Gaza: One Year On: Al Jazeera online
Displaced and desperate in Gaza
By Safa Joudeh in Gaza
A year after the war, many displaced families still live in tents [GALLO/GETTY]
One year has passed since the beginning of Operation Cast lead, Israel’s 22-day military assault on the besieged Gaza Strip and suspended is a word that best describes daily life in the Strip; the internal reconciliation process, peace talks with Israel, and most importantly, reconstruction being halted until further notice.
On the street, conversations shift between two topics: The first is the ‘internal peace process’ between rival parties Fatah and Hamas. The other is a possible, even partial opening of the borders by Israel to allow rebuilding to begin; a topic alluded to casually with much cynicism and little hope.
Israeli ground and air raids between December 27, 2008 and January 17, 2009 left extensive damage and mass devastation in its wake.
Factories, businesses, public service buildings, farms, mosques and schools were targeted, hundreds destroyed or damaged. About 15,000 homes were either demolished or severely damaged.
One year later and 20,000 people are still displaced, living with relatives, or in makeshift shacks. Many of them have almost resigned themselves to living in temporary accommodations permanently.
‘Help is not coming’
Abu Subhi, a resident of Beit Lahi, is one of thousands who received a tent from the Red Cross, following the destruction of his home during the war on Gaza.
Today, his tent serves as an extra room to an adjoining shack he built from wooden planks and corrugated iron sheets to house his family.
“I used to have a home and six children. My oldest son was killed in the war and I lost my home. It has been one year and all I’ve gained is the knowledge that help is not coming. The siege before the war was brutal. The siege after the war is pure evil,” he says.
And while a small number of displaced families remain in tents, shacks like Abu Subhi’s have sprung up on the sites of demolished homes all over the Strip.
The few who can afford it have rented apartments, but in one year not one single house has been rebuilt.
Nevertheless, there have been efforts on the part of international NGOs to prepare for the reconstruction of public and private buildings.
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) launched a rubble removal project that discarded 600,000 tonnes of rubble left over after the war, as part of its early recovery process.
Frustration and despair
The images of the mounds of rubble in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, one of the areas most heavily hit during the war, became representative of the scale of the destruction left behind.
Today, the same areas of this neighbourhood have been cleared, and where residents hoped new homes would be built, shacks, trailers and even mud houses have been erected.
According to a report issued by the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the damage to the civilian infrastructure after the war equals four times the size of the Gaza economy.
Over $4bn were pledged by the international community for reconstruction in March.
The reconstruction process would not only put the Strip on the road to recovery, but would also provide hundreds of thousands of jobs in a multitude of sectors, and assist in decreasing the unprecedented 60 per cent unemployment rate.
But, the continued indefinite delay has created an overwhelming sense of frustration and despair among Gazans.
‘Downhill from rock bottom’
At least 20,000 people were displaced by Israel’s war on Gaza [EPA] In the vegetable market in Gaza City vendors arrange and rearrange their produce, occasionally catering to the odd customer; a far cry from the hustle and bustle of what was once one of the liveliest areas in Gaza.
Raafat Hijazi supports a family of 15, his wife and three daughters, in addition to 11 nephews and nieces whose parents – Rafaat’s brothers and their wives – were killed during the Israeli aggression.
Raafat considers himself fortunate. Although business is slow, there will always be customers to buy his fruit and vegetables.
“Before the war we thought it could not get any worse. But despite the siege, things weren’t as bleak as they are now. You really can go downhill from rock bottom. At most only 10 truckloads of produce are allowed in through the Israeli controlled crossings,” he says.
This is compared to 70 truckloads during the two year blockade preceding the war on Gaza; already only 25 per cent of the amount required to meet the needs of the population.
Paying tunnel prices
But the tunnels between Gaza and Egypt are yet again a means to make up the shortages of produce in the market.
Items such as oranges and Guava are now being brought in through the tunnels.
But Raafat points out that the prices are so high, shoppers prefer not to waste money on what they call ‘luxury items’ such as fruit.
“By the time the produce, or any other items, make it to the stalls and shelves in the market they cost three or four times as much as they typically should,” he explains.
The same goes for items ranging from fish and cattle, to electronics, clothing and fuel, each ranging in the disparity between original price and tunnel price.
On one hand, the tunnels allow for the entry of necessities that would otherwise not be available, on the other tunnel trade is costly to both merchants and customers.
During the past 12 months the amount and range of items brought in through the tunnels has increased significantly, a development resulting directly from Israel’s tightening of the siege on the Strip.
Today, 15 per cent of food requirements in the Gaza Strip are being met by items that come in through tunnels, and yet 76 per cent of the population has become food insecure, as opposed to 53 per cent before the war.
‘Dying a slow death’
But despite ingenuity in dealing with the challenges posed by the continued blockade, Israel’s war on the Strip, resulted in billions of dollars worth of damage to the civilian infrastructure, which was already suffering major breakdowns following a two year blockade before the war.
One year later, electricity, water and sanitation systems not only fall short of providing the residents of the Strip with the minimum supply required for each household, but are also on the verge of collapse.
One fifth of the Gaza shore is polluted due to improper disposal of waste water into the sea. The waste water system sustained extensive during the war, and one year later there have been no repairs or maintenance.
A large portion of the costal area in Gaza is not fit for swimming or fishing, depriving Gazans of one of their only recreational outlets and most important industries.
But the majority of the population believes that this is the lesser of two evils.
In the town of Khan Younes in the central Gaza Strip locals are only too familiar with the occurrence of sewage water flooding their streets and even their homes.
Nabil Shakshak, a schoolteacher and father of three, lives only metres away from a sewage lake, created as a temporary holding place for the neighbourhood’s waste water until reconstruction of a waste water treatment plant can begin.
“This is a health and environment hazard,” he says. “My children are constantly sick, the ground, air and water we drink is contaminated.”
“What we don’t understand is that the resources, the funding, the workers, the skill, it’s all there. We’re dying a slow death because Israel chooses to say no repairs can be made. Someone explain this to my children.”
Nabil’s sentiments are not uncommon among the population of the Gaza Strip.
Many also believe that until the international community actively takes a stand against Israel’s collective punishment measures, Israel will never allow the rebuilding process to begin.
Israel Defends Its Inquiry Into Gaza War: New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: January 29, 2010
JERUSALEM — Israel sent a letter to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, on Friday, defending the credibility of its internal military investigation into the Israeli Army’s conduct during last winter’s Gaza war.
Israel Signals Tougher Line on West Bank Protests (January 29, 2010)
The 40-page document was the first official Israeli response to a harshly critical United Nations study called the Goldstone report and formed part of Israel’s effort to stave off accusations of war crimes.
