EDITOR: Playing with fire
So now Israel does not know how to stop the fire it started, and not for the first time. Remember Lebanon in summer of 2006? Israel and its allies kept the war going for a month, but as the Israeli loses mounted, they were thrashing about trying to bring an immediate end to it. Here we go again. After days of hammering Gaza with high explosives, they find that it is not so easy to ‘terminate the incident’, and civilians on both sides are paying the price. Israeli TV stations are following the numbers of casualties in Gaza like they were football results, with Israel=0, Gaza=26 headlines, and in the meantime the life of Israelis in the south are very difficult, not to mention the life of Palestinians in Gaza.
Saw the wind, and ye shall reap the storm.
Rockets fired at Be’er Sheva on seventh day of Israel-Gaza violence: Haaretz
IDF strikes Gaza overnight after Palestinian militants fire three Grad rockets at Be’er Sheva and Ofakim, violating an Israeli-Palestinian truce; school canceled in southern Israel.
Palestinian militants fired four Grad rockets toward southern Israel on Thursday morning, after the Israel Air Force launched several strikes on the Gaza Strip overnight.
One rocket landed near the southern Israeli city of Netivot early Thursday, and shortly afterward three Grad rockets were fired toward Be’er Sheva.
Despite an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire between the sides which went into effect early Tuesday morning, Palestinian militant groups continued to fire rockets sporadically into Israel on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Five cities in southern Israel – Be’er Sheva, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Kiryat Malakhi and Gan Yavneh – decided to cancel school on Thursday.
On Wednesday night, three Grad rockets were fired toward Be’er Sheva and Ofakim in southern Israel. Two were intercepted by an Iron Dome anti-missile battery, while the third landed in an open area near Ofakim. There were no casualties or damage to property, altough several suffered from shock.
In response, Israel carried out two air strikes on militant targets in Gaza early Thursday morning, according to the IDF Spokesman.
No Palestinian organization had claimed responsibility for the rockets, but the IDF believes they were launched by one of Gaza’s small, radical Islamist factions. All of the factions’ leaders committed to the truce in talks with Egyptian mediators.
Defense officials said they believe Hamas is not interested in a resumption of violence, and will therefore try to restrain smaller factions. However, they stressed that Israel will continue to carry out targeted killings of terrorists if it receives intelligence warnings of a planned attack.
Earlier on Wednesday, Palestinians fired a mortar shell at the western Negev, but it apparently fell short and landed in the Gaza Strip.
“There’s no magic solution to rockets,” GOC Southern Command Tal Russo said on Wednesday during a visit to a high school in Omer. “There won’t be a complete solution even if we embark on another round of fighting.”
Speaking before the rockets were fired at Be’er Sheva, Russo added, “I don’t know how long the quiet will hold. But if they violate the quiet, we have many tools. In this round, we didn’t use all the tools at our disposal. There could be situations in which a larger operation is needed.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was supposed to leave for Paris and Madrid on Wednesday, where he was meant to discuss Iran’s nuclear program with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the new Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy.
However, despite the cease-fire declaration, Netanyahu canceled the trip due to the “security situation in southern Israel” – raising the question of whether he expects another round of fighting to erupt.
The killing of Zuhair al-Qaissi exposes Israel’s attitude to its supreme court: Guardian
Did the Palestinian leader killed by Israeli forces plan an attack? Without transparency, there’s no accountability to the court
Mya Guarnieri
The recent escalation between Israel and Gaza began after Israeli forces assassinated Zuhair al-Qaissi, a leader of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a militant group composed of members of various Palestinian parties. Haaretz noted that the PRC was “the organisation that captured Gilad Shalit”, the Israeli soldier who was freed in October 2011. The army says that al-Qaissi was behind the August 2011 attack that took place on the Israeli-Egyptian border – even though the PRC denied involvement and it was later revealed that the militants came from Sinai, not Gaza.
