For sale: Gaza zoo where the zebras were not all they seemed: The Independent
Israeli blockade leaves animals starving and owners with no choice but to sell up
By Katherine Butler in Gaza City
Monday, 8 February 2010
An emaciated lion, a hyperactive camel, and the only “zebra” in Palestine – this unusual assortment of animals could soon be yours. Mahra Land, a ramshackle zoo in Gaza, is now on the market.
The zoo made headlines last year when its owners engineered, not with genetics, but black paint, a pair of “zebras” out of two donkeys. TV reports showed delighted local children patting, slapping and even riding the docile if exotic looking creatures. The donkeys replaced two real zebras that starved to death during Israel’s three-week war on the Gaza Strip last year.
But six months after acquiring global stardom, one “zebra” has died, and the owners, no longer able to meet the costs of feeding their menagerie under Israel’s illegal economic siege of Gaza, are being forced to sell up.
In their darkened office – electricity cuts are a daily occurrence because Gaza’s power plant keeps running out of fuel – Mohammed Berghout and his brother Ahmed, the two young businessmen behind Mahra Land, are still bemused at how they transformed two white mules into respectable copies of beasts that may have roamed the African savannah.
“Ahmed had the idea to paint donkeys” Mohammed says. First they tried ordinary black paint but that didn’t work so well, then they mixed human hair dye in a plastic bowl and using masking tape to get the striped effect, applied it to their white coats.
The results were pretty convincing but even more so when it came to helping shed light on the desperation of Gazans under siege and the limited options for its children, many of whom have never been allowed to travel even as far as Israel or the West Bank, and whose entertainment is limited to the beach in summer, an outing to one of four dilapidated zoos or a walk around a British First World War cemetery.
Last year’s Israeli air bombardment and ground invasion killed 1,300 Palestinian civilians and reduced much of the territory to rubble. For three weeks bombing and shelling made it too dangerous for Mohammed or Ahmed to reach the zoo to feed their charges. When they eventually did, they found the place intact but many of the animals had starved to death.
Smuggling in replacements via underground tunnels on the Egyptian border would have run to tens of thousands of pounds. But the Berghouts are typical of Gazan resilience and resourcefulness.
The sign at the entrance on the outskirts of Gaza City still beckons “Well Com” in English, but a raw east wind whips across the Strip and there isn’t a visitor in sight. The bumper cars have broken down and are gathering dust and Thomas the Tank Engine in the miniature train ride has shunted to a halt opposite an outdoor cafe whose white plastic chairs are deserted.
The animals seem to have stopped bothering, too. Curled up in the corner of his narrow cell, eyes shut, the lion certainly looks defeated. His female companion died of hunger during the war. In another pen there’s a household dog, like an overgrown Cairn terrier, barking in an urgent high pitch perhaps because his neighbours include a family of domestic cats.
A few doors down, a fox trots around his cell in agitated circles, his skinny vixen wife and their young offspring look on with glazed expressions from the corner. There’s a lone monkey, a gazelle, owls, storks, and some suspiciously inactive fish.
The surviving dye-job zebra looks scrawny on her fragile legs, her head cast down and the black stripes on her back faded to a dirty grey. “We thought it would be more successful, we thought people would love to come here,” says Mohammed. “But it is too expensive to feed the animals”. Admission costs only 3 shekels (around 60p). But inflation is high in Gaza and feeding a lion alone costs up to £15 a day. In an economic siege that is taking its toll on both the morale and the pockets of Gazans, exotic animals, or even just souped-up donkeys, were always going to be a difficult business model.
Officials: Jewish bid for East Jerusalem home likely to fail: Haaretz
Interior Minister Eli Yishai resolved Monday to use his powers to thwart a court-ordered evacuation of an illegally built home erected by nationalist Jews in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
The Shas chairman said he plans to raise the matter of legalizing the structure, known as “Beit Yonatan,” during the next meeting of the ministry’s district planning commission in Jerusalem. Yishai believes he will be able to void the evacuation orders which the municipality intends to distribute to the building’s residents.
Nonetheless, officials with intimate knowledge of the matter said the chances that Yishai will succeed are virtually nil, given that zoning approval for Beit Yonatan would require the approval of a long list of building violations.
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Beit Yonatan, a seven-story residential structure that houses eight Jewish families, was built illegally in the heart of the predominantly Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan by the nationalist association Ateret Cohanim. The courts issued an evacuation order for the building last July.
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat initially refused to enforce the evacuation order, though he later yielded after considerable public pressure from the attorney general and state prosecutor.
“Just as Nir Barkat is not above the law, Eli Yishai is also not above the law,” said a source familiar with the issue. “The interior minister cannot intervene in a court ruling and he will need to learn this lesson just like Barkat did.”
Even if the structure is legalized, the building’s residents would need to undergo a lengthy process in order to obtain the necessary permits from the Jerusalem municipality. These permits are a prerequisite for nullifying a court order.
The Jerusalem District Court has already turned down the residents’ appeal to strike down the evacuation order so that they can win approval for a new building plan.
In a letter to State Prosecutor Moshe Lador, Barkat pledged last week to enforce the court order to evacuate the structure, though he added that he was doing so under protest. Barkat also wrote that the municipality would tear down some 200 Palestinian homes slated for demolition in East Jerusalem. The letter essentially ended a power struggle between Barkat and the judicial system, especially the Jerusalem municipality’s legal consultant, Yossi Havilio.
Meanwhile, the Jerusalem municipality canceled a planned visit by inspectors Monday to the home. The municipality originally dispatched officials from its construction, licensing and inspection department to “Beit Yonatan” to distribute evacuation and seal orders to its residents, however sources in City Hall said the police requested the trip be postponed due to security concerns.
Meanwhile, residents of the house are enlisting the support of right-wing activists and public figures. The dwellers said they would not initiate violence should the evacuation proceed as planned.
Since Barkat’s letter was made public, right-wing members of the Jerusalem municipality have lobbied the mayor to delay the sealing of the building. Deputy Mayor David Hadari (National Religious Party) and city councilman Elisha Peleg (Likud) paid a solidarity visit to the site Monday. “We have come to protest the expulsion of Jews in East Jerusalem,” Peleg said.
“Everybody agrees that there cannot be discrimination against Jews in Jerusalem,” Hadari said. “This is not an issue just for the extreme fringe of the right wing.”