But the document did not address the possibility of an independent, nonmilitary commission of inquiry, as called for by the United Nations report into the war and by many concerned parties in Israel and abroad.
A copy released by the Israeli Foreign Ministry late Friday outlined the findings so far of various kinds of military investigations into several episodes. Among the conclusions, Israel stated that “the strategies adopted by Hamas, and in particular its systematic entrenchment in the heart of civilian areas, created profound operational dilemmas.” The document also declared that in complex combat situations, errors of judgment, even with tragic results, did not necessarily mean that war crimes had occurred.
The Israeli government has been considering the establishment of some kind of judicial investigative committee. While some prominent Israelis favor one, others have been opposed, including the defense minister, Ehud Barak. “All of the soldiers and officers whom we sent into battle need to know,” Mr. Barak said Friday, “that the State of Israel stands behind them, also the day after.”
The report, which was published in September, accused mainly Israel, but also Hamas, which controls Gaza, of possible war crimes during the three-week war. It was researched and written by a fact-finding mission created by the Human Rights Council and led by the respected international jurist Richard J. Goldstone, a South African judge and veteran war crimes prosecutor. In November, the General Assembly endorsed the Goldstone report and asked the secretary general to report back by Feb. 5 on Israeli and Palestinian progress in investigating their respective roles in the war.
Among other things, the report accused Israel of deliberate attacks against the civilian population of Gaza and of willful destruction of civilian infrastructure, a violation of international law.
Up to 1,400 Gazans were killed, including hundreds of civilians. Israel rejected the Goldstone report as biased.
The Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, said that the Palestinian government had delivered a letter to the secretary general saying it had established a special commission that would review the accusations raised in the Goldstone report and carry out whatever investigations the commission deemed necessary.
The report accused Hamas of firing rockets into Israel from Gaza, and Hamas said separately that it had responded to the United Nations demands for an investigation by calling Israeli civilian deaths a “mistake.”
The report called for “appropriate investigations that are independent and in conformity with international standards” into what it called “serious violations” of international law.
If no good-faith, independent investigations were under way within six months, the report recommended, the Security Council should refer the Gaza case to the International Criminal Court.
Many in Israel argue that the military investigation is not enough. Israel’s attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, said Israel was at risk of “Serbianization,” even though he considered the Goldstone report biased.
“Therefore, I believe that Israel has a clear interest in conducting a serious, expert examination that will deal with the report and produce an opposing report,” Mr. Mazuz said in an interview published Friday in the newspaper Haaretz.
Following is a complex and thought-provoking article about Israel and the Armenian genocde, which he interestingly terms the First Holocaust:
Robert Fisk’s World: Israel can no longer ignore the existence of the first Holocaust: The Independent
Recognition of the Armenian genocide is a paramount moral and educational act. While Israelis commemorated the second Holocaust of the 20th century this week, I was in the Gulbenkian library in Jerusalem, holding the printed and handwritten records of the victims of the century’s first Holocaust. It was a strange sensation.
The Armenians were not participating in Israel’s official ceremonies to remember the six million Jewish dead, murdered by the Germans between 1939 and 1945, perhaps because Israel officially refuses to acknowledge that Armenia’s million and a half dead of 1915-1923 were victims of a Turkish Holocaust. Israeli-Turkish diplomatic and military relations are more important than genocide. Or were.
George Hintlian, historian and prominent member of Jerusalem’s 2,000-strong Armenian community in Jerusalem, pointed out the posters a few metres from the 1,500-year old Armenian monastery. They advertised Armenia’s 24 April commemorations. All but one had been defaced, torn from the ancient walls or, in at least one case, spraypainted with graffiti in Hebrew. “Maybe they don’t like it that there was another genocide,” George told me. “These are things we can’t explain.” More than 70 members of George’s family were murdered in the butchery and death marches of 1915 – when German officers witnessed the system of executions, rail-car deportations to cholera camps and asphyxiation by smoke in caves – the world’s first “gas” chambers. One witness, the German vice-consul in Erzurum, Max von Scheubner-Richter, ended up as one of Hitler’s closest friends and advisers. It’s not as if there’s no connection between the first and second Holocausts.
But the times, they are a-changing. For ever since Turkey began shouting about Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza a year ago, prominent Israeli figures have suddenly rediscovered the Armenian genocide. Who are the Turks to talk about mass murder? Has anyone forgotten 1915? For George and his compatriots – there are in all 10,000 Armenians in Israel and the occupied West Bank, 4,000 of them holding Israeli passports – they had indeed been forgotten until the Gaza war. “In 1982, the Armenians were left out of a Holocaust conference in Jerusalem,” he said. “For three decades, no documentary on the Armenian genocide could be shown on Israeli television because it would offend the Turks. Then suddenly last year, important Israelis demanded that a documentary be shown. Thirty Knesset members supported us. We always had Yossi Sarid of Peace Now but now we’ve got right-wing Israelis.”
Maariv and Yediot Ahronot began to mention the Armenian genocide and George Hintlian turned up on Israeli television with Danny Ayalon – the foreign office minister who humiliated the Turkish ambassador by forcing him to sit on a sofa below him – and Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin who said that Israel should commemorate the Armenian genocide “every year”. The Israeli press now calls the Armenian genocide a “Shoah” – the same word all Israelis use for the Jewish Holocaust. As George put it with withering accuracy: “We have been upgraded!!!”
This piece of brash hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed by Yossi Sarid who has described how, a few months after Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced the Gaza war, “an important Israeli personality telephoned me and said the following: ‘Now you have to hit back at the Turks, to denounce them for the crimes they committed against the Armenians You, Yossi, have the right to do so…'” Sarid was appalled. “I was filled with revulsion and my soul wanted to puke,” he wrote in Haaretz. “The person who telephoned me was an example of the ugly Israeli who had disgracefully been at the forefront of those who denied the Armenian Holocaust.” So now “new tunes” – Sarid’s phrase – are being heard in Jerusalem: “The Turks are the last ones who have the right to teach us ethics.”
The bright side to this anguished debate is that one of Israel’s top Holocaust experts bravely insisted – to the fury of then-foreign minister (now president) Shimon Peres – that the Armenian massacres were undoubtedly a genocide. Tens of thousands of Israelis have always believed the same; several hundred are expected to turn up at the Armenian commemoration on 24 April, and most Israelis refer to the Armenian genocide as a “Shoah” rather than the tame “massacres” hitherto favoured by the political elite.
