EDITOR: Read our letter in the Independent!
Ahava is an Israeli concern which steals minerals from the Palestinian Occupied Territories and sells them at great price abroad – only one of many companies which thrive on the military illegal occupation. The campaign against them is picking up in Europe and the US. The current iteration is an action we are developing against Ahava’s inclusion in a research project funded by the EU, with the Natural History Museum, Kings College London and the Imperial College. Please read the letter and send it to all and sundry.
Letters: Museum must drop West Bank link: Independent letters
TUESDAY 17 JANUARY 2012
It is extraordinary, but true, that one of our great national museums is co-ordinating an activity that breaks international law. That museum is the Natural History Museum, which is collaborating in research with an Israeli commercial firm located in an illegal settlement in the Palestinian West Bank.
The firm is Ahava/Dead Sea Laboratories, whose business is manufacturing cosmetics out of mud, which it excavates from the banks of the Dead Sea. Ahava/DSL is located at Mitzpe Shalem, a settlement 10km beyond the Green Line. The collaboration with the Museum is through an EU-funded project called Nanoretox, in which Kings College London, Imperial College and a number of foreign institutions are also involved. The museum is the coordinating partner for this project.
Ahava/DSL is based on occupied territory. It extracts, processes and exports Palestinian resources to generate profits that fund an illegal settlement. Israel’s settlement project has been held by the International Court of Justice to break international law. Organisations which aid and abet this process may well themselves be found to be in violation. We find it almost inconceivable that a national institution of the status of the Natural History Museum should have put itself in this position.
We call on the museum to take immediate steps to terminate its involvement in Nanoretox and to establish safeguards that protect against any comparable entanglement.
Professor Sir Patrick Bateson FRS
University of Cambridge
Professor Malcolm Levitt FRS
University of Southampton
Professor Tim Shallice FRS
SISSA, Trieste
Mike Leigh
Ken Loach
Jonathan Miller
Victoria Brittain
Baroness Tonge
Dr Gillian Yudkin
Professor Laurence Dreyfus FBA
University of Oxford
Professor Jacqueline Rose FBA
Queen Mary University of London
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead
London School of Economics
Professor John Armitage
University of Bristol
Professor Haim Bresheeth
University of East London
Professor Barry Fuller
University College London
Professor Colin Green
University College, London
Dr Ghada Karmi
University of Exeter
Professor Adah Kay
City University
Professor David Pegg
University of York
Professor Steven Rose
Open University
Professor Lynne Segal
Birkbeck College
Natural History Museum attacked over links to ‘illegal’ Israeli company: Indpendent
The Natural History Museum is today accused by a coalition of prominent academics and cultural figures of helping to break international law by leading a research project which involves an Israeli cosmetics company based in an “illegal” settlement in the occupied West Bank.
In a letter to The Independent, leading scientists and the film directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, condemn the London museum – which is the fourth most visited in Britain – for its research collaboration with Ahava – Dead Sea Laboratories (DSL), which sells beauty products based on minerals extracted from the Dead Sea.
The museum, which has a substantial academic research team, is co-ordinating NANORETOX, a European Union-funded project looking at any risks to human health and the environment posed by so-called nanoparticles – microscopic engineered materials which scientists are developing for multiple uses from cancer treatment to double glazing.
Ahava-DSL, which is one of a dozen institutions and companies involved in the project including two University of London colleges, has its registered headquarters listed in Israel but most of its activities are carried out in Mitzpe Shalem, a Jewish settlement on the edge of the Dead Sea in the West Bank.
Settlements in the Occupied Territories have been declared illegal under international law by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. But despite international condemnation, the Israeli government insists that a large number of the settlements, including more than 120 on the West Bank, are not illegal.
In their letter, the 21 signatories, who include the eminent biologist Sir Patrick Bateson, president of the Zoological Society of London, and leading intellectual Sir Jonathan Miller, claim that the Natural History Museum’s connection with Ahava-DSL means that it is “co-ordinating an activity that breaks international law”.
They said: “[Ahava-DSL] extracts, processes and exports Palestinian resources to generate profits that fund an illegal settlement. Israel’s settlement project has been held… to break international law. Organisations which aid and abet this process may well themselves be found to be in violation.
“We find it almost inconceivable that a national institution of the status of the Natural History Museum should have put itself in this position. We call on the museum to take immediate steps to terminate its involvement in [the project] and to establish safeguards that protect against any comparable entanglement.”
The NANORETOX project began in December 2008 and is due to conclude at the end of this year, although campaigners say the involvement of Ahava-DSL has only now come to their attention. The company, which has conducted extensive research on nanoparticles for its products, was appointed to the project to supply materials and carry out toxicity tests.
The Natural History Museum yesterday defended its role in the research, saying that Ahava-DSL was chosen from a listed of scientific partners approved by the European Commission and suggested that any decision to boycott the project could be a challenge to “academic freedom”.
