Only yesterday she was a national hero, the first woman in Israel to be awarded the Nobel Prize, with all Israeli falling over each other trying to praise her out of existence… today, she is already an outcast, after she spoke openly and courageously:
Israeli Nobel Laureate calls for release of all Hamas prisoners: Ha’aretz
Israeli Nobel Prize for chemistry laureate Professor Ada Yonath on Saturday said all Hamas prisoners held in Israel should be released in order to bring Gilad Shalit home.
“I don’t understand why we incarcerate them in Israel in the first place,” the professor told Army Radio Saturday.
She added that “all prisoners should be returned to Palestine regardless of a deal for Gilad Shalit’s release.”
Yonath was interviewed on the weekly Saturday radio show about her thoughts in general regarding the Middle East conflict and called for a “change in the status quo.” She said that holding Palestinians captive encourages and perpetuates their motivation to harm Israel and its citizens.
“If we hold Palestinian prisoners captive for years on end, their familys’ resentment for Israel will grow and we are actively creating terrorists,” the Nobel Laureate suggested.
She also said that if we cease from incarcerating Palestinians it will end soldier abductions. “Once we don’t have any prisoners to release they will have no reason to kidnap soldiers.”
Yonath described many Palestinian lives as having “no hope for the future,” and said that “in a state of such despair they have every reason to jump at the opportunity to better their prospects for a better afterlife.”
Obama has betrayed mission to forge Mideast peace: Ha’aretz Correspondent
By Gideon Levy
Aluf Benn: Obama is worthy of Nobel Prize, he has changed the world
Oslo decided to change its ways and begin giving out deferred Nobel Prizes: Win now, pay tomorrow. There’s no other way to explain the bewildering, not to say bizarre, decision to grant the Nobel Prize for Peace to Barack Obama. Just like the reserved, esteemed Norwegians on the prize committee, we here, sweating and bleeding, were overjoyed with Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president – black, eloquent, enchanting, striking and promising. Many an eye welled with tears, from Jerusalem to Rafah, at his unforgettable inauguration address, and even as late as his Cairo speech we still clung to his beautiful words.
We here in the Middle East could not help but be impressed by the new spirit he ushered in. Negotiations with Iran, a handshake with Hugo Chavez, openness toward Cuba, tolerance toward North Korea and the cancellation of the missile shield in Eastern Europe. A new dawn broke after years of darkness under his predecessor, for whom the Apaches did the talking and who primitively divided the world into good guys and bad guys with his imbecilic invasion of Iraq and hopeless occupation of Afghanistan. America became less hated in the world.
If the Norwegians wanted to reward a promise, Obama has earned his Nobel. If they wanted to reward a change in the language America speaks to the world, he is the honorary laureate. If they wanted to reward his intentions, that would be fine, too. He might even deserve a prize for promoting peace, but only pending the fine print on his diploma, which will run: Anywhere but the Middle East. For the information of the esteemed committee members: Obama is not a complete package. So far he has betrayed his mission in the one region most threatening to world peace.
There has been no “change” and no “yes we can.” There has only been profoundly depressing treading in his predecessor’s footsteps. The same methods, the same foot-dragging, the same trudging through the same mire. Can you believe, when you see George Mitchell doing the rounds between President Shimon Peres’ empty words and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ vacuous statements, that Mitchell is the envoy of a Nobel Prize laureate? Obama might deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature, like Winston Churchill for his books, but as far as actions are concerned, at least in this part of the world, he deserves at most a conditional award, an IOU. At this point in his term, Obama resembles only one other Nobel Peace Prize winner – the Dalai Lama, zooming around the world and smiling beatifically.