Yet the most extraordinary irony of all occurred when the Armenian and Turkish governments last year agreed to reopen diplomatic relations and consign the Armenian Holocaust to a joint academic enquiry which would decide “if” there had been a genocide. As Israeli Professor Yair Oron of the Open University of Israel said, “I am afraid that countries will now hesitate to recognise the (Armenian) genocide. They will say: ‘Why should we grant recognition if the Armenians yielded?’ Recognition of the Armenian genocide is a paramount moral and educational act. We in Israel are obliged to recognise it.” And American-Armenian UCLA Professor Richard Hovannisian asked: “Would the Jewish people be willing to forgo the memory of the Holocaust for the sake of good relations with Germany, if Germany were to make that demand?” George Hintlian described the Armenian-Turkish agreement – which in fact may not now be ratified by either side – as “like an earthquake”.
We walked together in the cold afternoon through the darkened interior of the great Armenian monastery of Jerusalem with its icons and candles. George opened a cabinet to reveal a hidden staircase up which priests would creep for a secret week when invaders passed through Jerusalem. In this dank, pious place, Ronald Henry Amhurst Storrs, governor of British Mandate Jerusalem, would often sit to ponder what he called “the glory and the misery of a people”.
Miserable it has been for thousands of Armenians here. Up to 15,000 lived in Palestine until 1948, many of them survivors of the first Holocaust. But 10,000 of these Armenians shared the same fate as the Palestinian Arabs, fleeing or driven from their homes by the army of the new Israeli state. Most lost their businesses in Haifa and Jaffa, many of them seeking refuge – for the second time – in Jerusalem. A few set out for Cyprus where they were dispossessed for the third time by the 1974 Turkish invasion. As George put it bleakly, “Today, 6,000 Armenians are residents of Jerusalem and the West Bank. They cannot travel and they are counted as Armenian Palestinians. For Israeli bureaucracy, they are Palestinians.”
George himself is the son of Garbis Hintlian who, as a 17-year-old, survived the death march from his home at Talas in Cappadocia. “We lost my uncle – my grandfather was axed to death in front of him.” After the 1918 armistice, he worked for the British, carrying files of evidence to the initial (but quickly abandoned) Constantinople trials of Turkish war criminals. To no avail.
And glory be, if the tables haven’t changed again! Turkey and Israel have made up and become good friends again. Yossi Sarid anticipated this. “Let us assume that Turkey will renew its ties with Israel. Then what? What then? Will we also renew our contribution to the denial of the Armenian Holocaust?”
The following article by a relatively right-wing Amos Harel, is interesting nonetheles, as it is typical of tens of articles appearing daily, where the crisis created by the Gaza carnage is discussed and analysed. International Law is now ‘one of the dangerous weapons’ used by the enemies of the state… well, when international law becomes an enemy, they are really heading downwards fast! They seem to realise this:
Israel stuck in the mud on internal Gaza probe: Haaretz
By Amos Harel
On February 5, more than a year after Operation Cast Lead ended, the UN General Assembly will hold a follow-up discussion of it, in light of the Goldstone report. Israel will submit in advance to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon a detailed document containing its responses to the report’s allegations. Meanwhile, a consensus is emerging in Israel regarding the appointment of a limited commission of inquiry to investigate the events in Gaza, in the hopes of rebuffing the calls to try government leaders and Israel Defense Forces officers for alleged “war crimes.”
The Gaza operation – which at the time was considered to be an effective remedy to the failures of the 2006 Second Lebanon War, and was declared a smooth military victory immediately upon its conclusion (and intensively marketed as such even beforehand) – refuses to fade from the public agenda. This is not what the decision-makers envisioned when they launched Cast Lead. There is no question that the operation brought about an extended period of relative quiet to the country’s south, but the damage done in the international realm continues to reverberate. Israel is waging a battle to minimize this damage, which in essence means beating a gradual retreat.
As the investigations of the operation continue (the IDF finished its inquiry into the much more intensive Second Lebanon War in just six months), the question of appointing a commission drags on. The idea was considered well before the publication of the Goldstone report last September. Only now, with a gun to its head, is Israel liable to implement it.
Although the defense minister and chief of staff are amenable to the idea of an inquest, the army is still wary.
“If the intention is for field commanders to find themselves in Courtroom C [i.e., before a commission of inquiry – A.H.] with a lawyer by their side, then the implications could be ruinous,” says a senior officer in the General Staff. “It can’t be a ‘buy one get one free’ kind of thing – you went to war, now get a commission of inquiry.”
The fear in the army is that surrendering to UN pressure will lead to the establishment of a commission with vast authority, with the almost inevitable result that heads will roll. For his part, Ehud Barak is convinced that this trap can be circumvented if the authority of the panel is restricted to examining the quality of the IDF’s own investigations and the decision-making process in the cabinet and the military leadership.
It’s not clear whether this will be enough to satisfy the international community. In frequent conversations with officers in Western armies, IDF officials hear total understanding of the difficulties inherent in the kind of combat required in the mine field that is Gaza. The qualified U.S. support that Israel has received following the Goldstone report, despite the Obama administration’s anger over the stalemate in the peace process, derives from this understanding – and from the fact that America and other Western countries are stuck in the same kind of mud in their own war on terror and guerrilla warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Internal debate
In the wake of the report – and with many officers canceling trips to European countries for fear of being arrested – an internal debate has been going on within the IDF concerning the role of the jurist in asymmetric combat. The military advocate general, Major General Avichai Mandelblit, with the support of Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, is pushing for greater legal involvement. Indeed, since Cast Lead, legal advisers have been regularly assigned to the command headquarters of the combat divisions, even while fighting is occurring. The main justification for this is that combat that takes place amid a civilian population, generating countless real-time dilemmas, requires commanders to have recourse to legal advice.
However, Mandelblit goes one step beyond the American army, where lawyers have also been included at the brigade level (in the Marines, a lawyer is included in every battalion, but he must also have completed Marine combat training). The military advocate general’s approach has been coolly received by the Winograd Committee, whose members felt that legal consultation should end with the preparatory stage of an operation and not extend into combat itself.
One senior commander insists that the military advocate general and the chief of staff have gone too far, saying: “The roles have become confused. Instead of the commanders deciding how the force will be used, and taking care to restrain their men when necessary, they’re certain that the lawyer will do the work for them. I’m already hearing division commanders talking that way. It’s very disturbing. And it creates another problem: The law’s involvement during battles makes it hard for it to thoroughly investigate things afterward.”
The Dahiya doctrine
The speakers at a conference last Sunday at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies agreed that in recent years, Israel has faced adversaries that employ a three-part strategy: rockets and missiles aimed at the home front; deployment amid a civilian population to achieve immunity from attack; and a growing dependence on international law.
