty that there is a book out there on models of the inculcation of the colonised personality and that all that is needed are researchers and writers with the stomach for a study of this sort. I am not a candidate, but from my brief survey I found that in virtually all the interviews the officials used Israeli terms and concepts to describe the Palestinian people and their situation, and offered gratuitous concessions to Israeli public opinion. It was as though they were all driven by a desire to ingratiate themselves or, at best, to court their audience’s admiration by means of a mischievous drollery. Nearly all the officials issued denials of some of the statements they made the day after their interview — in Arabic and without demanding a retraction or a correction on the part of the Hebrew language newspaper in which their interview had appeared. Politicians with inferiority complexes who grow intoxicated on impressing the occupiers one day wake up the next suddenly gripped with fear of how the occupied people will react.
From the occupation power’s point of view, the Palestinian poser, puffed up by Israeli praise and pats on the back, is captive of the concessions he handed them for nothing in return but the “moderate” label. Then, when he starts to backtrack under the glare of the Palestinian public, the Israelis scoff at his weakness, call him a liar and point to him as proof of these supposedly intrinsic Arab traits. Meanwhile, his postures, inclusive of airing Palestinian dirty laundry before the Israeli public, criticising the Palestinians’ internal chaos and corruption, and mocking Hamas and others, have brought no change in the Israeli position or anything positive at all. Free concessions only encourage the adversary to press forward, free of charge, and up his demands. Of course he will protest that he has made a significant achievement. He will say that he has given “the forces of peace in Israel” a means to persuade Israelis to accept the idea of a Palestinian state. What is left unsaid is that this means to present a Palestinian state as a solution to the Israeli demographic problem and to point to those officials who oblige the Israeli press with conciliatory interviews as evidence of the existence of moderate and flexible Palestinians who will make good peace partners and who can always be cajoled into making more concessions.
Hardly had I finished that survey of interviews, whose language alone merits a separate study, than the PA president embarked on an “offensive” to win the approval of the Israeli public. Now that the Obama administration has made it clear exactly how far its desire to pressure Israel will go, and given that “life means negotiations”, negotiations must be the only way forward. But instead of just negotiating with the Israeli government, the PA president has escalated his “offensive” by launching negotiations with every individual Israeli. He unveiled this bold and aggressive strategy in a meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council.
The PA president will soon be surprised by a horde of negotiators. Some six million Israelis, together with political parties and associations, will rush forward to urge him to offer proof that he really wants peace and to do more to guarantee their safety. Still, he was evidently impatient for all this to begin. The day following the announcement of this “initiative” he decided to hasten the Israelis, and perhaps us as well, by holding a television interview on Israel’s Channel 2 in order to inter the last remnants of his government’s Palestinian national discourse. “There is no crisis of confidence with Netanyahu,” he proclaimed. On the right of return, he said, “We’re speaking of a just and agreed upon solution. You can’t get more flexible than that,” and, “We’ll agree on the solution and bring it before the Palestinian people.” Otherwise put, the Palestinian president handed the occupation power the right to accept or refuse the principle of the right of return and what he will put before the Palestinian people is none other than the Israeli formula for an acceptable solution. He must be praying that Netanyahu responds favourably to this strategy, because he does not want Palestinians “to even think about demonstrating”. Probably, too, his zeal for appealing to Israeli and American Jewish public opinion will eventually lead him to addressing AIPAC. Surely then Israeli public opinion and Israel’s instruments in the US will realise that the PA leadership under the occupation has relinquished all instruments of persuasion apart from conciliatory words and that it has surrendered to its status as hostage of the occupation authority.
