EDITOR: Until next time…
Another truce is agreed, to last exactly until Israel decides it is over. As always, Israel started this conflagration, and it did not end because of western or UN involvement, of course. If not for the Egyptians, Israel would still be bombing, though of course its own citizens are suffering the results of this criminal policy as well. The leopard will not change its spots.
Imagine the life of a small child in Gaza – I do not mean a child who was killed or maimed, just a child which needs to get used to the Israeli blitzkrieg. Of course, you cannot get used to it. You are scarred for life.
נקמת דם ילד קטן עוד לא ברא השטן
The Vengeance of a small child was not yet created by Satan (Hebrew, lines from a Bialik poem)
Israel and Gaza militants agree truce after clashes: BBC
A ceasefire is in place between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza after four days of deadly clashes.
The Egyptian-mediated truce took effect at 01:00 local time (23:00 GMT Monday).
The recent violence “appears to be behind us,” said Israeli Cabinet Minister Matan Vilnai.
At least 25 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes since Friday, reports say. Israel says 35 people were injured in Palestinian rocket attacks.
Officials from Hamas, which governs Gaza, told the BBC that Israel had agreed to stop targeting leaders of militant groups in Gaza, if rocket attacks on its southern cities ceased.
The number of Palestinian attacks dropped sharply after the truce went into effect overnight, and no major towns in southern Israel were targeted.
The Israeli military said a total of six rockets and mortars had hit, causing no casualties, and that there had been no Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
Previous ceasefire deals after earlier rounds of fighting have often taken a day or two to take effect fully.
The deal was brokered by the Egyptian authorities, who reportedly negotiated with each side separately.
Four days of cross-border violence was triggered by an Israeli air strike on Friday that killed a senior leader of the militant group, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), who Israel said had been planning an attack.
Militants in Gaza responded quickly by unleashing a barrage of rockets towards southern Israel, triggering further air strikes.
Most of those killed in Gaza were militants, but several civilians also died, Palestinian medical sources say.
Israel said the major reason for a relatively low number of injuries among its population was the country’s new Iron Dome missile system, which shot down about 50 rockets launched from Gaza.
The US condemned the rocket attacks as “cowardly”; the Arab League called the Israeli air strikes “a massacre”.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed grave concern over the flare-up in violence, describing rocket attacks on Israeli civilians as “unacceptable” and urging Israel to “exercise maximum restraint”.
Islamic Jihad and the PRC – and not Hamas – have said they have been behind the rocket attacks.
The increase in violence has alarmed world powers trying to bring peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis back on track.
Israel and Gaza militants agree to ceasefire after clashes: Guardian
Egyptian-brokered truce between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza after four days of violence killed 25 people
Israel and militant factions in the Gaza Strip have agreed to an Egyptian-brokered truce to end four days of cross-border violence in which 25 Palestinians have been killed, a senior Egyptian security official said.
Both sides had “agreed to end the current operations”, according to the official, with Israel giving an unusual undertaking to “stop assassinations”, and an overall agreement “to begin a comprehensive and mutual calm”.
The agreement was set to take effect at 1am local time (2300 GMT). There was no immediate comment from either side. Previous ceasefire deals after earlier rounds of fighting have often got off to a shaky start.
Israeli media quoted Israeli officials as reiterating the longstanding policy that Israel would “answer quiet with quiet” but stopped short of providing any guarantees to withhold fire in response to rocket attacks.
An Israeli military spokesman declined to comment.
Israel signalled earlier it would not halt what it calls “preventive targeting” operations aimed at stopping rocket fire and cross-border attacks.
“The Israeli army will continue to attack the terrorists in Gaza with strength and determination,” the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told lawmakers in his Likud party on Sunday.
But while Israel was keen to bar rocket fire at its homefront there seemed to be little public enthusiasm for waging a longer military campaign reminiscent of a 2008-2009 offensive in which 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
A Palestinian official close to the talks said “the factions are committed”, alluding to the Islamic Jihad and Popular Resistance Committees, who were most active in the fighting, but that these groups were waiting to see how Israel would respond.
Gaza’s Hamas Islamist leadership, whose own cadres have kept out of the fighting and seemed eager to avoid a larger conflict with Israel, had confirmed on Sunday that Egypt was working on a deal to stop the violence.