One of the Israelis residing in the building gave a tour of the site. “Look around,” he said, pointing toward the neighboring Palestinian homes. “Everything you see here is illegally built structures.”
United solidarity with Gaza: The Electronic Intifada
Philip Rizk, 8 February 2010
On the third night of my abduction by Egyptian authorities last year, after intermittent interrogation and being handcuffed and blindfolded in a two by two meter cell, a state security officer asked me why I had so many “international relationships.” The following night my kidnappers drove me home. I was never given a reason for why state security agents kidnapped me from a march protesting the ongoing siege on Gaza. Though, judging from the focus of the interrogation, the reason had something to do with the two years I lived and worked in Gaza and solidarity efforts I have been involved in since then.
Upon being reunited with my family I started realizing the explanation of what “Nour” — my main interrogator — must have meant by “international relations.” During my abduction by the Egyptian state security apparatus, protests were staged around the world, letters were sent to embassies, some friends initiated a widespread Internet campaign and the press covered the story extensively.
During Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip the Egyptian authorities kidnapped or arrested many Egyptian activists that protested or expressed criticism of the Egyptian government’s role in the Israeli attacks on the Palestinian enclave. Most of these activists were beaten, deprived of sleep and tortured. Likely due to my second (German) citizenship I was only threatened with torture during my abduction. From the start I was treated with a different standard than Egyptians without a second passport.
And yet, my quick release I attribute to the multitude that stepped into action around the world. These included friends, family members but also a mass of people I don’t know and who, one year later, can’t thank enough. My final days of interrogation were extremely sped up — though under intense mental pressure of heightened interrogation and accusations. Suddenly “Nour” and his compatriots simply wanted to get rid of me and get this “story” off their backs.
Fast-forward to December 2009. Members of various civil society and human rights groups from around the world organized the Gaza Freedom March (GFM) in response to the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in December 2008/January 2009 and the ongoing siege. The marchers from over 42 countries had set out with a similar message to the 15 person strong march that I had been abducted from earlier that year — an end to the siege of the Gaza Strip. The reason it had been that small is that we knew how the Egyptian state apparatuses work. They follow online organizing and tap phone calls, so we had to organize clandestinely if we were to get anywhere.
The organizers and participants of the GFM who I know are committed activists, and collectively they had an incredible capacity for networking with activists around the globe. Prominent Palestinian activists in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine provided vital backing to the march and a steering committee was formed to lead the events. Yet, some curious decisions were made early on that should be questioned in retrospect.
For many months, activists in Cairo remained in the dark as to who was organizing the Gaza Freedom March and what its intentions were. Although the idea of a march garnered much excitement, it left many in Egypt asking why they knew nothing more than the few details available on the GFM’s public website. This was all the more confusing considering that the march was going to be launched from Cairo where numerous Palestine solidarity groups are based.
Many Egyptian activists who I know were excited to be involved in an event that would increase global awareness about the siege on Gaza. I called some of the organizers of CODEPINK during a trip to the US in October. They informed me that they had decided to follow the instructions of the Egyptian regime, which included no contact with Egyptian activists and meant they were providing the Egyptian authorities with a list of names of all the participants. Once the marchers arrived in Cairo I repeatedly heard justification that GFM organizers did not want to put Egyptian protesters at risk. Yet, Egyptians regularly protest in Egypt despite the risks. For a group of outsiders to justify the exclusion of our involvement without asking our opinion — in spite of the good intentions of “protecting” us — felt paternalistic and demeaning.
I believe from the start a political miscalculation was made: the colonization of Palestine and the siege on Gaza do not take place in isolation. The network of neo-liberal hegemony in the region includes Egypt as a key player and thus the regime acts as a partner with Israel when shared interests are at stake. Despite my reservations about the organizational dimensions of the march, I believe some very critical sporadic protests were staged all over Cairo that made an impact and caught Egyptian security completely off guard.
One week after most of the GFM participants had left Egypt, the site of a planned protest to commemorate the end of the Israeli assault on Gaza was completely overrun with Egyptian state security. Passersby were barely permitted to pass the square and the march had to be relocated to a less public place. The Gaza Freedom March was an important effort that reminded me of what I had learned upon my release from prison: our best weapon is numbers.
Fast-forward again to Saturday, 23 January 2010. In Beirut various factions including a movement called “The Campaign to Stop the Wall of Shame” staged a significant protest at the Egyptian embassy protesting the regime’s construction of an underground steel barrier on the border with Gaza. This was powerful. When activists of a nearby country move to the street to protest the Egyptian government — and an Egyptian multinational corporation’s role in aiding the Israelis in besieging the Palestinians.
My question is, how do we take it a step further? Can we coordinate actions between Cairo, Beirut, Gaza and other cities against this wall of shame? On 13 February a joint protest against the wall is planned to happen in Beirut and Cairo. The Arab Contractors company that is constructing the wall along Egypt’s border with Gaza operates in 29 countries. Let us move 29 countries to the streets and call for an end to complicity in the siege.
One year on from my abduction I have the liberty to move, act freely and live. The population of the Gaza Strip does not have that luxury. What we have on our side are numbers determined to end the siege on Gaza and call for justice in Palestine. Let us move together.
Philip Rizk is an Egyptian-German filmmaker and freelance journalist based in Cairo, Egypt. Philip lived in Gaza City from 2005 to 2007 working as a writer for a nongovernmental organization. In 2009 his documentary This Palestinian Life premiered at the London International Documentary Festival. Philip can be reached at rizkphilip AT gmail DOT com.
Justice denied in Gaza: The Electronic Intifada
Mel Frykberg, 8 February 2010
RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) – Gazans hoping for a modicum of justice following Israel’s indiscriminate military assault on the coastal territory during December 2008 and January 2009 — which left 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead — could be waiting in vain.
The Israeli government has taken the offensive in the propaganda battle and attacked United Nations-appointed Justice Richard Goldstone’s report into war crimes committed during the war. The report alleges that Israel was responsible for the lion’s share of human rights abuses.
Following international censure and UN calls for independent inquiries to be carried out by both the Israeli government and Gaza’s de facto Hamas government, Israel submitted a counter-report to the UN last weekend.
