EDITOR: Dr. Frankenstein seems worried about his Creature…
The settlers, a creature of the Israeli government, is supposedly beyond and above the law. Of course, this is exactly what they wee made to be – a extra-judicial force of illegal settlers, in illegal settlements, who torture, oppress and kill Palestinians, steal their lands, and never brought to justice. It is really difficult to now turn round (as if anyone was even trying to do this…) and try to speak of the law, and of controlling the settlers, is really bizarre – the IOF kills Palestinians every week for no reason other than their identity, and now they tell us they cannot control the settlers; this is just another turning of the screw on Palestine: “We would have liked to stop those settlers, but unfortunaely they are above the law”.
IDF fears settler violence could spark Palestinian uprising: Haaretz
GOC Central Command tells Kfir Brigade soldiers the IDF does not know of any Palestinian plans for response, but to prepare for possibility.
Extremist settler activity could set the West Bank ablaze, GOC Central Command Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi warned on Monday at a brigade-wide training exercise at the Tze’elim military base in the Negev.
The Kfir Brigade exercise focused on urban warfare – including the capture of a simulated Arab city – and pitted Israeli troops against Palestinian security forces.
Senior officers present at the exercise, the most extensive session the infantry brigade has undergone since it was founded just over four years ago, said Monday there were no indications that Israel would have to fight the security forces.
However, the army said it needs to be prepared for all eventualities.
Mizrahi said he doesn’t expect tensions to rise in the West Bank in the near future.
“I don’t think something will happen anytime soon, unless there’s a very serious incident on the Temple Mount or in the Cave of the Patriarchs,” he said. However, he said he was “very anxious” about an escalation being set off by settler violence.
“Most of the settlement movement is fine, very normal, but a mosque set on fire and another mosque set on fire adds up,” Mizrahi said.
Defense officials are concerned over a series of mosque burnings in the past six months, including a fire that destroyed books and prayer rugs in a mosque near Nablus that firefighters said earlier this month was caused by arson.
Mizrahi said that while the council that officially represents settlers is willing to listen to defense officials, the army is worried about what some of the more radical settlers might do.
“The Yesha Council is sane. Even if they might have become more militant, they understand what’s going on and we can talk to them,” Mizrahi said. “But in Yitzhar, in Maon and in Havat Gilad, they don’t believe in us at all as a state. They want something else, and when someone doesn’t know the limits anymore you don’t know where it will end up.”
Mizrahi said the army and the Palestinian security forces, trained in Jordan by Keith Dayton, an American general, have been cooperating, but that Israeli soldiers still need to know how to fight them if the need should arise.
“This is a trained, equipped, American-educated force,” Mizrahi said. “This means that at the beginning of a battle, we’ll pay a higher price. A force like that can shut down an urban area with four snipers. It’s not the Jenin militants anymore ¬ it’s a proper infantry force facing us and we need to take that into account. They have attack capabilities and we don’t expect them to give up so easily.”
In the training exercise, three battalions went from house to house, where they faced Israel Defense Forces soldiers posing as members of the regular Palestinian security forces, Palestinian civilians or reporters.
Until now, soldiers serving in the brigade have been serving only in the West Bank, but Armored Corps commander Brig. Gen. Agai Yehezkel said the exercises would enable the brigade to fight on the Gaza and Lebanon fronts as well as in the West Bank, if necessary. He said Kfir battalions would be deployed for operational duty within the Green Line as early as next year.
The Kfir Brigade, which was created in December 2005, consists of six battalions whose soldiers man 30 percent of the roadblocks in the West Bank and are responsible for 60 percent of arrests. They have succeeded in decreasing the number of terrorist attacks in the West Bank.
Much of the brigade’s responsibilities have diminished recently, due to the increased activities of the Palestinian security forces.
It should be noted that the main perpetrators of crimes against Palestinians belong to the Kfir Brigade, according to statistics on Military Police investigations, which the Israel Defense Forces provided to the human rights organization Yesh Din.
In 2007 the Military Police opened 351 probes for crimes in the territories, compared to 152 cases in 2006. The Military Police managed to tie the complaints to specific IDF units in only 55 percent of the cases, compared to 78 percent in the previous year.
Sixty-six of the investigations opened in 2007 were against Kfir soldiers, compared to 35 in 2006; 52 were against the paratroopers brigade (19 in 2006); 14 against Nahal (only one in 2006); 10 against Givati (one in 2006); six against the tank corps (none in 2006); and five each against Golani and the West Bank division.
The Kfir brigade is posted in the West Bank permanently, which means it spends several more months a year there than any other brigade. It also has more regiments than other infantry brigades.
The Military Police is investigating a variety of crimes in the territories, from the killing of Palestinians and the illegal use of firearms to abuse and plunder.
The perils of prattle: Haaretz
By Akiva Eldar
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares that Israel will not be able to restrain itself from responding to Syria’s transfer of long-range missiles to Hezbollah, the Israeli embassy in Madrid goes on the alert. The diplomats there know that by the next day there will be a hysterical directive from Jerusalem to ask Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos to relay a reassuring message to Damascus.