While army sources took care to point out al-Qaissi’s alleged involvement in the August 2011 incident, his assassination wasn’t just an act of punishment. No, Israel killed him on the basis of secret evidence – evidence that is not subject to legal or judicial review – that supposedly proves that al-Qaissi was planning a terror attack. Never mind that the Israeli supreme court’s December 2006 ruling placed numerous restrictions on such assassinations.
Fatmeh el-Ajou, an attorney with Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, explains that while the judgment did not place a blanket prohibition on targeted killings, it stated that the decision to carry out an assassination must be made on a case-by-case basis, “depending on the evidence that [security forces] have”. But, without seeing the security forces’ secret evidence, it’s impossible to know if al-Qaissi was indeed planning an attack, and if the army was in line with the 2006 ruling. There’s no transparency in this so-called democracy and, without transparency, there is no accountability to the state’s highest court. “From the perspective of human rights law,” el-Ajou adds, “assassinations are not legitimate … They should only be carried out if there is a ‘ticking bomb.’ [Suspects] should be brought to trial.”
To some extent, the 2006 ruling dovetails with this, stating that, whenever possible, the person in question must be arrested and tried – which is exactly what didn’t happen in 2007, when the army violated the supreme court’s restrictions on targeted killings and assassinated two men they had the power to detain instead. And then there’s the laundry list of less dramatic examples, instances when state bodies quietly ignore the court, revealing Israel to be the weak democracy it is. Such cases have spurred former deputy attorney general Yehudit Karp to send not one but two letters of complaint to the current attorney General Yehuda Weinstein. Here’s a partial sampling of rulings that Israel can’t be bothered to fully implement:
• In 2002, the supreme court ordered the municipalities of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Lod, Ramle and Nazareth Illit to “add Arabic to all municipal signs”, Adalah writes. Last April, the supreme court chastised the municipality of Nazareth Illit (upper Nazareth, a predominately Jewish area) for its lack of compliance with the nine-year-old ruling.
• In 2006, the supreme court struck down the binding arrangement, a policy that binds migrant workers to one employer, essentially making his or her visa contingent on his employer’s whim. Last year, the Knesset circumvented this ruling, passing legislation so severe that human rights groups referred to it as the “slavery law”.
• In 2007, the Israeli supreme court ruled that the separation barrier in the West Bank Palestinian village of Bilin served no security purpose in its location and ordered the state to move the fence. While Israel did move it in 2011, more than four years after the court’s decision, villagers are still separated from some of their land.
• During the December 2008 to January 2009 Israeli military operation known as Cast Lead, Israel barred media from the Gaza Strip. Even though the supreme court ruled against the ban, the press was not admitted to Gaza.
• In April 2011, the supreme court overturned the policy that stripped migrant workers who had children in Israel of their legal status, calling it a violation of the state’s own labour laws. Almost a year later, Israel is still deporting some of these women and their children, despite the fact that the very mechanism that made them “illegal” has been nullified.
In his 2006 ruling on targeted killings, former supreme court president Aharon Barak quoted an earlier judgment in which he’d stated: “At times democracy fights with one hand behind her back.” But in its war on Palestinians – and anyone that Israel deems an “other” – not only does the state use both hands, it fights with the proverbial gloves off.
Israel ‘must end imputiny of violence by settlers’: Independent
DONALD MACINTYRE WEDNESDAY 14 MARCH 2012
EU governments, including Britain, have secretly been urged by their top diplomats in Jerusalem and the West Bank to press Israel to enforce laws against Jewish settlers responsible for an “alarming” rise in violence against Palestinians and their property.
A report sent to Brussels last month, which has been seen by The Independent, calls for an end to “the impunity” of acts that force Palestinians from their land near the settlements and increase the “opportunities” for settlers to expand. The report repeatedly stresses that settlements are illegal in international law and “threaten to make a two state solution impossible”.
Citing recent UN figures showing that the number of settler attacks in 2011 had tripled to 411 in two years, the diplomats also highlight the fact that more than 90 per cent of complaints filed with the Israeli police by Palestinians – against sometimes armed attacks on people, mosques, agricultural land and livestock –go unpunished.