The truce agreement also followed appeals from world powers – the US, United Nations, France, European Union and the Arab League – for both sides to exercise restraint.
Israel said Gaza militants had fired about 150 rockets at its southern towns and cities from Gaza since fighting flared on Friday after Israel killed a senior militant it accused of plotting to attack Israel from Egyptian territory.
Eight Israelis were injured by the rockets, dozens of which were shot down harmlessly by Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile interceptor system.
Twenty of the Palestinians killed since fighting flared in the Hamas-controlled enclave were militants and five were civilians, according to medical officials.
At least 80 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been wounded in the violence, which also brought much of southern Israel to a standstill, forcing schools to close and hundreds of thousands to remain indoors.
Gaza, home to 1.7 million people, was under Israeli occupation from 1967 until 2005 and remains under blockade.
Hamas has controlled Gaza since seizing it from West Bank-based Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in 2007, and is fighting for an independent Palestinian state, but has shunned the stalled peace process supervised by international powers and refuses to recognise the Jewish state.
Violent flareups have been frequent between Israel and Gaza’s militant factions in the past few years, in most cases lasting no longer than a week.
The last conflagration of this intensity was in August after a cross-border attack launched from Egypt killed seven in Israel, and Israel struck back killing 15 Gaza gunmen.
Gaza militants fire rocket at Israeli town, despite truce: Haaretz
Mid-range projectile hits residential area of Negev town of Netivot, one person lightliy wounded; earlier in the day the IDF announced that school would resume in southern schools in rocket range
Gaza militants fired a Grad-type Katyusha rocket toward the western Negev on Tuesday, despite a Egypt-mediated cease fire between Israel and militant groups that went into effect earlier in the day.
The rocket struck a residential area if the town of Netivot, with one person lightly wounded. Eleven people were treated for shock.
Despite a ceasefire agreement reached late Monday night, the Kayusha attack on Netivot wasn’t the only launch on Tuesday, with seven rockets and five mortar shells fired toward southern Israel. They exploded in open areas and there were no reported casualties.
All in all, nearly 200 rockets have exploded in Israeli territory since the latest round of violence between Israel and Gaza broke out on Friday and until the Israel Defense Forces and Gaza militants agreed to cease fire.
Responding to rocket fire, the Israel Air Force carried out 37 airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, 19 strikes targeted rocket-launchers and 18 targeted weapons warehouses in response to rocket attacks.
Twenty-six Palestinians were killed as a result of IAF strikes on Gaza. Out of these 22 were militants and 4 were civilians who were in the area of IAF strikes, but were not involved in the rocket fire.
Earlier Tuesday, IDF officials announced that, following the ceasefire, 207,000 schoolchildren in communities 7-40 kilometers from Gaza would be returning to their studies on Wednesday, for the first time since the beginning of the week.
Awad Abdelfattah: Risk of unrest grows as Israel redraws relations with Arab citizens: IOA
By Awad Abdelfattah, 13 March 2012
Israel sees its Arab citizens as a security threat, and their leaders are increasingly under attack. While cooperation and political participation once seemed feasible, systematic discrimination has led to an untenable situation. Secretary general of The National Democratic Party Assembly (Tajamoa) writes on missed opportunities and grim predictions.
More and more voices among the 1.2 million Palestinians in Israel have been asking whether Israel is trying to redefine the rules of the game that have governed the relationship between the state and the Palestinians since 1948. In recent years, and especially since the outbreak of the second intifada in October 2000, Arab citizens have been re-characterized by the state of Israel as a security and demographic threat, like they were between 1948 and 1966, when they were subject to military rule.
Since 2000, a new series of repressive and discriminatory practices and laws have been implemented and legislated. Palestinian leaders in the Knesset have been systematically threatened and some have been prosecuted. The continued campaign of delegitimization has taken almost unprecedented forms.
MK Haneen Zoabi, from my party, Balad, has repeatedly received death threats from unknown right-wingers, and was been stripped of her diplomatic passport after participating in the 2010 flotilla that tried to break the siege on Gaza. Voices from the ruling Likud party have called to remove her and her party from the Knesset.
Attempts by the right-wing ruling coalition to further marginalize the Arab Palestinian community and its political parties in the Knesset are manifested in a flood of racist laws aimed at restricting their political movement and expression. Our party – the National Democratic Assembly, known as Balad in Hebrew – is the most heavily targeted. Its former leader, Azmi Bishara, faced a fabricated security charge in 2007 involving alleged collaboration with Hezbollah. He preferred to leave the country and remain in exile rather than face such a charge, for which lawyers cannot properly defend their client, since they are not given access to all of the material in the investigation.