And when Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatens to wipe out the Assad clan, ministry officials assume there must have been a development in the criminal investigation against Lieberman. The problem is that the Arabs just don’t get the Israelis: They take our ministers’ twaddle more seriously than we do.
It seems that Netanyahu and Lieberman want to scare us and put the peace genie back in the bottle. But how to convince the Arabs that their scaremongering is aimed at diverting our attention from the destruction the government is wreaking on Israel’s foreign relations? Barak Ravid reported in Haaretz last week that Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said, on his return from Beirut, that there was total panic in Lebanon over the possibility of an Israeli offensive there. It turns out that when Israeli officials try to scare us about the menace of the Scud missiles that Syria has given Hezbollah, it is the Arabs who get frightened.
According to articles appearing recently in the Arab press, the Syrians think that in the absence of permission from the United States to launch an offensive against Iran’s nuclear installations, Israel will strike in Iran’s front yard by attacking Hezbollah’s missiles and dragging Syria into a confrontation. In an atmosphere of panic, a local incident would be enough to start a major flare-up. Hassan Nasrallah said after the last war that he had not correctly assessed the action Israel would take. The Hezbollah leader implied that he had not been interested in a conflict of such high intensity.
In 2006, it ended with missiles landing on the outskirts of Hadera and 1 million refugees who fled from the north. According to the head of the Military Intelligence research division, Brig. Gen. Yossi Baidatz, if the Syrians err in their assessment of Israel’s intentions in 2010, the missiles will land in Tel Aviv and even further south. He recently told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Hezbollah’s military capabilities had developed greatly since the Second Lebanon War and that it now has thousands of rockets of all kinds and ranges, as well as long-range solid-fuel missiles that are highly accurate.
No less important, the “national appraiser” pointed out that Hezbollah is regarded by the Syrians as “part of their own defense entity” – and this comes at a time when the U.S. defense establishment does not see an Israel ruled by a right-wing government as part of the American defense entity. The checks and balances through which the peace process with Syria has contributed to a state of calm have worn thin. Baidatz said the Syrians are still interested in a peace deal with Israel for the return of the Golan Heights and American involvement. Military Intelligence believes that in exchange for this, “Syria will alter its role in the radical axis.” For Syrian President Bashar Assad, however, progress in the diplomatic process with the current Israeli government is of no import.
As long as Israel is not ready to pay the territorial price for peace with Syria, deterrence is a legitimate, and even vital, means of avoiding a military confrontation. Deterrence, according to the accepted definition in the Israel Defense Forces, consists of “an action or process of threatening that prevents the enemy from taking action because of a fear of its repercussions.”
Deterrence creates an atmosphere of the existence of a credible threat that decision makers believe could lead to an outcome that they cannot or do not wish to countenance. What would happen if the decision makers in Damascus decide that Israel is determined this summer to carry out its threat to attack, no matter what? When its life is threatened, even a pet cat unsheathes its claws.
We can only hope that our neighbors begin taking the blathering of Israeli leaders as seriously as most Israelis do. Otherwise, it could end in disaster.
Mordechai Vanunu’s cruel treatment: Guardian Letters
On 11 May the nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was sentenced to a further three months in prison, to start on 23 May. This latest sentence follows his objection to doing community service in West Jerusalem, where he reasonably feared for his safety. He was quite prepared to work in East Jerusalem, but this compromise was denied him by the supreme court. This most recent court hearing arose because Vanunu had been charged with breaking the draconian restrictions imposed on him ever since his release, in 2004, from his 18-year prison sentence – 11½ of which were spent in solitary confinement. These cruel and arbitrary restrictions forbade Vanunu freedom of movement, expression and association, in complete contravention of international law and his human rights. The continuing and outrageous harassment of Vanunu, for telling the world the truth of Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, all of 24 years ago, comes right at the start of the 2010 negotiations, at the United Nations in New York, to strengthen not only the international ban on nuclear weapons but also the 1968 non-proliferation treaty. This cynical treatment of Vanunu is a clear indication, once again, that Israel cares nothing for human rights legislation, nor any attempts to limit the possession, development and general spread of nuclear weapons.
Tony Benn, Ben Birnberg, Jeremy Dear, Bruce Kent, Jenny Morgan, Susannah York and Ernest Rodker
Chomsky refused entry into West Bank: Haaretz
By Donald Macintyre
Monday, 17 May 2010
Noam Chomsky, the internationally renowned philosopher and leading dissident US intellectual, was yesterday stopped by Israeli immigration officials from entering the West Bank to deliver a lecture.
The 81-year-old Jewish professor, an often mordant critic of the Israeli government who had been due to lecture at Birzeit University and the Institute for Palestine Studies, was refused entry at the Allenby Bridge across the river Jordan.
The bar was described by Professor Chomsky’s host, the Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti, as a “fascist action, amounting to suppression of freedom of expression”.
