Not only does the illegal blockade of Gaza continued with the quiet assent of the west, but hardlya day passes without Israel bombing and killing more civilians in Gaza. Why is the world not reacting to this endless atrocity?
The Israeli military has carried out an air strike on the Gaza Strip, targeting what it said were Palestinian militants preparing to fire rockets into Israel.
Palestinian medical sources said four civilians were injured, one of them critically. Hamas officials said the attack had occurred near a cemetery.
But Israel said a member of a Salafist militant group, Jaljalat, was killed.
On Thursday, two Palestinians were injured in an air strike on smuggling tunnels near the border with Egypt.
The strike reportedly came in response to to rocket fire the previous day by Palestinian militants.
Incidents of rocket fire from Gaza have decreased since Israeli forces launched a large-scale offensive last December and January, but there have been sporadic attacks.
In a statement issued on Friday morning, the Israeli military said its air force had attacked a group of militants “on their way to fire rockets from the northern Gaza Strip”.
“Accurate hits, including the rocket launching pad, were identified,” it added.
But the Hamas movement, which controls Gaza, said civilians who had been on their way to visit the graves of relatives were hit.
According to reports from Gaza, a group called Jaish al-Umma (Army of the Nation), an Islamist militant group affiliated with al-Qaeda, has said it fired several mortars into Israel overnight.
However, the Israeli army has said it was only aware of two mortars fired on Thursday, and that they did not reach Israel.
What a nice game this is – they announce a ‘freeze’ on the same day that they announce this, blow. Is Obama stupid? I doubt it; in which case, he is culpable and isa party to the continued Nakba:
Israel’s government has approved 28 new schools for settlements in the West Bank, a day after it announced a 10-month halt to new residential building.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak said construction would completed before the beginning of the 2010-11 school year.
Settlers have been angered by the decision to limit building, although the Palestinians say it is not enough.
They refuse to restart peace talks without a total freeze and are angry the policy does not include Jerusalem.
Under the Israeli new policy, backed by the security cabinet on Wednesday, permits for new homes in the West Bank will not be approved for 10 months. But municipal buildings and hundreds of houses already under construction will still be allowed to go ahead.
The Palestinian Authority and some members of the international community, including Russia and the UK, want Israel to go further and include East Jerusalem. However, Israel does not consider Jerusalem occupied territory.
Nevertheless, right-wing Israeli leaders have been angered by what they see as capitulation by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party, and vowed to keep building.
The chairman of the settler group, the Yesha Council, Danny Dayan said on Wednesday that Mr Netanyahu had “betrayed the very principles for which he stood for all his life”.
‘Real test’
After approving the 28 educational institutions, Mr Barak said: “Alongside our duty to be open and attentive to the settler public we must not confuse ourselves, the state means what it says.”
“Everybody who asks whether the political echelon intends to fulfil its decision, I say, the answer is positive. This is a real test for the Israeli democracy,” he added.
The row over settlements has dogged US President Barack Obama’s attempts to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians since he took office.
Israel previously pledged to freeze all settlement activity under the 2003 Middle East peace plan known as the Roadmap, which also called on the Palestinian Authority to dismantle militant groups.
However, the administration of former US President George W Bush did not pressure it to curtail building in the settlement blocs which it was widely expected to keep in any eventual deal.
Mr Obama’s administration began by pressing for a total freeze, but softened its language in the face of refusals from Mr Netanyahu and his right-leaning government.
Nearly 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built on occupied territory in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Settlement building in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under international law – although Israel disputes this.
Jewish settlers have sought to prevent building inspectors from enforcing recently announced limits on construction in the occupied West Bank.
Groups of settlers, who have vowed to ignore the curbs, gathered at the entrance to one settlement and said they had forced inspectors to leave.
A government official said there had been some “low level friction”.
The Palestinians say Israel’s 10-month building pause is not enough and are refusing to restart peace talks.
The building restrictions do not apply to East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians want to locate the capital of their future state.
‘Without violence’
Settler groups have reacted angrily to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement of the new policy last week.
Qoute:
We would like them to disappear to where they came from
Malachi Levinger
Kiryat Arba
Obstacles to peace: Borders and settlements
He had been under heavy pressure from the US, with the settlements issue becoming a major sticking point in attempts to resume peace negotiations.
On Monday, the Yesha Council settler group dubbed the new policy, “illegitimate, immoral, anti-Zionist and inhuman”, and said the settlers would “continue building the country with the government or without it”.
On Tuesday it said it had called on all residents of Israeli settlements in the West Bank to try to “prevent, without violence” the entry of the inspectors.
An Israeli government official said that teams from the civil administration in the West Bank, which is tasked with enforcing the restrictions, had inspected 80 settlements in the past two days.
‘Resistance’
He said the teams, which are operating with police escorts, had served at least 60 notices demanding that construction work be halted, and seized five heavy construction vehicles.
The official said residents and local council leaders had “showed some resistance” but “most cases were resolved peacefully”.
In the settlement of Kiryat Arba in the southern West Bank, the head of the regional council, Malachi Levinger, told the Israeli media residents had forced a team of inspectors to “retrace their steps” by using “passive resistance”.
“We would like them to disappear to where they came from,” Mr Levinger said.
Under the Israeli new policy, backed by the security cabinet on Wednesday, permits for new homes in the West Bank will not be approved for 10 months.
In an effort to ease the fears of the settlers, many of whom are political allies of his right-wing Likud party, Netanyahu told an audience in Tel Aviv the moratorium was “a one-time decision and it is temporary”.
“We shall resume building once the moratorium is over,” and the future of the settlements in occupied land “shall be determined only through peace negotiations and not a single day beforehand”, Netanyahu said.
Israeli courts
But municipal buildings and about 3,000 homes already under construction will still be allowed to go ahead.
Last week the Defence Ministry approved the construction of 28 educational establishments.
Separately on Tuesday, scuffles broke out at a disputed house in East Jerusalem, which a Jewish family has been attempting to take over.
Television footage showed a Palestinian hitting one of the settlers on the head with a stick.
The house is one of a group of properties which both Palestinian and Jewish families claim to own. Israeli courts have recently ruled in favour of the Jewish claims in some of the cases.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed his “dismay” at the “continuation of demolitions, evictions and the instalment of Israeli settlers in Palestinian neighbourhoods in occupied East Jerusalem”.
Nearly 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built on occupied territory in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Settlement building in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under international law – although Israel disputes this.
The Palestinians have refused to return to peace negotiations unless Israel completely ends all settlement activity.
The news that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was in Australia and was welcomed by the honorable members of our parliament came as somewhat of a shock. It is one thing to have allowed a man charged with corruption and suspected of war crimes into Australia at all; it is another thing that he was listed as a distinguished guest in Hansard — the official record of parliamentary proceedings — and received a resounding “hear, hear” from our elected representatives.
As a High Contracting Party to the Fourth Geneva Convention, Australia has a duty to bring before its courts those responsible for alleged violations amounting to grave breaches of the convention. The UN-commissioned Goldstone report and other investigations into Israel’s conduct during its attack on Gaza last winter by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross and others, make for chilling reading of what the Palestinians in Gaza are made to endure for Israel’s “security.” Our government has shown a callous disregard for Palestinian human rights and no amount of aid can compensate for its cavalier decisions to back Israel regardless.
Colonel Efraim (Fein) Eitam was only following orders when he told his troops to beat Ayyad Aqel in 1988. They beat him to death.
Eitam, who since then has held several senior posts in the Israeli government, has recently toured the US as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Special Emissary” to the “Caravan for Democracy” program of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). This is a marriage made in heaven. Since Israel was founded, the JNF has organized the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the settlement of Jews on their expropriated land; Eitam sees himself as the messianic soldier-prophet directing future expulsions of Palestinians from Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Hillel of Buffalo, New York, invited Eitam to speak at our campus, the University at Buffalo (UB), on the recommendation of UB Professor Ernest Sternberg, a board member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and a founder of its local campus chapter.
In February 1988, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin discreetly told the Israeli army to break the bones of Palestinians rising up during the first Palestinian intifada. According to the testimony of Israeli soldiers, Colonel Eitam relayed the message to his Givati Brigade, then occupying Gaza. On 7 February, he ordered four of them to break the bones of two brothers from al-Bureij refugee camp. They cuffed and blindfolded them, beat them for a while in their own home, then took them to a secluded olive grove, where they kicked and beat them for 20 minutes. Khalid Aqel survived; his 21-year-old brother Ayyad died. In 1990, an Israeli court martial convicted these soldiers of assault, reduced their ranks, gave suspended sentences to three, and sentenced the fourth to two months (“Soldier jailed for intifada killing will sue Rabin,” Guardian, 2 November 1990).
Eitam’s soldiers testified he had ordered and participated in the Givati beatings. He admitted driving around Gaza with four batons in his jeep, including a shatter-proof, non-regulation knout made of thick rope. The army judges found that Eitam’s “violent behavior became the norm, and was taken as an example by those under his command” (“Soldier Sentenced for Palestinian Beatings,” Associated Press, 31 October 1990; “Givati Commander Denies Telling Men to ‘Break Bones'”, The Jerusalem Post, 23 February 1990; “Givati 4 Are Convicted”, The Jerusalem Post, 2 October 1990). Still, he received no judgment for almost two years. Then, on 13 July 1992, Rabin became prime minister, and three days later, Eitam got off with a reprimand and a recommendation against promotion. The Jerusalem Post quotes sources suggesting that his likely appeal to Israel’s high court of any conviction might have implicated his higher-ups, including Rabin, in the beatings and murders (“Effi Fein Reprimanded to Prevent Him Appealing to Supreme Court”, 19 July 1992).
Nevertheless, when Ehud Barak became Rabin’s general staff chief, he promoted Eitam to brigadier general. In December 2000, after Rabin’s death, Barak’s successor Shaul Mofaz refused to promote Eitam to the general staff. Chafing at the slight, Eitam gave an incendiary anti-Oslo lecture at Bar-Ilan University. He called Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat “a miserable murderer,” attacked the government for sharing control of Jerusalem, and proposed a new Nakba, or dispossession: the Israeli army “can tomorrow … conquer Judea, Samaria [the West Bank], and the Gaza Strip and expel the population there overnight. It’s not a problem to do this. We have a problem of having the will to do this. As a nation we are inhibited” (“Eitam quits IDF”, The Jerusalem Post, 27 December 2000).
Shortly thereafter, Eitam resigned from the army, but his career flourished. Elected to the Knesset in February 2003, he helped form the National Religious Party and the Renewed Religious National Zionist Party. In 2002-04 he held several cabinet-level portfolios in the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, including minister of housing and construction, a post he used to accelerate settlement in the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In a long interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, Eitam called Palestinian citizens of Israel a “ticking bomb” and a “cancer” (“Dear God, this is Effi”, 20 March 2002). Nations other than Israel are a “world of robots without souls.” In classic fascist fashion, he stated that in war the most “sublime things in man appear.” He seems to believe that he is the Messiah, saying his mission is “to save the people of Israel and the State of Israel.” Such a leader, Eitam said, “also leads the Jewish people. He stands in the place where not only Ben-Gurion stood, but where Moses, too, stood. Where King David stood. So how does one do that, yet remain modest? How does one not get lost between coalition agreements and political intrigues, and a process that involves the very order of nature and the order of the heavens and the earth?” (“Continuation of Dear God, this is Effi”, Haaretz, 20 March 2002).
But this modest Messiah isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Unchastened by the killing of Aqel, Eitam has continued his racist and violent incitement. At a 2002 address in a Tel Aviv synagogue, Eitam called for the murder of then Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat, along with the rest of his colleagues: “If I [could] give the order now, he would be dead in 15 minutes, together with his whole gang.” Of former Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade leader Marwan Barghouti, then being investigated by Israel in preparation for trial, Eitam suggested Israel should just “Take him out to an orchard and shoot him in the head” (“NRP leader Eitam: Arafat, Barghouti should be killed”, The Jerusalem Post, 5 July 2002).