Let these reservations not be seen as evidence of provincialism, because it’s as simple as this: A president of the world who has not done enough to achieve peace here is not worthy of the Oslo crown. What has the new Nobel laureate done so far in our region? Mitchell Shmitchell, a bitter and lost struggle over settlement expansion, a bizarre struggle against the Goldstone report, a disgraceful silence about the Gaza siege, and the ultimate proof that there’s nothing new under the Middle Eastern sun. It’s not Obama who “can,” it’s Israel. Israel can twist the arms of any president. You don’t want to freeze the settlements? Okay, never mind. You don’t want to take responsibility for the crimes in Gaza? Okay, never mind. You don’t want to end the occupation? Okay, never mind. This is not the conduct of a Nobel laureate and president.
A consolation prize: Perhaps the Nobel will serve as a catalyst, a kind of alarm clock ringing to wake the laureate in the final minute. Unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq, in this region he will not need to shed American blood to secure peace. It’s enough to show political determination, apply pressure and use Israel’s isolation and dependency for the cause of peace. Israel needs a friend to save it from itself.
Obama now needs to choose whether to join the laureates-in-vain – from Henry Kissinger to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat – or join the great ones, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Aung San Suu Kyi and Mother Teresa. It’s true, no one has ever won the prize twice (except the International Committee of the Red Cross), but no one has won it on a down payment, either. If Obama brings peace to the Middle East, perhaps Oslo will change its ways once more and grant him the Nobel again – once as a down payment, once by right. Congratulations, Mr. President, now it’s time to settle your debt.
Hamas says more babies born with birth defects since Cast Lead: Ha’aretz
The Hamas Health Ministry is claiming that since the Israel Defense Forces operation in Gaza last winter, a higher percentage of children have been born with birth defects, the Ma’an news agency has reported.
According to Dr. Muweiyah Hassenein, head of the ministry’s ambulance and emergency department, “we have found cases among newborn babies involving heart defects and brain abnormalities.”
The report, which was published by Ma’an in September, quotes Hassenein as saying that the higher number of birth defects is a result of “Israel’s use of internationally prohibited weapons against the civilians of Gaza.”
According to the Ma’an article, some researchers have alleged “Israel used the Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) as well, which could cause biological effects on fetuses.”
The ministry says they haven’t received confirmation that IDF ordnance caused the birth defects, and that the group is waiting for the results of examinations performed in European labs.
Israel’s export of occupation police tactics: The Electronic Intifada
Jimmy Johnson, 9 October 2009
Israel’s specialized policing and fighting capacity, which it is currently exporting to other countries, including the US, began to take shape after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In the territories it occupied during the conflict, especially the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, the Israeli government wanted to lay claim, permanently, to specific parts of the occupied area. This desire ran into Zionism’s longest-running problem, the presence of Palestinians. As Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 about indigenous resistance to colonial projects, “The native populations … have always stubbornly resisted the colonists.”
This resistance would have to be suppressed and the population pacified if the occupation of these lands was to be sustainable. Thus began an evolutionary relationship that continues to this day, that of the Palestinian resistance versus Israel’s policy of permanent occupation. Architect Eyal Weizman lays out in great detail the study of urban warfare and urban police actions undertaken by the Israeli military in his book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Importantly, he looks at the ways the army adapts to the dynamics on the ground, explaining that “Indeed, military attempts to adapt their practices and forms of organization has been inspired by the guerilla forms of violence that confront it. Because they adapt, mimic and learn from each other, the military and the guerillas enter a cycle of ‘co-evolution.'” This reciprocal cycle of tactical evolution, and intertwined relationship of Israel’s police and army, is proving politically valuable to Israel by helping to shape international norms on policing more like its own.
Israel participates significantly in areas of the international political and economic markets of arms, security and policing. It is especially renowned for having a highly developed arms industry. There are significant potential political benefits to be gained by participation in the arms trade, especially in the military interoperability that develops with using the same training and systems of war. Military interoperability often lead to the development of political alliances and close personal relationships between high level defense and commerce officials during the research, bidding and approval processes.
To read the whole article use the link above.