Professor Chomsky told Reuters from Amman, where he had returned from the crossing, that officials had refused him permission to enter the West Bank, adding: “They apparently didn’t like the fact that I was due to lecture at a Palestinian university and not in Israel.”
But the Israeli Ministry of Interior said last night that the bar had been a “mistake” by a member of the staff on the spot and that the Ministry had no objection to Professor Chomsky making the crossing if he was travelling directly to Ramallah, as distinct from visiting or passing through Israel.
Asked how a staff member at the crossing could have erred, an official said that the person may have wrongly responded to information held on a computer database.
Professor Chomsky, widely recognised as a giant of 20th-century linguistic philosophy as well as a prominent critic of US and Western foreign policy over decades, said that he was on a speaking tour of the region and that his schedule was too tight to attempt another entry into the West Bank.
Israel denies US academic Chomsky West Bank entry: BBC
Israel says the denial may be a misunderstanding
Renowned US scholar Noam Chomsky has been denied entry to the West Bank by Israeli immigration officials.
Prof Chomsky, renowned for his work on linguistics and philosophy, was planning to deliver a lecture at Birzeit University.
Prof Chomsky, 82, had been trying to enter from Jordan.
An Israeli interior ministry spokeswoman said it was to trying to clear the matter up and allow Prof Chomsky to enter.
Prof Chomsky said the officials were very polite but he was denied entry because “the government did not like the kinds of things I say and they did not like that I was only talking at Birzeit and not at an Israeli university too.”
He added: “I asked them if they could find any government in the world that likes the things I say.”
Prof Chomsky’s Palestinian host for the visit, Mustafa al-Barghouti, told Reuters: “This decision is a fascist action, amounting to suppression of freedom of expression.”
The interior ministry spokeswoman, Sabine Hadad, said: “We are trying to contact the military to clear things up and if they have no objection we see no reason why he should not be allowed in.”
Prof Chomsky has frequently spoken out against Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
After denied entry to West Bank, Chomsky likens Israel to ‘Stalinist regime’: Haaretz
Linguist Noam Chomsky was scheduled to lecture at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, meet PA Prime Minister Fayyad.
By Amira Hass
Tags: Israel news West Bank Noam Chomsky
The Interior Ministry refused to let linguist Noam Chomsky into Israel and the West Bank on Sunday. Chomsky, who aligns himself with the radical left, had been scheduled to lecture at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, and visit Bil’in and Hebron, as well as meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and various Palestinian activists.
In a telephone conversation last night from Amman, Chomsky told Haaretz that he concluded from the questions of the Israeli official that the fact that he came to lecture at a Palestinian and not an Israeli university led to the decision to deny him entry.
“I find it hard to think of a similar case, in which entry to a person is denied because he is not lecturing in Tel Aviv. Perhaps only in Stalinist regimes,” Chomsky told Haaretz.
Sabine Haddad, a spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, confirmed to Haaretz that the officials at the border were from the ministry.
“Because he entered the Palestinian Authority territory only, his entry is the responsibility of the Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories at the Defense Ministry. There was a misunderstanding on our side, and the matter was not brought to the attention of the COGAT.”
Haddad told Haaretz that “the minute the COGAT says that they do not object, Chomsky’s entry would have been permitted.”
Chomsky, a Jewish professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had spent several months at Kibbutz Hazore’a during the 1950s and had considered a longer stay in Israel. He had been invited by the Department of Philosophy at Bir Zeit.
He planned to spend four days in the West Bank and give two lectures.
On Sunday, at about 1:30 P.M. he came to the Israeli side of the border with Jordan. After three hours of questioning, during which the border officer repeatedly called the Interior Ministry for instructions, Chomsky’s passport was stamped with “Denied Entry.”
With Chomsky, 81, were his daughter Aviva, and a couple of old friends of his and his late wife.
Entry was also denied to his daughter.
Their friends, one of whom is a Palestinian who grew up in Beirut, were allowed in, but they opted to return with Chomsky to Amman.
Chomsky told Haaretz that it was clear that his arrival had been known to the authorities, because the minute he entered the passport control room the official told him that he was honored to see him and that he had read his works.
The professor concluded that the officer was a student, and said he looked embarrassed at the task at hand, especially when he began reading from text the questions that had been dictated to him, and which were also told to him later by telephone.
Chomsky told Haaretz about the questions.
“The official asked me why I was lecturing only at Bir Zeit and not an Israeli university,” Chomsky recalled. “I told him that I have lectured a great deal in Israel. The official read the following statement: ‘Israel does not like what you say.'”
Chomsky replied: “Find one government in the world which does.”
“The young man asked me whether I had ever been denied entry into other countries. I told him that once, to Czechoslovakia, after the Soviet invasion in 1968,” he said, adding that he had gone to visit ousted Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek, whose reforms the Soviets crushed.
In response to the official’s question, Chomsky said that the subjects of his lectures were “America and the world,” and “America at home.”
The official asked him whether he would speak on Israel and Chomsky said that because he would talk of U.S. policy he would also comment on Israel and its policies.
He was then told by the official: “You have spoken with [Hassan] Nasrallah.”