Specific incidents during which Goldstone says civilians and civilian infrastructure were deliberately targeted were either justified or denied outright by the Israeli military.
However, two senior Israeli officers were brought before a disciplinary committee after they authorized the use of phosphorous on a UN facility sheltering 700 civilians. The Israeli military, however, refused to divulge what action was taken against the officers.
Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has sent an urgent letter to Judge Advocate General Major General Avichai Mandelblit demanding an immediate investigation into the circumstances surrounding the firing of phosphorous shells at Gaza’s UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) compound in Gaza.
Gaza’s UNRWA director John Ging stated that he had put many calls through to Israeli military officials during the shelling but it continued nevertheless.
“Senior officers were well aware of the danger in continuing the shelling. Despite this knowledge, the army continued to shell the facility, starting fires and causing great damage. The danger to civilians was enormous, and the fact that no lives were lost in the incident is nothing short of a miracle,” said Ging.
According to the UN another of the incidents involved the bombing of a flour mill in Gaza with apparently no military justification.
The Israeli military denied the bombing stating that after an investigation, which included reconnaissance photos, the building showed no damage from an aerial attack and failed to even mention the attack in its report to the UN
But the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Tuesday that a UN bomb disposal team had searched the flour mill shortly after the war and found the front part of an MK-82 500-pound bomb which is used by the Israeli Air Force. It was subsequently neutralized.
Furthermore, the British daily, The Independent, was told by a high-ranking Israeli military officer that the Israeli military deliberately chose to risk the lives of Palestinian civilians to protect the lives of Israeli soldiers.
“The [Israeli army] officer claimed the traditional ‘means and intentions’ engagement principle — stating that a suspect must have both a weapon and a visible intent to use it before being fired at — was discarded during Israel’s Gaza incursion,” reported Haaretz.
Another soldier explained that in place of identifying military targets, the opposite was done. First you shot and then later you looked into the shooting.
During “Operation Cast Lead” foreign correspondents were briefed by the Israeli military that excessive military firepower was used against homes where soldiers merely assumed a gunman could be taking refuge.
A house where they suspected the presence of a fighter would be hit with an aerial missile, two tank shells and then a bulldozer before even considering the presence of civilian families.
Critics argue that if Israel can justify this indiscriminate shelling of predominantly Palestinian civilian targets, on the pretext of the alleged presence of a military person, then Palestinian military organizations could likewise justify the bombing of Israeli buses or restaurants which are regularly patronized by Israeli military personnel.
Punitive measures against Israel, however, are highly unlikely due to United States veto power in the UN Security Council and the lack of political will by mostly Western members.
Meanwhile, Gazans continue to suffer human rights abuses at the hands of the Hamas authorities who control Gaza.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza has released several statements condemning the continued mistreatment by Hamas of political opponents, mostly belonging to the rival Fatah movement, but including other factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
At the beginning of January Fatah activists trying to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the organization’s establishment were arrested, beaten up and degraded by Hamas security officials.
A mother of one of the activists died from a suspected heart attack after she too was beaten and arrested. Some activists were incarcerated merely for lighting candles in commemoration.
Recently, several members from the smaller PLO faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), were hospitalized after being attacked by club-wielding Hamas police after returning from a ceremony marking the death of the founder of the group.
“There is a repressive political atmosphere in Gaza,” says Issam Younis the director of the Gaza-based Palestinian human rights group al-Mezan.
“Political association of the smaller groups is tolerated to some extent by the authorities. It is mostly Fatah activists who are targeted. Due process is lacking,” Younis told IPS.
Journalist Riham Abdul Karim from the Middle East Broadcasting Centre (MBC), who has had several confrontations with Hamas authorities, told IPS that there is no reporting freedom.
“There is no freedom. The definition was lost several years ago. The media is divided between those that support Hamas and those that support Fatah. For those of us in between we are constantly harassed,” Abdul Karim said. “There are certain stories we just can’t touch. Nevertheless, we try to get the message out in a subtle way and hope viewers can read between the lines.”
U.K. academics urge Elton John to cancel Israel concert: Haaretz
A group of British academics have called on singer Elton John to cancel his scheduled performance in Israel this June.
“Political or not political, when you stand up on that stage in Tel Aviv, you line yourself up with a racist state,” the British Committee for Universities of Palestine wrote in an open letter to John on Monday. “Do you want to give them the satisfaction? Please don’t go.”
In the letter, the group urged John to read the Goldstone Commission’s report on Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza last year in order to understand why his performance carried an inherently political undertone.
“You may say you’re not a political person, but does an army dropping white phosphorus on a school building full of children demand a political response? Does walling a million and a half people up in a ghetto and then pounding that ghetto to rubble require a political response from us, or a human one?
“You’re behaving as if playing in Israel is morally neutral – but how can it be? How can the cruelties Israel practices against the Palestinians – fundamentally because the Palestinians are there, on Palestinian land, and Israel wants them to go – be morally neutral?”
“Okay, you turn up in Ramat Gan, and it gets to that ‘Candle in the Wind? moment, and thousands of lighters flicker – but there won’t be any Palestinians from the Occupied Territories swaying along with the Israelis – the army won’t let them leave their ghettoes.
“Please read what Judge Goldstone said about the onslaught on Gaza; what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have been saying for decades about the crimes committed against the Palestinians. Of course the Israeli state denies it has a case to answer, though it’s knee-deep in ethnic cleansing and land-theft and the endless daily suffocating of Palestinian lives and hopes.”
Israel boycotters succeeded just weeks ago in convincing Santana to cancel his own performance. Similar attempts to get Leonard Cohen and Paul McCartney to stay away, however, failed
Muslim students scream ‘killer’ during Israel envoy speech: Haaretz
Police arrest 12 hecklers who distrupted Michael Oren’s speech at California university.
California police reportedly made 12 arrests on Monday after a speech by Israel’s U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren descended into chaos.
Hecklers interrupted Oren’s lecture at Irving University in Los Angeles over 10 times, shouting “killers” and “how many Palestinians did you kill?”
Oren took a 20 minute break after the fourth protest, only to be interrupted again by young men yelling at him every few minutes, local press reported.
Many members of the audience also applauded Oren.
The arrested students were apparently members of the university’s Muslim Student Union, which had publicly condemned Oren’s visit earlier in the day.