Of course the end of this chapter is a foregone conclusion. When the next chapter opens its protagonist will be the man who abandoned the national discourse, forswore national rights and came from outside the national movement. The former World Bank official, who boasts of being pragmatic, is offering day-to-day life solutions instead of a national cause. He calls this practical and basks in the admiration of the ever so pragmatic West because he doesn’t fritter away his time in politics — this he leaves to the West, the Quartet and Israel, while he concentrates on building economic structures. Sadly, the economic aspect of these types of structures is a mirage. These so-called economic structures are political instruments, and after they perform their function the agencies that finance them will let them fall into neglect.
The Palestinian economy in the West Bank is a camouflage for security arrangements and measures. It is a rentier economy that lives on aid in exchange for security and political services, an economy built entirely on foreign subsidies in exchange for certain political positions and driven by the desire to promote those who accept Israeli conditions and prioritise the protection of Israel’s security. The man who promotes this economy is involved in politics up to his ears, but it is the politics of the West and the Quartet. His economy is built on serving these politics, and from the aid money it yields he pays out wages and builds the façades of economic institutions. If Fatah frowns at this, he will respond with his consummate pragmatism by awarding Fatah officials a majority of seats in his cabinet. This type of seemingly apolitical politics calls to mind those who appealed to the Palestinian people via the Israeli media to abandon the resistance, which angers the Israelis and destroys homes, and to fight “extremists” and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Their slogan for this campaign was “We want to live”.
“Love for life” comes in two brands: one for aggressor states, such as Israel, and one for their victims, such as Palestine. In the former there is no contradiction between the love for life and politics and political participation; nationalism, religiosity and secularism; literature and the arts; nihilism and dissolution; the army, parliament and electoral processes; industry, agriculture and the sciences, and even war if necessary. This applies to Israel as it does to the US. For occupied peoples, on the other hand, “love for life” has to be practised at a far remove from politics, arms and resistance, and from national enterprises and autonomous production. This brand of living life takes its symbols from the kitchen — “kebab,” “humous” and “tabbouleh” — and it is about exhibitions of mirth and merrymaking, and competing to bestow gifts and prizes on the elites. The occupation loves the noisy and crowded coffeehouses and restaurants in Ramallah and it displays films on these vibrant locales as proof of life behind the barriers.
When life is reduced to this brand of “we want to live” you have to fabricate it, as it does not have the wherewithal to regenerate itself. There can be no life under occupation without a fight against occupation. In the absence of independence and national sovereignty, sorrow and joy and life itself can only exist within the context of a project for national independence. When this is abandoned or unravels, all you get is a contrived folk festival passed off as authenticity and the love for life.
The public relations business, which is a science in the US, strives to insulate itself against truth, to buffer itself against conscience, and to remain indifferent to whether it is marketing fact or fiction. It is an applied branch of instrumentalism and the market and the commodification of human relations are its field and mode of application. Its function is to find a way to market anything, to create a sellable package for even the most aesthetically or morally abhorrent things. But even the most inventive PR imagination would be hard put to package admiring the largest ever dish of Ramallah musakhan or of Nablus-style kunafa, or squatting down on one’s haunches to eat olives and cheese along with the people as a form of national struggle. You don’t need to tell the people what kind of foods they eat, just as you don’t need to tell them the sky is blue or that they “want to live”. You do not need to market the obvious. There is no need for PR, copywriters or even political leaders to tell the people what is already a part of their daily consciousness.
The job of political leaders is to help people answer such questions as “How can we live?” “How should we live?” “Will the occupation power let us live once we lay down our arms?” “Who will fund all these economic institutions after the donor countries lose interest in them?” “Who will finance 200,000 jobs that support more than a million people who are living on the hope that the so-called international community will support an unjust settlement?” “What will become of us without the rest of our people?” “What about our obligations towards the refugees and Jerusalem?” “What kind of life is left for a people that gives up their sovereignty for crumbs?” Their job is not to sell apathy packaged as “We want to live”. It is a cheap product anyway and like all cheap products it has a short lifespan.