The day before, Minister Yossi Peled had caused a small uproar when he said that Israel and Hezbollah were heading for another confrontation in the north. Peled’s remarks at a Saturday afternoon gathering in Be’er Sheva immediately made top headlines. The Prime Minister’s Office was so upset that it took the unusual step of issuing a quick clarification that very day, saying that Israel had no intention of launching any aggressive action against Lebanon.
The timing of Peled’s off-the-cuff remarks was highly sensitive. Iran, fearing that the international push for sanctions spearheaded by the United States is about to be ratcheted up a notch, is urging its collaborators in the region to be more on guard than ever against potential Israeli schemes. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah frequently summons teams with cameras and microphones to his bunker to warn that his organization is prepared for any assault. By the summer, Hezbollah will likely have completed its recovery from the last war, and will be ready for a new round.
The main speaker at the conference, GOC Northern Command Gadi Eisenkot, called the tension in the north “virtual” and attributed it to the Arab media. But the remainder of his remarks was less reassuring. He described the close cooperation between the Syrians and Hezbollah, and the IDF’s expectation that every sophisticated weapons system in Syria will eventually make its way to Lebanon. He also said that, since the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh two years ago, Iran has increased its control over what goes on inside Hezbollah. And on top of that, Major General (res.) Yaakov Amidror said that there are hundreds of Iranian missiles capable of striking Israel (until now, local officials estimated the number of such missiles in the dozens). The current security situation may be relatively comfortable and the deterrence level may be high, but the potential threat is steadily intensifying.
Eisenkot, quite deliberately it seems, spoke of the response the IDF is preparing in rather general terms. It appears to comprise both a massive aerial attack and a ground maneuver that would breach the enemy’s defenses. The Achilles’ heel of such a plan is that it would require a lot of time and patience: from civilians on the home front, who would have to remain in shelters until the fighting subsides; from the political echelon, which would have to back up the generals even in the face of potentially heavy losses; and also from the international community, which would have to resist its impulse to intervene.
All of this relates directly to the Goldstone report, of course. A year and a half ago, Eisenkot came up with the “Dahiya doctrine.” Israel, he threatened, would consider responding to any Hezbollah attack on its civilian population by destroying Shi’ite villages in South Lebanon, just as it destroyed Dahiya, the Shi’ite district of south Beirut in 2006. This would be a legitimate move, he said, since after the war Hezbollah moved its activity to the villages and built bunkers and command centers there. The Goldstone report, in its rather distorted fashion, linked Eisenkot’s remarks to the conduct of the war in Gaza, citing them as proof that Israel perpetrated a deliberate punitive campaign against the civilians there.
Arab commentators and leaders say they hope the report will paralyze the IDF in the next round. Asked about it this week, a senior officer in the General Staff replied without hesitation: “When missiles fly at Tel Aviv in the next war, and we presume that they will, we will respond with all the necessary force. Don’t delude yourselves that anyone’s going to wait for the lawyers.”
Top official: Israel will have to probe Gaza operation: Haaretz
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not impose his opinion on Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi regarding the possibility of Israel establishing an independent mechanism for investigating the claims that Palestinian civilians were targeted in Operation Cast Lead. As such, the report Israel relayed to the United Nations secretary general on Friday does not mention the issue.
Netanyahu attempted to bring Barak and Ashkenazi around but the defense establishment appears to be steadfast in its refusal to have the IDF’s monopoly over examination of its actions challenged.
Senior Jerusalem officials warned that Israel’s response to the UN will not satisfy the international community and that eventually an examination committee that is outside the IDF will have to be appointed to investigate last year’s military operation in the Gaza Strip.
Senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Bureau say that Netanyahu is inclined to accept the justice and foreign ministries’ call for an additional examination, by an extra-military body, into cases in which innocent civilians were harmed during Operation Cast Lead. Netanyahu is convinced that only an independent probe will convince the international community that Israel is serious in its investigation of alleged violations of the law of war.
For now, however, Netanyahu is conceding to the strong objections of Barak and Ashenazi to an independent probe. “The prime minister knows what he wants to do on this matter, but he does not want to bring the matter to the cabinet,” a senior source close to Netanyahu said.
Sources say that Netanyahu managed to secure another week during which to convince Barak and Ashkenazi of his position. A final decision is expected on Friday, sources close to the prime minister say, at which time UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is to inform the General Assembly on the implementation of the conclusions of the Goldstone commission’s report by both Israel and the Palestinians.
Sources close to Netanyahu described the Israeli report submitted last Friday as the first stage. They said that Israel is now waiting for the response of the international community.
The view of the IDF and the Defense Ministry has been that Israel’s response to the UN should stand as is, and that there is no need for the creation of an independent examination committee. However, sources close to the prime minister, and at the foreign and justice Ministries, believe that the result will be the opposite.
We will wait a few days to see if we need to make further decisions, sources close to Netanyahu said.
There was very little that was new in the report sent Friday. Much of the response to the Secretary General explained the framework of the IDF investigations, the position of the Military Advocate General, as well as the civilian judicial system in Israel. The main argument was the at MAG is an independent body that does not answer to military hierarchy.
The report also described the investigations that were carried out with regards to allegations of war crimes. “To date,” the Israeli report states, “the IDF has launched investigations into 150 separate incidents arising from the Gaza Operation. Of the 150 incidents, so far 36 have been referred for criminal investigation. Criminal investigators have taken statements from almost 100 Palestinian complainants and witnesses, along with approximately 500 IDF soldiers and commanders.”
In addition, six special investigations were initiated by GOC Southern Command on the orders of Ashkenazi.
Robert Fisk: In the West Bank’s stony hills, Palestine is slowly dying: The Independent
Area C doesn’t sound very ominous. A land of stone-sprinkled grey hills and soft green valleys, it’s part of the wreckage of the equally wrecked Oslo Agreement, accounting for 60 per cent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that was eventually supposed to be handed over to its Palestinian inhabitants.
But look at the statistics and leaf through the pile of demolition orders lying on the table in front of Abed Kasab, head of the village council in Jiftlik, and it all looks like ethnic cleansing via bureaucracy. Perverse might be the word for the paperwork involved. Obscene appear to be the results.
Palestinian houses that cannot be permitted to stand, roofs that must be taken down, wells closed, sewage systems demolished; in one village, I even saw a primitive electricity system in which Palestinians must sink their electrical poles cemented into concrete blocks standing on the surface of the dirt road. To place the poles in the earth would ensure their destruction – no Palestinian can dig a hole more than 40cm below the ground.