“True,” Chomsky told him. “When I was in Lebanon [prior to the war in 2006] I spoke with people from the entire political spectrum there, as in Israel I also spoke with people on the right.”
“At the time I read reports of my visit in the Israeli press, and the articles in the Israeli press had no connection with reality,” Chomsky told the border official.
The official asked Chomsky why he did not have an Israeli passport.
“I replied I am an American citizen,” Chomsky said.
Chomsky said that he asked the man at border control for an official written explanation for the reason his entry was denied and that “it would help the Interior Ministry because this way my version will not be the only one given to the media.”
The official called the ministry and then told Chomsky that he would be able to find the official statement at the U.S. Embassy.
The last time Chomsky visited Israel and the West Bank was in 1997, when he lectured on both sides of the Green Line. He had also planned a visit to the Gaza strip, but because the Palestinian Authority insisted that he be escorted by Palestinian guards, he canceled that part of the visit.
To Haaretz, Chomsky said Sunday that preventing him entry is tantamount to boycotting Bir Zeit University. Chomsky is known to oppose a general boycott on Israel. “I was against a boycott of apartheid South Africa as well. If we are going to boycott, why not the United States, whose record is even worse? I’m in favor of boycotting American companies which collaborate with the occupation,” he said. “But if we are to boycott Tel Aviv University, why not MIT?”
Chomsky told Haaretz that he supports a two-state solution, but not the solution proposed by Jerusalem, “pieces of land that will be called a state.”
He said that Israel’s behavior today reminds him of that of South Africa in the 1960s, when it realized that it was already considered a pariah, but thought that it would resolve the problem with better public relations.
Chomsky Al-Jazeera video interview: Al Jazeera online
“We were denied entry”
By Al-Jazeera – 16 May 2010
Noam Chomsky, a renowned Jewish-American scholar and political activist, has been barred from entering the West Bank.
Chomsky was denied entry by Israeli immigration officials as he attempted to cross the Allenby Bridge from Jordan on Sunday.
The linguistics professor, who frequently speaks out against Israeli policy in the occupied Palestinian territories, had been scheduled to give a lecture at Birzeit University in the West Bank.
“I entered with my daughter and two friends who we met in Amman the day before,” he told Al Jazeera.
“After several hours of waiting and multiple interrogations our two friends were permitted entry and my daughter and I were informed that we were denied entry after much discussion indirectly with the interior ministry.”
Chomsky said the border officials were “very polite” as they “transmitted inquiries from the [Israeli] ministry of the interior”.
He said that he believed he was denied entry was for two reasons.
“The government does not like the kind of things I say which puts them into the category of every other government in the world,” he said.
“The second was that they seemed upset about the fact that I was taking an invitation from Birzeit and I had no plans of speaking to any Israeli universities as I’ve done many times in the past, but not this time.”
‘Misunderstanding’
However, a spokeswoman at the Israeli interior ministry, which controls the country’s borders, said Chomsky had not been allowed to cross the border due to misunderstanding.
She said officials were trying to get clearance from the Israeli military, which controls access to the West Bank to allow Chomsky to enter.
“We are trying to contact the military to clear things up and if they have no objection we see no reason why he should not be allowed in,” Sabine Hadad told the Reuters news agency.
Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian MP who had invited Chomsky to speak at the university’s philosophy department, said the scholar had been detained at the border for five hours.
“This act shows the nature of the Israeli government that is against freedom of speech, particularly from such a noted international figure like Chomsky,” Barghouti said.
Chomsky, 81, is a professor of linguistics at the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has frequently spoken out against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.
Israel is encouraging academic boycott by denying entry to Chomsky: Haaretz
If Israel feels it cannot survive free speech, then it is one step closer to flirting with totalitarianism.
By Carlo Strenger
Professor Noam Chomsky, the left-wing radical thinker and activist, is regularly voted the most influential public intellectual in the world. He has been highly critical of Israel’s policies for many years, particularly since the time of the first Lebanon war in 1982.
On Sunday, Chomsky was denied entry at the Allenby Bridge on his way from Amman to Ramallah, where he was scheduled to lecture about American foreign policy at Bir Zeit University.
By his own account, it seems the authorities had been expecting to detain him because he was respectfully asked to follow a young man, who seemed somewhat embarrassed by the task, for questioning.
During the hours there, the young man repeatedly spoke on the phone, apparently to the Interior Ministry in Jerusalem. Chomsky was, among other things, told that Israel doesn’t like what he is.
Nobody in his right mind can claim that Chomsky represents a security threat to Israel. He’s 81 years old. He is not a specialist on armed insurrection, and he has never called for violence against Israel.
While reading talkbacks to the reports that he was denied entry I came upon statements like “He’s a well-known Holocaust denier” that fall somewhere between total ignorance and the onset of paranoia.
So just for the record: Chomsky is in favor of the two-state solution, and neither calls for violence against Israel nor for dismantling the state. He is even against an academic boycott of Israel’s universities – a rather popular cause of the European left in recent years.