Arrest of Palestinian leaders in Israel “a dangerous development”: The Electronic Intifada
Jonathan Cook, 14 May 2010
The recent arrest of two respected public figures from Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority in nighttime raids on their homes by the Shin Bet secret police — brought to light this week when a gag order was partially lifted — has sent shock waves through the community.
The arrests are not the first of their kind. The Shin Bet has been hounding and imprisoning politicians and intellectuals from the country’s Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population, since the birth of the Jewish state more than six decades ago. Currently, two MPs from Arab political parties, as well as the leader of the popular Islamic Movement, are facing trials.
But the detention of Ameer Makhoul and Omar Said is seen differently — as the gathering storm clouds in a political climate already fiercely hostile to its Palestinian citizens.
Mohammed Zeidan, the head of the Human Rights Association in Nazareth, said: “We are used to our political leaders being persecuted but now the Shin Bet is turning its sights on the leaders of Palestinian civil society in Israel, and that’s a dangerous development.”
Makhoul and Said are not accused of the usual public order offenses, nor have they simply violated chauvinistic legislation that criminalizes Palestinian citizens’ visits to neighboring Arab states. Both are facing the much more serious charge of espionage, on behalf of Lebanon’s Hizballah.
Makhoul, who appears to be the chief object of the Shin Bet’s interest, is the head of Ittijah, an umbrella organization coordinating the activities of Palestinian human rights groups in Israel. More specifically, he has become the leading voice inside Israel backing the growing international campaign for boycott, sanctions and divestment against Israel.
On Wednesday, the courts approved an extension of Makhoul’s remand. He was not allowed to be present and was denied the right to a lawyer until at least next Monday, 12 days since his arrest. He is reportedly being interrogated around the clock.
Said, an activist with the Tajamu political party and a scientist who specializes in developing new medicines from Middle Eastern plants, has been held by the Shin Bet since 24 April.
Amnesty International has threatened to declare Makhoul a “prisoner of conscience,” saying his arrest “smacks of pure harassment, designed to hinder his human rights work.”
Observers from the Palestinian minority too have ridiculed the allegations, based on secret evidence, that the pair made “contact with a foreign agent.” They point out that under the draconian emergency regulations being used in this case the Shin Bet needs only the flimsiest circumstantial evidence to lay such a charge.
Zeidan called it an easy, “one size fits all” security offense that was difficult to challenge but persuasive to the Jewish majority. “You only need unwittingly to meet at a conference a relative of a relative of someone in Hizballah and the Shin Bet thinks it has grounds to arrest you.”
The Palestinian minority is not alone in believing that Makhoul and Said have not spied in the accepted sense of passing classified or sensitive information to an enemy: Israel’s military correspondents have been largely dismissive of the espionage charges too. In the Israeli daily Haaretz, Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff pointed out that neither Palestinian citizen is privy to secrets that would interest Hizballah.
Instead, the correspondents hinted at other motives behind the arrests. Any contacts between Israel’s enemies such as Hizballah and Palestinian rights activists in Israel are a threat, they surmise, because Palestinian leaders in Israel might offer assistance in “coordinating political positions” or initiate “protests and riots during sensitive periods.” That radically expands the traditional definition of “espionage.”
The Shin Bet’s pursuit of Makhoul and Said, in the view of community leaders, needs to be understood in terms of a fixed assumption by the Israeli establishment that the Arab minority poses a political threat to the continued survival of a Jewish state.
The roots of this worldview can be traced back to the signing of the Oslo accords. With the launch of a peace process with the Palestinians, Israeli politicians began to reconsider the status of the large Palestinian minority. Many believed that allowing a significant population of Palestinians to remain inside Israel as citizens after the creation of a neighboring Palestinian state might one day prove to be the country’s Achilles’ heel.
Might not the Palestinian minority provide the Palestinians in the occupied territories with a “foot in the door” to try to win back the whole of historic Palestine rather than settle for a mini-state in the West Bank and Gaza?