In typical colonial fashion he has called Palestinians “creatures who came out of the depths of darkness” who were “collectively guilty” and who could be indiscriminately killed not only if they had “blood on their hands” but because of “the evil in their heads.” “We will have to kill them all,” he said (“A Reporter at Large: Among the Settlers”, The New Yorker, 31 May 2004).
Eitam has repeatedly called for the wholesale expulsion of Palestinians, seeing a 2002 Israeli assault on the West Bank as an opportunity to force them into Jordan, leaving “our Jewish conscience … clean” (“Israeli nationalist hopes to persuade the country to expel Palestinians, Associated Press, 7 April 2002). In 2006, he stated: “We will have to expel the great majority of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]” (“Leftist MKs blast Eitam’s statements on Arabs”, Haaretz, 11 September 2006).
Addressing Arab Knesset members in 2008, he said, “the day will come when we will banish you from this house … and from the national home. … You … should be expelled to Gaza, where your people, who are fighting us, dwell; that is where you belong” (“Security around MK Eitam boosted after anti-Arab speech”, Ynet, 15 April 2008). During Israel’s attacks on Gaza last winter, Eitam advocated mass transfer of Gaza civilians and turning the Strip into a “free hunting zone” (“Audio Exclusive: One Jerusalem Interview with Israeli General Effie Eitam (Res)”, One Jerusalem, 7 January 2009).
The Israeli press has documented other staggering statements by Eitam: on the Israeli army’s “very moral” but also fatal use of Jenin teenager Nidal Abu Muhsein as a human shield; his demand that Israel “declare war” on Palestinian citizens of Israel living in the Negev; and his calls for outlawing commemoration of the Nakba; executing Israeli politicians who favor returning occupied territories to Palestinians; and “decapitating” Hamas leaders.
Eitam’s visit protested
When University at Buffalo community members asked Hillel to cancel Eitam’s meeting because of his previous violence and hate speech and the damage his visit would do to local interfaith efforts, it refused. Hillel and other Eitam supporters responded that the scrupulously-documented charges made against him were a “medieval blood libel”; that Eitam never said or did these things; that he was misquoted (he seems to be misquoted a lot) or quoted out of context; that the leading Israeli newspapers reporting his words and deeds were part of a vast left-wing conspiracy; and that even if Eitam did say and do these things, he represents an important sector of Israeli opinion that should be heard.
On 2 November, Hillel held a noon meeting with Eitam for University at Buffalo students. Before the talk, one Eitam supporter talked with another about killing a protestor, while third called out to a student wearing a headscarf, “Why don’t you go blow yourself up?” Eitam’s speech consisted of a tirade about Iran, Hamas and Hizballah, and how efforts to make peace with them all failed, and “withdrawal” from Gaza was also a failure. Eitam compared Israel’s actions to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, explaining that [US President] Truman had to “incinerate 200,000 people in a second” to protect American troops. When challenged repeatedly by one of us why he has made racist statements such as calling Palestinian citizens of Israel a “cancer,” Eitam simply denied ever having said them and insisted his words had been taken “far out of context” (“Hillel Student to Arab Student: “Why don’t you go blow yourself up?”, The Buffalo Activist, 2 November 2009).
Eitam also spoke at a packed evening lecture. Hillel President Dan Lenard began by denouncing the “fascists” who had presented critical information about Eitam. Consistent with his earlier performance, Eitam’s speech was a mish-mash of Arab-hating, Israel-boosting, and bare-faced lies. He insisted that Iran constitutes an unprecedented existential threat, and indeed, he has been calling for an attack on Iran since at least 2006 (“MK Eitam: Strike Iran now”, Ynet, 18 May 2006). Astonishingly, he said Iran sponsored al-Qaeda’s attacks. And again he compared the course taken by the US with Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the course the US and Israel should take with Iran.
But Eitam couldn’t completely forget his favorite enemies. He claimed that Palestinians fled Palestine in 1947-48 on the broadcast orders of Arab leaders — a claim long discredited. He said that a steady barrage of Hamas-fired Qassam rockets prompted the Gaza massacre, though Israeli sources, including Ehud Olmert’s press spokesman, demonstrate that Hamas ceased all rocket fire between 19 June and 4 November 2008, when Israelis infiltrated Gaza and killed six Hamas activists. Palestinians on the West Bank, he says, are desperate for Israel to maintain the occupation and protect them from Hamas.
It was not a memorable performance. Eitam left the hall with a posse of three armed guards (or so a supporter reports) and a few diehard supporters. Outside the event, 40 students and community members protested Eitam’s presence on campus; they had been alerted by UB Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestine-Israel Committee of the Western New York Peace Center. A few Eitam supporters spat at protesters or yelled “terrorists!” but more passers-by joined in with the protest.
Eitam’s policies may not ultimately be much different from those of, say, former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. But there is an air of desperation in organizing a US tour by such an unmanicured monster. On the other hand, the quickly-organized protest was one of the most spirited in recent UB memory. As the recent actions against former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in New Orleans, the University of Kentucky, the University of Arkansas, the University of Chicago and in San Francisco suggests, Israeli war criminals can no longer count on respectful US campus forums for state-funded propaganda tours. There’s something in the air.
Jim Holstun teaches world literature at SUNY Buffalo and has published several articles for The Electronic Intifada. He can be reached at jamesholstun A T hotmail D O T com. Irene Morrison is Assistant to the Director of the Western New York Peace Center. She can be reached at Irene A T wnypeace D O T org. Both are members of the WNYPC Palestine-Israel Committee.
With the Western allies having been entangled in two destructive and illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Benny Morris (The Guardia, Obama’s Nuclear Spring, November 24th) is eager and willing to start a third one, with even more devastating consequences. The history professor who now believes that the Nakba in 1948 did not go far enough, with too few Palestinians being ejected out of their land, is now of the opinion that Obama must give Israel the go-ahead for an attack on Iran, so as to destroy its nuclear potential. As he considers that it is unlikely that “Israel can live with a nuclear Iran”, the coming war, which he admits will engulf not just the Middle East, but regions far beyond, is, for him and for most Israelis, seemingly unavoidable. Interestingly, there seems to be no problem with a nuclear Israel for Mr. Morris…
Let us hope that for once, the US President will show some resolve and fight back against the destructive and aggressive Zionist lobby, and stop this terrifying prospect of an all-out conflict in the Middle East. The advice given by Morris, Lieberman and Netanyahu is the promise of doom for us all. If he sounds crimin ally insane, it is because he is, as is the culture he comes from. Read the maniacal academic below, remembering that he indeed represents Israel very well, not just himself:
An Israeli attack on Iran’s atomic weapons plants rests on one thing – the US president’s approval
Benny Morris, Tuesday 24 November 2009
The talk in Israel, explicit and open – including in the country’s leading daily, Haaretz, last week – is about a war in the coming spring or summer. The skies will have cleared for air operations, Israel’s missile shields against short- and medium-range rockets will at least be partly operational, and the international community, led by President Obama, will palpably have failed to stymie Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. And the Iranians will be that much closer to a bomb.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and Ehud Barak, the defence minister, will then have to decide if Israel can live with a nuclear Iran and rely on deterrence. But if they judge the risk of a nuclear assault on Israel too great, Israel’s military will have to do what it can to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, despite the likely devastating repercussions – regional and global.
These will probably include massive rocketing of Israel’s cities and military bases by the Iranians and Hezbollah (from Lebanon), and possibly by Hamas (from Gaza). This could trigger land wars in Lebanon and Gaza as well as a protracted long-range war with Iran. It could see terrorism by Iranian agents against Israeli (and Jewish) targets around the world; a steep increase in world oil prices, which will rebound politically against Israel; and Iranian action against American targets in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf. More generally, Islamist terrorism against western targets could only grow.
But it is not only Israel’s leaders who will have to decide. So will Obama, a man who has, in the international arena, shown a proclivity for indecision (except when it comes to Israeli settlements in the West Bank). Will he give the Israelis a green light (and perhaps some additional equipment they have been seeking to facilitate a strike) and a right-of-passage corridor over Iraq for their aircraft? Or will he acquiesce in putting atomic weaponry in the mullahs’ hands?
It is clear – and should be by then to all but the most supine appeasers – that the diplomatic approach is going nowhere, with the Iranians conning and stonewalling and dragging their feet, all the while enriching more uranium. And Tehran is laughing, as it were, all the way to Armageddon. Ahmadinejad and the mullahs know full well that the west will never impose the only sanctions that could work (a complete boycott of Iranian oil and cessation of the export to Iran of all products).
Some in the west blithely hope that the Iranians are aiming for a low-key and shadowy “bomb in the basement”, rather than immediately usable atomic bombs, and that this reduces the necessity of a pre-emptive military strike. My guess is that Iran has not taken this giant gamble in order to achieve a dubious, implicit capability: it will not stop short of actual, usable atomic weapons with which to overawe and gain hegemony over its neighbours, deter the west and, perhaps, destroy Israel.
So Obama is fast approaching his moment of truth. His predecessor, George Bush, repeatedly assured Israel that the US would not allow fundamentalist Iran to attain the bomb. The implication was that America itself would prevent this – at the last resort, by military means.
Today that seems highly unlikely. Obama is enmeshed in two wars in Muslim lands, with Afghanistan looking increasingly unwinnable, and Iraq stumbling either toward de facto partition or growing subordination to Shia Iran. With an American public increasingly tired of war, any war, the US president is unlikely to send in the air force, navy and special forces to smash the Iranian nuclear installations.
There is a sad double irony here. The Iranians and their proxies are likely to attack American targets whether or not the US is involved in a strike against Iran. And while Israel’s conventional military capabilities are limited and could probably delay the Iranian acquisition of nuclear arms only by a few years, American conventional might – if brought resolutely and efficiently to bear – could completely halt Iran’s nuclear project and thoroughly destroy its military carapace in a few weeks of intensive bombing; indeed, the regime itself might collapse like a house of cards, as did Saddam’s under the American onslaught of March 2003.
This is not going to happen. Nevertheless Obama will soon have to decide whether to give Israel a green light, and how brightly it will shine. And soon. For spring is fast approaching.
The Palestinian “unilateralism” making recent news is more like a game of politicking — and a dangerous one at that.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas could be keen to push the proposal for unilateral statehood/Security Council recognition as a way of undermining Salam Fayyad’s own “two year plan,” amid
worries that the US has already designated Fayyad to replace Abbas, just as Abbas himself was “empowered” by
the US to sideline and eventually embrace the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Ben White comments for
The Electronic Intifada.
Despite mounting pressure to withdraw from the light rail project in Jerusalem designed to serve the needs of
Israel’s illegal settlements, the French transportation giant Veolia is set to be highly involved in the project
for the next five years. The company needs to support its new Israeli partner, the Dan Bus Company, which lacks the experience to operate the light rail. Adri Nieuwhof reports for The Electronic Intifada.
South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travelers.
The right of Palestinian students to an education was the main theme of a video conference between students from the occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank on 12 November 2009, sponsored by the al-Quds Bank for Culture and Information Society and Bethlehem University. Bianca Zammit reports for The Electronic Intifada.
By Sarah Lazare and Clare Bayard, Live from Palestine, 23 November 2009
The word “revenge” is scrawled in Hebrew on a Palestinian school in Hebron in the occupied West Bank. The windows are covered with screens and the play yard obstructed with more screens tipped with barbed wire, to obstruct the stones regularly pelted down by Jewish settlers. Sarah Lazare and Clare Bayard write from Hebron, occupied West Bank.
A plan by right-wing legislators in Israel to commemorate the anniversary this month of the death of Meir Kahane, whose banned anti-Arab movement is classified as a terrorist organization, risks further damaging the
prospects for talks between Israel and the Palestinians, US officials have warned. Jonathan Cook reports.
FAITHS UNITE AT ACTORS’ CHURCH TO MARK PALESTINE’S PLIGHT
On December 8, Jews, Christians and Muslims will join forces to highlight the tragedy of modern day Palestine with an evening of poetry, prose, song and theatre at a popular central London church.
The event, titled Bethlehem Now: Alternative lessons and songs of protest for Palestine, will take place at The Actors’ Church, St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, with the support of organisations including the interfaith Amos Trust, the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the charity War on Want.