But let’s return to the bureaucracy. “Ro’i” – if that is indeed the Israeli official’s name, for it is difficult to decipher – signed a batch of demolition papers for Jiftlik last December, all duly delivered, in Arabic and Hebrew, to Mr Kasab. There are 21 of them, running – non-sequentially – from numbers 143912 through 145059, all from “The High Planning Council Monitoring [sic] Sub-Committee of the Civil Administration for the Area of Judea and Samaria”. Judea and Samaria – for ordinary folk – is the occupied West Bank. The first communication is dated 8 December, 2009, the last 17 December.
And as Mr Kasab puts it, that’s the least of his problems. Palestinian requests to build houses are either delayed for years or refused; houses built without permission are ruthlessly torn down; corrugated iron roofs have to be camouflaged with plastic sheets in the hope the “Civil Administration” won’t deem them an extra floor – in which case “Ro’i’s” lads will be round to rip the lot off the top of the house.
In Area C, there are up to 150,000 Palestinians and 300,000 Jewish colonists living – illegally under international law – in 120 official settlements and 100 “unapproved” settlements or, in the language we must use these days, “illegal outposts”; illegal under Israeli as well as international law, that is – as opposed to the 120 internationally illegal colonies which are legal under Israeli law. Jewish settlers, needless to say, don’t have problems with planning permission.
The winter sun blazes through the door of Mr Kasab’s office and cigarette smoke drifts through the room as the angry men of Jiftlik shout their grievances. “I don’t mind if you print my name, I am so angry, I will take the consequences,” he says. “Breathing is the only thing we don’t need a permit for – yet!” The rhetoric is tired, but the fury is real. “Buildings, new roads, reservoirs, we have been waiting three years to get permits. We cannot get a permit for a new health clinic. We are short of water for both human and agricultural use. Getting permission to rehabilitate the water system costs 70,000 Israeli shekels [about £14,000] – it costs more than the rehabilitation system itself.”
A drive along the wild roads of Area C – from the outskirts of Jerusalem to the semi-humid basin of the Jordan valley – runs through dark hills and bare, stony valleys lined with deep, ancient caves, until, further east, lie the fields of the Palestinians and the Jewish settlers’ palm groves – electrified fences round the groves – and the mud or stone huts of Palestinian sheep farmers. This paradise is a double illusion. One group of inhabitants, the Israelis, may remember their history and live in paradise. The smaller group, the Palestinian Arabs, are able to look across these wonderful lands and remember their history – but they are already out of paradise and into limbo.
Even the western NGOs working in Area C find their work for Palestinians blocked by the Israelis. This is not just a “hitch” in the “peace process” – whatever that is – but an international scandal. Oxfam, for example, asked the Israelis for a permit to build a 300m2 capacity below-ground reservoir along with 700m of underground 4in pipes for the thousands of Palestinians living around Jiftlik. It was refused. They then gave notice that they intended to construct an above-ground installation of two glass-fibre tanks, an above-ground pipe and booster pump. They were told they would need a permit even though the pipes were above ground – and they were refused a permit. As a last resort, Oxfam is now distributing rooftop water tanks.
I came across an even more outrageous example of this apartheid-by-permit in the village of Zbeidat, where the European Union’s humanitarian aid division installed 18 waste water systems to prevent the hamlet’s vile-smelling sewage running through the gardens and across the main road into the fields. The £80,000 system – a series of 40ft shafts regularly flushed out by sewage trucks – was duly installed because the location lay inside Area B, where no planning permission was required.
Yet now the aid workers have been told by the Israelis that work “must stop” on six of the 18 shafts – a prelude to their demolition, although already they are already built beside the road – because part of the village stands in Area C. Needless to say, no one – neither Palestinians nor Israelis – knows the exact borderline between B and C. Thus around £20,000 of European money has been thrown away by the Israeli “Civil Administration”.
But in one way, this storm of permission and non-permission papers is intended to obscure the terrible reality of Area C. Many Israeli activists as well as western NGOs suspect Israel intends to force the Palestinians here to leave their lands and homes and villages and depart into the wretchedness of Areas B and A. B is jointly controlled by Israeli military and civil authorities and Palestinian police, and A by the witless Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas. Thus would the Palestinians be left to argue over a mere 40 per cent of the occupied West Bank – in itself a tiny fraction of the 22 per cent of Mandated Palestine over which the equally useless Yasser Arafat once hoped to rule. Add to this the designation of 18 per cent of Area C as “closed military areas” by the Israelis and add another 3 per cent preposterously designated as a “nature reserve” – it would be interesting to know what kind of animals roam there – and the result is simple: even without demolition orders, Palestinians cannot build in 70 per cent of Area C.
Along one road, I discovered a series of large concrete blocks erected by the Israeli army in front of Palestinian shacks. “Danger – Firing Area” was printed on each in Hebrew, Arabic and English. “Entrance Forbidden.” What are the Palestinians living here supposed to do? Area C, it should be added, is the richest of the occupied Palestinian lands, with cheese production and animal farms. Many of the 5,000 souls in Jiftlik have been refugees already, their families fled lands to the west of Jerusalem – in present-day Israel – in 1947 and 1948. Their tragedy has not yet ended, of course. What price Palestine?
Report: Killers injected Hamas leader with heart attack drug: Haaretz
A hit squad that killed a top Hamas commander in his Dubai hotel room injected him with a drug that induced a heart attack, London newspaper The Times reported on Sunday.
A team of assassins broke into the room of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh and killed him silently before photographing all the documents in his briefcase and left a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door, said the paper quoting unnamed sources in the Middle East.
Latest theories contradict a version of events given last week by Al-Mabhouh’s brother, who told Haaretz that a medical team had determined the cause of death as a massive electric shock sustained to the head. Doctors had also found evidence of strangulation, he said.
Hamas has publicly blamed Israel for the assassination, which occurred only three days after the first ever visit to the Arab Emirates by an Israeli minister.
Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of the group’s leaders and co-founders, claimed Saturday in an interview with Al-Jazeera television that the killers entered Dubai on forged passports as part of the entourage of Uzi Landau, the infrastructure minister, who was attending a regional conference on renewable energy.
Landau has refuted any connection between his visit and the assassination.
The 50-year-old Hamas man’s body was discovered by staff at the luxury Al Bustan Rotana hotel after lunch on January 20. There were no suspicious signs and local doctors diagnosed a heart attack.
But nine days later, blood samples sent to Paris for analysis showed signs of poison and Hamas announced his death and blamed the Israeli agents for the assassination.