Those fears escalated dramatically when Oslo turned sour and the second Palestinian intifada erupted in 2000. Israel believed the Palestinians had refused its “generous” offer at Camp David in the hope that they could use the Palestinian minority as a “Trojan horse” to destroy the Jewish state demographically from within.
Ehud Barak, the prime minister at the time, called the Palestinian minority the “spear point” of what he believed was Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat’s attempt to dismantle Israel as a Jewish state. He feared that a political reform program demanding a “state of all its citizens,” which had become a rallying cry for Palestinian citizens, was really intended to bring the return of millions of Palestinian refugees under cover of an equal rights struggle.
Israel responded by making contact all but impossible between Palestinians in Israel and those in the occupied territories, including by building a wall around the West Bank and legislating an effective ban on marriages across the Green Line boundary between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Shin Bet’s chief target prior to the latest arrests was Azmi Bishara, the architect of the “state of all its citizens” campaign. In 2007 Bishara was accused of spying for Hizballah too, and has been in exile ever since.
At that time, Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, warned that he regarded it as his job to “thwart” any activities, including political ones, that threatened Israel’s survival as a Jewish state.
According to Zeidan and other analysts, the Shin Bet’s hand in the latest arrests appears to be guided by a similar assessment that the Palestinian minority is again posing an “existential threat” to Israel — even if for different reasons.
Makhoul is seen as at the figurehead of an emerging movement inside Israel that, faced with the refusal of Israelis to countenance political reforms to democratize the country, is devising new political strategies.
He has not hidden the extensive contacts he has developed both among western Palestinian solidarity activists and in the Arab world, urging the need for a boycott of Israel. He was also at the forefront of the protests inside Israel against its attack on Gaza last year. He was called in for interrogation by the Shin Bet at the time.
“The occupation isn’t news anymore,” Zeidan said. “The big threats facing Israel, in the Shin Bet’s view, are its deteriorating image in terms of human rights and the growing sense abroad that it is an apartheid state.
“Palestinian civil society in Israel, more so even than our political parties, is best placed to make the case on those issues to the international community, to expose the racism and discrimination inherent in a Jewish state. Ameer Makhoul’s arrest should be understood in that light.
“The Shin Bet believes we have crossed a red line in our international advocacy.”
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi, and is republished with the author’s permission.
Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East by David Hirst: The Guardian
Fawaz A Gerges on a survey of the troubles of the Middle East
Beware of Small States is a history of the Arab-Israeli conflict as seen through the prism of its impact on the internal development of neighbouring Arab states, particularly tiny, fragile Lebanon, the sectarian state par excellence and historic battleground for other peoples’ conflicts. As a long- term Middle East correspondent of the Guardian, few people are as well qualified as David Hirst to write it.
Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East
by David Hirst
480pp, Faber, £20
Buy Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East at the Guardian bookshop
He deals well with the complex historical relations between early Israeli leaders and the “pro-Zionist” Maronite Christians who dominated the neighbouring state. Both sought their raison d’etre in a real or imagined past in opposition to Middle Eastern, Arabic and Muslim culture and heritage, and a “minority alliance” between their two religious communities. Subsequent Israeli leaders envisioned a more ambitious, “fantastic” grand design to transform “Christian Lebanon” into Israel’s “natural” ally. In the 1970s Lebanon was plunged into all-out civil war and by the time of the 1982 Israeli invasion, “Greater-Israel expansionists” such as right-wing Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his then defence minister Ariel Sharon saw in the disintegration of Lebanon a historic opportunity to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East which included securing the whole of Palestine for themselves and extinguishing any rival claims to the occupied territories.
Hirst notes astutely that Israel’s imperial hubris coincided with the advent of the Reagan administration; as Begin acknowledged, there had never been an administration as favourable to Israel as this one. No wonder then, says Hirst, that before Begin and Sharon sent their army to Lebanon – 90,000 men, 1,300 tanks, 1,500 armoured personnel carriers – they got a green light from then US Secretary of State Alexander Haig that was so phrased that a man like Sharon could only see it “as a hunting licence”.