Last month’s dispatch updates an also still confidential report produced by the EU’s diplomatic heads of mission last year, which warned that Israel’s failure to enforce the law risks “engendering more violence and jeopardises political dialogue”. The earlier report also recommended that the EU put settlers with a record of violence or incitement on a travel “watch list” to prevent them entering member countries.
But while the updated report was endorsed by 21 out of 22 EU Consuls-General – ambassador-level representatives to the Palestinians who have offices in Jerusalem or Ramallah – attempts at unanimity have been undermined by the refusal of The Netherlands to sign the document.
The Dutch government is rapidly emerging as the most reluctant in Western Europe to criticise Israeli policy in the occupied West Bank. Close ties between The Hague and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government were further cemented by the Israeli Prime Minister’s two-day visit to The Netherlands in January.
The updated report acknowledges that, thanks to an enhanced presence by the Israeli military, last year’s olive harvest, which has traditionally seen a spike in settler attacks on Palestinians and their olive groves, was a “notable exception” to the general steep rise in settler violence. It adds that eight settlers were killed in three separate attacks in 2011, including one on a family in the Itamar settlement, for which two Palestinians were convicted. Three Palestinians were also killed by settlers in 2011.
But the earlier report warned that the Israeli military has limited authority to confront settlers attacking Palestinians, while by contrast they routinely intervene against Palestinians.
Weiss: Zionism has created ‘rivers of blood’: AlJazeera English
Rabbi Yisrael Dovid Weiss explains why he believes that Israel as a state is not legitimate.
When Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, visited Washington last week on the eve of the Purim holiday, he gave Barack Obama, the US president, what he considered a symbolic gift – a copy of the old testament book of Esther.
Netanyahu called it “background reading on Iran”, since its story concerns relations with Jews in the Persian empire some 2,500 years ago.
It is considered by scholars to be mostly fiction, but for Netanyahu Esther represented justification for his stance against modern Iran.
”Israel must reserve the right to defend itself. And after all that’s the very purpose of the Jewish state. To restore to the Jewish people control over our destiny,” Netanyahu said.
But Netanyahu’s controversial reading of history, even his fight to preserve the state of Israel, are questioned by many of Judaism’s own religious authorities.
“This is against the will of the Almighty and this is not what it means to be a Jew,” says Jewish religious scholar Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, a spokesman for “Jews against Zionism”, who believes that Israel as a state is not legitimate. He says that Zionism has created “rivers of blood” and he opposes the occupation of Palestine.
On the threat from Iran and President Ahmadinejad he says: “He gives charity to Jewish communities and he says one thing: he has a problem with the oppression of the Palestinian people. And the words “wipe out” he constantly says that Iran doesn’t have a history and he is not talking about harming anybody he says that God will not allow this crime to happen. We concur with him that Jews are in danger because there is Zionism because it says in the Tora if you rebel against God, it will not be successful and there will be catastrophic results and Zionism has brought catastrophic results and it could be much worse.”
Today on Talk to Al Jazeera Weiss explains why Zionism and Judaism are not necessarily the same thing.
The storm over Bamba and apathy concerning Gaza: Haaretz
In an alert civil society – you keep things clean and throw the Bamba in the garbage bin. However on the other side of the colorful bag of snacks lurks a destructive apathy.
By Gideon Levy
For four consecutive days and nights, millions of citizens of this country once again lived under conditions of fear and terror. The innovation was that, this time, no one tried to whitewash things. The mass terror was to be expected and it stemmed directly from an Israeli act of violence. Nevertheless, no one thought of expressing opposition. Better not to even ask whether indeed a terror attack had been foiled; whether the secretary general of the Popular Resistance Committees was one of those rare people in human history for whom there is no replacement; or whether indeed his assassination was beneficial or legal.
The assassination and the revenge were seen here as a divine edict, as a force majeure, as a storm in the southern skies – a quick strike that would blow away with the wind. The south was scared, the north turned a blind eye, and all together were amazed at the way Iron Dome successfully intercepted the missiles. And at times like these, there is no opposition in Israel.