It is inspired by what one of the Palestinian contributors, Omar Barghouti, describes as “our humanity, our dreams, our hopes and our will to resist and to be free.”
Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal, former Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, has also sent a message of support.
For the past 42 years Israel has occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Gaza in defiance of international law. So new lyrics, many to be premiered on December 8, have been written for familiar carols. Thus “The Holly and the Ivy” becomes “The Olive and the Army”, with the refrain:
O the rampaging of settlers
And the rolling of the tanks;
The grinding of the bulldozers
As olives fall in ranks.
Organiser Deborah Fink, a Jewish human rights campaigner, noted that the event will take place very close to the anniversary of Israel’s military assault on Gaza. Between December 27, 2008 and January 22, 2009 almost 1,400 Palestinians were killed and thousands more maimed.
The evening will feature a scene from the play ‘Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea’, by Justin Butcher and Ahmed Masoud.
Staged in February in the aftermath of the slaughter in Gaza it was described at the time by Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington as “a deeply felt, humane and vividly expressive reaction to the current crisis.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/feb/21/go-gaza-drink-sea-technis)
“Our songs and readings will reflect the seldom heard Palestinian experience since Israel was founded in 1948,” said Fink, a professional soprano who will lead the singing.
Readers will include Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, veteran peace campaigner Bruce Kent, Baroness Jenny Tonge and Lauren Booth (sister of Cherie Blair).
Funds raised will support the work of the Free Gaza Movement (http://www.freegaza.org/), the Bethlehem-based Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre (Wi’am – http://www.alaslah.org/) and Interpal (http://www.interpal.info/our-work)
NOTES FOR EDITORS –
– Leaflet including cartoon graphic (PDF file attached)
– Supporting organisations (below)
– Supporting statements from prominent Christians (below)
– Background information on Palestinian contributors (below)
– Background about St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden (below)
ORGANISATIONS SUPPORTING BETHLEHEM NOW
AMOS TRUST – http://www.amostrust.org/
Promoting human rights and nurturing local responses to situations of injustice.
BRICUP (British Committee for the Universities of Palestine)
UK based academics working to support Palestinian universities, staff and students, and to oppose the continued illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands with its concomitant breaches of international conventions of human rights, its refusal to accept UN resolutions or rulings of the International Court, and its persistent suppression of Palestinian academic freedom.
CAABU (Council for Arab-British Understanding)
http://www.caabu.org/
CAABU works to promote a positive approach to Arab-British relations by providing an unrivalled forum for a diverse range of politicians, journalists, opinion formers and members of the public to co-operate on issues relating the Arab world.
FRIENDS OF SABEEL-UK, http://www.friendsofsabeel.org.uk/Home.shtml
Sabeel works for a just peace for the people of Palestine and Israel. Started by Palestinian Christians, Sabeel promotes non-violence and reconciliation.
INTERNATIONAL JEWISH ANTI-ZIONIST NETWORK,
http://www.ijsn.net/home/
An international network of Jews who are uncompromisingly committed to struggles for human emancipation, of which the liberation of the Palestinian people and land is an indispensable part.
JUST PEACE FOR PALESTINE, http://www.justpeaceforpalestine.org/
A new interfaith initiative committed to justice for Palestine and peace and security for Israel and Palestinians.
WAR ON WANT, http://www.waronwant.org/
War on Want fights poverty in developing countries in partnership <http://www.waronwant.org/overseas-work> with people affected by globalisation. We campaign <http://www.waronwant.org/campaigns> for human rights and against the root causes of global poverty, inequality and injustice.
ZAYTOUN, http://www.zaytoun.org/
A cooperative founded in 2004 to create and develop a UK market for artisan Palestinian produce. A member of the International Fair Trade Association.
There was a time when citizens of Israel took seriously the name of the Israeli Defense Forces. There was a time when this army was seriously considered as the people’s army. It was a long, long time ago.
The State of Israel is holding under occupation rule millions of Palestinians for 42 years, more than two-thirds of its entire history. Decades have passed since the army for the last time fought a real war of army against army.
The great majority of soldiers and officers serving in this army today – conscripts, reservists and career personnel – know only the type of service known as “ongoing security” and “maintenance of order” and “guarding settlements” and “struggling against terrorism” and other terms expressing: forcible control over a rebellious civilian population which does not want to live under Israeli occupation. An army of occupation and oppression, an army of which occupation and oppression are the main mission.
Who wants to serve in this kind of army? Many do not. Many feel disgusted by the very idea. Some state it clearly and openly, and enter into a head-on confrontation with the military authorities, and go to prison, sometimes for long terms. (For example, Or Ben David, girl refuser of the Shministim protest letter, who entered on her second prison term a few days ago.)
The following is a real heartbreaking story: The American President is hurt and dismayed by Israel’s action. One can understand poor Obamah – after all, what can he do? He is ony the Us President!
• Controversial settlement expansion criticised • Obama’s efforts to resume negotiations undermined The White House yesterday expressed exasperation with Israel over a plan to build 900 new houses on the West Bank at a time when Barack Obama is trying to broker a Middle East peace agreement. Although Obama is mainly focused on a tour of south-east Asia, the White House took time out to express disappointment over approval of the new houses at Gilo, a controversial settlement on the outskirts of east Jerusalem. It is politically risky for Israel to snub Obama so publicly. The White House has been pressing Israel for at least a week not to take this course of action. The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said it was “dismayed” by the decision. “At a time when we are working to relaunch negotiations, these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed,” he said. Obama brought together the Israeli leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, in New York in September but failed to secure the restart of negotiations. Abbas said he would not enter negotiations while Israel continued to build settlements on the West Bank. The Jerusalem municipal planning committee approved the Gilo expansion yesterday. The Palestinians denounced the move as a provocation. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said: “We condemn this in the strongest possible terms. It shows that it is meaningless to resume negotiations when this goes on.” Since the failure to secure a resumption of talks in September, Obama, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Middle East special envoy George Mitchell have been working to close the gap between the two sides. The Palestinians want a complete freeze on settlement construction first while Netanyahu has offered a temporary freeze, excluding 2,500 houses he insists are already in the pipeline. The Gilo expansion is in addition to those. Jerusalem and settlements are key sticking points in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Israel captured east Jerusalem in 1967. It insists that east Jerusalem is part of Israel and rejects efforts to restrict building there. Palestinians consider the Jewish neighbourhoods there to be settlements. In a statement, Netanyahu’s office defended the plan. “This concerns a routine procedure of the district planning commission,” it said. “The neighbourhood of Gilo is an integral part of Jerusalem.” Although the Obama administration has been more critical of Israel than the Bush administration and has expressed disapproval of settlement expansion in the West Bank, a reprimand such as yesterday’s is still relatively rare. The US state department expressed its disapproval yesterday and the White House could have chosen to leave it at that but opted instead to join the criticism. Gibbs, reflecting White House unhappiness, said: “Neither party should engage in efforts or take actions that could unilaterally pre-empt, or appear to pre-empt, negotiations. “The US also objects to other Israeli practices in Jerusalem related to housing, including the continuing pattern of evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes. Our position is clear: the status of Jerusalem is a permanent status issue that must be resolved through negotiations between the parties.” Although Gilo is on the Palestinian side of the 1967 Green Line, the border before that year’s war, Israel claims it is not on the West Bank so is not a settlement. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as their capital. On Friday, Gibbs had expressed regret over reports of the new construction, saying Obama did not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion. Britain also criticised the plan yesterday. The Foreign Office said: “The foreign secretary has been very clear that a credible deal involves Jerusalem as a shared capital. Expanding settlements on occupied land in east Jerusalem makes that deal much harder. So this decision on Gilo is wrong and we oppose it.”
Following the excellent Channel 4 TV Dispatches programme on the Zionist Lobby in Britain on Monday, the usual suspects are creeping out of hiding to put in their tuppence for Israel. First is the long-term, consistent apologist, David Cesarani, never late with accusations of anti-semitism, and second only to Melanie Phillips; His diatribe is revealing – after telling us about some great ‘rift’ in the Jewish community about Israel and Gaza, his bottom line is sheer evidence of his politics – support of Israel for better or worse!
So here are the rules of the game, for those of you who are still perplexed:
Rule 1: Anyone caught crticising Israeli policies and actions is an anti-semite. Even the EU says so. You can crticise everyone else, but not Israel, because it isa Jewish State.
Rule 2: Anyone criticising the the fact that they cannot criticise Israel, is a double-anti-semite.
Rule 3: Anyone criticising the Zionist lobby, which only exists in the fevered imagination of lefty journalists of the Guardian and the BBC, is not only an anti-semite, but also a phantasist and a conspiracy theorist.
Rule 4: Anyone criticising the right of Zionists to attack anyone and everyone who is less than supportive of the Zionist empire and occupation, and its war crimes by calling them anti-semites, is an anti-semite. (Obviously)
Rule 5: Any Jew who is stupid enough to criticise Israel, its many Zionist apologists, the Zionist Lobby (which does not exist, and is a figment of the imagination of said journalists) is not only a an anti-semite, by also a Self-hating Jew.
Rule 6: Anyone who has not yet voiced his unconditional support of Israel is an anti-semite in hiding, not courageous enough to stand up for his mistaken beliefs.
Rule 7: Anyone else, not included in the above, is, in all likelihood, an anti-semite, and is expected to prove that this is not the case.
If you remember those rules, and act accordingly, you just cannot go wrong! So, don’t say you have not been warned!