In a statement, Professor Ian Owens, the musuem’s director of science, said: “We work within the legal and policy boundaries established by politicians and policy makers, and would not participate in any academic or educational boycotts that could restrict academic freedom.”
Ahava-DSL, which has been the subject of a boycott campaign targeting its shops in Europe and America, did not respond to requests for a comment. The company has previously said that the Dead Sea mud and materials used in its products are excavated from Israeli land outside the occupied territories and that Mitzpe Shalem is not an illegal settlement.
U.K. museum lambasted over links to Israeli Dead Sea firm: Haaretz
Open letter to U.K.’s Independent newspaper urges London’s Natural History Museum to quit project with Israeli skincare product firm Ahava.
By Reuters
Experts at a leading British museum should pull out of a European-funded study into tiny particles because one of their partners is an Israeli company that operates in the West Bank, British scientists and public figures said on Tuesday.
More than a dozen scientists, some from leading British universities, wrote an open letter with film-makers Mike Leigh and Ken Loach calling on the Natural History Museum in London to stop working with the Israeli company Ahava, which makes skincare products from Dead Sea minerals.
The group said Ahava works on land in the West Bank, “where it extracts, processes and exports Palestinian resources to generate profits that fund an illegal settlement.”
The company denies that claim and says it takes minerals from Israeli waters.
Ahava is based in Israel but has a center in Mitzpe Shalem, a settlement close to the shores of the Dead Sea.
“It is extraordinary, but true, that one of our great national museums is co-ordinating an activity that breaks international law,” the group wrote in the letter published in the U.K’s Independent newspaper.
“We find it almost inconceivable that a national institution of the status of the Natural History Museum should have put itself in this position. We call on the museum to take immediate steps to terminate its involvement. ”
No one at Ahava could immediately be reached for comment. Company executives have previously disputed campaigners’ claims about their products, saying they are produced from minerals taken from undisputed Israeli parts of the Dead Sea. The company also says Mitzpe Shalem is not an illegal settlement.
London’s Natural History Museum is a lead partner in the four-year study, funded by the European Commission, into nanomaterials, substances at the atomic scale which are used in a range of industries.
The project, called NanoReTox, aims to identify potential risks to the environment and human health posed by the tiny man-made materials.
Ahava and nine other research bodies are also taking part, including the United States Geological Survey, Kings College London and Imperial College London.
Pro-Palestinian campaigners have previously targeted shops around the world that sell Ahava’s skin products.
The Natural History Museum’s Director of Science Professor Ian Owens said Ahava were experts in the analysis of nano-particles and had been approved as a partner by the European Commission.
“We work within the legal and policy boundaries established by politicians and policymakers, and would not participate in any academic or educational boycotts that could restrict academic freedom,” Owens said in a statement.
Robert Fisk: The ‘invented people’ stand little chance: Independent
SATURDAY 14 JANUARY 2012
His statement that the Palestinians were an “invented people” marked about the lowest point in the Republican-Christian Right-Likudist/Israel relationship. So deep has this pact now become that you can deny the existence of an entire people if you want to become US president. It’s time, surely, to take a look at this extraordinary movement, to remind ourselves – since US “statesmen” cannot – just what its implications really are.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in New York on 23 September, few noticed a quite remarkable reference in his speech. In refusing Newt’s “invented” people’s request for statehood, he made an extremely unpleasant remark about “the insatiable crocodile of militant Islam”. But far more disturbing was this: “In 1984, when I was appointed Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, I visited the great rabbi of Lubovich. He said to me … you’ll be serving in a house of many lies … remember that even in the darkest place, the light of a single candle can be seen far and wide.”
Did Obama and Clinton or anyone else pick up on this reverent memoir, indeed the only quotation from any of Netanyahu’s meetings which he chose to mention at the UN? For this is the rabbi who viewed himself as a messiah and whose followers stood behind Netanyahu in his successful 1996 election campaign. Only Sefi Rachlevsky in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz appeared to spot the significance of Netanyahu’s remark.
“The Lubavitcher Rebbe [sic] was famous for his vehement opposition to even the tiniest withdrawal from any territory ever held by the Israel Defence Forces, even in the framework of full peace,” Rachlevsky wrote. “The most prominent emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe – the great rabbi, as Netanyahu termed him at the United Nations – included Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the 1994 Hebron massacre, and Yitzhak Ginsburg, the rabbi of Yitzhar, he of the radical book Baruch the Man (which celebrates the massacre).” The rabbi, Rachlevsky continued, believed that in the land of the messiah, there is no room for Arabs. Newt was right on track, it seems. “Thus racism entered Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations – not ‘merely’ against Islam, but also against Arabs.”