Following al-Aqsa clashes, Israel mulls banning Islamic movement: The Electronic Intifada
Jonathan Cook, 8 October 2009
The Israeli government announced yesterday it would consider banning Israel’s Islamic Movement at the next cabinet meeting, in a significant escalation of tensions that have fueled a fortnight of bloody clashes in Jerusalem over access to the Haram al-Sharif compound of mosques.
The move followed the arrest of the movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, on Tuesday on suspicion of incitement and sedition. Police accused Sheikh Salah of calling for a “religious war” in recent statements in which he warned that Israel was seeking a takeover of the Haram, which includes the al-Aqsa mosque.
Sheikh Salah was released a few hours later on condition that he stay away from Jerusalem for 30 days. The decision was widely interpreted as a move to damp down a possible backlash from Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, many of whom regard the sheikh as a spiritual leader. Police were deployed in large numbers throughout Jerusalem yesterday.
An Islamic Movement spokesman, Zadi Nujeidat, told the Haaretz newspaper: “We will continue our activities and call for a continued presence in and around the mosque. We are used to arrests.”
The move against the Islamic Movement follows a series of pronouncements from Sheikh Salah, echoing statements from Palestinian officials in the occupied territories, that have infuriated the Israeli government.
This week he called on Muslims who could reach the compound — access to which has been heavily restricted by the Israeli police — to “shield the [al Aqsa] mosque with their bodies.” Sheikh Salah himself has been barred by the courts from entering the Haram compound for several months.
At his annual “Al-Aqsa is in danger” rally in his hometown of Umm al-Fahm in northern Israel last week, he warned tens of thousands of supporters that Israel was trying to prize away control of the compound from the Islamic religious authorities. He added that, should Israel force a choice between martyrdom and renouncing al-Aqsa, “we will clearly choose to be martyrs.”
Like many other Palestinian leaders, Sheikh Salah fears that, as well as “Judaizing” East Jerusalem, Israel is engineering a takeover of the Haram — known to Jews as the Temple Mount because the remains of the destroyed first and second Jewish temples are believed to lie under the mosques.
He has raised repeated concerns that Israel is secretly digging under the mosques, as it did before opening the Western Wall tunnels in 1996. Then, clashes led to the deaths of 75 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers.
A delegation of Palestinian leaders from inside Israel who visited the compound yesterday warned that there was strong evidence of such excavations.
To read the whole article use the link above.
Stephen Lendman: The Gaza War’s Effect on Women: The Occupation Archive
by Stephen Lendman, Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel – 7 Oct 2009
http://baltimorechronicle.com/2009/100709Lendman.shtml
83% of all fatalities were civilian, and so were most of the injured. The September 25 Goldstone Commission’s findings confirmed that Israel committed grievous war crimes. Israel and the White House, alone, are working to discredit the report.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights’ (PCHR) new report, titled “Through Women’s Eyes,” highlights “the Gender-Specific Impact and Consequences of Operation Cast Lead” and the ongoing siege, including 12 case study examples “through the victims’ words.” Several are discussed below.
In patriarchal Palestinian society, women traditionally are caregivers while men typically head households and are the main breadwinners. As a result, when widows are thrust into this role, they’re often victimized by cultural, social and economic discrimination and marginalization. In Gaza today, it’s hard for women to get by alone, so widows must either live with family members or remarry. The alternative is a hard struggle alone, something most Palestinian women try to avoid, but post-conflict many have no choice.
Besides the vast destruction from Operation Cast Lead claiming over 1,400 lives and thousands more wounded, 118 women were killed and 825 injured, in many cases severely enough to make it hard for them to get by. The majority of victims were in Northern Gaza and Gaza City where the heaviest fighting and bombardment occurred. PCHR listed the names of the dead by age, their address, date and place of attack, and date of death.
Israel said the death toll was an unavoidable part of its military operations during which efforts were made to minimize civilian casualties. PCHR debunked this as baseless by documenting numerous indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks against civilians and their property.
Individual testimonies bear witness that 83% of all fatalities were civilian, and so were most of the injured. “These crimes constitute serious violations of international law; they demand judicial redress.” The September 25 Goldstone Commission’s findings confirmed that Israel committed grievous war crimes that must not go unaddressed.