Peter Oborne’s investigation into Britain’s pro-Israel lobby shows one side of a complicated picture. It will do more harm than good David Cesarani In his Dispatches programme on the pro-Israel lobby, and the accompanying online pamphlet authored with James Jones, Peter Oborne sets out to expose a secretive lobby of rich and powerful Jews who use money and strong-arm tactics to skew British foreign policy in favour of Israel, intimidate MPs, and stifle media criticism of Zionism. Sadly, the result is more heat than light, a controversy that will confuse issues rather than explain anything. It may have worse consequences. Oborne rightly rejects the argument that criticism of Israel is a form of antisemitism and reiterates the received wisdom that the accusation of antisemitism is used to muzzle Israel’s critics. Yet within minutes of the programme finishing, the comments page of the C4 website carried crude anti-Jewish invective. Oborne showed beyond doubt that there are well-resourced pro-Israel advocacy groups operating in the UK. Like other campaigning organisations they mobilise financial support for political allies and cultivate friends in parliament. Both the Conservative Friends of Israel and the Labour Friends of Israel wine and dine MPs at party conferences and fly them in batches to Israel for PR tours. But this is standard operating procedure for lobbying. Indeed, Oborne repeatedly states that: “The pro-Israel lobby does nothing wrong, or illegal.” So what is Oborne’s beef about the pro-Israel activists? First, he complains that they operate semi-covertly. Although he disavows any imputation of a conspiracy, that is what his charge amounts to. The pro-Israel lobby “needs to be far more open about how it is funded and what it does”. But the same can be said about Michael Ashcroft, Rupert Murdoch, the arms industry, the Saudi Arabians, and the list can go on. More to the point, the evidence he amasses comes mostly from publicly disclosed sources, such as the register of MPs’ interests. Political donations have to be made public, too, and these lists provide much of his ammunition. Like many who claim to expose the secretive behaviour of lobbyists, it turns out that much of what they do is already open to scrutiny. With manipulative skill Oborne builds up the frisson of exposing a conspiracy while using publicly available information as evidence and, the ultimate chutzpah, at the same time as declaring that the lobby is doing nothing wrong. A second strand to his thesis is that pro-Israel campaigners target the media and crush any criticism of Israel. But anyone who remembers the coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza or the battering of Lebanon in 2006 may wonder what more the media could have done to show the appalling effects of Israeli military tactics. Oborne charges that British policy in the Middle East is being influenced by foreigners with interests inimical to those of Britain and the peace process in general. Specifically, he focuses on Poju Zabludowicz, a Finnish-Jewish ex arms dealer and tycoon who bankrolls the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom). Oborne asks two experts, Professor David Newman and Rabbi David Goldberg, if they have ever heard of Zabludowicz and when they draw a blank he paints the billionaire Finn as some kind of Trilby figure – a man of mystery and power. Perhaps he asked the wrong people. Zabludowicz is regularly in the Sunday Times Rich List, is often mentioned in the Jewish Chronicle, and was even listed as the second most powerful man in the British Jewish community in the JC’s annual round up of the great and the good. Newman and Goldberg need to get better informed. More pertinently for an investigative journalist, so does Oborne. However, the real problem with Zabludowicz lies with his investments in Israel. As well as financing an Israel advocacy outfit and donating generously to the Tories, he owns a share in a shopping mall in Ma’ale Adumim, a town built on occupied territory in the West Bank. This, Oborne intones, means that a man with a stake in obstructing the peace process has an undue influence on British politics. But how do Poju’s real-estate deals compare with UK investments in the Middle East oil industry or arms sales to the Gulf states? What impact do they have on the determination of UK foreign policy? As so often in programmes of this type, there is no context and no perspective. Finally, Oborne and Jones dispute whether British and Israeli foreign policy interests should go in step. They suggest that the amity is false and based on the money power of the hidden lobby or the result of kowtowing to America, which is pretty much the same thing in their world. Oborne never pauses to explore whether Israeli friendship might be a strategic asset at a time when the UK and Israel face the same threats in the Middle East. Throughout this masquerade Oborne presents just one side of a complicated picture. This is nowhere more so than in the depiction of the pro-Israel lobby as a controlling force in British Jewish life. In fact, the Jews in this country are bitterly divided over Israel. Nor do they agree about Britain’s foreign policy. Every point of view is vented, none is suppressed. Why then are British Jews, who tend to be dovish regarding Israel, so alarmed about attacks on Israel and supposed revelations about Jewish lobbies? Just look at the comments that followed transmission of Oborne’s documentary and you can see why. At 21.34 Stuart Downie posted his congratulations to the brave programme makers who showed that “the UK parliament has, like the USA senate and congress, become Israel’s occupied territory”. It showed that British MPs “buckle under pressure from people whose first loyalty is not to the UK but to the State of Israel”. So in a few lines this posting accused Jews of dual-loyalty and echoed the name ZOG – Zionist Occupied Government – that the far right in the US uses to designate Washington. A few comments further on and Detta asked, “why does Israel have such power? Why do most of the world seem afraid of upsetting them?” Nazir, posting at 12.11, chimed in that it is “time to reclaim British policy from those working for a foreign country”. We have thus left the reality in which Israel is internationally isolated and regularly pounded by the UN, and in which sincere men and women support Israel because they think it is an embattled democracy that shares many of the values held dear in Britain, as well as facing many of the same foes. Guided by Oborne and Jones we are drifting into the world of fantasy and phobia. Despite their proclaimed efforts to avoid such an outcome their shallow and irresponsible polemic will do more damage than good. It will only reinforce the very fears that cause British Jews to rally behind Israel, right or wrong.
If David Cesarani, or anyone else, wishes to read despicable anti-semitic and racist views, they only need to read ANY feedback page on ANY Israeli news media blog. Of course, those mad Nazis are writing against Palestinians, so that must be OK…
One hope that Cesarani is proficient in Hebrew (Idoubt it) as otherwise the full venom of those blogs is not available to him…
No matter how they're packaged, "peace" initiatives will do little until Israel's oppression of Palestinians ends. (Rami Swidan/MaanImages)
As a child in early-1940s Palestine, I grew up in a small village of 1,500 individuals with its roots in biblical times. I would like to tell you an anecdote from my childhood that I recalled as I was reading the news the other day.
Life was simple, tranquil and often hard but despite the lack of modern amenities or even what was then available in the city, it was happy. There was no electricity or running water. We used kerosene lamps that gave poor lighting and kerosene stoves for cooking. The best stoves for indoor cooking were of the Swedish-made Primus or Radius brands. Weather-permitting, we cooked outdoors, often using a pottery pot, placed on three stones with a wood-fire underneath.
Food was tastier, simpler and healthier then, although we had no refrigerators. People dried fruits for the long, harsh winter, first by oiling them (which preserved tenderness) and then exposing them to the hot summer sun. Vegetables were sprayed with sea salt before drying. All our winter tomatoes were sun-dried, although nowadays that is a delicacy.
Bread-making was a well-honed process as well. You started with the grain, usually wheat, which was stone ground. I remember the mill was made of two round, heavy coarse black stones on top of each other with a three-inch diameter hole in the center of the top stone. Women (men never did the milling) turned the heavy top stone around with a wood handle while slowly putting wheat in the middle hole. Flour emerged sparingly from between the two stone wheels. The process was repeated daily as wheat was easier to store as grains than flour. Rarely, people carried their wheat to big mills in the city to grind all at once.
The dough made from this flour was left to ferment before being baked over hot round stones inside a thick clay dome called a taboun — which many still use today. The taboun had to be heated by covering it with slow-burning straw and dry manure without flames; it took many hours before it was ready to use. The stones on the ground absorbed the right amount of heat for the baking process to be perfect — producing delicious bread.
Women had to carry water many times a day from the village spring. I often wondered how young women balanced the large pottery jars perfectly on their heads without using their hands as they carried water up from the spring. During village celebrations, the women often danced with jars on their heads to demonstrate their skill, balance and prowess.
Jars, often larger, were used for storing olive oil to supply families with their needs until the next season. People used the same jars year after year, and the porous pottery became saturated with oil. People believed that the jars never needed to be washed because the oil in them never spoiled. Now we know that oil should not be exposed to either heat or light to maintain its color and taste. This wisdom was already built in to the thick-walled pottery storage jars.
Jars were also used to store homemade jams made of grapes, apricots and quince. From grapes they also made a heavy sweet molasses which was a great source of energy as well as a stable source of healthy diet in winter. All such winter supplies were naturally sterilized by prolonged cooking; they therefore kept well with no need for refrigeration.
Villagers were mostly illiterate, but that did not mean they lacked wisdom (though there was a boys school established in 1888, and girls had formal education when UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, established a school in the early 1950s). Despite the distance of formal governmental authorities or police (which ventured out of the city only when there was a serious problem), people followed strict rules and traditions of conduct toward each other.
The hard life that people led, and the necessity of putting all one’s efforts into ensuring you had the means to survive, meant people had little time for nonsense. So, now, after this pleasant digression, let me come back to the anecdote.
I remember that whenever my mother was upset, she would express her anger by uttering the Arabic expression “zeit ou laban, laban ou zeit.” It meant nothing to me until I grew older and my mother explained this common expression of disagreement. My mother said that a man once asked his wife to prepare lunch. When the wife asked what he wanted, the husband answered “laban ou zeit,” which means yoghurt with olive oil — something people ate then and now with fresh bread as a simple and delicious meal. You mean “zeit ou laban” — olive oil with yoghurt? — the wife replied, reversing the order. No, the husband insisted, “laban ou zeit” not “zeit ou laban.” The story goes that the disagreement between the two escalated into a furious quarrel with dire consequences. Neither the wife nor the husband wanted to admit that it made no difference no matter how one would arrange the two simple ingredients.
For the villagers, this story came to stand for any disagreement where the positions being put forward were essentially indistinguishable. So I found myself muttering this ancient expression last week as I read about a new “peace” plan offered by former Israeli deputy prime minister and former army chief Shaul Mofaz.
Despite the hype, it turned out to be nothing more than recycling of familiar worn-out schemes, repeatedly put forward by Israel and then abandoned: a Palestinian state with “temporary borders” on 50 to 60 percent of the West Bank with large Jewish-only settlement blocs annexed to Israel.
Of course Mofaz’s scheme was presented as a great departure — especially since he suggested that he would talk to Hamas in the course of implementing it. But just like all the previous schemes, Jerusalem and the rights of Palestinian refugees would be off the table. With the Palestinians offered no more than about 15 percent of historic Palestine broken up into isolated enclaves, it was simply a case of Mofaz offering “laban ou zeit,” when all the other Israeli schemes offered “zeit ou laban.”
Similarly, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to host an international summit in Paris to “break the deadlock” in the Middle East peace process sounds indeed like suggesting that putting the “zeit and laban” in a different container would change it into caviar. It is hard to understand how simple facts escape the notice of leaders of the caliber of the French president. The problem is not how, where, or who would attend, and at what level. Rather, it what the conference would be able to discuss with zero options at hand.
The same can be said for all the other “peace process” schemes from Madrid to Oslo to the Clinton parameters, the “Geneva initiative,” the Road Map, Annapolis, and finally the failed mission of US envoy George Mitchell. They can all be summed up in that village wisdom which despite decades of Israeli oppression still survives, and provides much needed clarity, today: “Zeit ou laban, laban ou zeit.”
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and is republished with the author’s permission.
US President Barack Obama has said Israel’s approval of 900 extra housing units at a settlement in East Jerusalem could lead to a “dangerous” situation.
Mr Obama told Fox News that additional settlement construction made it harder for Israel to make peace in the region and “embitters the Palestinians”.
The settlement of Gilo has been built on land Israel captured in 1967.
The Palestinians have refused to attend peace talks until Israel stops building settlements on occupied territory.
The Israeli government disputes that East Jerusalem is occupied territory, and therefore refuses to include annexed areas as part of any accommodation of Mr Obama’s past calls for “restraint” in settlement construction.
Nearly 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built on occupied territory.
The settlements are illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
In the interview with Fox News, Mr Obama stressed that Israel’s security was “a vital national interest to the United States”, but warned that its policies were complicating his administration’s efforts to revive the peace process.
“I think that additional settlement building does not contribute to Israel’s security, I think it makes it harder for them to make peace with their neighbours,” he said.
“I think it embitters the Palestinians in a way that could end up being very dangerous,” he added.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reportedly rejected a request from Mr Obama to freeze the work at Gilo.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said the settlement expansion, approved by the Jerusalem Planning Committee, showed Israel was not interested in restraint.
“Obviously this is completely unacceptable.
“There is no such thing as restraint when it comes to settlement activity. Either this stops completely or clearly it doesn’t stop.”
The European Union presidency, currently held by Sweden, added its criticism, saying settlement expansion would hinder the conflict’s resolution.
“If there is to be genuine peace, a way must be found to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states,” it said.
Israel demolished a Palestinian property in occupied East Jerusalem a day after the planning decision was publicised.
Palestinian reports said there were two homes and two commercial premises in the building.
Israeli officials commonly say that buildings they issue demolition orders for have been built without permission.
Palestinians say building permits are virtually impossible to obtain as they face discrimination by the Israeli authorities.
The Israel Defense Forces’ chief rabbi told students in a pre-army yeshiva program last week that soldiers who “show mercy” toward the enemy in wartime will be “damned.”
Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki also told the yeshiva students that religious individuals made better combat troops.
Speaking Thursday at the Hesder yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Karnei Shomron , Rontzki referred to Maimonides’ discourse on the laws of war. That text quotes a passage from the Book of Jeremiah stating: “Cursed be he that doeth the work of the Lord with a slack hand, and cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.” In Rontzki’s words, “In times of war, whoever doesn’t fight with all his heart and soul is damned – if he keeps his sword from bloodshed, if he shows mercy toward his enemy when no mercy should be shown.”
Rontzki’s remarks came during a ceremony to celebrate a new Torah scroll at the yeshiva. The service was held in commemoration of Yosef Fink, one of two yeshiva students kidnapped by Hezbollah in 1986.
Their bodies were returned 10 years later in a prisoner exchange.
Rontzki also referred specifically to the Israel Defense Forces’ conduct during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. “Apropos all that we’ve heard in the media of late, thank God that the people of Israel has united recently around the simple understanding of how it must fight. One of the major innovations of that offensive was the conduct of war – not as some kind of mission or detention.”
“We all remember the beginning of the war, with a major attack of 80 planes bombing various places, and then artillery, mortar and tank fire and so forth, as in war,” he said. “Everyone fought with all their heart and soul, and that includes bravery of course, but also fighting with all the resources one has – to fight as if to truly determine the mission.”
Rontzki also referred to the qualities of the ideal combat soldier.