In a statement printed by the Orange County Register, a newspaper, the union said:
“We condemn and oppose the presence of Michael Oren, the ambassador of Israel to the United States, on our campus today.
“We resent that the Law School and the Political Science Department on our campus have agreed to cosponsor a public figure who represents a state that continues to break international and humanitarian law and is condemned by more UN Human Rights Council resolutions than all other countries in the world combined.?
Oren eventually completed his speech, some time later than scheduled, but did not take questions from the audience as planned.
University Chancellor Michael Drake was booed by some and applauded by others when told the audience that he was embarrassed by the outburst.
GAZA: ONE YEAR ON: ‘Punish, humiliate, terrorise‘: Al Jazeera online
By Ben White
As the one year anniversary of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip is marked, it is vital to re-examine Operation Cast Lead within the wider context of Israel’s approach to both Gaza and the Palestinians.
There is a danger that the scale of the devastation and the international protests which followed the war can deflect attention from the broader Israeli policies of collective punishment and deliberately-engineered socio-economic collapse.
The first important part of this context for both before – and since – Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip is the crippling blockade.
The isolation of the Gaza Strip actually goes back to the early 1990s, when Israel first implemented the system of ‘closure’ and fenced off the territory. But Israel’s current tight control of the Gaza Strip dates back to the aftermath of the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006, and then Hamas’ armed defeat of Fatah in the summer of 2007.
Thus even before the widespread targeting of civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military a year ago, the Gaza Strip had been subjected to what the Goldstone report described as “a systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation”.
‘Economy dismantled’
Since 2007, aid as a proportion of all imports into the Gaza Strip has increased eightfold. Workforce unemployment stands at around 40 per cent, with only seven per cent of factories operational. The weekly average for truckloads of goods entering Gaza is a quarter of the quantity in the first half of 2007.
Months before Operation Cast Lead, an aid agency report described how the blockade “is destroying public service infrastructure in Gaza” and “has effectively dismantled the economy”.
Little wonder then that the World Health Organisation’s mission to Gaza reported in May this year that “since 2006, the health effects of the blockade have included stagnating life expectancy, worsening infant and child mortality, and childhood stunting”.
Israel has also maintained a tight control over Gaza’s air space and territorial waters, the population registry, and movement between Gaza and the West Bank.
Political strategy
The second crucial context for Operation Cast Lead is the overarching political strategy behind Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza. For the humanitarian catastrophe documented in numerous reports by the UN and NGOs is not, of course, a ‘natural disaster’ but a deliberate, political policy.
War was intended to diminish civilian support for Hamas, White says [EPA] One of Israel’s main aims over the last few years has been to keep Hamas diplomatically and internationally isolated. Tzipi Livni, the then foreign minister, told a press conference a few days into Operation Cast Lead of how it was “important to keep Hamas from becoming a legitimate organisation” (a reason for Israel preferring not to extend a six-month truce).
Another key Israeli goal, evident in both the ongoing blockade as well as the brutal military assault of Operation Cast Lead, is to punish the civilian population in the hope of turning them against Hamas.
In early 2006, an advisor to Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli prime minister, said that “the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet” in order to pressure the elected Hamas-majority government.
In September 2007, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported on the Israeli military’s plans “to limit services to the civilian population in Gaza” in order “to compromise the ability of Hamas to govern”.
It was this logic that shaped Israel’s military operations which, in the words of the UN’s Goldstone report, were “directed by Israel at the people of Gaza as a whole, in furtherance of an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population”.
‘De-developing’ Gaza
That this was a “carefully planned” assault intended “to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population” was clear at the time.
The Jerusalem Post reported Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, as saying that Israel’s aim was to “to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel”.
As hundreds of Palestinians were being killed, The Washington Post related how the “hope” of Israeli officials was that “Gazans become disgusted with Hamas and drive the group from power”.
An Israeli ex-national security adviser told The New York Times that “the terrible devastation” caused by going beyond just “military targets” would lead to “a lot of political pressure” on Hamas.
Targeting civilians to advance a political goal is a standard definition of terrorism: in the words of the US state department, “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets”. US federal law describes terrorism as violence or “life-threatening acts” apparently intended “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population”.
A final part of Israel’s political strategy for the Gaza Strip is to turn the territory into a depoliticised humanitarian crisis, its population rendered utterly dependent on international aid. This is the strategy of ‘de-development’ that has been going on for decades and which is now intensified and more brutal.
Zionism’s contemporary dilemma
But the third and final context for recalling the events of a year ago means looking beyond just Gaza to take in Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians as a whole.
Israel’s regime of control over the Palestinians, both those in the Occupied Territories as well as those with citizenship in the pre-1967 borders, is a response to political Zionism’s historic and contemporary dilemma: how to create and maintain a Jewish state in a land with a non-Jewish population.
In 1948 and 1967, Israel was able to carry out the mass expulsion of Palestinians. Since then, however, Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, aimed at maintaining the domination of one group over another, have been guided by two, parallel principles: maximum land with the minimum number of Arabs, and, the maximum number of Arabs on the minimum amount of land.
That is how the blockade of Gaza and Operation Cast Lead fit in with the eviction of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the consolidation of the settlement blocs in the West Bank, and Israeli state policy toward the Negev and Galilee.
Slowly, Palestinians are being forced out, whether through house demolitions, the removal of residency permits, or the creation of conditions which make the continuation of normal life impossible.
There is no ‘solution’ to Gaza outside of a just peace for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis that can only emerge when the Palestinian people’s rights under international law are realised, and Israel’s policies of dispossession, separation, and structural discrimination are seriously challenged.
Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer specialising in Palestine/Israel. His articles have appeared in publications like the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’, New Statesman, Electronic Intifada, Middle East International, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and others. His first book, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, was published earlier this year by Pluto Press.
Jerusalem mayor to raze 200 Palestinian homes: The Electronic Intifada
Jonathan Cook, 9 February 2010
Jerusalem’s mayor threatened last week to demolish 200 homes in Palestinian neighborhoods of the city in an act even he conceded would probably bring long-simmering tensions over housing in East Jerusalem to a boil.
His uncompromising stance is the latest stage in a protracted legal battle over a single building towering above the jumble of modest homes of Silwan, a deprived and overcrowded Palestinian community lying just outside the Old City walls, in the shadow of the silver-topped al-Aqsa mosque.