Al-Mabhouh, who was the official responsible for arranging arms supplies from Iran to Gaza, was tracked from the moment he boarded Emirates flight EK 912 at Damascus at 10.05 on January 19, the Times reported.
Hamas has since accused Israel of ‘breaking the rules of the game’ by taking its war with Hamas onto foreign territory and vowed to retaliate by targeting Israeli officials in Europe.
Swedish mayor calls both Anti-Semitism and Zionism forms of ‘unacceptable extremism’:Haaretz
Swedish Jews are upset about comments made this week by the mayor of Malmo, who said anti-Semitism and Zionism were both forms of “unacceptable extremism,” and urged local Jews to disassociate themselves from Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip.
“These statements and other events in Malmo are making the Jewish community feel very uncomfortable and some people, especially the young, are leaving the city,” George Braun, the president of the Jewish community in Gothenburg, about 250 kilometers from Malmo, told Haaretz. Ilmar Reepalu, mayor of Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city, spoke in an interview published in a Swedish newspaper on Wednesday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “We accept neither Zionism nor anti-Semitism,” Reepalu said. “They are extremes who put themselves above other groups, seeing others as something lesser.”
He said it was “terrible” that Jews felt so insecure in Malmo that they felt compelled to leave, but that a recent city-center demonstration in solidarity with Israel by local Jews stirred up feelings against them
“I wish the Jewish Community would distance itself from Israel’s violations of the rights of the civilian population in Gaza,” he said. I wish that representatives of Muslims in Malmo would clearly say that the Jews in Malmo shouldn’t be mixed up in the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
Malmo’s Jewish community has complained about harassment by extreme left-wing and right-wing activists, but mostly by radical elements from the city’s Muslims, who make up about 15 percent of the population of 250,000.
Malmo drew international attention last March when the city council barred spectators from a Davis Cup tennis match in which Israelis were competing, citing public order concerns because of planned anti-Israel protests.
The Israelis won and the International Tennis Federation banned Malmo from hosting Davis Cup events for five years. Dr. Mikael Tossavainen of Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, said Reepalu’s statements were “far from helpful in indicating that the Jews themselves have a share in the responsibility for their precarious position.”
He added: “Mr. Reepalu’s statements risk strengthening those who take out their frustration against Israel on the local Jews.”
Netanyahu backs Israel probe into Gaza war crimes claims, aides say: Haaretz
PM wants inquiry but defense ministry and IDF blocking investigation into deliberate targeting of civilians.
Defense officials have successfully resisted an attempt by the prime minister to launch an inquiry into the targeting of civilians by Israeli troops in Gaza – amid warnings from inside the government that skirting the issue will fail to satisfy the United Nations.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made concerted efforts to persuade Defense Minister Ehud Barak to accept an Israeli investigation into civilian deaths during Israel’s three-week Gaza offensive a year ago, senior aides on his staff said on Saturday.
But Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi have dug in their heels, refusing to yield authority to investigators from outside the defense establishment, officials told Haaretz.
As a result, a report submitted by Israel to the UN secretary general on Friday made no mention of claims that Israel knowingly attacked noncombatants.
Senior Jerusalem officials now warn that Israel’s response to the UN will not satisfy the international community and that eventually an examination committee that is outside the IDF will have to be appointed to investigate the military operation in the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu is inclined to accept the justice and foreign ministries’ call for an extra-military inquiry into civilian deaths, aides say. The prime minister is apparently convinced that only an independent probe will convince the international community that Israel is serious about investigating alleged violations of the law of war.
For now, however, Netanyahu continues to bow to strong objections from Barak and Ashenazi, refusing to sanction an an inquiry.
“The prime minister knows what he wants to do on this matter – but he does not want to bring the matter to the cabinet,” a senior source close to Netanyahu said.
Sources say that Netanyahu managed to secure another week during which to convince Barak and Ashkenazi of his position. A final decision is expected on Friday, when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is to update the General Assembly on implementation of the Goldstone commission’s findings.
Aides described the Israeli report submitted last Friday as the first stage. They said that Israel is now waiting for the response of the international community.
The view of the IDF and the Defense Ministry has been that Israel’s response to the UN should stand as is, and that there is no need for the creation of an independent examination committee. However, sources close to the prime minister, and at the foreign and justice Ministries, believe that the result will be the opposite.
We will wait a few days to see if we need to make further decisions, sources close to Netanyahu said.
There was very little that was new in the report sent Friday. Much of the response to the Secretary General explained the framework of the IDF investigations, the position of the Military Advocate General, as well as the civilian judicial system in Israel. The main argument was the at MAG is an independent body that does not answer to military hierarchy.
The report also described the investigations that were carried out with regards to allegations of war crimes. “To date,” the Israeli report states, “the IDF has launched investigations into 150 separate incidents arising from the Gaza Operation. Of the 150 incidents, so far 36 have been referred for criminal investigation. Criminal investigators have taken statements from almost 100 Palestinian complainants and witnesses, along with approximately 500 IDF soldiers and commanders.”
In addition, six special investigations were initiated by GOC Southern Command on the orders of Ashkenazi.
Another piece of incisive analysis on the state of the ‘left’ in Israel, by the tireless knight Gideon Levy. However, he is still looking for Zionist left, not realising or accepting that such a concept is an oxymoron:
Israeli left needs to wake up before it’s too late: Haaretz
By Gideon Levy
Looking at the way the right acts makes one go green with envy and want to learn from them. Four hundred criminal cases opened against opponents of the 2005 Gaza Strip disengagement, people who threw oil, acid, garbage and stones at soldiers and police, were closed last week and their criminal record expunged. Fifty-one MKs voted in favor of the closure, nine against. That is the true map of Israeli politics (and society). Only about seven percent of the lawmakers believed that this was a worthless and dangerous decision. All the rest agreed with it, or did not bother to vote or take an interest.
Neither did anyone think to apply a similar rule to 800 protesters against Operation Cast Lead, who were arrested and charged, perhaps because they are Arabs, nor to the dozens arrested for protesting in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, perhaps because they are leftists. Left-wing demonstrators never acted as violently as the settlers do, but no one thinks about pardoning them. Not even a semblance of equality before the law, not even the appearance of justice for all – that is unnecessary in a place where public shame no longer exists.
This scandalous decision did not appear out of nowhere. It is the fruit of a campaign of pressure and solicitation, bullying and extortion. From now on, settlers and Israeli society will know that they can go as wild as they want: Even if someone dares charge them – another will arise who will know how to extricate them from trouble and penalty. In contrast, left-wing protesters are orphans. They have no public or parliamentary support. Protesters against disengagement and pogromists in Palestinian villages know they will be cleared, while leftist protesters are abandoned to their fate.