“In Israel’s wars, warriors are God-fearing people, righteous people, people who don’t have sins on their hands,” he said. “One needs to fight with an understanding of what one is fighting for.”
Right-wing groups in Israel want to create a climate of fear among left-wing scholars at Israeli universities by emulating the “witch-hunt” tactics of the US academic monitoring group Campus Watch, Israeli professors warn.
The watchdog groups IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor are believed to be stepping up their campaigns after the recent publication in a US newspaper of an Israeli professor’s call to boycott Israel.
Both groups have been alerting the universities’ external donors, mostly US Jews, to what they describe as “subversive” professors as a way to bring pressure to bear on university administrations to sanction faculty staff who are critical of Israeli policies.
“I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign,” said David Newman, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s southern city of Beersheva. “What they are doing is very dangerous.”
Last month, in what appeared to be a new tactic, IsraCampus placed a full-page advertisement in an official diary issued to students at Haifa University, urging them to visit its website to see a “rogues’ gallery” of 100 Israeli scholars the group deems an “academic fifth column.”
“The goal is to transform our students into spies in the classroom to gather information and intimidate us,” a senior Israeli lecturer said. “It’s a model of ‘policing’ faculty staff that has been very successful in stifling academic freedom in the US.”
Both Israel Academia Monitor, established in 2004, and the later IsraCampus, model themselves on Campus Watch, a US organization founded by Daniel Pipes, an academic closely identified with the US neoconservative movement.
Campus Watch has been widely accused of intimidating US scholars who have expressed views critical of US and Israeli policies in the Middle East. The organization’s goal, according to critics, is to pressure US universities to avoid hiring left-wing lecturers or awarding them tenure.
The advertisement placed by IsraCampus, and seen by Haifa University students as they returned from their summer break, warned that a number of their professors “openly support terrorist attacks against Jews, initiate an international boycott of Israel, exploit their status in the classroom for anti-Israeli incitement and anti-Zionist brainwashing, collaborate with known anti-Semites … who publicly call for Israel’s destruction.”
Publication of the advert was supported by the head of Haifa’s student union, Felix Koritney: “Students who study here need to know who their lecturers are, and if there are lecturers who oppose the state of Israel it is important to publish their names.”
In a statement, Haifa University officials also defended the advertisement — after receiving a complaint from a student who called the advertisement incitement — justifying it on the grounds of “freedom of speech.”
IsraCampus is associated with Steven Plaut, an economics professor at Haifa University, who was reported to have paid for the advertisement. On the group’s site and on his personal blog, Plaut has lambasted many Israeli left-wing academics.
IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor have targeted professors for criticizing the occupation, joining protests against Israel’s wall in the West Bank, signing petitions or attending conferences critical of Israel, defending the UN report of Judge Richard Goldstone on last winter’s attack on Gaza, or calling for a boycott of Israel.
Both groups have focused their efforts on the staff at Ben Gurion and Haifa universities, two regional campuses that have attracted more outspoken dissidents.
Ilan Pappe, a former history professor at Haifa University and the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, admitted he abandoned his academic career in Israel and relocated to the UK after a campaign of vilification.
But, according to Newman, Ben Gurion University had become the groups’ “public enemy No 1” after publication by Neve Gordon, a colleague of Newman, of an article in the Los Angeles Times calling for a boycott of Israel.
Despite having tenure, observers say, Gordon has come under increasing pressure from the university to resign his position as chair of the university’s politics department over his published views.
Rivka Carmi, president of Ben Gurion University, issued a statement shortly after Gordon’s article was printed, condemning his opinions as “morally repugnant” and warning that he was “welcome to search for a personal and professional home elsewhere.”
Dana Barnett, founder of Israel Academia Monitor, has launched a petition demanding that Gordon be sacked from his position as chair, that his courses be treated as elective rather than compulsory for his students, and that he be denied travel and research funding.
Newman said decisions about hiring and retaining staff at Ben Gurion were still being taken on academic grounds but that the monitoring groups were seeking to change that by calling for donor boycotts of universities seen to be harboring anti-Zionist professors.
Yaakov Dayan, the Israeli consul in Los Angeles, sent a letter to Ben Gurion University after publication of Mr Gordon’s article, warning that private benefactors “were unanimous in threatening to withhold their donations to your institution.”
Although the universities are chiefly backed by government money, external donations account for about five percent of their funding. With universities struggling with large debts, donations can be seen as leverage over the universities.
Newman said the monitoring groups hoped to redirect donations to right-wing academic institutions and think tanks, such as the Shalem Centre in Jerusalem, whose founding president is the US neoconservative scholar Martin Kramer, and Ariel College, located in a West Bank settlement near Nablus.
On his website, Plaut credited IsraCampus with forcing Tel Aviv University last week to investigate claims by one of its professors, Nira Hativa, that some right-wing students were afraid to speak out in class because of fears that they would be penalized by their lecturers.
Under questioning from the Haaretz newspaper, Hativa admitted that her allegations were based only on “intuition and personal impressions.”
Both IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor have been incensed by the support offered to Gordon’s call for a boycott of Israel by a small number of Israeli academics.
One such professor, Anat Matar, who teaches philosophy at Tel Aviv University, said the atmosphere both within the universities and more widely in Israeli society was changing rapidly and becoming increasingly “intolerant” of dissent. “We’ve become a little more fascistic as a society,” she said.
Plaut has been at the centre of a libel battle with Gordon since 2002 after he called him a “Judenrat wannabe” — a reference to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis.
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.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
There are serious difficulties for the IOF, as many school leavers find ways of avoiding conscription. The following item in instructive:
Some 279 Israeli Defense Forces officers will be speaking to high-school teachers in a program to increase army service that Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar calls one of his “central aims.” Sa’ar presented his ideas to the Knesset Education Committee yesterday, and the new program was attacked by some education professionals.
The plan is to have the army officers rally teachers in encouraging their students not to avoid conscription and to join combat units.
Sa’ar also plans to publish the conscription rates in the IDF of individual schools and to hold a national conference on the subject of conscription and the role of schools with the participation of high-school principals and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.
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Sa’ar’s new program drew reaction. “This shows there are no limits,” said Hagit Gur-Ziv, an academic lecturer at the Seminar Hakibbutzim Teachers College in Tel Aviv.
Diana Dolev, of the organization New Profile said that “there is an element of fascism introducing people in uniform into the schools and the teacher’s room.”
At the Knesset Education Committee meeting Sa’ar presented the main points of his policy. “Increasing the numbers of those being drafted by the IDF among the youth is one of my central aims. We are applying this program broadly to encourage conscription into the IDF,” the minister said.
One of the key components of the program, which was prepared in coordination with the Defense Ministry, is to have a group of 279 officers visit with teachers in schools so “school activities would encourage conscription into IDF combat units,” according to a statement.
Some 600 high-school principals have been invited to participate in a Jerusalem conference December 1 on ways to encourage youth to join combat units. Ashkenazi and Sa’ar will be at the meet. Its organizer, Yossi Levy, who heads the ministry’s Society and Youth Administration, said the ministry expects the teachers will contribute to promoting conscription. “It is a goal that was set by the education minister himself, and this obligates the principals more than previous programs,” Levy said.
The publication of conscription rates from individual schools will begin, experimentally, in Haifa and Petah Tikva.
Gur-Ziv said publishing draft rates according to schools “creates a distorted picture … without even mentioning the militaristic assumption behind it – it assumes that a school needs to educate toward the draft and combat service. A proper education system would, at least, raise these issues for discussion.”
Next month the Gaza Freedom March will travel to Gaza on the anniversary of the Israeli assault in solidarity with Palestinians in the territory. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)
The Obama Administration proved twice recently that it intends to continue to consider Israel above the law. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton caused consternation amongst the US’s allies in the Palestinian Authority and across the region by declaring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention to “restrict” settlement activity in the West Bank “unprecedented.” Netanyahu’s restriction restricts very little. Three thousand housing units that are already approved will be built. Netanyahu announced plans for building a new settlement in Jerusalem, Ma’aleh David, while settlers continue their violent assault against Palestinians, intending to expel them from the city. Last week, settlers invaded a Palestinian house, backed by a court order. The US responded with a statement calling Israel’s moves “unhelpful,” but did nothing to stop them.
If Obama’s first message to the Palestinians as elected president went to those living in the occupied West Bank — as president-elect he was quiet during Israel’s winter invasion of Gaza — the second was to the families of the thousands of victims of that three-week attack. Last week the US voted against a UN General Assembly resolution to endorse the findings of the Goldstone report, which calls for Israel and Hamas to investigate allegations of war crimes. Hamas accepted the report. Israel, which killed 1,417 Palestinians, 926 of them civilians, including 437 children, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, did not. The US consented to Israel’s disapproval and initiated a campaign in the UN to discredit the report. The facts in the report remained unchallenged.
The US House of Representatives condemned the report as “one-sided and distorted.” In a letter to the sponsors of the resolution, Judge Goldstone pointed out gross “inaccuracies” in the resolution. It is probable that most of those who voted for the resolution, sponsored by the powerful lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), did not read the 575-page report. What’s called “support for Israel” in Congress has achieved the status of a sacred cow. Dissent comes only at significant political cost, and inevitable smear campaigns by the pro-Israel lobby. Notwithstanding these facts, 36 representatives opposed the resolution, and 22 abstained, signs that the lobby’s control of Congress may be cracking slightly. In contrast, the House was almost unanimous in its support of the Israeli offensive in January.
The US has a long history of vetoes to protect Israel from accountability. During the Nixon presidency, in 1972, the US first used its veto power in the Security Council to protect Israel. This was its second veto overall, preventing the passing of a resolution that would have condemned Israel for the killing of hundreds of civilians in air raids against Syria and Lebanon. The US has since used its veto power more than 40 times to give Israel a free hand to commit atrocities against Palestinians and the region’s peoples.
Bush Administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, defending the US’s refusal to support a cease-fire during the 2006 assaults on Lebanon and Gaza, said that “It is time for a new Middle East, it is time to say to those who do not want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail; they will not.” The “new Middle East” that Rice was referring to is one where Israel can continue to occupy the land of millions, kill thousands and kidnap hundreds, all the while running roughshod over human rights and international law.
Susan Rice, the Obama Administration ambassador to the UN, is scarcely distinguishable from the other top diplomat sharing her last name. She said in an interview with The Washington Post that the Goldstone “mandate was unbalanced, one-sided and unacceptable.” She justifies this statement by claiming that it was “85 percent oriented towards very specific and harsh condemnation and conclusions related to Israel.”
Yet, even if Judge Goldstone had wanted to dedicate an equal number of pages to both sides, there is only so much one can write about the three Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian fighters, or of the holes punched in roofs by the home-made projectiles. The difference in power, Israel’s status under international law as an occupying power, and the catastrophe that befell a besieged population that had nowhere to flee (unprecedented in modern warfare) suggest nearly indisputable grounds for substantiating the allegations of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” Moreover, all that the report asked for were credible investigations and prosecution for those found to merit it. Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon said that Israel arrived at a “silent understanding” with the Obama Administration that a veto will be applied if there are attempts made to put the report before the Security Council following the UN General Assembly vote.
But there is a glimmer of hope that the people of Gaza will see justice. The massacre brought about sweeping change, across the world, in perceptions of Israel. Citizen-led mobilizations in the past few months have showed that where governments have failed, ordinary citizens can, perhaps, make a difference. Even in the US, where public support for Israel has been consistently high, a discourse supporting justice for Palestinians is now voiced in mainstream media. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was met with a frigid reception in a series of lectures around the country, with audience members interrupting constantly, calling for his immediate arrest. Moreover, there are signs that opposition to AIPAC’s dominance within the Jewish American community is gaining strength.
The movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) called for by Palestinian civil society in 2005 has also gained momentum, as the Norwegian government has divested from Elbit Systems as a result of its role in the construction of the apartheid wall. Last month, an Israeli deputy prime minister was forced to cancel a trip to the UK for fear of arrest. He has since announced that he will forgo all trips to European capitals.