Beit Yehonatan, or Jonathan’s House, is distinctive not only for its height — at seven stories, it is at least three floors taller than its neighbors — but also for the Israeli flag draped from the roof to the street.
The settlement outpost, named for Jonathan Pollard, serving a life sentence in the US for spying on Israel’s behalf in the 1980s, has been home to eight Jewish families since 2004, when it was built without a license by an extremist settler organization known as Ateret Cohanim.
Beit Yehonatan is one of dozens of settler-occupied homes springing up in Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem, most of them takeovers of Palestinian homes.
Critics say the intent of these “outposts,” together with the large settlements of East Jerusalem built by the state and home to nearly 200,000 Jews, is to foil any peace agreement that might one day offer the Palestinians a meaningful state with Jerusalem as its capital.
But exceptionally for the settlers, who are used to a mix of overt and covert assistance from officials, the inhabitants of Beit Yehonatan are at risk of being evicted from their home, two years after an “urgent” enforcement order was issued by the Israeli Supreme Court.
Last week Nir Barkat, Jerusalem’s mayor, finally agreed “under protest” to seal Beit Yehonatan amid mounting pressure from an array of legal officials. Barkat had been fighting strenuously against implementing the court order, aided by senior members of the parliament, the police, and even Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who opposed his own attorney general’s advice by declaring Beit Yehonatan’s future “a purely municipal matter.”
But the mayor has not simply capitulated. He warned that Beit Yehonatan would be evacuated only on condition that more than 200 demolition orders on Palestinian homes, most of them in Silwan, were carried out at the same time. He argued that he had to avoid any impression that the law was being enforced in a “discriminatory” manner against Jews.
Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said Barkat’s idea of fairness was “ridiculous.”
“In the past 15 years there have been more than a thousand Palestinian homes demolished in East Jerusalem versus absolutely no settler homes,” he said. “In fact, no settlers have ever lost their home in East Jerusalem.”
In making his announcement, Barkat admitted that the 200 demolitions would trigger “a strong possibility for conflict.” Palestinians in East Jerusalem are already seething over decades of planning restrictions that have forced many of them to build or extend homes illegally because it is all but impossible to get permits from the Israeli authorities.
Halper said the municipality had classified 22,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem as illegal, even as it also assessed a shortage of 25,000 homes for the city’s 250,000-strong Palestinian population.
The homes targeted for demolition include Palestinian houses around Beit Yehonatan that violate planning restrictions that allow families to build only two floors; despite the restriction, many houses have four stories and owners pay fines.
In addition, the city council wants to demolish 88 homes in a small area called Bustan that the municipality claims is in danger of flooding.
Zeinab Jaber lives next to Beit Yehonatan in the home she was born in 61 years ago. The building was declared illegal 20 years ago, after it was extended to four stories to accommodate her growing family. Today she and her six grown-up sons pay monthly fines of more than $1,000 in the hope of warding off destruction.
Her son Amjad, 32, married with two young sons, said he did not dare miss a payment. “It’s simple: if you don’t pay, you’ll end up in prison.”
“What is there for the settlers here?” Jaber asked. “They are only here because they want to take this place from us. They won’t be happy till we leave.”
On the opposite slope across the valley from Beit Yehonatan, Mohammed Jalajil, 48, said he did not doubt that the municipality would demolish the 200 homes. He, his wife and five children have been crammed into a room in a relative’s apartment since their own house was demolished seven years ago.
Jalajil, 48, said: “It was only months after they took our house from us that I saw the settlers building theirs nearby. My lawyer tells me that, even though my house is gone, I won’t have paid off my fines for another 10 years.”
If Barkat follows through with his threat, the demolitions will prompt a rebuke from the international community. Last month, France and the United States joined the UN in denouncing more than 100 demolitions in East Jerusalem over the past three months.
The mayor’s decision, warned Meir Margalit, a Jerusalem city councillor, was comparable to the “price tag” policy of the settlers in the West Bank, who have attacked Palestinian villages in retaliation against official attempts to dismantle a few of the settlement outposts dotting Palestinian territory.
“But the difference here is that the price tag is being levied not by the settlers themselves but by the municipality and the government on their behalf,” he said.
Yesterday the municipality was due to issue a seven-day evacuation notice to the inhabitants of Beit Yehonatan, but the operation was cancelled at the last minute when police refused to cooperate.
Frictions have been growing in Silwan for several years over the activities of another settler organization, Elad, which, with official backing, has been building an archaeological park known as the City of David in the midst of the Palestinian neighborhood. As Palestinians have been pushed out, at least 80 Jewish families have moved into homes nearby.
As Elad entrenches itself in Silwan, Beit Yehonatan has proved more difficult to secure. “Usually the settlers present a facade of legality to what they do,” Halper said. “The problem here is that they built in an overtly illegal manner, without a permit and way over the building height restrictions.”
Barkat’s resistance to evicting Beit Yehonatan’s inhabitants was highlighted last month when he tried to stave off legal pressure by proposing a new planning policy to legalize unlicensed buildings in Silwan. The mayor proposed that the rules limiting homes to two stories be revised to four.
The reform would have applied to Beit Yehonatan first, sealing its top three stories but allowing the Jewish families to inhabit the rest of the building.
Although Barkat promised that illegal Palestinian buildings would also be saved, Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights groups, dismissed the mayor’s claim.
The overwhelming majority of Palestinian homes would fail to qualify because land registry documents are missing for the area and a range of requirements on car parking, access roads and sewerage connections are “impossible” to meet, Orly Noy, a spokeswoman, wrote in the Haaretz newspaper last month.
She added that Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem lacked 70 km of sewage pipes and that not a single new road had been paved in their neighborhoods since Israel’s occupation in 1967.
A planning map of East Jerusalem drawn up recently by the Jerusalem municipality came to light last month, as Barkat was promising to legalize buildings, showing that more than 300 homes — most of them in Silwan — were facing imminent demolition.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Radical reading at the Israeli-Arab book club: The Guardian
A groundbreaking new literary event offers new paths to understanding in what often seems an intractable conflict
The Middle East generates huge amounts of news coverage, but as the New Yorker pointed out last month, only recently has literature documenting people’s daily lives in the region started winning western readers. In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, while some writers (Amos Oz and David Grossman spring to mind) are closely associated with it, many more authors don’t make it onto the radar.