But the campaign against him started long before, and it is ideological and political in essence. It was cited clearly in a book written by the former head of the Israel Security Agency, Ami Ayalon, who demanded in 2001 that Bishara be brought to trial for allegedly crossing “red lines.” Ayalon accused Bishara of rejecting the right of the Jews to a Jewish state. The party itself has been subjected to repeated attempts at disqualification from Knesset elections.
The goal of the party as stated in its platform is to reinvent Israel as a state of all its citizens. That would mean that 20 percent of the citizens of the Jewish state, who are an indigenous ethnic minority, would be entitled to full equality, and would have genuine legislative and political power to improve their status and their lives in a democratic secular state.
The emergence of Balad and its platform in 1996 quickly gained wide support from Arab citizens and scores of non-Zionist Jewish Israeli intellectuals. It was viewed by many as the most modern and liberal democratic formula to emerge among the Arab Palestinian community in Israel since 1948.
This community had undergone major social, economic, and political changes since the 1970s. A new intelligentsia emerged, looking for ways to express its needs and aspirations. This epoch witnessed the start of a new national and civic consciousness among the Arab elites who sought collective and individual rights and equal citizenship. Political thinking changed with regard to participation in elections for the Knesset, which had been viewed by many Arab citizens as a predominantly Zionist institution. Most of the founders of Balad, both individuals and groups (I for example), had previously refrained from engaging in the parliamentary game, and others had previously advocated a one-state solution.
The transition to a norm of participation – i.e., voting in Knesset elections – was painful and has been viewed by many inside the party as a major compromise. The leaders of Balad had hoped this new approach of seeking parliamentary representation would help create a more convenient climate for a dialogue with liberal Israelis and pave the way for the future bi-national entity.
However, the campaign against the party that began with the second intifada has continued and escalated, as members are routinely harassed and interrogated by the police. Israeli officials continue to claim that Arab citizens are not as extreme as their leaders, in order to drive a wedge between them. For most Palestinians in Israel, this claim is a worn-out cliché. Israeli officials can no longer deceive Arab citizens, as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s, when they were subjected to a tight system of control under military rule.
The continued incitement campaign against Arab parties like Balad and their leaders is perceived by many Arab citizens as a tactic to distance them from their representatives. Many also see it as a way to shift attention from Israel’s plans to complete the takeover of Arab lands. Coupled with the discriminatory policies Israeli implements, these land takeovers have led to the impoverishment of the Arab citizens.
The Israeli ruling coalition’s campaign to restrict Arab representation in the Knesset has deepened the Arab citizen’s distrust in the electoral process. In the last two rounds of elections in 2006 and 2009, the percentage of Arab voters dropped, from 90 percent at its peak and an average of 78 percent up until 1999 to 56 percent. It is expected to drop further in light the ongoing and rapid shift of Israeli politics and society to the extreme right. Like in 2001 – after the incidents of October 2000, where 13 Arab citizens of Israel were killed in demonstrations – more and more voices call to boycott elections.
There are two reasons behind this call. First, if they vote, the Arabs legitimize Israel’s ethnic democracy, which systematically exclude them. Second, voting slows or curbs the prospects of real mass struggle. Those who call for a boycott hold that hostile plans by Jewish Israeli politicians against Arab leaders are being drawn up, and they believe that in a few years, a new and harsher reality will emerge. This reality – which could entail separated and besieged ghettos, poverty, violence and social fragmentation – could lead to wide internal civil unrest.
The Arab region is boiling, and revolutions are in the making. Palestinians inside and outside Israel are watching these upheavals closely.
The international community began only recently to shift some of its attention to the plight of the Arab citizens of Israel. It tended to praise Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East, despite the fact that 20 percent of the state’s citizens are being rapidly stripped of their basic rights.
In his 2003 book, Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel, Israeli writer David Grossman wondered, “How long can a relatively large minority be assumed by the majority to be an enemy without in the end actually turning them into one?”
He continues: “Slowly and steadily, as if slumbering, Israel is missing its chance to rescue itself from a horrible mistake. It is creating for itself the enemy it will run up against after other countries have made their peace with it.”