And while the world’s most powerful governments cavil over making Israel comply with international law, their citizens do not. Some of them — some of us — are taking up the banner of the international nonviolent struggle, staying loyal to principles of human rights and international law, following the wishes of the Palestinian people. In December, we will march in solidarity with the Palestinians living imprisoned in Gaza. In December, the Gaza Freedom March will attempt to lift the siege of Gaza, as we commemorate the one-year anniversary of Israel’s invasion. From 29-31 December, we will move through Rafah and Khan Younis and Gaza City, the length of the Strip, with a host of luminaries including Alice Walker and Walden Bello. On 31 December, we will march to the threshold of the Erez crossing. The peoples of nearly every continent will be there, in Gaza, demanding that the world take action, that the leaders of the world recognize their peoples’ solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, and recognize the inhumanity of the siege, and end it. Punishing a people in this way is not only illegal. It is wrong. It is time to make it stop.
Ziyaad Lunat is one of the organizers of the Gaza Freedom March (www.gazafreedommarch.org) and an activist for Palestine. He can be contacted at z.lunat A T gmail D O T com. Max Ajl is also one of the organizers of the Gaza Freedom March and blogs on the Israel-Palestine conflict at www.maxajl.com.
The White House responded angrily Tuesday to Israel’s plan to build 900 new housing units beyond the Green Line in Jerusalem, despite specific objections from the U.S., saying that “we are dismayed.”
In a statement, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs voiced the U.S.’s disappointment with “the Jerusalem Planning Committee’s decision to move forward on the approval process for the expansion of Gilo in Jerusalem.”
The Jerusalem municipal planning committee approved the construction plan Tuesday despite an expose in Israel’s Yedioth Aharonot newspaper earlier in the day revealing that the U.S. has specifically objected to the construction outlined in the plan.
“At a time when we are working to relaunch negotiations,” the White House spokesman went on to say, “these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed. Neither party should engage in efforts or take actions that could unilaterally pre-empt, or appear to pre-empt, negotiations.”
“The U.S. also objects to other Israeli practices in Jerusalem related to housing, including the continuing pattern of evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes,” the statement continued.
“Our position is clear: the status of Jerusalem is a permanent status issue that must be resolved through negotiations between the parties,” he added.
State Department Spokesman Ian Kelly also voiced disapproval, saying “we understand the Israeli point of view about Jerusalem but we think all sides right now should refrain from these actions. We’re calling on both parties to refrain from action and from rhetoric that would impede this process. It’s a challenging time and we need to focus on what’s important.”
The plan – named “Gilo’s western slopes” – will account for a significant expansion of the neighborhood. The planned 900 housing unites will be built in the form of 4-5 bedroom apartments, in an effort to lure relatively well-off residents.
The plan was initiated by the Israel Land Administration, and has received an initial green light, but on Tuesday the authorization was finalized.
The additional housing units are only part of the planned expansion of Gilo. In fact, the majority of apartments slated to be built in Jerusalem in the coming years will be located in Gilo. Other building plans in various stages of approval include some 4,000 new housing units in Gilo and adjacent areas.
According to sources in the planning committee, extensive building plans stem from the scrapping of the Safdie plan, which would have seen the city expand westward. The Safdie plan, named after architect Moshe Safdie, included over 20,000 housing units on open areas covering 26,600 dunams (some 6,600 acres) west of the city on natural and planted forests near Ramot. The plan had come under attack by environmental groups, and was later discarded.
According to the sources, this created a need for new land for construction, which can be found in the southern parts of the city and beyond the Green Line.
The chairman of the Gilo community administration, Moshe Ben Shushan, voiced amazement at the American disapproval, saying “this is a trend of interference in Israel’s policies. I have never thought of Gilo as a settlement.”
Senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said Tuesday that there was no point in negotiating while Israel expands Jewish neighborhoods in the part of Jerusalem the Palestinians want for their capital.
He said the Israeli move shows that it is meaningless to resume negotiations.
Over recent days, American officials have shown a tremendous amount of interest in the construction plans, and have even approached left-wing activists for information.
Well, you can imagine how ‘dismayed’ they are in Washington, as they continue to pay for Israel’s plethora of crimes…
An Israeli judge made an historic ruling last week when he decided that an Arab teenager needed “protection” from the justice system and ordered that he not be convicted despite being found guilty of throwing stones at a police car during a protest against Israel’s attack last winter on Gaza.
Prosecutors had demanded that the juvenile, a 17-year-old from Nazareth in northern Israel, be convicted of endangering a vehicle on the road, a charge that carries a punishment of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, as a way to deter other members of Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority from committing similar offenses.
But Judge Yuval Shadmi said discrimination in the Israeli legal system’s treatment of Jewish and Arab minors, particularly in cases of what he called “ideologically motivated” offenses, was “common knowledge.”
In the verdict, he wrote: “I will say that the state is not authorized to caress with one hand the Jewish ‘ideological’ felons, and flog with its other hand the Arab ‘ideological’ felons.”
He referred in particular to the lenient treatment by the police and courts both of Jewish settler youths who have attacked soldiers in the West Bank and who violently resisted the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and of religious extremists who have spent many months battling police to prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath in Jerusalem.
Abir Baker, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal group for Israel’s 1.3 million-strong Arab minority, said the ruling was the first time a judge in a criminal court had acknowledged that the state pursued a policy of systematic discrimination in demanding harsher punishments for Arab citizens.
“We have known this for a long time, but it has been something very hard for us to prove to the court’s satisfaction,” she said. “Now we have a legal precedent that we can use to appeal against convictions in similar cases.”
The youth was arrested during a protest on a road near Nazareth a few days after Israel launched its operation in Gaza last December.
Dozens of demonstrations took place in Israel during the three-week attack, leading to the arrests of 830 protesters in what human rights groups described as often brutal Israeli police action.
The overwhelming majority of those arrested, say the rights groups, were Arab citizens, despite the participation of Israeli Jews. Adalah reported that 250 protesters were subsequently indicted, almost all of them Arabs and half of them minors.
Judge Richard Goldstone, in his United Nations fact-finding report into the Gaza assault published in September, wrote that he had been “struck” by the fact that despite many counter-demonstrations by right-wing Jews that had turned violent the police appeared to have made “no arrests” in those cases.
He also noted that, according to the information he had seen, most Arab protesters had been refused bail and held in detention for lengthy periods, even in cases where they faced relatively minor charges.
Of the court system, Goldstone concluded that “the element of discrimination between … and differential treatment of Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel by the judicial authorities, as reflected in the reports received, is a substantial cause for concern.”
The ruling by the Nazareth juvenile court appeared to confirm those findings.
Shadmi wrote in his verdict that, in recent years, the Israeli authorities had been “working on two fundamentally different enforcement levels in relation to crimes perpetrated by [Israeli] minors.”
He pointed out that in cases of violence by Jewish youths against the security services, legal proceedings were usually frozen or cancelled before the indictment stage. He said he had not heard of a single instance of a Jewish minor being sent to prison for such offenses, even though most Arab minors were convicted and jailed.
The judge admitted that he had nearly been swayed by prosecution demands for a lengthy jail term for the youth, who cannot be named because of his age. But ultimately, he said, he had been persuaded by the defense’s argument that similar cases of “ideological violence” involving Jewish youths — such as settler attacks on soldiers — rarely, if ever, merited jail terms.
“If the state feels that ideological offenses justify relatively forgiving enforcement for minors, then this should be the policy towards all minors regardless of nationality or religion.”
Earlier this year the justice ministry recommended that 40 Jewish settlers convicted of resisting the disengagement from Gaza be pardoned on the grounds that their acts “were prompted by an unusual historical event and that the perpetrators are not felons.” According to Israeli media reports, many of the settlers arrested over the disengagement will never be brought to trial.
Shadmi ordered the Nazareth youth to refrain from committing any offense against the police for two years against a bond of $1,300. In a procedure mainly reserved for juvenile offenses, he sentenced the youth to 200 hours of community service without convicting him.
The verdict was greeted with surprise by the youth’s family. The father told the Israeli media: “Thank God we had a judge like him, who is not motivated by racism. This may lead the state of Israel to understand that it’s time to stop treating the Arab population like enemies.”
The prosecution announced that it would appeal against the decision.
Gideon Fishman, a sociology professor at Haifa University who has made a study of criminal sentencing policies in Israel, said he was not aware of research into discriminatory policies by prosecutors towards juvenile offenders. However, he said he was sure that there was systematic bias.
“The judge is right to raise his voice against a policy that is more lenient towards Jewish offenders. This is a policy being pursued by state prosecutors intentionally and not by accident, and it undermines trust in the system.”
Judge Shadmi referred only to discrimination in sentencing in Israeli criminal courts.
Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories are tried in Israeli military courts under different legal rules and procedures that have been severely criticized by human rights groups.
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.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
Cost of the Occupation to Israeli Society: Alternative Information Centre
On 24 October 2009, Shir Hever, economist with the Alternative Information Center (AIC), discussed “The Cost of the Occupation to Israeli Society.”
He gave this lecture at the two day seminar “United in Struggle against Israeli Colonialism, Occupation, and Racism: Economic Perspectives and Advocacy Strategies,” which took place in Bethlehem on the 24th through the 25th of October.
The seminar is jointly sponsored by The Alternative Information Center (AIC) and the Occupied Palestine and Golan Heights Advocacy Initiative (OPGAI).
Gaza-born Berlanty Azzam, 21, was two months from receiving her bachelor’s degree from Bethlehem University when the past caught up with her.
During a routine stop at a West Bank checkpoint on Oct. 28, an Israeli guard noticed Gaza City as the town of residence on her ID, placed her under arrest for being in the West Bank without permission and, within hours, had her deported back to the Gaza Strip, blindfolded briefly and in handcuffs.
Her case has drawn high-level attention — including inquiries from the U.S. State Department — from those who question whether such a strict enforcement of the rules is reasonable at a time when Israeli Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu says he is trying to ease restrictions on Palestinians and encourage economic development as a way to progress toward peace.
Judge Richard Goldstone told Haaretz Thursday that President Shimon Peres’ remarks criticizing him were “specious and ill-befitting the head of State of Israel.” Peres was quoted Wednesday as calling Goldstone “a small man, devoid of any sense of justice, a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence,” who was “on a one-sided mission to hurt Israel.”
In Thursday’s interview by e-mail with Haaretz, Goldstone said: “I am content to be judged by my actions over the course of my career both in terms of my professional judicial career and my voluntary service.””I would suggest that time has come for Israel to look at the allegations not only of the killing and injuring of so many civilians but also the collective punishment meted out to the people of Gaza by the substantial destruction of the infrastructure, and particularly the food infrastructure of Gaza. The debate should continue, not attempt to be silenced.”
Goldstone also said he had anticipated that the report would engender considerable criticism. “After all, no one likes to be accused of committing serious war crimes. However, I was surprised at the many nasty attacks made against me personally. In my view, it was a classic case of attacking the messenger rather than addressing the message.”
Goldstone also rejected the claim that the fact that he is Jewish was exploited to make it more difficult for Israelis to challenge his conclusions. “I was approached because of my experience with regard to the investigation of serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.”
The Goldstone report is expected to be raised for discussion in the United Nations Security Council in the near future, and Goldstone Thursday discussed the possibility that the United States would veto any resolution that would hurt Israel when it comes to the implementation of the report’s findings. “I do not believe that any nation should protect another nation blindly. I would prefer to see the United States furnish reasons for criticizing the report. The United States has supported our call for credible investigations by Israel and by the Gaza authorities, whether the PA or Hamas,” he said.
Goldstone reiterated statements he has made, as well as those made by a number of Israeli human rights groups, inviting an open, public investigation and categorically rejecting a probe by the Israel Defense Forces of the Gaza campaign. “It does not suffice for the military to investigate itself. That will satisfy very few people and certainly not the victims.”
However Goldstone stressed that “in any public inquiry, it would be open to the Israeli government and the IDF to have sensitive security information protected from public disclosure.”
When asked how far up the chain of command he felt such a criminal investigation should go, and whether decision-makers in government be its subject, he replied: “A criminal investigation should go as high up the chain of command, both military and civilian, as the evidence justifies.”