A new public book club recently took some small but heroic steps towards addressing this by promoting writing by Israeli and Palestinian writers that focuses on the conflict. Its opening night attracted around 20 people who met above a north London pub, their interest piqued by the chance to encounter different perspectives within this complex debate. The discussion was led by writer and lecturer Ariel Kahn and Palestinian novelist Samir El-youssef, who set up the book club in collaboration with the Jewish Community Centre in London.
The club is intended to help people “listen deeply to other voices” in the Israel-Palestine conflict, as Kahn explained. While media coverage of Israel and Palestine often provides simplified narratives, novels insist on complexity, demanding that we consider individual characters and stories. Crucially, in a debate where so many have a vested interest in not listening to the other side, literature opens up a space where we can encounter multiple perspectives. (El-youssef has experience here, having collaborated on the short story collection Gaza Blues with Israeli author Etgar Keret, which was written to show that dialogue was still possible after the second intifada of 2000.)
The night was a roaring success; the room fizzed with energy as we discussed Arabesques by Anton Shammas. The book sparked controversy when it was first published in 1986 for being the first novel written in Hebrew by an Israeli-Arab, a demographic that accounts for 20 per cent of the Israeli population but remains seriously marginalised. Blending novel and autobiography, the book explores what it means to be both Arab and an Israeli citizen by charting Shammas’s attempts to become recognised as an Israeli author, rather than an outsider in what he saw his own country. Along the way it also weaves a dense tapestry of family stories that richly detail life in a vanished world: the villages of Arab Palestine, now annexed by Israel. The novel casts “a spell against forgetting”, using storytelling to replace absence.
The discussion that followed was a reminder that in this way, fiction is often at its most powerful when it confounds our expectations – whether emotionally, politically or intellectually. For example, one scene from Arabesques that raised eyebrows around the room was the moment when the Israeli army descends on the Arab village of Fassuta in 1948, during the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. It’s a moment where you might expect the utmost solemnity. But instead, Shammas provides a moment of pure comedy: ridiculously, the villagers begin to dance:
“And thus they stood, the [Jewish soldiers] on the one side and the inhabitants of Fassuta on the other, until from somewhere a mijwez was whipped out and to its strains the men who had come back from the fields arranged themselves in a semicircle and their feet responded as if of their own accord to the rhythm of the melody.”
But while this baffled some of us, Kahn argued that “being presented with something painful can make you feel coerced into a particular response”, which can in turn leave you feeling nothing. By contrast, humour opens up a space for you as the reader, giving you options for how to respond. It’s a liberating force, and can awaken compassion that might otherwise have gone untapped.
Literature brings a human dimension to our understanding that nothing else can. As Adhaf Soueif, founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, said to me recently: “To read a story, you have to care about its characters – that act of empathy can be a short-cut into a situation.” The moment you make that daring leap into another person’s shoes, literature stops being a solitary pursuit and becomes something quite different: a radical act.
NYT’s dilemma after son of Jerusalem bureau chief joins Israeli military: The guardian
An ethical riddle, wrapped up in a PR nightmare, inside a seemingly insoluble conflict is playing itself out in public at the New York Times.
The 20-year-old son of the NYT’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bronner, has joined the Israeli Defence Force – and the relationship has been pointed out by the website Electronic Intifada.
The paper’s executive editor, Bill Keller, confirmed that it was true after the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting website suggested that it might pose a conflict of interest.
Under the headline “Too Close to Home”, the NYT’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, then debated the issue in a long and balanced column, praising Bronner’s journalistic integrity, weighing up the NYT’s ethical guidelines and the strength of feeling on all sides of the Middle Eastern conflict. He concludes:
“There are so many considerations swirling around this case: Bronner is a superb reporter. Nobody at The Times wants to give in to what they see as relentlessly unfair criticism of the paper’s Middle East coverage by people hostile to objective reporting. It doesn’t seem fair to hold a father accountable for the decision of an adult son.
“But, stepping back, this is what I see: The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.
“I have enormous respect for Bronner and his work, and he has done nothing wrong. But this is not about punishment; it is simply a difficult reality. I would find a plum assignment for him somewhere else, at least for the duration of his son’s service in the IDF.”
Keller, however, responds, under the heading “Bill Keller Takes Exception to ‘Too Close to Home'”:
“Much as I respect your concern for appearances, we will not be taking your advice to remove Ethan Bronner from the Jerusalem Bureau … It’s not just that we value the expertise and integrity of a journalist who has covered this most difficult of stories extraordinarily well for more than a quarter century. It’s not just that we are reluctant to capitulate to the more savage partisans who make that assignment so difficult – and who make the fairmindedness of a correspondent like Ethan so precious and courageous.
It is, in addition to those things, a sign of respect for readers who care about the region and who follow the news from there with minds at least partially open. You seem to think that you can tell the difference between reality and appearances, but our readers can’t. I disagree.
As you say in your column, our policies require us to pay attention to potential conflicts of interest, or appearances of such conflict, that could impair our credibility in the eyes of readers. Editors at The Times take those policies very seriously, because we love this paper and prize its reputation, and because we write regularly about conflicts of interest in other institutions. But our policies are designed to make us alert, not to preempt our professional judgment.”
The short term result of this debate would seem to be that Ethan Bronner will continue in his post. There is, however, no doubt that some readers will be unhappy about this and will look for evidence to back their case. As Hoyt points out, this was the case even before his son joined the Isreali military:
“Bronner occupies one of journalism’s hottest seats, covering the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. As the top correspondent for America’s most influential newspaper, everything he writes is examined microscopically for signs of bias. Web sites like the Angry Arab News Service have called him a propagandist for Israel. I have received hundreds of messages heatedly contending the opposite: that his coverage is slanted against Israel. Sometimes the ‘evidence’ is a single word in one news article. Sometimes it is his ‘failure’ to show how one side or the other is solely to blame for what is happening.”
Alex Jones – the director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, but also a former NYT reporter – added: “The appearance of a conflict of interest is often as important or more important than a real conflict of interest.”