And so the ghost of Goldstein slid into the UN, the doctor who put on his IDF uniform to enter the mosque of Abraham and slay 29 praying Arabs before being almost torn to pieces. His grave, in the neighbouring settlement of Kiryat Arba, is today treated by his admirers as a shrine. But, for the Prime Minister of Israel, the “crocodile” was militant Islam. Of course, Netanyahu can lavish praise on whatever oddball he wants – his predecessors, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, officially received a Lebanese militiaman called Etienne Saqr whose civil war “Guardians of the Cedars” routinely mutilated Palestinian prisoners before putting them to death, and whose motto was “it is the duty of each Lebanese to kill one Palestinian” – but something very dark was getting loose here. The Israel of socialist kibbutzim and phoenix-like power, of honour and renewal that the world believed in after the Second World War, had vanished.
What came in its place? The Arab Awakening has allowed us to avoid this all-consuming question. That Israel has “veered to the right” (as if it might soon “veer” back to the left) has long been a sop phrase for American journalists – though it’s not long ago that one of them was instructed to refrain from referring to a Netanyahu cabinet as “right wing” on the grounds that this upset his paper’s Jewish readers. The presence of Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister – Nicolas Sarkozy has many times beseeched Netanyahu to get rid of him – is proof of that; it would be difficult to find a better Israeli “match” for the crackpot president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But something far more worrying is taking place.
In the United States, where Netanyahu received so many standing ovations from a Congress that apparently thought it was the Knesset – far more ovations than he would ever have received in the real Knesset in Jerusalem – Israel is increasingly relying on the support of Christian fundamentalists.
This support has now coalesced with the Republican Party against Obama – whose grovelling to Netanyahu has won him no new friends – so that over recent years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is routinely used to attack the Democrats. Having once been sustained by the progressive left, Israel now draws its principal support from right-wing conservatism of a particularly unpleasant kind. Christian evangelicals believe that all Jews will die if they do not convert to Christianity on the coming of the Messiah. And right-wing racists in Europe – the most prominent of them being Dutch – are welcome in Israel, while the likes of Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein are not.
Not a word about this from the would-be Republican candidates and their followers these past few days. Governor Rick Perry has long accused Obama of “appeasement” in the Middle East, and former New York mayor Ed Koch has never withdrawn his claim that Obama “threw Israel under the bus”. Mitt Romney has said that he wants “to increase military and intelligence co-ordination with Israel” – as if the US hasn’t been handing out aircraft and billions of dollars to Israel for decades. What chance do an “invented people” have against this?
Knesset panel bans Israeli Arab MK for reciting controversial poem: Haaretz
Ahmed Tibi will not be able to participate in parliament sessions for one week following a verbal attack on Yisrael Beiteinu’s Anastasia Michaeli after she spilled a glass of water on a fellow MK.
The Knesset’s Ethics Committee baned Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi participating in sessions in any of the Israeli parliaments’ sessions on Tuesday, following a controversial poem he recited following an incident involving Yisrael Beiteinu MK Anastasia Michaeli.
Last week, Michaeli was banned from the Knesset after she poured a glass of water on Israeli Arab MK Raleb Majadele (Labor) during a committee session last week.
Tibi reciting his poem: in Hebrew – no translation yet
Following the incident, Tibi read a short poem poking fun at Michaeli, the words of which were: “Anastasia, who has a problem with her plumbing / who grew there in the garbage pile of Yisrael Beiteinu [Israel our Home], / Or should we say, Russia our Home, / From which the road was short for the bill called muezzin, now a joint Bibi- Anastasia venture / As well as her unwise use of water, during a dry spell in which every drop counts / For, Israel may be drying [mityabeshet], but it is far from being ashamed [mitbayeshet], / Anastasia, who has run amok, / Poured water on her colleague / And thus I will call the baby by its name: Kos Amok [literally, a ‘glass of madness’, but a play on words on an Arabic profanity].
Michaeli spilling water on Majadele:
The Knesset Ethics Committee ruling, which allows Tibi vote, came after earlier this week the United Arab List – Ta’al MK lodged an official complaint with Knesset security after a number of death threats were posted to his Facebook page following his recitation.
Knesset authorities have transferred the complaint to Israel Police.
“The ethics committee has no Arab members and I am treated by some of its members as enemy, thus its decision is tainted prejudice,” Tibi responded to the decision.
Israeli Arabs have never been equal before the law: Haaretz
The looming expulsion of thousands will be carried out with the silent agreement of enlightened members of society, because maintaining a Jewish majority is an ideological common denominator for the overwhelming majority of Israelis.
By Yitzhak Laor
Last week’s decision by the High Court of Justice to uphold the amendment to the Citizenship Law that keeps Palestinians apart from their Israeli spouses has closed a chapter in the life of Israeli democracy. The Supreme Court no longer wants to protect Israel’s Arab citizens.