That war killed 20,000 people, mostly civilians. Israel laid siege to an Arab capital, Beirut; drove out Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership and destroyed the guerrilla state-within-the state; and presided over the pro-Zionist Maronite forces’ genocidal slaughter of 3,000 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Although Hirst argues that Sabra and Shatila in fact marked the beginning of Israel’s decline, his narrative is filled with evidence that Israeli society and its leadership have not learned from history. Targeting civilians, he writes, has emerged as the very essence of Israel’s deterrence, as demonstrated by the more recent wars against Hezbollah (2006) and Hamas (2009). But Hirst is not only critical of Israel. Beware of Small States is a demolition exercise that doesn’t spare Syria, Iran, Iraq, and the PLO who also fought proxy wars in Lebanon. Hirst contends that Syrian leaders used blood and iron to perpetuate their domination of Lebanon, secure their own backyard and siphon off nearly $2bn a year. He also notes that Ayatollah Khomeini’s interest in Lebanon was strategic and pragmatic. The struggle against the Jewish state allowed him to pose, in an ecumenical, pan-Islamic spirit, as the champion of a cause that was not a monopoly of Sunni Arabs and Palestinians.
But it was the 1982 war (which lasted till 2000) that transformed Lebanese domestic politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The war inflicted irreparable damage on Israel’s aura of invincibility and created a new Shiite enemy from whose ranks arose a grass-roots resistance movement, Hezbollah, more formidable than the bureaucratic and corrupt PLO. “Had the enemy not taken this step,” said its leader Hassan Nasrallah many years later, “I don’t know whether something called Hezbollah would have been born. I doubt it.”
Hezbollah now projects itself as the spearhead of the whole Arab/Muslim struggle against the Jewish state, and much of the global Muslim community seem to see it that way too. According to Hirst, Israel’s colossal strategic and moral failure in Lebanon has also further delegitimised pro-US “moderate” Arab regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia and strengthened the Islamo-nationalist resistance camp led by Iran and Syria.
In his post-2006 war speech, Nasrallah told the immense, euphoric throng that the victory they were celebrating had transformed Lebanon from a “small” state in the Middle East into a “great” one. Hirst agrees that Lebanon is no longer the hapless object of others’ actions but also an active agent in its own right because of Hezbollah’s powerful influence in the region. “Lebanon – the eternal victim – has now become an active player too, posing no less a threat to greater states than they habitually posed to it.”
That is a mixed blessing. Hirst cites Israeli leaders who say they are readying themselves for the “next war”, the “second round” against Hezbollah and the Lebanese state, which they deem to be all but inevitable. And while Hezbollah has evolved into a conventional political party with a domestic agenda, he argues it still possesses a potent militia, with an external, visionary, Islamist agenda and is aligned with Iranian and even Syrian foreign policy. In other words, Lebanon is still a battlefield for others’ wars. The only difference now is that if Israel fires the first shot in the “seventh Middle Eastern war”, the war might not remain confined to Lebanon.
Fawaz A Gerges’s The Making of the Arab World will be published by Public Affairs.
Strenger than fiction / A triumph of academic freedom at Tel Aviv University: Haaretz
Behind the scenes a drama unfolded last week which could have done enormous damage to Tel Aviv University, Israel’s higher education system and to Israel as a country.
By Carlo Strenger
Behind the scenes a drama unfolded last week which could have done enormous damage to Tel Aviv University, to Israel’s higher education system and to Israel as a country.
A few members of Tel Aviv University’s board of governors were pushing for a change in the statutes that would have allowed or even required the university to censor or possibly fire professors involved in activity perceived as harming Israel, e.g. by supporting global motions to boycott Israeli universities.
One of the proponents of the motion to limit academic freedom at Tel Aviv University argued that, while academic freedom is important, Israel is under existential threat, and hence discipline must be enforced.