Israel’s Imposed Closure of Gaza
The ongoing siege is a form of collective punishment, in direct violation of Fourth Geneva’s Article 33 stating:
“No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”
The siege restricts everything and makes reconstruction and recovery impossible. Homes can’t be rebuilt. Families are forced to stay in camps, find temporary shelter with relatives, or get rented accommodation if available and they can afford it. Around 600,000 tons of rubble remain. It can’t be cleared, and enough concrete for tombstones can’t be found.
The situation is increasingly desperate with over 60% unemployment, at least an 80% poverty level, and according to a new UN Conference on Trade and Development report, the figure is 90% with the few jobs available almost solely in government, public administration, and small service industries along with the tunnel economy.
Health services “are in a state of imminent collapse due to shortages of electricity, medicine, and other vital, life-saving equipment,” and the siege prevents most of those needing emergency care from leaving to get it. As a result, PCHR found that at least 61 patients died. It also cites a lack of safe drinking water as electricity cuts prevent pumps that supply it from operating. Even basic foodstuffs and other essentials are in short supply or not available, except for what UNRWA and other relief agencies supply in inadequate amounts.
As an occupying power, Israel is obligated under international law to fulfill what Fourth Geneva’s Articles 55 and 56 require.
Article 55 states:
“To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.”
Article 56 states:
“To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the cooperation of the national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.”
Article 69 of Fourth Geneva’s Additional Protocol I requires the occupying power to:
“ensure the provision of clothing, bedding, means of shelter, other supplies essential to the survival of the civilian population of the occupied territory and objects necessary for religious worship.”
Protection of Women Under International Law
As especially vulnerable non-combatants, they’re afforded particular protection and remain so notably under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
As a result, their lives, physical, and moral integrity are protected against willful killing, coercion, collective penalties, reprisals, and the destruction of objects indispensable to their survival.
As a signatory to the major international human rights laws, Israel is required to obey them. Under the Hague Regulations and Geneva’s Common Article 3, they include the principles of distinction and proportionality:
distinction between combatants and military targets v. civilians and non-military ones; attacking the latter ones are war crimes except when civilians take direct part in hostilities; and
proportionality prohibitions against disproportionate indiscriminate force likely to cause damage to or loss of lives and objects.
In addition, parties to a conflict must take all precautions to avoid and minimize incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, and damage to non-military sites. Civilians must also be given “effective advance warning,” and “neutralized zones” must be available to protect them as much as possible. Further, using human shields is strictly prohibited.
By committing egregious war crimes throughout its history, Israel is a serial scofflaw with a record few countries anywhere can match.
To read the rest of this important article, which includes case studies, use the link above.
Amira Hass: Mahmoud Abbas’ chronic submissiveness: Ha’aretz
By Amira Hass
In a single phone call to his man in Geneva, Mahmoud Abbas has demonstrated his disregard for popular action, and his lack of faith in its accumulative power and the place of mass movements in processes of change.
For nine months, thousands of people – Palestinians, their supporters abroad and Israeli anti-occupation activists – toiled to ensure that the legacy of Israel’s military offensive against Gaza would not be consigned to the garbage bin of occupying nations obsessed with their feelings of superiority.
Thanks to the Goldstone report, even in Israel voices began to stammer about the need for an independent inquiry into the assault. But shortly after Abbas was visited by the American consul-general on Thursday, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization got on the phone to instruct his representative on the United Nations Human Rights Council to ask his colleagues to postpone the vote on the adoption of the report’s conclusions.
Heavy American pressure and the resumption of peace negotiations were the reasons for Abbas’ move, it was said. Palestinian spokespeople spun various versions over the weekend in an attempt to make the move kosher, explaining that it was not a cancelation but a six-month postponement that Abbas was seeking.