I have heard Chomsky speak on a number of occasions in Israel in the 1980s and 1990s. According to his own testimony, he was here last in 1997.
Chomsky has not changed his views since, so it must be Israel that has changed – and very much for the worse. Otniel Schneller, a Knesset member from the Kadima party – a supposedly centrist faction – had the following to say about the Chomsky affair: “It’s good that Israel did not allow one of its accusers to enter its territory. I recommend [Chomsky] try one of the tunnels connecting Gaza and Egypt.”
I have never heard of a democratic state denying entry to thinkers (or anybody else for that matter) who neither call for violence or break local or international law. So what on earth is happening to Israel? Is the Interior Ministry offended that Chomsky didn’t also plan to speak in Israel? If so, is this a reason to deny him entry?
Israel is currently fighting international calls to boycott Israeli universities and academics. Does anybody think that denying entry to Chomsky will strengthen our case?
If anything, barring Chomsky gives ammunition to those who say that Israel is infringing on academic freedom in the Palestinian Authority, and that a boycott against its universities is therefore justified.
If Israel feels it can defend its actions morally and politically, it should not fear thinkers who criticize it. But Israel is beginning to tamper with free speech, and this is a truly worrying development.
If Israel feels it cannot survive free speech, then it is one step closer to flirting with totalitarianism. In fact, during his questioning, when Chomsky was asked whether he was ever denied entry into a country he said, yes: into Czechoslovakia in 1968, after the Russian invasion, when he wanted to visit his friend Dubcek. This puts Israel into very poor company indeed.
This shameful episode, once again, reminds me of Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s dictum: “I don’t know whether Israel’s policies since 1967 are evil stupidity or stupidly evil.” This particular case I would argue is both.
It is evil to deny Bir Zeit University lectures, even if some government official here doesn’t like their content. And it is utterly stupid, because Israel has once again succeeded in making the world’s headlines as a brutish state that infringes on human rights, freedom of speech and academic freedom, all of which many of us here are working so hard to defend.
Mustafa Barghouthi And Noam Chomsky Deliver Joint Condemnation Of ’Facist’ Israeli Policies: Palestine Monitor
17 May 2010
MP Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, co-hosted a press conference in Ramallah today with Professor Noam Chomsky, speaking from Amman, Jordan. Professor Chomsky, who along with his daughter was prevented from entering the West Bank yesterday by Israeli authorities, could not recall “comparable actions outside of totalitarian states”. Dr. Barghouthi denounced Chomsky’s treatment, saying it “represented facist tendancies” of the Israeli government.
Professor Chomsky had been due to deliver addresses at Birzeit University, as well as meeting with public officials and visiting popular protest sites in Bilin and Nilin. Speaking via phone link from Amman he described five hours of interrogation, during which he was informed the questions were coming directly from the Ministry of Interior. Chomsky explained the two recurrent problems the army had with his visit.
“The first point was that they dont like my opinions about Israeli policies, which is true of every other country but has never stopped me coming and giving lectures before.”
“The second, most crucial point was that they didnt like the fact that I was visiting the West Bank but then not going on to speak in Israel. The issue was going to Birzeit, just as I would any other university, without specific Israeli approval. I would say that is very unusual, perhaps unique, outside totalitarian states.”
Chomsky went on to compare the incident with the only previous instance of his being barred from entering a country, which occurred while attempting to visit dissident prisoners in the former Czechoslovakia, during the Soviet era in 1968. “But that was an overtly political act” he explained. Chomsky has never before been prevented from delivering lectures around the world, including previous visits to Israel and the West bank.
Professor Chomsky lecturing on Palestine
On behalf of the Palestinian public, Dr. Barghouthi thanked Professor Chomsky for his “stand in support of the cause of justice in Palestine”. He denounced the “stupid act” of Israeli authorities, which represented “facist tendancies and oppression of freedom of expression.”
“In our opinion the decision is unacceptable and makes no sense. Professor Chomsky is the most important linguist in the world today, a lecturer at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), is himself Jewish and holds an American passport. Israel is telling us and the world that no one can visit or work here in the West Bank without permission from their military authorities. We will not accept the establishment of such a precedent. It is a very dangerous regression and we will struggle against it in every possible way.”
Dr. Barghouthi went on to criticise a lack of international intervention. “Israel would not have gone so far had the international community taken proper measures against its policies. We think it was inappropriate to accept Israel into the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) because such acceptance is like a reward. The world has to revise its policies toward Israel for the sake for the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians, because what we see today is the consolidation of an apartheid, totalitarian system that is dangerous to the whole of humanity.”
Mayor mulls hiring private guards to demolish illegal homes in East Jerusalem: Haaretz
Municipality spokesperson denies report, says Barkat insists house demolitions and enforcement of building regulations be implemented only under the protection of the police.
By Akiva Eldar
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat is considering the possibility of hiring private security guards to take part in the demolition of homes in East Jerusalem and provide security for construction teams, according to an internal memo written Sunday by the municipality’s legal consultant.