From now on the left will know that as long as it continues its winter (and summer) hibernation, its protesters will be thrown into jail and no one will spring them. From now on, Israel will know that its legal system discriminates between right and left – a strong, aggressive and violent right and a left deep in hibernation. That is the way it is when the leftovers of the left are busy with wages for authors, animal rights and useless organizing against Ehud Barak, with exemption from municipal taxes for synagogues and maternity leave for men. Meretz MKs do not even have time for Sheikh Jarrah. That is the way it is when the left wing of the Zionist establishment is dead.
In Israeli society there has for a long time been only one alert and significant group. Except for a few radical leftist groups, which are brave and determined but small and compartmentalized, only the settlers and their fans are still fighting here for matters that are not personal and do not involve money. For that, they are to be admired. The Knesset decision to pardon the settlers should be a wake-up call to the left. If it continues in its complacence, not only will it find the last of its activists thrown into jail, it will not recognize the country in which it lives. There have been worse decisions than the one to pardon the right-wing protesters, but not one that is so revealing of our new face of law, justice and equality.
We may continue to remain silent about all of this. We may see photographs of settler-rioters, their faces exposed, in Haaretz (and only there) on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and not ask where the police are. We may read descriptions of attacks on innocent Palestinians and do nothing either to protect them or to protest against their attackers. We may continue to ignore xenophobia from the establishment, the deportation of international left-wing activists only because of their opinions and of Palestinians only because of their national affiliation, and get people to sign ridiculous petitions. We may continue to create a storm around gossip about Sara Netanyahu and even be shocked out of all proportion at the shoe thrown by an embittered man at the president of the Supreme Court, tsk-tsk and speak in exaggerated flowery terms about the “serious harm” to the rule of law. Hardly a word has been heard about the rude shoe the Knesset threw at the rule of law.
We can continue to remain silent and know that silence means collaboration. But when the left wakes up it will be too late. In fact, it is already too late. Meretz is dead, Labor is dying, Kadima is nonexistent, Peace Now is still deliberating over whether to petition against the pardon, and the right is freely celebrating and going wild. Eyes right: wake up and learn from its methods and the way it fights. In Israeli society, there is apparently no other way.
Tomorrow Berlusconi with more than half of his cabinet come to give succor to Netanyahu and his bull-in-the-china-shop policies. It is interestin, however, that despite the tosh this partner of Bush and Blair is exuding, even he has noticed that there might be a problem with the settlements policy:
Berlusconi to Haaretz: Israel’s settlement policy is unwise: Haaretz
Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi arrives in Israel Monday for a three-day visit. In the course of the visit, Berlusconi will visit Yad Vashem, plant a tree in Jerusalem’s Grove of Nations and speak at a special session at the Knesset, where seven original sketches from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus will also be put on display.
Berlusconi will be accompanied on his trip by eight Italian cabinet ministers who will for the first time participate in a joint cabinet meeting. The meeting will also highlight bilateral cooperation in the fields of science, technology and culture. A special conference will be held bringing together leaders of Italian business, industry and science and their Israeli counterparts. Three laboratories that were funded by the Italians will be dedicated in the course of the visit.
Haaretz asked the Italian prime minister to relate to several current issues pertaining to ties between the two countries. His responses were as follows:
On his exceptional friendship with Israel:
“For my entire life, first as an entrepreneur and later as prime minister, I have had a love of freedom. The Jewish people, with courage and persistence, created a paragon of democracy in the Middle East. Israel is part of Europe. It belongs to the West. It believes in the values of democracy in which we, too, believe. As a result, I always supported Israel. As a result, as prime minister, I changed Italy’s foreign policy and thereby turned Italy into Israel’s closest friend in Europe … I would like to add that the visit I made to Auschwitz [in January 2005] made a deep impression on me. I told myself there that it was impossible not to be Israeli.
“At the same time, I cultivated ties with the moderate leaders of the Arab and Muslim world. Italy today is an essential stop, sometimes the first, that Middle Eastern leaders make in Europe. We feel involved in efforts to find a lasting and comprehensive solution to the Palestinian question. Italy proposed the beautiful town of Arice as a location for future peace talks between the [two] sides.”
On the Middle East peace process:
“Henry Kissinger used to say that there could never be war in the Middle East without Egypt, but no peace was possible without Syria. By virtue of the courage of statesmen like [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat and [Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin, Egypt definitively disengaged from this equation and President [Hosni] Mubarak has decisively continued on this path. The time has come for Syria and Israel to act together for the sake of peace, in the framework of which the Golan Heights will be returned and at the same time diplomatic and friendly relations will be established between the two countries, and Damascus for its part will stop supporting organizations that do not recognize Israel’s existence. All of us are working to find a comprehensive solution, and Italy’s presence in Lebanon [as part of the United Nations peacekeeping force] is testimony to this.”
On Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank and relations with the Palestinians:
“Israel’s settlement policy could be an obstacle to peace. I would like to say to the people and government of Israel, as a friend, with my hand on my heart, that persisting with this policy is a mistake. I welcomed Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s courage is his announcement of a 10-month [residential settlement construction] freeze. It will never be possible to convince the Palestinians of Israel’s good intentions while Israel continues to build in territories that are to be returned as part of a piece agreement. At the same time, what happened in Gaza should prompt some thought. It is not possible to evacuate communities to [then] face burned synagogues, acts of destruction, and inter-Palestinian violence and missiles being shot into Israeli territory.
Dutch pro-Palestinian socialite: Jewish lobby plays on Holocaust: Haaretz
“Holland’s powerful Jewish lobby is playing on the country’s sense of guilt over the Holocaust,” a prominent Dutch activist said last week, triggering angry reactions and accusation of anti-Semitism from pro-Israel Dutch Jews.
Gretta Duisenberg, the widow of the first president of the European Central Bank and a friend of the Queen of the Netherlands, said in an interview for Islam Online that “the Jewish lobby in Holland, like in the United States, is very strong and powerful, and it is still playing on our guilt feelings although it is 63 years since the Holocaust.”
Duisenberg, a leading pro-Palestinian activist and well-known member of Holland’s high society, added that “whenever you have something against the Jewish people in Holland, they call you an anti-Semite.”
“These are anti-Semitic remarks, based on the libel of the Protocols of Zion, that the Jews dominate the world,” said Ronny Naftaniel, head of Holland’s largest pro-Israel group and watchdog on anti-Semitism, the Center for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI.)