Racists sitting in the stands at soccer games who yell “Death to Arabs” have never ripped a mother away from her children. But Justice Asher Dan Grunis and his friends have rendered such expulsions kosher, and the representatives of Israel’s Arab citizens will now have to bring the issue to the international community.
Of the amendment upheld by the High Court, Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken wrote in this paper in May 2005: “Ostensibly the amendment to the Citizenship Law is equitable. It prevents a man from Haifa from marrying a woman from Ramallah and living with her in Haifa, and does not distinguish between Jews and Arabs. But it’s clear that it isn’t equitable: Jews rarely marry Palestinians.”
For three days afterward, in a hysterical response, Maariv’s entire opinion page was devoted to wild attacks on Schocken and his piece. Only one of the opinion pieces is even worth quoting: that of Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, author of “The Constitutional Law of the State of Israel.”
“Every state, even if not by law, has the right to prevent immigration of any kind from an enemy state or enemy territory,” Rubinstein wrote at the time. “Must Israel permit immigration from Syria? Of course not. Was England, during World War II, obligated to permit immigration from Germany, or even from German protectorates? Of course not. So why doesn’t this rule apply to Israel?
“It’s true, the Palestinian Authority is not a state, but if a ban on immigration applies to an enemy state, it applies even more so to an enemy territory.”
Afterward, Rubinstein published statements to this effect as part of a scholarly academic article, which expanded the argument with the help of numerous references and citations. He later chaired a government committee that justified this wrongdoing.
Why is Rubinstein worth quoting? Because before leaving the Knesset in 2002, he was an MK representing Meretz, the last significant political party of the Zionist left; because his words are cited by Grunis in his ruling; and because Rubinstein is considered a veteran analyst, a member of a select group of legal commentators who sat quietly for eight years, since the amendment came into force as a “temporary emergency measure.”
Even now, these legal commentators are not commenting. The looming expulsion of thousands will be carried out with the silent agreement of enlightened members of society. This silence does not stem from their deep respect for the High Court of Justice. Its cause is that maintaining a Jewish majority is an ideological common denominator for the overwhelming majority of Israelis, and this ruling is a symptom of the demographic arguments made on their behalf.
But in effect, Rubinstein was lying. In order to discriminate against the Arab citizens of Israel, Rubinstein wrote about residents of the territories, who do not live in an enemy state. They live in an Israeli ghetto, a bantustan, without the right, as blacks had in apartheid South Africa, to earn a living from their masters.
The State of Israel is officially in its 64th year. But it can be more accurately seen as an imaginary entity that existed in reality only for the 19 years between 1948 and 1967.
Temporariness is an illusion. For jurists it’s also a cynical trick.
The expulsion of women and children from their homes will be carried out by a state that has never held Arabs to be equal before the law. That’s the real reason an Israeli constitution was never written. That inequality was the wound. Now it’s just pus.
EDITOR: The Empire Strikes Back…
So now Israel is not only bombing whoever and whatever it likes, but also hacks just anybody. The IDF has set upa specialist unit for this pupose, just over three years ago, with some 800 hackers in it. This is another way in which Israel will contribute to world peace and harmony, no doubt.
Israeli hackers bring down Saudi, UAE stock exchange websites: Haaretz
In fresh round of cyber warfare, Israel hackers, who go by the name IDF-TEAM, retaliate against Saudi attack on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, El Al websites.
Israeli hackers brought down the websites of both the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) and the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) Monday, in the latest episode of a continuing cyber war between hackers in the two countries.
The Israeli hackers, who go by the name IDF-Team, were able to paralyze the Tadawul website, while causing significant delays to the ADX exchange site.
The hackers wrote that the attack came in response to the “pathetic” hacking of Israeli sites on Monday. The hackers warned that if the attacks continue, they will “move to the next stage and paralyze websites for a period of two weeks to a month.”
Earlier Tuesday, a pro-Israel hacker published a list of 30,000 e-mail addresses and Facebook passwords of “helpless Arabs” on a popular hacking site. The hacker, who goes by Hannibal, wrote that his actions – which began Friday – are a “counter-attack” following the publication of Israeli credit card details on the Internet by a reportedly Saudi hacker.
“I noticed that poor intelligence of 0x omar and his friends [sic],” he wrote on pastebin.com, the same site used by the Saudi hacker. “State of Israel, not to worry, you’re in the hands of the world’s best hacker that I am [sic],” Hannibal reassured. “I will continue to support the government of Israel will continue to attack the Arab countries,” he wrote.
Hannibal claims to have 30 million e-mail addresses of Arabs, complete with passwords, and to have fielded e-mails not only from potential victims but from officials in France and other countries asking him to desist. But if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares a cyber war, he’s ready to publish the details of 10 million bank accounts, Hannibal wrote, adding that he also had information on 4 million Arab credit cards.