In the memo, which was obtained by Haaretz, legal consultant Yossi Havilio wrote that the mayor had broached the subject with the municipal construction, licensing and inspecting department and that the municipality’s supervisor of building inspections, Ofir Mai, asked Havilio to examine the matter from a legal standpoint.
Havilio said he would issue an opinion on the matter shortly.
Municipality spokesperson Gidi Shmerling denied the contents of the memo, saying that Barkat is insisting that house demolitions and enforcement of building regulations in both parts of the city be implemented only under the protection of the police.
According to Havilio, Barkat sought to examine the various aspects entailed in the contracting of private firms for building inspection jobs in East Jerusalem. The mayor was also said to be inquiring about the legal ramifications of using private firms to perform tasks normally assigned to police or municipal officials, including taking part in patrol missions throughout East Jerusalem and entering private residences to collect witness statements and evidence.
According to Havilio, Barkat is considering using private firms to enforce construction and building codes only in East Jerusalem.
Last week Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said the police were preparing to enforce demolition orders against illegally built Arab homes in East Jerusalem. Yet the Prime Minister’s Bureau made clear that in the next two weeks there would be no demolitions in the eastern part of the capital due to security considerations.
Haaretz has also learned that Havilio was unhappy over the police refusal to take part in enforcing demolition orders without written approval from the director general of the municipality. Havilio made his displeasure known to Jerusalem police chief Aharon Franco.
Deputy Mayor Yosef (Pepe ) Alalu received a copy of an e-mail from Havilio in which Mai indicates that he passed along the police request to municipality director general Yair Maayan.
In a letter to Franco, Havilio states that the police requirement for approval from the director general, who answers to the mayor, is inconsistent with the directives issued by the attorney general.
In December 2009 former attorney general Menachem Mazuz wrote that the exclusive authority over enforcing demolition orders against illegal housing belongs to the city’s top legal official and the supervisory department in the city engineer’s office. Mazuz said the municipality is not to accept any instructions regarding enforcement from any other official.
The municipality said the director general has no knowledge of the police request for his approval to carry out the demolitions.
A spokesperson for the Jerusalem police said they did not submit a request for approval from the director general of the municipality and that the police are prepared to carry out demolition orders in coordination with the municipality if and when a date is set.
Palestinians working to stop Israeli bid to divide West Bank and Gaza residents: Haaretz
As Israel cracks down on Gazans living in the West Bank, a new group is demanding freedom of movement for all Palestinians.
By Amira Hass
Tags: Israel news West Bank Gaza Palestinians
A mistaken report needs to be corrected. Two weeks ago I wrote about a young man who claimed he was expelled from the West Bank to Gaza. He was born in Gaza but had lived in the West Bank since he was 7, he said. The military spokesman’s office informed me that it was not familiar with the case, but I’ve heard that line before – for example, in reference to Palestinians who were used as “human shields” during Operation Cast Lead. The fact that the army says it doesn’t know about an incident doesn’t mean such an incident hasn’t taken place.
But this time, it turns out that there was no evasive maneuver here, and there was a real reason this case was unfamiliar to the Israel Defense Forces: The young man has lived with his family in Israel for many years. And it was from Be’er Sheva, not the West Bank town of Dahariya, that he was expelled. For him, the lie he told reporters, myself included, is perhaps a fraction of a lie. After all, the distance between Dahariya and Be’er Sheva is small, the borders are artificial, the lifestyle is similar, relatives live on both sides of the Green Line. But as far as I am concerned, his tale is a full-fledged lie that piggybacked on the great media interest, the first of its kind, in the situation of Gaza natives who live in the West Bank.
Over the last few months, all sorts of rumors were disseminated, but were easy to spot right away as being totally unfounded: the rumors that 20 Palestinians were expelled as a single group to Gaza, that a Shin Bet questionnaire was distributed in four homes of native Gazans, that dozens of deported Palestinians were gathered in a protest tent in Gaza. These false rumors came on the heels of a Haaretz report about an amended military order, No. 1650, that is aimed at preventing infiltration into the West Bank.
In suspiciously vague language, order No. 1650 (amendment No. 2 ) expands the definition of “infiltrator” such that it applies to anyone who is in the West Bank without a permit from the military commander, and anyone who fits that definition is subject to expulsion. Rumors sparked by the fact that this order went into effect on April 13 caused panic and uncertainty, primarily among Palestinians whose identity cards bear an address in the Gaza Strip.
Long before the order was made public, many knew that the Israeli authorities – the army, Civil Administration and the police – consider West Bank residents with a Gaza address on their ID cards to be living in the West Bank illegally. Many sought over the years to change the address that appears on their official records, and discovered that Israel was preventing them from doing so. One case even required the intervention of a very senior French minister who knew the Palestinian woman who has been married for years to a West Bank native; she lives and works in the West Bank, but continued to be registered as living in Gaza. The minister approached a certain party and the address was changed. Those who do not have such high-level connections have long stopped moving around the West Bank and leaving the Area A enclaves where they live.