Will the American and European representatives in Geneva support the adoption of the report in six months’ time? Will Israel heed international law in the coming months, stop building in the settlements and announce immediate negotiations on their dismantlement and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories? Is this what adoption of the report would have endangered? Of course not.
A great deal of political folly and short-sightedness was bared by that phone call, on the eve of Hamas’s celebration of its victory in securing the release of 20 female prisoners. Precisely on that day, Abbas put Gaza in the headlines within the context of the PLO’s defeatism and of spitting in the face of the victims of the attack – that is how they felt in Gaza and elsewhere.
Abbas confirmed in fact that Hamas is the real national leadership, and gave ammunition to those who claim that its path – the path of armed struggle – yields results that negotiations do not.
This was not an isolated gaffe, but a pattern that has endured since the PLO leadership concocted, together with naive Norwegians and shrewd Israeli lawyers, the Oslo Accords. Disregard for, and lack of interest in the knowledge and experience accumulated in the inhabitants of the occupied territories’ prolonged popular struggle led to the first errors: the absence of an explicit statement that the aim was the establishment of a state within defined borders, not insisting on a construction freeze in the settlements, forgetting about the prisoners, endorsing the Area C arrangement, etc.
The chronic submissiveness is always explained by a desire to “make progress.” But for the PLO and Fatah, progress is the very continued existence of the Palestinian Authority, which is now functioning more than ever before as a subcontractor for the IDF, the Shin Bet security service and the Civil Administration.
This is a leadership that has been convinced that armed struggle – certainly in the face of Israeli military superiority – cannot bring independence. And indeed, the disastrous repercussions of the Second Intifada are proof of this position. This is a leadership that believes in negotiation as a strategic path to obtaining a state and integration in the world that the United States is shaping.
But in such a world there is personal gain that accrues from chronic submissiveness – benefits enjoyed by the leaders and their immediate circles. This personal gain shapes the tactics.
Is the choice really only between negotiations and armed-struggle theater, the way the Palestinian leadership makes it out to be? No.
The true choice is between negotiations as part of a popular struggle anchored in the language of the universal culture of equality and rights, and negotiations between business partners with the junior partner submissively expressing his gratitude to the senior partner for his generosity.
PA pushes UNHRC to hold special meet on Gaza report: Ha’aretz
The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva may hold an emergency meeting this week to discuss the Goldstone report on Israel’s military operation in Gaza last winter and alleged human rights violations, according to sources at the Foreign Ministry. Israeli officials say they hope the United States will block the Palestinian initiative to bring the report back into focus. According to information Israel has received, the Palestinian representative at the council, Ibrahim Khraishi, asked a number of Arab countries on the panel, as well as members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, to ask for a special session of the council on the Goldstone report.
A senior political source said the Palestinians need the support of 17 country members to organize a meeting, and there are signs they might succeed. An emergency meeting of the council is no different than a regular meeting in terms of the impact of its decisions. This means the council may adopt the Goldstone report’s conclusions. A political source said the council has never held an emergency meeting on a report, only on military confrontations. The source said the Palestinian decision to bring back the idea of discussing the report stemmed from criticism that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had suffered last week on the news that he declined to request the Council to adopt the report.
A source at the Foreign Ministry said yesterday that Israel had contacted the U.S. government with a request to intervene and prevent the discussion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to raise the issue today during his meeting with the special U.S. envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell. In another development, the Balad party called yesterday for the removal of Abbas and the Palestinian leadership negotiating with Israel because they are “behaving shamefully vis-a-vis Israel and in the Goldstone-report affair.”
This is the first time an active Arab Israeli party in the Knesset has publicly called for the removal of the Palestinian Authority’s leader. MK Jamal Zahalka called on Abbas’ Fatah faction to dismiss him and not wait for him to decide whether to resign. “Fatah is the backbone of the Palestinian national movement and cannot accept the policy of concessions that Abu Mazen [Abbas] is advancing,” Zahalka said. “The latest decision on the Goldstone report is a blow to the Palestinian people and a blow to international law.”