Goldstone, who is widely considered one of the fathers of transitional justice and has extolled its virtues in achieving peace and reconciliation in post-conflict societies, was asked what role he thought a truth and reconciliation commission – which received international recognition as a tool for probing the South African government’s actions during apartheid – could play in contributing to a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by establishing accountability in a more constructive fashion than criminal proceedings. Goldstone said he believed it would, “on condition that it is set up to look at allegations on all sides and is established by a democratic process.”
Goldstone was asked how he reconciled his finding that kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit should be accorded the privileges of a prisoner of war, and calling for his immediate release as a humanitarian gesture, with the fact that Hamas is a non-state actor not bound by the Third Geneva Convention, which defines the concept of prisoner of war status. Should not Shalit be defined as an illegal abductee, the victim of a war crime, and his release not subject to the goodwill of Hamas?
Goldstone replied: “In no way did we regard Hamas as a state party. We decided that it was in the interests of giving greater protection to people in the position of Gilad Shalit to extend prisoner-of-war status to them. We extended existing norms in order to do that. We based this decision on the military operations being controlled by the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, i.e., that it was an international armed conflict.”
In response to the Israeli allegation that Goldstone’s mandate was one-sided, he replied: “This incorrect allegation continues to be made in the attempt to discredit the report despite the fact that it is demonstrably false. The claim is based on a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution that I specifically and explicitly rejected.”
Goldstone also said that he had “demanded and received a balanced mandate to enable me to investigate allegations of war crimes by all sides. The government of Israel clearly knows this, as it is all a matter of public record that I discussed at the press conference announcing the inquiry and its mandate. I believe that the continued reference to the mission’s mandate is yet another attempt to avoid addressing the substance of the report.”
Goldstone said he believed that for Israel, “this is unfortunate because the report contains the clearest finding that Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups committed serious war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. The acceptance of those findings by the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly has been ignored completely by Israel.
“I suggest that Israel has not acknowledged that because it would confer credibility on the report,” Goldstone also said. Goldstone called the allegation that the report encourages terror and negates Israel’s right to self-defense “quite untrue and a fallacious attempt to win opposition to what is contained in the report.
“The report is based on the assumption that Israel was entitled to act in self-defense. The investigation was concerned with whether the exercise of the right to self-defense was lawful or unlawful. The condemnation in the report of the rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza is the clearest possible statement against terror, and the endorsement of the report by the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly is probably the first time that the United Nations has recognized Israel’s right to act in self-defense against such terror.”
Goldstone also said: “Many Israelis are right to feel that the United Nations and its member bodies such as the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly have devoted inordinate and disproportionate attention to scrutinizing and criticizing Israel. This has come at the price of ignoring violations of human rights in other countries, some of them members of those very same bodies. The time has come for the investigation of all violations of international human rights law and international law whenever they are committed, in any state.
“However, this disproportionate focus on Israel does not exempt Israel from respecting international law,” Goldstone also said.
“I would suggest that time has come for Israel to look at the allegations not only of the killing and injuring of so many civilians but also the collective punishment meted out to the people of Gaza by the substantial destruction of the infrastructure, and particularly the food infrastructure of Gaza. The debate should continue, not attempt to be silenced.
It is precisely now that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas must not give up hope, and not because of the sweet nothings that Shimon Peres uttered at the rally in the square last Saturday night about people giving up hope in Ramallah. As if at the President’s Residence every day is Carnaval, and not only when he’s packing his bags for his trip to Brazil.
Abbas was right when he decided to announce he would soon resign: It is impossible to hold negotiations “without prior conditions” while settlement is going on. For 42 years Israel has been scattering prior conditions and faits accomplis all over, marking them with red tile roofs and making the peace process into nothing more than a never-ending process.
But before Abu Mazen quits, he has just one more job to do: He must declare, unilaterally, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Palestine now.
By Jimmy Carter
November 06, 2009 “New York Times” — Published: November 5, 2009 — Judge Richard Goldstone and the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict have issued a report about Gaza that is strongly critical of both Israel and Hamas for their violations of human rights. On Wednesday, a special meeting of the U.N. General Assembly began a debate on whether to refer the report to the Security Council.
In January 2009 rudimentary rockets had been launched from Gaza toward nearby Jewish communities, and Israel had wreaked havoc with bombs, missiles, and ground invading forces. Judge Goldstone’s claim is that they are both guilty of “crimes against humanity.” Predictably, both the accused parties have denounced the report as biased and inaccurate.
It is good to remember that Judge Goldstone, from South Africa, is one of the world’s most widely respected jurists, with an impeccable record of wisdom, honesty and integrity. He is a devout Jew and has long been known as a fervent defender of Israel’s right to peace and security.
In April 2008 I personally visited Sderot and Ashkelon, Israeli communities near enough to have been hit by rockets fired from within Gaza. While there, I condemned these indiscriminate attacks on civilians as acts of terrorism, and I consider their condemnation by Judge Goldstone to be justified.
A year later, after the Israeli attack on Gaza, I was able to examine the damage done to the small and heavily populated area, surrounded by an impenetrable wall, with its gates tightly controlled. Knowing of the ability of Israeli forces, often using U.S. weapons, to strike targets with pinpoint accuracy, it was difficult to understand or explain the destruction of hospitals, schools, prisons, United Nations facilities, small factories and repair shops, agricultural processing plants and almost 40,000 homes.
The Goldstone committee examined closely the cause of deaths of the 1,387 Palestinians who perished, and the degree of damage to the various areas. The conclusion was that the civilian areas were targeted and the devastation was deliberate. Again, the criticism of Israel in the Goldstone report is justified.
He has called on the United States, Israel and others who dispute the accuracy of the report to conduct an independent investigation of their own. Hamas leaders have announced that their investigation is under way, but Israel has rejected Judge Goldstone’s request.
Putting this dispute aside, it is important to examine present circumstances and the need to prevent further suffering. The rocket fire from Gaza is now being severely restrained, perhaps because of the certainty of Israeli retaliation, but the punishment of the 1.5 million Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza continues. Now and for the past 10 months, Israel has not permitted cement, lumber, panes of glass, or other building materials to pass their entry points into Gaza. Several hundred thousand homeless people suffered through last winter in a few tents, under plastic sheets, or huddled in caves dug into the debris of their former homes. The weather was warmer when I was there several months later, but the description of suffering through the winter cold was heartbreaking.
Another winter is now approaching, and neither the Israelis nor the international community has taken steps to alleviate the Gazans’ plight. United Nations agencies and leaders in the European community have offered to provide an avenue of channeling funds and building materials directly to the people in need, completely bypassing the Hamas political leaders. These officials, both in Gaza and in Damascus, have assured me that they would accept this arrangement.
There would be no chance for the misuse of such assistance for weapons, military fortifications, or other non-humanitarian purposes.
I was informed recently by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia that he has pledged $1 billion, and other Arab leaders have added an additional $300 million for this purpose. There is little doubt that other nations would also be generous.
Without ascribing blame to either of the disputing parties, it is imperative that the United States and the international community take steps to assure that the rebuilding of Gaza be commenced, and without delay. The cries of homeless and freezing people demand relief.
Jimmy Carter was president of the United States from 1977 to 1981 and is a member of the Elders.
I thought they would feel right at home in the alleys of Balata refugee camp, the Casbah and the Hawara checkpoint. But they said there is no comparison: for them the Israeli occupation regime is worse than anything they knew under apartheid. This week, 21 human rights activists from South Africa visited Israel. Among them were members of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress; at least one of them took part in the armed struggle and at least two were jailed. There were two South African Supreme Court judges, a former deputy minister, members of Parliament, attorneys, writers and journalists. Blacks and whites, about half of them Jews who today are in conflict with attitudes of the conservative Jewish community in their country. Some of them have been here before; for others it was their first visit.
For five days they paid an unconventional visit to Israel – without Sderot, the IDF and the Foreign Ministry (but with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and a meeting with Supreme Court President Justice Dorit Beinisch. They spent most of their time in the occupied areas, where hardly any official guests go – places that are also shunned by most Israelis.
On Monday they visited Nablus, the most imprisoned city in the West Bank. From Hawara to the Casbah, from the Casbah to Balata, from Joseph’s Tomb to the monastery of Jacob’s Well. They traveled from Jerusalem to Nablus via Highway 60, observing the imprisoned villages that have no access to the main road, and seeing the “roads for the natives,” which pass under the main road. They saw and said nothing. There were no separate roads under apartheid. They went through the Hawara checkpoint mutely: they never had such barriers.
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Jody Kollapen, who was head of Lawyers for Human Rights in the apartheid regime, watches silently. He sees the “carousel” into which masses of people are jammed on their way to work, visit family or go to the hospital. Israeli peace activist Neta Golan, who lived for several years in the besieged city, explains that only 1 percent of the inhabitants are allowed to leave the city by car, and they are suspected of being collaborators with Israel. Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, a former deputy minister of defense and of health and a current member of Parliament, a revered figure in her country, notices a sick person being taken through on a stretcher and is shocked. “To deprive people of humane medical care? You know, people die because of that,” she says in a muted voice.
The tour guides – Palestinian activists – explain that Nablus is closed off by six checkpoints. Until 2005, one of them was open. “The checkpoints are supposedly for security purposes, but anyone who wants to perpetrate an attack can pay NIS 10 for a taxi and travel by bypass roads, or walk through the hills.
The real purpose is to make life hard for the inhabitants. The civilian population suffers,” says Said Abu Hijla, a lecturer at Al-Najah University in the city.
In the bus I get acquainted with my two neighbors: Andrew Feinstein, a son of Holocaust survivors who is married to a Muslim woman from Bangladesh and served six years as an MP for the ANC; and Nathan Gefen, who has a male Muslim partner and was a member of the right-wing Betar movement in his youth. Gefen is active on the Committee against AIDS in his AIDS-ravaged country.
“Look left and right,” the guide says through a loudspeaker, “on the top of every hill, on Gerizim and Ebal, is an Israeli army outpost that is watching us.” Here are bullet holes in the wall of a school, there is Joseph’s Tomb, guarded by a group of armed Palestinian policemen. Here there was a checkpoint, and this is where a woman passerby was shot to death two years ago. The government building that used to be here was bombed and destroyed by F-16 warplanes. A thousand residents of Nablus were killed in the second intifada, 90 of them in Operation Defensive Shield – more than in Jenin. Two weeks ago, on the day the Gaza Strip truce came into effect, Israel carried out its last two assassinations here for the time being. Last night the soldiers entered again and arrested people.
It has been a long time since tourists visited here. There is something new: the numberless memorial posters that were pasted to the walls to commemorate the fallen have been replaced by marble monuments and metal plaques in every corner of the Casbah.
“Don’t throw paper into the toilet bowl, because we have a water shortage,” the guests are told in the offices of the Casbah Popular Committee, located high in a spectacular old stone building. The former deputy minister takes a seat at the head of the table. Behind her are portraits of Yasser Arafat, Abu Jihad and Marwan Barghouti – the jailed Tanzim leader. Representatives of the Casbah residents describe the ordeals they face. Ninety percent of the children in the ancient neighborhood suffer from anemia and malnutrition, the economic situation is dire, the nightly incursions are continuing, and some of the inhabitants are not allowed to leave the city at all. We go out for a tour on the trail of devastation wrought by the IDF over the years.
Edwin Cameron, a judge on the Supreme Court of Appeal, tells his hosts: “We came here lacking in knowledge and are thirsty to know. We are shocked by what we have seen until now. It is very clear to us that the situation here is intolerable.” A poster pasted on an outside wall has a photograph of a man who spent 34 years in an Israeli prison. Mandela was incarcerated seven years less than that. One of the Jewish members of the delegation is prepared to say, though not for attribution, that the comparison with apartheid is very relevant and that the Israelis are even more efficient in implementing the separation-of-races regime than the South Africans were. If he were to say this publicly, he would be attacked by the members of the Jewish community, he says.