True, the IDF and the other official spokesmen sought to explain that the order was not intended to kick out Gazans who do not have a permit to stay in the West Bank, which the IDF did not even require them to get until 2007. They distributed a reassuring letter to diplomats as well. Though the diplomats haven’t come out in favor of the Fayyad government’s demand that the order be rescinded, “in Israel they know we are on the watch,” one of them told Haaretz.
Like the diplomat, Palestinian officials in the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization have not been convinced by the reassurances Israel has issued. “The order is another substantial blow to the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, as agreed to in the Oslo Accords,” said Saeb Erekat on Thursday at a public meeting in Ramallah. He told his audience that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has asked the Americans directly about the order, saying: “Are you interested in my having authority in the Palestinian territories or not? I want an answer.”
The public meeting with Erekat was a first-of-its-kind event. Three Palestinian groups joined together to arrange it: Al Haq, a veteran human rights organization; Right to Enter, a voluntary association of Palestinians with foreign citizenship who live in the West Bank; and Harakeh (“Movement” ), an organization started about three months ago by Gaza natives who live in the West Bank. The right to have freedom of movement and to choose where they want to live, the fight against the restrictions on movement that Israel imposes on all Palestinians, the tie that should not be broken between Palestinian society in Gaza and that in the West Bank: This is the underlying basis of the organization. The surprising thing is that no one formed a group like this 15 years ago, and that there aren’t thousands of Palestinians waiting to join.
The issuing of order No. 1650 was an opportunity for Harakeh to come out of the closet, so to speak. Around 10 days ago, its representatives attended a closed meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad during which social activists discussed ways of combating the order. But the meeting with Erekat was open to the public (and was later broadcast ), and he was asked several direct questions. For instance: The office of civilian affairs, which mediates between Palestinian residents and Israel’s Civil Administration, and which is subordinate to Abbas’ office, recently started handing out Israeli-issued permits that allow Gazans to temporarily stay in the West Bank; isn’t that a kind of recognition of the separation that Israel has created between the two societies?
The participants at the meeting asked the PA to take some action and not just issue denunciations. For example, they asked, why shouldn’t the PA change the addresses of thousands of people, instead of having its officials turn them away while explaining obediently that “the Israelis don’t agree to it”? In this way, the PA will exercise its authority in accordance with Oslo.
This would be a form of integrated civil disobedience, if you like: the leadership and the public together reject the occupiers’ dictates. It’s just like Bil’in, in a different guise.
Erekat talked at length about the occupation. It is only natural for something 43 years old to lead to the development of racism among Israelis. It is an illness that endangered and endangers all of mankind, he said, and people always find pretexts for it. The head of the Palestinian negotiating team reiterated that “our choice is a two-state solution” and that “there is no Palestinian state without the Gaza Strip.” He joked that even Abbas can be seen as an infiltrator. The meeting concluded with an agreement that Erekat would send Abbas a letter containing the three groups’ recommendations on how to proceed. It was also agreed that a joint coordinating committee would be set up (including representatives of the president’s office, the government, the PLO and civil society organizations ) to work against order No. 1650.
Forget the two- state solution: The Independent Letters
You rightly describe William Hague as holding hawkish views on Iran, but then quickly revert to safe territory by stressing the importance of Israeli-Palestinian talks (“The Tories must demonstrate they have moved on from old dogmas”, 15 May).
The portrayal of Iran by the Neocons as the West’s arch-enemy is a ploy to distract us from the harsh truth that the colonisation of the West Bank with Israeli settlements has put paid to a viable two-state solution. It is no longer good enough to invoke the “two-state” mantra with its spurious claim that peace would break out, provided Iran stopped supporting Hamas and Hizbollah.
The only options are an apartheid Greater Israel or, as in the case of present-day South Africa, a common state with common citizenship for all Israelis and Palestinians. A passive West ensures the former outcome. The latter requires a proactive West, one able to bite its lips while facilitating the unmentionable, namely Ahmadinejad’s metaphorical dream of wiping the Zionist state of Israel off the map.
As for the alleged Iranian nuclear threat, this is best dealt with by the establishment of a nuclear-free Middle East, as called for by the UN General Assembly. Iran needs to be told that if it forgoes its rights as a signatory of the existing international non-proliferation treaty in a fully verifiable form, the Security Council will ensure that Israel becomes a signatory and surrenders its nuclear weapons. There is a precedent, of sorts, in that post-apartheid South Africa gave up its few, admittedly crude, atomic devices.
Israel would vociferously object, but it is, after all, a western dependency. Thanks to the American taxpayer, for instance, it possesses overwhelming conventional military superiority in the region. The converse is that the vital interests of America and the West may, on occasion, trump those of Israel.