Awad Abdelfattah is the secretary general of Balad, which holds three seats in the current Knesset (Said Naffaa, Jamal Zahalka, and Haneen Zoabi).
Jonathan Cook: Welcome to the world’s first bunker state: Jcook.net
18 JANUARY 2012
Room for Jews only in Israel’s ‘villa in the jungle’
Nazareth – The wheel is turning full circle. Last week the Israeli parliament updated a 59-year-old law originally intended to prevent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from returning to the homes and lands from which they had been expelled as Israel was established.
The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.
As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalised these new refugees – in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.
Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.
To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s prison service, to contain 10,000 of these unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind in the world – according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger than the next largest, in the much more populous, and divine retribution-loving, US state of Texas.
Israeli critics of the law fear their country is failing in its moral duty to help those fleeing persecution, thereby betraying the Jewish people’s own experiences of suffering and oppression. But the Israeli government and the large majority of legislators who backed the law – like their predecessors in the 1950s – have drawn a very different conclusion from history.
The new infiltration law is the latest in a set of policies fortifying Israel’s status as the world’s first “bunker state”- and one designed to be as ethnically pure as possible. The concept was expressed most famously by an earlier prime minister, Ehud Barak, now the defence minister, who called Israel “a villa in the jungle”, relegating the country’s neighbours to the status of wild animals.
Barak and his successors have been turning this metaphor into a physical reality, slowly sealing off their state from the rest of the region at astronomical cost, much of it subsidised by US taxpayers. Their ultimate goal is to make Israel so impervious to outside influence that no concessions for peace, such as agreeing to a Palestinian state, need ever be made with the “beasts” around them.
The most tangible expression of this mentality has been a frenzy of wall-building. The best-known are those erected around the Palestinian territories: first Gaza, then the areas of the West Bank Israel is not intending to annex – or, at least, not yet.
The northern border is already one of the most heavily militarised in the world – as Lebanese and Syrian protesters found to great cost last summer when dozens were shot dead and wounded as they approached or stormed the fences there. And Israel has a proposal in the drawer for another wall along the border with Jordan, much of which is already mined.
The only remaining border, the 260km one with Egypt, is currently being closed with another gargantuan wall. The plans were agreed before last year’s Arab revolutions but have gained fresh impetus with the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Israel is not only well advanced on the walls of the bunker; it is also working round the clock on the roof. It has three missile-defence systems in various stages of development, including the revealingly named “Iron Dome”, as well as US Patriot batteries stationed on its soil. The interception systems are supposed to neutralise any combination of short and long-range missile attacks Israel’s neighbours might launch.
But there is a flaw in the design of this shelter, one that is apparent even to its architects. Israel is sealing itself in with some of the very “animals” the villa is supposed to exclude: not only the African refugees, but also 1.5 million “Israeli Arabs”, descendants of the small number of Palestinians who avoided expulsion in 1948.
This has been the chief motive for the steady stream of anti-democratic measures by the government and parliament that is rapidly turning into a torrent. It is also the reason for the Israeli leadership’s new-found demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel’s Jewishness; its obsessions with loyalty; and the growing appeal of population exchange schemes.
In the face of the legislative assault, Israel’s Supreme Court has grown ever more complicit. Last week, it sullied its reputation by upholding a law that tears apart families by denying tens of thousands of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship the right to live with their Palestinian spouse in Israel – “ethnic cleansing” by other means, as leading Israeli commentator Gideon Levy noted.
Back in the early 1950s, the Israeli army shot dead thousands of unarmed Palestinians as they tried to reclaim property that had been stolen from them. These many years later, Israel appears no less determined to keep non-Jews out of its precious villa.
The bunker state is almost finished, and with it the dream of Israel’s founders is about to be realised.
Jonathan Cook won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. 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, published in Abu Dhabi.
Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon: By email
– MARCH 13, 2012
For many years now, Gilad Atzmon, a musician born in Israel and currently living in the United Kingdom, has taken on the self-appointed task of defining for the Palestinian movement the nature of our struggle, and the philosophy underpinning it. He has done so through his various blogs and Internet outlets, in speeches, and in articles. He is currently on tour in the United States promoting his most recent book, entitled, ‘The Wandering Who.’