British academics ask Elton John to read Goldstone: YNet
British Committee for Universities of Palestine send open letter to singer asking that he cancel summer concert in Israel, refer him to Goldstone Report. ‘You’re behaving as if playing in Israel is morally neutral,’ they write
LONDON – ”Political or not political, when you stand up on that stage in Tel Aviv, you line yourself up with a racist state,” wrote a group of British academics in an open letter to Elton John on Monday. The group, the British Committee for Universities of Palestine, seek to convince the singer to cancel his upcoming performance in Israel this June.
“Dear Elton John: Like much of the world, we think you’re a good bloke. You came out when it was difficult; you admitted your addictions were stronger than you were; you’ve poured money into AIDS research. Oh, and then there’s the music – not bad at all.
“But we’re struggling to understand why you’re playing in Israel on June 17. You may say you’re not a political person, but does an army dropping white phosphorus on a school building full of children demand a political response? Does walling a million and a half people up in a ghetto and then pounding that ghetto to rubble require a political response from us, or a human one?” they quipped.
“You’re behaving as if playing in Israel is morally neutral – but how can it be? How can the cruelties Israel practices against the Palestinians – fundamentally because the Palestinians are there, on Palestinian land, and Israel wants them to go – be morally neutral?” claimed the authors of the letter.
The pro-Palestinian British academics continued on to say: “Okay, you turn up in Ramat Gan, and it gets to that ‘Candle in the Wind’ moment, and thousands of lighters flicker – but there won’t be any Palestinians from the Occupied Territories swaying along with the Israelis – the army won’t let them leave their ghettoes.
The organization, which includes Israeli and Jewish members among its ranks, called upon Elton John to read the Goldstone Report as well as reports from human rights groups regarding the decades of what they labeled “crimes committed against the Palestinians.”
Head of the organization, Prof. Haim Bresheeth, said, “The letter we published is on Elton John’s homepage and is already posted on all of his fan sites on the internet, and has drawn responses that we hope will influence him not to come to Israel.”
According to Bresheeth, a similar initiative resulted in the cancellation of guitarist Santana’s Israel show about two weeks ago.
Prof. Bresheeth, who spearheaded the demand to place an academic boycott on Israel more than two years ago, added, “Unfortunately, we did not succeed in convincing Paul McCartney from canceling his concert, but we will continue to take similar action in order to prevent these respectable artists from arriving in an occupying country that breaks international law. The decision ultimate is in the hands of the artists themselves.”
Readers of this site will probably know that the Wiesenthal Center’s proposed “Museum of Tolerance” is to be built over Jerusalem’s Moslem cemetaries, in Mammila. The document attached here is supplying important information on this project, and on the struggle being undertaken to save the cemetary from ‘tolerance’. In Israel, murder, confiscation, occupation, brutalities – are all in the name of “peace”, “coexistence” and “tolerance”…
Wiesenthal Center’s “Museum of Tolerance” and the Jerusalem Muslim Cemetery
Readers of this site will probably know that the Wiesenthal Center’s proposed “Museum of Tolerance” is to be built over Jerusalem’s Moslem cemetaries, in Mammila. The document attached here is supplying important information on this project, and on the struggle being undertaken to save the cemetary from ‘tolerance’. In Israel, murder, confis
The preparations for an Israeli attack on Iran
Below you can read a typical short article about the ongoing preparations in Israel for the attack on Iran. No one in Israel is in any doubt, either that it will happen or that it should happen. After all, no one in Israel (literally) was in doubt about the morality or wisdom, not to mention the legality of the attack on Gaza and the carnage therein. Israelis are not given to doubts. Indeed, the pundits are writing about this with some relish, and seem to really look forward to the new military challenge, now that they have ‘defeated’ the Gaza Ghetto on its 1.5 million helpless people. It is really blood-curdling, this detachment from the terrifying events which are likely to follow shortly.
Over the last few months, this campaign against Iran, started four years ago, has been gaining pace, speeding onwards to the ‘inevitable’ attack. While we know Israel and Israelis are like that, what justification is there for the rest of the international community playing a part in this frightening spiral of violence and irrationality?
Four things Netanyahu needs for an Israeli strike on Iran: Haaretz
To give the green light for a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu requires evidence of a clear and present danger; the assurance of the Israel Defense Forces that it can do the job; domestic support; and also the consent of President Obama, who learned from his predecessors in the Bush family that you should only go to war in the Persian Gulf three years into your presidential term, after congressional elections. Tehran is in the crosshairs, but not before 2011.
Four-star General Kevin Chilton was in Israel last week. He is head of the U.S. Strategic Command, whose sphere of operations includes responsibility for missiles on submarines and in underground silos, as well as bombers and satellites, and computer-network warfare. If American forces were to take part in an offensive campaign against Iran, Chilton would play a significant part in preparing them for battle and in long-distance missile launches, although responsibility for the theater itself would be retained by Gen. David Petraeus, of Central Command.
Chilton, who as a teenager was a surfer in Southern California, deserves to be called Kevin Spacey – he is a veteran of both NASA and the Air Force space command, wearing the wings of an astronaut who peered down at Earth during three space voyages. He well understands the anxiety in Israel. His hosts brought him, as usual, to Yad Vashem. But in his conversation with Israel Air Force commander Ido Nehushtan and Deputy Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, Chilton didn’t offer even a hint of readiness to engage in any operational coordination against their mutual rival. On the contrary: He wondered if it might somehow be possible to persuade Iran to abandon its effort to develop nuclear arms, in order to stave off an aggressive confrontation.
Robert Fisk: Israel feels under siege. Like a victim. An underdog: The Independent
Anyone who is anyone in Israel will come to Herzliya this week for a conference about the state of the Jewish nation. Our correspondent joined them and found a climate of unprecedented insecurity – and paranoia
So the propaganda war is on. Forget Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the 15,000 Lebanese and Palestinian dead. Forget the Sabra and Shatila massacre that same year by Israel’s militia allies as their troops watched. Erase the Qana massacre of 1996 – 106 Lebanese killed by Israeli shellfire, more than half of them children – and delete the 1,500 in the 2006 Lebanon war. And forget, of course, the more than 1,300 Palestinians slaughtered by Israel in Gaza last year (and the 13 Israelis killed by Hamas at that time) after Hamas rockets fell on Sderot. Israel – if you believe the security elite of Israel’s right wing here in Herzliya – is now under an even more dangerous, near-unprecedented attack.