Duisenberg’s spokesperson, Paul Lamp, rejected this, telling Haaretz that in the interview Duisenberg also referred to “Zionist Jews and orthodox Christians who dominate our government and the government of the United States.”
While this quote does not appear in the piece, the interview does contain a quote by Duisenberg saying that “Holland’s right-wing government is Christian radical, and the radical people within the Jewish people have very strong feelings toward Israel, and they dominate our government.”
Duisenberg once said she wants to collect six million signatures for a pro-Palestinian petition. In a 2005 television discussion, she said: “I hope the Jews realize they can’t take over the south of Amsterdam the same way they took over the West Bank.”
“She doesn’t realize it, but with this kind of statements she doesn’t only insult Jews, but is also severely damaging the Palestinian position in the Netherlands,” Naftaniel said. “People will believe that to support the Palestinians you have to be anti-Semitic, which of course is not true.”
This month Naftaniel’s organization released data showing that in 2009, the number of anti-Semite incidents in Amsterdam doubled compared to 2008, when 14 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in the Dutch capital. Jews in Amsterdam feel increasingly “besieged” as they are exposed to a growing barrage of name-calling, hate mail, firecrackers in their mailboxes, graffiti and – occasionally – physical abuse, CIDI said.
It’s all Obama’s fault: Haaretz
Zvi Bar’el
Speeches, so it turns out, are an excellent substitute for policy. There’s no solution to the problem of radical Islam? Talk about reaching out in friendship to moderate Islam. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is stuck? Talk about the legitimate rights of the Palestinians. The war on Al-Qaida is not progressing? Speak of building a nation in Afghanistan. Iran is being impudent? Issue an elegant warning. Wait a year. Let it be forgotten and then make another speech. Erase all that did not succeed, bypass the major crises and continue on to the next year.
Indeed, President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address reveals that what stirred the world’s imagination during the past year, what led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, what caused sandstorms in Middle Eastern and Muslim states and sowed terror in Israel – simply popped like a bubble. Not a single word on the Middle East peace process. Only a restrained “promise” to Iran’s leaders of “growing consequences.” No new outstretched arm to moderate Islam. A word about human rights? Nothing. Just let us make it through the year in peace.
The great vision came down to local politics. To fighting against tribes, gangs, or, in the case of Israel, nationalist parties. Whoever thought that Obama would fulfill the message of Arab-Israeli peace can, like Obama, kick himself for nurturing lofty expectations. But if Obama can chalk up his meager achievements in the Middle Eastern marketplace to inexperience – as if every U.S. president has to reinvent the wheel – that doesn’t absolve the Israelis from paying the bill.
The very thought that whoever is elected prime minister of Israel, the United States will take care of things for us reeks of the sin of pride, resulting from the fact that in Israeli eyes there is no connection between politics and policy. We can have a braggart for prime minister, a thug for foreign minister, someone with racist tendences as interior minister, a gourmand for defense minister, a nationalist for minister of national infrastructure and for the minister of culture … well, okay. But our future – that we place in the hands of the U.S. president. He is the one who must bear for us responsibility for negotiations with the Palestinians, to block, for us, the Iranian bomb, to fight against radical Islam and to worry about our economy. We will enjoy ourselves with our political acrobatics, and he will cook, lay the table and also force us to eat so that we can grow and be strong. If he fails, it is his failure, not ours.
We are, of course, not alone. The existence of failed states like Iraq or Afghanistan depends not only on external assistance but also on decisions made by the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon. More “organized” states, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and even Syria, conduct their own policies and set an agenda for the U.S., not the other way around. Turkey decided to broaden its influence and its links with the Arab world and with Central Asia; Saudi Arabia dictates moves in the Middle East; and Iran has become a power on its own accord. Syria reclaimed its control over Lebanon and returned to the warm embrace of the Arab center, and now holds significant sway over the future of the Arab-Israeli peace process.
As usual these changes are of no interest to Israel. Obama, like every other U.S. president, continues to be our impresario. Only ours. As such, the real negotiations are with him and not with the Palestinians or the Arab states. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to limit construction in the territories he was responding not to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, but to Obama. When Netanyahu speaks of resuming negotiations he is addressing not the Palestinian government, but rather Obama. Abbas and Obama, of course, are the ones responsible for the lack of a peace process: Abbas painted himself into a corner, while Obama aimed for the skies with his vision and now cannot deliver the goods. It’s his fault, and Israel can celebrate its victory.
It may be that Obama is only an orator and not a statesman. But Israel is the last one who can judge him for that. Israel is very pleased with the cage in which it has trapped him. The question is what will Israel be left with after this success. Indeed, the threat of peace was nearer a year ago. We nearly fell into the trap when Netanyahu announced the freeze in settlement construction. We were on the verge of another Masada. But thank God we pulled ourselves together. Certainly we will survive this American president, too.
Dershowitz: Goldstone is a traitor to the Jewish people: Haaretz
Prominent political commentator Professor Alan Dershowitz slammed jurist Richard Goldstone, the architect of a UN report which accuses Israel of Gaza war crimes, saying he is a traitor to the Jewish people, Army Radio reported Sunday.
Dershowitz and Goldstone have been colleagues and close friends for many years before the UN Gaza probe, but once Goldstone published his report the ties between the two were severed. “The Goldstone report is a defamation written by an evil, evil man,” Dershowitz said.
In an interview with Army Radio, Dershowitz said he is appalled by the report and can’t fathom how it could have been written by a Jew. He said it is as if a Jew would have written the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that the jurist is using the fact that his last name is ‘Goldstone’ to substantiate the report’s defamation against the Jewish people.
Dershowitz said he doesn?t believe he should be a part of an Israeli internal inquiry into last winter’s Gaza offensive, but said that he would be happy to help if he was asked to.
The professor said that in his opinion, the best way to deal with the report is to set up an Israeli committee headed by a reputable Israeli judge, suggesting former Supreme Court presidents Aharon Barak and Meir Shamgar.
Former minister and Meretz chairwoman Shulamit Aloni responded to Dershowitz’s comments, saying that Goldstone is far from a traitor. “Dershowitz’s statements border on hate. Goldstone is a Zionist Jew who was simply doing his job,” Aloni told Army Radio.
Aloni further went on to say that Dershowitz is a despicable man who opposes the left and supports the settlers. “His opinion doesn’t count in my eyes, and the way he speaks of Goldstone is disgraceful,” Aloni said.
“The Goldstone report isn’t entirely accurate, though we cannot ignore the fact that we did violate international law – the IDF used phosphorus and bombed schools and hospitals,” said Aloni.
The former minister also attacked the defense minister, saying “Ehud Barak is the most dangerous man in the state of Israel.”