Not just at times like these. It is possible to imagine a situation in which Israel would have continued with another ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. And would anyone have raised his voice against that? Of course not. Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee’s chairman Shaul Mofaz would be in favor of course, and so apparently would opposition leader Tzipi Livni (whose voice was once again not heard this week ); Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovich is busy to the hilt with the tycoons; Knesset hopeful Yair Lapid would have made do with another ideological “okay, bye!”; the summer protest movement leader Daphni Leef is traveling across the seas to explain that Israel is not an apartheid nation; on the Facebook page of Meretz leader Zahava Gal-On there is no mention of what happened in the south; and the Arab members of the Knesset are isolated as usual from the public discourse.
And as if that was not enough – it seems to everyone that this is a normal situation. That’s how things are and there is nothing we can do about it. A difficult reality in the south following an act of choice by Israel and no one even considers asking questions, casting doubts, offering alternatives. Hamas held its fire? Rubbish. It announced it had renounced violence? Nonsense. Once again Egypt turned out to be the only party that could bring back quiet despite its Muslim Brothers? So what? Speak with Hamas? What, have we lost our minds? Only a stand-up artist in the south raised that brilliant idea on television: To continue with assassinations in Gaza “until the inventory is completed.” That’s an idea and that’s an idea. Laughter. An Israeli democracy that lacks an opposition, free of any alternative ideas for government – a global innovation.
But just a minute, there are storms here nevertheless. For two days a storm has been raging here over [the children’s snack] Bamba, a storm which was almost wilder than the storm in the south. Had it not been for the summer social protest, the baby icon of the Bamba snack would have turned into the official mascot of Israel’s Olympic team. Only decent public intervention prevented the disgrace.
The Internet was flooded with reactions, the minister of sports and culture threatened to intervene, the chairman of the Knesset’s Education Committee called for an emergency meeting, columnists joined in the struggle, and the cute little Bamba baby will not march at the London Olympics. Psychosis and neurosis. Two days of newspaper headlines. All of a sudden, everyone is interested in sports and concerned about the moral standards of the Olympic team, and they have reservations about using a commercial symbol. Suddenly there is a protest, there is an opposition and there is a popular uprising. Even if this protest is justified in principle and there really is no place for commercial sponsorship of a national mascot, what about the proportions? Where is the proportionality? This exaggeration was intended for one purpose only – to cover the shame of apathy and to give ourselves the superficial appearance of involvement.
That is the other side of the apolitical nature of the summer protest movement – the connection between a vacuous patriot and a hollow protester. Because that’s how things are in an involved democracy, that’s how things are when there is an alert civil society – you keep things clean and throw the Bamba in the garbage bin. However on the other side of the colorful bag of snacks lurks a destructive apathy.
All the futile storms of the past months – Bamba, Big Brother, Pesek-Zman, Hatikva, and even the scandal of cancelling free train rides for soldiers for three consecutive hours per week – cannot hide the disgrace: In the land of Bamba, in Bamba Land, people come to life only the marginal and the meaningless. Let it be known: there is a direct link between the storm over Bamba and the apathy concerning Gaza. Both are driven by blind and cheap patriotism. And which mascot will march in our name at the Olympic stadium in London? That affects us much more deeply than what is done in our name in Gaza.
EDITOR: Haaretz says it clearly
The Editor of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, is clear about what Netanyahu is doing – he is preparing the Israeli public for the attack on Iran. The question is – do they now understand he is not bluffing, and actually means to do the mad thing? Most of them are still thinking this is bluff, I am sure.
Netanyahu is preparing Israeli public opinion for a war on Iran: Haaretz
In response to Netanyahu’s AIPAC speech, Haaretz’s editor-in-chief says that what looks like a preparation for war, acts like a preparation for war, and quacks like a preparation for war, is a preparation for war.
By Aluf Benn
Since his return from Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has mainly been preoccupied with one thing: Preparing public opinion for war against Iran.
Netanyahu is attempting to convince the Israeli public that the Iranian threat is a tangible and existential one, and that there is only one effective way to stop it and prevent a “second Holocaust”: An Israeli military attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, which is buried deep underground.