Britain – this came yesterday from Israel’s ambassador in London, no less – is “a battlefield” in which Israel’s enemies wish to “de-legitimise” the 62-year-old Jewish state.
Even Israel’s erstwhile friend, that fine Jewish judge Richard Goldstone, is now, in the words of one of Israel’s staunchest American-Jewish supporters, Al Dershowitz, an “absolute traitor to the Jewish people” and “an evil, evil man”. (Headlines for this, of course, in Israel yesterday.)
Israel under siege. That was the dreary, familiar, hopelessly misunderstood theme at the 10th annual Herzliya conference of diplomats, Israeli civil servants, military gold braid and government yesterday.
Israel the underdog. Israel the victim. Israel whose state-of-the-art, more-moral-than-any-other army was now in danger of seeing its generals arraigned on war crimes charges if they set foot in Europe.
Heaven forbid that Israeli officers should ever be accused of atrocities! The Jerusalem Post yesterday carried a photograph of Kadima leader Tzipi Livni looking at a Krakow poster abusing her as “wanted for war crimes in Gaza”. Forget that she did nothing as Foreign Minister when the Israelis rained phosphorus on Gaza. This whole judicial attack on Israel was an abuse, a deliberate use of international law to de-legitimise the state of Israel – like all the other condemnation of Israel. Would that it was. This current identity crisis is indeed a tragedy for Israel – though not in the way that its right-wing government now suggests.
I remember all too well how, after the disastrous Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a huge London conference sought to find out how Israeli “propaganda” failed. Never mind the slaughter of the Lebanese and the growing Israeli military casualties. How come Israel’s message didn’t get across? How come the anti-Semitic press was allowed to get away with such calumny? It was an identikit forum to this week’s Herzliya confab.
Today we must forget Operation Cast Lead against Gaza and its savage casualties. We must condemn the Goldstone Report for its unspeakable lies – that the army of good may have committed war crimes against the terrorists of evil – and realise that Israel only wanted peace.
In reality, Israel has made a series of terrible diplomatic mistakes. I’m not talking about the humiliation heaped on the Turkish ambassador by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon – he, too, was at Herzliya. I’m not referring to the preposterous complaints by Ron Prossor, the Israeli ambassador to Britain, that in times of crisis there was “a cacophany of voices from Israel”, rather than a single voice.
No, Israel’s gravest mistake in recent years was to refuse to contribute to Goldstone’s report on the 2008-09 slaughter in Gaza. A “foolish boycott”, the daily Haaretz called it. A disaster, according to Israel’s liberal left, who rightly spotted that it placed Israel on the level of Hamas.
I have sat through hours of the Herzliya conference – it ends with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cheerleading for the masses tomorrow night – and the Goldstone Report and the fear of “de-legitimisation” has run like a thread through almost every debate.
I sat next to an Israeli PhD student yesterday who shook his head in despair. “I and my friends are filled with terrible disappointment when we hear these statements from our government. What can we say? What can we do?” It was an enlightening comment. Is this not what millions of British people said when Tony Blair took them to war on a sheaf of lies in 2003?
One of the most distressing moments at Herzliya came when Lorna Fitzsimons, former Labour MP and now head of Bicom, a British-based pro-Israeli think-tank, pointed out that “public opinion does not influence foreign policy in Britain. Foreign policy is an elite issue.” Deal with the elite, and the proles will follow – that was the implication. “Our enemies are going out to international courts where we are not supreme,” she said.
And that, in a sense, said it all. International legitimacy is what Israel demands. And as a state it is legitimate. It was voted into existence by the United Nations. And, as the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has said, its creation may not have been just – but it was legitimate. Yet when an international juridical team invited Israel to participate in its inquiries, Mr Netanyahu smugly refused.
In this sense, the Gaza war proved what is so deeply troubling about the current Israeli body politic. It wants the world to recognise its democracy – however flawed this may be – but it will not join the world when asked to account for its behaviour in Gaza.It claims to be a light among the nations but will not let anyone look too closely at that light, to examine its fuel and to look precisely at what it illuminates.
Goldstone, Goldstone, Goldstone. The eminent lawyer who so bravely sought justice for the murdered and raped victims of the Serbs in the Bosnian war – and whose bravery inspired the world, including Israel, at that time – has been on the lips of every Israeli government apologist at Herzliya.
Tzipi Livni spoke of him. So did Yossi Gal, the Israeli foreign affairs ministry director-general. He spoke of the “attempt to use the Goldstone Report to push Israel to the margins of legitimacy”. So did Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations. He noted that the US administration had been “overwhelmingly responsive” – ie dismissive – of the Goldstone Report. Even the mouse-like US ambassador to Israel, James Cunningham, suggested that the Goldstone Report might be used as an attempt to de-legitimise Israel.
What is this nonsense? After the 1982 massacre of Sabra and Shatila Palestinians, Israel appointed a government commission of inquiry. The Kahan Commission’s report was not perfect – but what other Middle Eastern nation would examine its sins so courageously? It stated that the then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon’s responsibility – he had sent in the Lebanese militias – was “personal”. This report did not expunge Israel’s guilt but it proved that it was a worthy state, one that was prepared to confront this slaughter with honesty rather than abuse.
Alas, no Kahan Commissions for Israel today. No judgment for Gaza. Just a slap on the wrist for a couple of officers who used phosphorus and a criminal charge against a soldier for stealing credit cards.
As it happens, I met Goldstone after he was appointed head of the war crimes tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia in The Hague. A palpably decent, honest man, he said that the world had grown tired of allowing governments to commit war crimes with impunity. He was talking, of course, about Milosevic. He wrote a book on the same lines, warmly praised by Israel. But now he is the earthquake beneath Israel’s legitimacy.
I dropped by the eminently sensible Israeli army reserve colonel Shaul Arieli at his NGO’s office in Tel Aviv yesterday afternoon and discussed the attempts to arrest Israeli military officers for war crimes if they visited Britain and other European countries.
“All this is much more disturbing to us today than it was a few years ago,” he said. “We are afraid of this trend after Operation Cast Lead. It affects the image of Israel all over the world, not just for military officers. If they were charged, it would show that the state of Israel couldn’t protect its soldiers. I am sure that the Goldstone Report affects these things.”
All of which suggests that the real earthquake beneath Israel, the real danger to its image and standing and legitimacy, is a nation called Israel.