Under a fig tree in the center of the Casbah one of the Palestinian activists explains: “The Israeli soldiers are cowards. That is why they created routes of movement with bulldozers. In doing so they killed three generations of one family, the Shubi family, with the bulldozers.” Here is the stone monument to the family – grandfather, two aunts, mother and two children. The words “We will never forget, we will never forgive” are engraved on the stone.
No less beautiful than the famed Paris cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, the central cemetery of Nablus rests in the shadow of a large grove of pine trees. Among the hundreds of headstones, those of the intifada victims stand out. Here is the fresh grave of a boy who was killed a few weeks ago at the Hawara checkpoint. The South Africans walk quietly between the graves, pausing at the grave of the mother of our guide, Abu Hijla. She was shot 15 times. “We promise you we will not surrender,” her children wrote on the headstone of the woman who was known as “mother of the poor.”
Lunch is in a hotel in the city, and Madlala-Routledge speaks. “It is hard for me to describe what I am feeling. What I see here is worse than what we experienced. But I am encouraged to find that there are courageous people here. We want to support you in your struggle, by every possible means. There are quite a few Jews in our delegation, and we are very proud that they are the ones who brought us here. They are demonstrating their commitment to support you. In our country we were able to unite all the forces behind one struggle, and there were courageous whites, including Jews, who joined the struggle. I hope we will see more Israeli Jews joining your struggle.”
She was deputy defense minister from 1999 to 2004; in 1987 she served time in prison. Later, I asked her in what ways the situation here is worse than apartheid. “The absolute control of people’s lives, the lack of freedom of movement, the army presence everywhere, the total separation and the extensive destruction we saw.”
Madlala-Routledge thinks that the struggle against the occupation is not succeeding here because of U.S. support for Israel – not the case with apartheid, which international sanctions helped destroy. Here, the racist ideology is also reinforced by religion, which was not the case in South Africa. “Talk about the ‘promised land’ and the ‘chosen people’ adds a religious dimension to racism which we did not have.”
Equally harsh are the remarks of the editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times of South Africa, Mondli Makhanya, 38. “When you observe from afar you know that things are bad, but you do not know how bad. Nothing can prepare you for the evil we have seen here. In a certain sense, it is worse, worse, worse than everything we endured. The level of the apartheid, the racism and the brutality are worse than the worst period of apartheid.
“The apartheid regime viewed the blacks as inferior; I do not think the Israelis see the Palestinians as human beings at all. How can a human brain engineer this total separation, the separate roads, the checkpoints? What we went through was terrible, terrible, terrible – and yet there is no comparison. Here it is more terrible. We also knew that it would end one day; here there is no end in sight. The end of the tunnel is blacker than black.
“Under apartheid, whites and blacks met in certain places. The Israelis and the Palestinians do not meet any longer at all. The separation is total. It seems to me that the Israelis would like the Palestinians to disappear. There was never anything like that in our case. The whites did not want the blacks to disappear. I saw the settlers in Silwan [in East Jerusalem] – people who want to expel other people from their place.”
Afterward we walk silently through the alleys of Balata, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank, a place that was designated 60 years ago to be a temporary haven for 5,000 refugees and is now inhabited by 26,000. In the dark alleys, which are about the width of a thin person, an oppressive silence prevailed. Everyone was immersed in his thoughts, and only the voice of the muezzin broke the stillness.
Chomsky on the US’s unwavering support for Israel and “rejectionism” of the two-state solution, effectively on offer for 30 years: That’s not because of the overweening power of the Israel lobby in the US, but because Israel is a strategic and commercial asset which underpins rather than undermines US domination of the Middle East… America’s one-sided role in the Middle East isn’t harming their interests, whatever risks it might bring for anyone else.
Noam Chomsky in London
Noam Chomsky is the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar. A philosopher of language and political campaigner of towering academic reputation, who as good as invented modern linguistics, he is entertained by presidents, addresses the UN general assembly and commands a mass international audience. When he spoke in London last week, thousands of young people battled for tickets to attend his lectures, followed live on the internet across the globe, as the 80-year-old American linguist fielded questions from as far away as besieged Gaza.
But the bulk of the mainstream western media doesn’t seem to have noticed. His books sell in their hundreds of thousands, he is mobbed by students as a celebrity, but he is rarely reported or interviewed in the US outside radical journals and websites. The explanation, of course, isn’t hard to find. Chomsky is America’s most prominent critic of the US imperial role in the world, which he has used his erudition and standing to expose and excoriate since Vietnam.
Like the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, who spoke out against western-backed wars until his death at the age of 97, Chomsky has lent his academic prestige to a relentless campaign against his own country’s barbarities abroad – though in contrast to the aristocratic Russell, Chomsky is the child of working class Jewish refugees from Tsarist pogroms. Not surprisingly, he has been repaid with either denunciation or, far more typically, silence. Whereas a much slighter figure such as the Atlanticist French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy is lionised at home and abroad, Chomsky and his genuine popularity are ignored.
Indeed, his books have been banned from the US prison library in Guantánamo. You’d hardly need a clearer example of his model of how dissenting views are filtered out of the western media, set out in his 1990’s book Manufacturing Consent, than his own case. But as Chomsky is the first to point out, the marginalisation of opponents of western state policy is as nothing compared to the brutalities suffered by those who challenge states backed by the US and its allies in the Middle East.
We meet in a break between a schedule of lectures and talks that would be punishing for a man half his age. At the podium, Chomsky’s style is dry and low-key, as he ranges without pausing for breath from one region and historical conflict to another, always buttressed with a barrage of sources and quotations, often from US government archives and leaders themselves.
But in discussion he is warm and engaged, only hampered by slight deafness. He has only recently started travelling again, he explains, after a three-year hiatus while he was caring for his wife and fellow linguist, Carol, who died from cancer last December. Despite their privilege, his concentrated exposure to the continuing injustices and exorbitant expense of the US health system has clearly left him angry. Public emergency rooms are “uncivilised, there is no health care”, he says, and the same kind of corporate interests that drive US foreign policy are also setting the limits of domestic social reform.
All three schemes now being considered for Barack Obama’s health care reform are “to the right of the public, which is two to one in favour of a public option. But the New York Times says that has no political support, by which they mean from the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.” Now the American Petroleum Institute is determined to “follow the success of the insurance industry in killing off health reform,” Chomsky says, and do the same to hopes of genuine international action at next month’s Copenhagen climate change summit. Only the forms of power have changed since the foundation of the republic, he says, when James Madison insisted that the new state should “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”.
Chomsky supported Obama’s election campaign in swing states, but regards his presidency as representing little more than a “shift back towards the centre” and a striking foreign policy continuity with George Bush’s second administration. “The first Bush administration was way off the spectrum, America’s prestige sank to a historic low and the people who run the country didn’t like that.” But he is surprised so many people abroad, especially in the third world, are disappointed at how little Obama has changed. “His campaign rhetoric, hope and change, was entirely vacuous. There was no principled criticism of the Iraq war: he called it a strategic blunder. And Condoleezza Rice was black – does that mean she was sympathetic to third world problems?”
The veteran activist has described the US invasion of Afghanistan as “one of the most immoral acts in modern history”, which united the jihadist movement around al-Qaida, sharply increased the level of terrorism and was “perfectly irrational – unless the security of the population is not the main priority”. Which, of course, Chomsky believes, it is not. “States are not moral agents,” he says, and believes that now that Obama is escalating the war, it has become even clearer that the occupation is about the credibility of Nato and US global power.
This is a recurrent theme in Chomsky’s thinking about the American empire. He argues that since government officials first formulated plans for a “grand area” strategy for US global domination in the early 1940s, successive administrations have been guided by a “godfather principle, straight out of the mafia: that defiance cannot be tolerated. It’s a major feature of state policy.” “Successful defiance” has to be punished, even where it damages business interests, as in the economic blockade of Cuba – in case “the contagion spreads”.
The gap between the interests of those who control American foreign policy and the public is also borne out, in Chomsky’s view, by the US’s unwavering support for Israel and “rejectionism” of the two-state solution effectively on offer for 30 years. That’s not because of the overweening power of the Israel lobby in the US, but because Israel is a strategic and commercial asset which underpins rather than undermines US domination of the Middle East. “Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the US in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.”
Half a century later, corporations like Lockheed Martin and Exxon Mobil are doing fine, he says: America’s one-sided role in the Middle East isn’t harming their interests, whatever risks it might bring for anyone else.
Chomsky is sometimes criticised on the left for encouraging pessimism or inaction by emphasising the overwhelming weight of US power – or for failing to connect his own activism with labour or social movements on the ground. He is certainly his own man, holds some idiosyncratic views (I was startled, for instance, to hear him say that Vietnam was a strategic victory for the US in southeast Asia, despite its humiliating 1975 withdrawal) and has drawn flak for defending freedom of speech for Holocaust deniers. He describes himself as an anarchist or libertarian socialist, but often sounds more like a radical liberal – which is perhaps why he enrages more middle-of-the-road American liberals who don’t appreciate their views being taken to the logical conclusion.
But for an octogenarian who has been active on the left since the 1930s, Chomsky sounds strikingly upbeat. He’s a keen supporter of the wave of progressive change that has swept South America in the past decade (“one of the liberal criticisms of Bush is that he didn’t pay enough attention to Latin America – it was the best thing that ever happened to Latin America”). He also believes there are now constraints on imperial power which didn’t exist in the past: “They couldn’t get away with the kind of chemical warfare and blanket B52 bombing that Kennedy did,” in the 1960s. He even has some qualified hopes for the internet as a way around the monopoly of the corporate-dominated media.
But what of the charge so often made that he’s an “anti-American” figure who can only see the crimes of his own government while ignoring the crimes of others around the world? “Anti-Americanism is a pure totalitarian concept,” he retorts. “The very notion is idiotic. Of course you don’t deny other crimes, but your primary moral responsibility is for your own actions, which you can do something about. It’s the same charge which was made in the Bible by King Ahab, the epitome of evil, when he demanded of the prophet Elijah: why are you a hater of Israel? He was identifying himself with society and criticism of the state with criticism of society.”
It’s a telling analogy. Chomsky is a studiedly modest man who would balk at any such comparison. But in the Biblical tradition of the conflict between prophets and kings, there’s not the slightest doubt which side he represents.
Published by Jihan Andoni on November 5, 2009 Domestic policies such as health care reform and financial regulation are dominating Congress’ legislative agenda this year.
But on Wednesday, the House of Representatives approved a non-binding measure denouncing a United Nations inquiry that found that Israel committed scores of war crimes in its three-week assault last year in Gaza. More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, many of whom were civilians, according to Amnesty International. Headed by South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the inquiry also accused Hamas of war crimes and said both sides should investigate the allegations or face international prosecution.
In voting for the measure, the House dismissed the Goldstone report as “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.” It also called on the Obama administration to “strongly and unequivocally oppose” discussion of the report’s findings in any international setting.
The resolution passed 344-46.
The members of the House who voted in favor of the resolution have received $51,260 more on average from pro-Israel organizations ($81,020 versus $29,770) since 1989 than those who opposed it, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has found. Those who opposed the measure have collected $15,760 more, on average, from pro-Arab groups in that time than those who supported the bill ($16,360 versus $600).
Here’s the money breakdown, by party:
To see the illustrations please use the link above
Campaign Campaign contributions aren’t the only way these groups are trying to get their voices heard on Capitol Hill.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, pro-Arab organizations have spent $70,000 on lobbying efforts since 1998, while pro-Israel groups have spent $5.8 million within the same period. Excluding trips within the United States, members of Congress travel most frequently to Israel.
These trips are usually paid for by pro-Israel groups, according to Legistorm.org.
Lawmakers made 845 trips to Israel since 2000, to the tune of $6 million.
Compare that to some of the Arab countries. Members made 171 trips to Morocco for a total cost of $714,250 and 145 trips to Egypt with a cost of $593,900. The U.N. General Assembly was expected to take up the Goldstone report today.
Jihan Andoni is the Center for Responsive Politics’ research director and an occasional contributor to Capital Eye.
Following a landmark referendum, students at Sussex University have voted to boycott Israeli goods. The decision will become part of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which calls upon Israel to respect international law and end the occupation of Palestine.