In his speech before the Knesset on Wednesday, Netanyahu urged his colleagues to reject claims that Israel is too weak to go it alone in a war against a regional power such as Iran and therefore needs to rely on the United States, which has much greater military capabilities, to do the job and remove the threat.
According to polls published last week, this is the position of most of the Israeli public, which supports a U.S. strike on Iran, but is wary of sending the IDF to the task without the backing of the friendly superpower.
Netanyahu presented three examples in which his predecessors broke the American directive and made crucial decisions regarding the future of Israel: the declaration of independence in 1948, starting the Six Day War in 1967 and the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981.
The lesson was clear: Just as David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol and Menachem Begin said “no” to the White House, Netanyahu also needs not be alarmed by President Obama’s opposition to an attack on Iran. Netanyahu believes that, as in the previous incidents, the U.S. may grumble at first, but will then quickly adopt the Israeli position and provide Israel with support and backing in the international community.
If Netanyahu had submitted his speech as a term paper to his father the history professor, he would have received a very poor grade. In 1948, the U.S. State Department, headed by George Marshall, opposed the declaration of independence and supported a United Nations trusteeship for Palestine. But President Truman had other considerations.
Like Obama today, Truman was also a democratic president contending for his reelection, who needed the support of the Jewish voters and donors. Under those circumstances, Truman rejected Marshall’s advice, and listened to his political adviser Clark Clifford, who pressured him to recognize the Zionist state. And indeed, Truman sent a telegram with an official recognition of Israel just 11 minutes after Ben-Gurion finished reading the Scroll of Independence. The U.S. opposition to the recognition of Israel was halted at the desk of the president, who repelled the explanations by the Secretary of State and the “Arabists” in his office.
In 1967, the official U.S. position called on Israel to hold back and refrain from going to war, but a different message was passing through the secret channels: go “bomb Nasser,” reported Levi Eshkol’s envoys to Washington, Meir Amit and Avraham Harman. This message tipped the scales in favor of going to war. In 1981, Begin did not bother asking the Americans their opinion before attacking Iraq, but lulled them to sleep and launched a surprise attack.
In these past incidents, Israel acted against the U.S. position formally, but made sure that the Americans will accept the results of the action and support it in retrospect. And indeed, the U.S. recognized Israel in 1948, allowed it to control the territories annexed in 1967, and made do with weak condemnations of the attack on the Iraq nuclear reactor in 1981.
That being the case, then Netanyahu is hinting that in his Washington visit, he received Obama’s tacit approval for an Israeli attack against Iran – under the guise of opposition. Obama will speak out against it but act for it, just as the past U.S. administrations speak against the settlements in the territories but allow their expansion. And in this manner Netanyahu summarized the visit: “I presented before my hosts the examples that I just noted before you, and I believe that the first objective that I presented – to fortify the recognition of Israel’s right to defend itself – I think that objective has been achieved.”
This morning, the editor-in-chief of the Israel Hayom newspaper, Amos Regev, published on his front page an enthusiastic op-ed in support of a war against Iran. Regev writes what Netanyahu cannot say in his speeches: that we cannot rely on Obama – who wasn’t even a mechanic in the armored corps – but only on ourselves. “Difficult, daring, but possible,” Regev promised. We need not be alarmed by the Iranian response: the arrow would take down the Shahab missiles, and Hezbollah and Hamas would hesitate about entering a war. The damage would be reminiscent of the Iraqi scuds in the 1991 Gulf War – unpleasant, but definitely not too bad. The analysts are weak, but the soldiers and the residents of the Home Front have motivation. So onward, to battle!
To use Netanyahu’s “duck allegory”, what looks like a preparation for war, acts like a preparation for war, and quacks like a preparation for war, is a preparation for war, and not just a “bluff” or a diversion tactic. Until his trip to Washington, Netanyahu and his supporters in the media refrained from such explicit wording and made do with hints. But since he’s been back, Netanyahu has issued an emergency call-up for himself and the Israeli public.