This is a dangerous and defeatist position. Israel does have enemies. But we must not heed this call and remember what Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at a crucial moment in American history, said: ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself’.
My point of view is this: professors who think that the university where they teach is involved in such immoral activities that it should be boycotted, should act on their views and resign. Nevertheless, while I find their position distasteful, I defend their right to voice their views, and thus join Tel Aviv University President Prof. Joseph Klafter in his principled stance: he empathizes with the anger of many Diaspora Jews against academics who draw their salaries from Israeli Universities while calling to boycott them, but he is adamant that the principles of freedom of speech and academic freedom must not be compromised.
A claim has been made that Prof. Klafter cut the discussion about the motion short, thus curtailing the freedom of speech of the board of governors. I was there, and can testify that nothing of the sort happened: an incisive hour-long discussion took place, during which the proponents of the motion had ample time to state their case. They were a small minority; most of the speakers, both from abroad and from Israel, including a number of senior faculty, emphasized the phenomenal danger in this motion. The danger of playing around with sacred principles of freedom speech and academic freedom, as Alan Dershowitz emphasized in the meeting before.
Furthermore, Israel’s status as a democracy would have been harmed irretrievably if the motion had been approved. The overwhelming majority was in favor of dropping the motion altogether, and applauded Prof. Klafter’s suggestion to do so.
Two clarifications are in order. Prof. Dershowitz has contributed greatly to the success of dismissing this motion. In two recent speeches he made clear that freedom of speech and academic freedom must be held sacred while expressing his distaste for Israeli supporters of the boycott. He also spoke against the intimidation of students on the basis of their political views. A number of my colleagues at Tel Aviv University seem to have interpreted his remarks as a reference to Tel Aviv University, something I believe to be a misunderstanding: I took his remarks to be a reference to situations he has encountered in the U.S.
My colleagues’ sensitivity is understandable: the myth that Tel Aviv University Professors intimidate students on the basis of their right-wing views keeps being perpetuated, for example by Brenda Katten, public relation chair for WIZO. This allegation was proven to be entirely fabricated in an in-depth investigation conducted by the Rector of Tel Aviv University last December.
Tel Aviv University has an electronic feedback system through which students anonymously evaluate their teachers’ performance (to make sure that they can speak their minds). It turned out that 140 complaints were filed by students who felt they were being harassed for their right-wing views. Most of the complaints were against three professors. Tel Aviv University has 25,000 students and 1,000 senior faculty, hence every year there are several hundred thousand feedbacks. That means that less than one of one thousand evaluations included complaints about this issue. But this simply doesn’t bother those who continue to perpetuate this myth.
There is one point on which I disagree with Alan Dershowitz: it is regrettable that he has repeated the false accusation that TAU historian Shlomo Sand denies the authenticity of the Jewish people and the legitimacy of the State of Israel, something that nobody who has actually read Sand’s book would claim. As I have addressed these insinuations against Sand in the past, I’ll just restate briefly: Sand indeed claims that many aspects of the Zionist narrative are historically problematic, but he emphasizes that in this Israel is no different than national narratives of other countries ranging from France and Switzerland to Indonesia.
Sand’s explicit goal is to safeguard Israel as a democracy with Jewish character, and he believes that holding on to the territories precludes that. In this he takes the same line as Defense Minister Ehud Barak, whom nobody accuses of denying Israel’s legitimacy.
In the end, beyond the small disagreements, one thing truly matters: the consensus of the overwhelming majority of the board of governors, Prof Klafter, Prof. Dershowitz and the faculty of Tel Aviv University that freedom of speech and academic freedom are sacred, and must not be tampered with. Those who prefer censorship and other undemocratic means to open discussion are caving in to fear. The resistance of the board of governors, the president and faculty to their pressure is a triumph of academic freedom and the democratic right to freedom of speech.