With this letter, we call for the disavowal of Atzmon by fellow Palestinian organizers, as well as Palestine solidarity activists, and allies of the Palestinian people, and note the dangers of supporting Atzmon’s political work and writings and providing any platforms for their dissemination. We do so as Palestinian organizers and activists, working across continents, campaigns, and ideological positions.
Atzmon’s politics rest on one main overriding assertion that serves as springboard for vicious attacks on anyone who disagrees with his obsession with “Jewishness”. He claims that all Jewish politics is “tribal,” and essentially, Zionist. Zionism, to Atzmon, is not a settler-colonial project, but a trans-historical “Jewish” one, part and parcel of defining one’s self as a Jew. Therefore, he claims, one cannot self-describe as a Jew and also do work in solidarity with Palestine, because to identify as a Jew is to be a Zionist. We could not disagree more. Indeed, we believe Atzmon’s argument is itself Zionist because it agrees with the ideology of Zionism and Israel that the only way to be a Jew is to be a Zionist.
Palestinians have faced two centuries of orientalist, colonialist and imperialist domination of our native lands. And so as Palestinians, we see such language as immoral and completely outside the core foundations of humanism, equality and justice, on which the struggle for Palestine and its national movement rests. As countless Palestinian activists and organizers, their parties, associations and campaigns, have attested throughout the last century, our struggle was never, and will never be, with Jews, or Judaism, no matter how much Zionism insists that our enemies are the Jews. Rather, our struggle is with Zionism, a modern European settler colonial movement, similar to movements in many other parts of the world that aim to displace indigenous people and build new European societies on their lands.
We reaffirm that there is no room in this historic and foundational analysis of our struggle for any attacks on our Jewish allies, Jews, or Judaism; nor denying the Holocaust; nor allying in any way shape or form with any conspiracy theories, far-right, orientalist, and racist arguments, associations and entities. Challenging Zionism, including the illegitimate power of institutions that support the oppression of Palestinians, and the illegitimate use of Jewish identities to protect and legitimize oppression, must never become an attack on Jewish identities, nor the demeaning and denial of Jewish histories in all their diversity.
Indeed, we regard any attempt to link and adopt antisemitic or racist language, even if it is within a self-described anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist politics, as reaffirming and legitimizing Zionism. In addition to its immorality, this language obscures the fundamental role of imperialism and colonialism in destroying our homeland, expelling its people, and sustaining the systems and ideologies of oppression, apartheid and occupation. It leaves one squarely outside true solidarity with Palestine and its people.
The goal of the Palestinian people has always been clear: self determination. And we can only exercise that inalienable right through liberation, the return of our refugees (the absolute majority of our people) and achieving equal rights to all through decolonization. As such, we stand with all and any movements that call for justice, human dignity, equality, and social, economic, cultural and political rights. We will never compromise the principles and spirit of our liberation struggle. We will not allow a false sense of expediency to drive us into alliance with those who attack, malign, or otherwise attempt to target our political fraternity with all liberation struggles and movements for justice.
As Palestinians, it is our collective responsibility, whether we are in Palestine or in exile, to assert our guidance of our grassroots liberation struggle. We must protect the integrity of our movement, and to do so we must continue to remain vigilant that those for whom we provide platforms actually speak to its principles.
When the Palestinian people call for self-determination and decolonization of our homeland, we do so in the promise and hope of a community founded on justice, where all are free, all are equal and all are welcome.
Until liberation and return.
Signed:
Ali Abunimah
Naseer Aruri, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Omar Barghouti, human rights activist
Hatem Bazian, Chair, American Muslims for Palestine
Andrew Dalack, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network
Haidar Eid, Gaza
Nada Elia, US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
Toufic Haddad
Kathryn Hamoudah
Adam Hanieh, Lecturer, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London
Mostafa Henaway, Tadamon! Canada
Monadel Herzallah, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network
Nadia Hijab, author and human rights advocate
Andrew Kadi
Abir Kobty, Palestinian blogger and activist
Joseph Massad, Professor, Columbia University, NY
Danya Mustafa, Israeli Apartheid Week US National Co-Coordinator & Students for Justice in Palestine- University of New Mexico
Dina Omar, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine
Haitham Salawdeh, National Coordinating Committee, US Palestinian Community Network
Sobhi Samour, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London
Khaled Ziada, SOAS Palestine Society, London
Rafeef Ziadah, poet and human rights advocate