Yugo Kovach
Winterborne Houghton, Dorset
Israel’s apartheid road: Haaretz
Rachel Shabi
The ban on Palestinians using highway 443 has been lifted but sidestepped by the Israeli army. It’s bare-faced segregation
If you didn’t have peripheral vision, it would probably be fine. If you didn’t glance to the sides of Israel’s highway 443 between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, then it wouldn’t smack you in the face that the road is – how shall we put it? – segregated. As it is, you can’t help but notice that when the 443 passes by the Israeli town of Modi’in and heads east into the occupied West Bank, some of its side-routes are blocked. Concrete boulders, metal barriers, rubble and heaps of rubbish halt roads from Palestinian villages such as Beit Sira and Beit Ur al-Fuka.
And if you stop at one of those barricades, a complicated coping apparatus comes to light: cars deposit weary Palestinians who work inside Israel at these blocked routes; on the other side, lines of parked Palestinian cabs await to resume the interrupted journey home.
Palestinians without permits to work or travel inside Israel can’t be on the 443 at all. So for the 3,000 inhabitants of Beit Sira, one of six villages affected by the blocked highway, a trip to nearby Ramallah, about 12 miles away, now takes hours via minor roads that are prohibitively long, pot-holed and sometimes flooded. Some 55,000 Palestinians are thought to be affected by the road ban.
The Israeli military barred Palestinian access to this road in 2002, citing security reasons after several shootings in which five Israelis were killed. But last December, Israel’s supreme court ruled that this sweeping ban on Palestinian movement was disproportionate and that the roadblocks had to be lifted.
The court pointed out that the 443 – which cuts through the occupied West Bank for a 12-mile stretch – had only been approved during the 1980s on condition that it would be open to all. (A comic Hebrew animation explains this here.)
The army has had five months to sort it out, but that time was mostly employed by ministers to scaremonger about how an open 443 would make sitting targets of Israeli drivers, who would instantly migrate to the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem route, highway 1 – and choke it.
Now the military has unveiled its response to the court’s decision: a sort of de-block-and-re-block manoeuvre. The idea is to partially open parts of the road but to compensate that with an extra checkpoint at one end, scrutinising those Palestinians newly permitted to drive this limited section.
And so, once again, the Israeli military – the real authority in the West Bank – has shown that, unless absolutely compelled to do so, it cannot be trusted to do the right thing in the occupied territories. No matter that thousands of Palestinians who have nothing to do with any shooting or stone-throwing are denied easy access to the most basic facilities. No matter that sick patients don’t make it to hospital on time; or that Palestinians have to rise at the crack of dawn, slip through the crevices of concrete barriers and creep slowly though an Israeli checkpoint – while Israeli-plated cars breeze past – just to get to work.
And why bother getting to the bones of the issue by asking why those few Palestinians would have attacked Israeli cars whistling through the West Bank, on a road that has been dug out of occupied land, in the midst of the viciously crushed second intifada? No; far easier to completely bar Palestinian passage on this road. And when the Israeli court challenges that, just block the road in a different way and see if those pedantic judges shut up.
But could the court be disinclined to shut up on this matter? The Israeli military claims that the court knew about the partial-opening plans. Meanwhile, some 1,000 Israeli families have petitioned the court to keep the road closed because they say the army’s solution is too lax.
And the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, which filed the original petition to open the road, immediately filed another in response to army’s unblocked-but-closed policy.
It looks as though highway 443 – so often cited as a symbol of segregationist policy – might not be properly open to Palestinians in the near future. But until it is, a drive on this road feels like a fast, scenic shortcut through another people’s daily punishment.
Israel to Europe: Stop your citizens from sailing to Gaza with aid
Israel to deport Turkish volunteer arrested by Shin Bet for allegedly belonging to outlawed Islamist group organizing aid boat to Gaza.
Israel warned a number of European states that it would not permit leftist-organizations planning to sail to the Gaza Strip with international aid to complete their mission.
The director of European affairs for the Foreign Ministry, Naor Gilon, met separately with envoys from Turkey, Greece, Ireland and Sweden to convey the message that any of their citizens intending to set sail for Gaza would be stopped before they could reach the coastal territory.
Describing such mission as provocative and in violation of Israeli law, Gilon told the diplomats: “Israel has not intention of allowing these sailboats in Gaza.”
The Foreign Ministry message essentially entails that anybody who tries to sail to Gaza with aid, or who tries to transfer goods into the Hamas-ruled territory, must do so in accordance with procedure.
The diplomats promised to pass the message along to the appropriate sources, said the Foreign Ministry, with some even offering to help prevent their citizens from attempting the mission.
Earlier Monday, Israeli security forces released a Turkish national arrested this month for allegedly belonging to an outlawed Islamic group, and were set to deport him later in the day.
Izzet Shahin, a volunteer for the Turkish NGO Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), was arrested in the West Bank by the Israel Defense Forces and was then transferred to the Shin Bet for investigation.
IHH, who had been organizing a Gaza aid boat planned to depart at the end of the month, was outlawed in Israel a few years ago.
According to the IHH website, the organization had been organizing a “major initiative…to deliver aid via the sea to the Gaza Strip, which has been under an embargo for over three years.”
“Hundreds of concerned people will set out on 10 ships in May to take over 5,000 tons of relief aid and materials to Gaza,” the website statement said,