Uri Brodsky arrested in Warsaw for allegedly obtaining forged German passport involved in Hamas strongman hit, AFP reports; Foreign ministry confirms Israeli citizen arrested in Poland.
An alleged Mossad spy from Israel wanted in connection with the hit-squad slaying of a Hamas agent in Dubai has been arrested in Poland, officials said Saturday.
The man, using the name Uri Brodsky, is suspected of working for Mossad in Germany and helping to issue a fake German passport to a member of the Mossad operation that allegedly killed Hamas agent Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January, a spokesman for the German federal prosecutor’s office told The Associated Press.
Brodsky was arrested in early June upon his arrival in Poland because of a European arrest warrant issued by Germany which is now seeking his extradition, the spokesman said, declining to be named in line with department policy.
The spokesman had no estimate of how long it could take for Brodsky to be extradited from Poland to Germany, saying the matter is now in the hands of the Polish authorities. “If Brodsky agrees, the extradition could take a few days, but that isn’t likely,” the spokesman said.
In Warsaw, Monika Lewandowska, a spokeswoman for Polish prosecutors, confirmed that the suspect, identified only as Uri B., was arrested at the city’s international airport on June 4. She told the AP that the arrest warrant was made in connection with the murder of a Hamas member in Dubai.
“The suspect appeared before a Polish court on June 6, and was ordered to remain in temporary arrest for up to 40 days,” she said. Lewandowska had no information on his possible extradition.
In Israel, the Foreign Ministry said without elaborating that it was aware of the man’s fate. “At the moment, we’re looking into that like any other Israeli who has been arrested, and he’s getting consular treatment,” spokesman Andy David said.
Police in the United Arab Emirates said the elaborate hit squad linked to the Jan. 19 slaying in Dubai of al-Mabhouh – one of the founders of Hamas’ military wing – involved some 25 suspects, most of them carrying fake passports from European nations.
Dubai’s police chief, Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, has said he is nearly 100 percent certain that Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, masterminded the killing.
The brazen assault in a luxury hotel and its alleged perpetrators were widely captured by security cameras. Some footage, released by Dubai’s police, showed alleged members of the hit squad disguised as tourists, wearing baggy shorts, sneakers and baseball caps, and carrying tennis rackets.
At the time, Israel said it didn’t know who was responsible for the killing but welcomed it, claiming al-Mabhouh was a key link in smuggling weapons to Gaza and a possible middleman with Israel’s archenemy, Iran.
The German news weekly Der Spiegel reported that the arrest in Poland already has led to some diplomatic friction. The Israeli Embassy has urged Polish authorities not to extradite Brodsky, the magazine reports in its issue to be published Monday.
Germany’s Foreign Ministry had no comment on the case and referred to an ongoing judicial investigation by the federal prosecutor’s office. The country’s top investigating unit deals with all cases affecting internal or external security, including terrorism or espionage.
After a German passport was used by a person linked to the Dubai slaying, the prosecutor’s office in February started investigating a possible connection to a foreign intelligence agency.
Authorities in the western city of Cologne had issued a passport to a man named Michael Bodenheimer. “A man using that name was among the assassins who killed the Hamas operative,” according to Dubai police.
In February, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle urged a thorough investigation and said German authorities would do everything possible to support their counterparts in the U.A.E.
If Brodsky’s extradition goes through, however, it could put the government in Berlin – a staunch Israeli ally – in a difficult diplomatic position.
Page last updated at 15:02 GMT, Saturday, 12 June 2010 16:02 UK
E-mail this to a friendPrintable version Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in his hotel room in Dubai on 19 January
Polish authorities have reportedly arrested a suspected Israeli agent in connection with the murder of a Hamas operative in Dubai in January.
German prosecutors say the agent was arrested in early June. Media reports named him as Uri Brodsky.
Germany is seeking his extradition over a forged German passport used by one of the killers, the prosecutors say.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing, was found dead in a Dubai hotel on 20 January.
Dubai police have said they are 99% sure Israeli agents were involved, but Israel says there is no proof.
On Saturday, German prosecutors said the agent had been arrested on a warrant issued by Germany, as he arrived in Poland.
“It’s now up to the Poles to decide if they are going to hand him over,” a spokesman for the federal German prosecutor’s office told AP news agency.
There have been no comments so far from the Polish or Israeli authorities.
Forged passports from Britain, the Irish Republic, France, Australia, and Germany were used in the Dubai operation, leading to diplomatic rows between those countries and Israel.
The UK and Australia have expelled Israeli nationals over the forgeries.
Israel gave itself a nice present to celebrate the 43rd anniversary of losing its borders. The raid on the Gaza flotilla in international waters is like the first Lebanon War – as if in a nightmarish experiment, we seem to be examining the question: What happens when a country has no borders?
By Sefi Rachlevsky
Israel gave itself a nice present to celebrate the 43rd anniversary of losing its borders. The raid on the Gaza flotilla in international waters is like the first Lebanon War – as if in a nightmarish experiment, we seem to be examining the question: What happens when a country has no borders?
Israel’s maritime attack did not happen by chance. A border is one of the fundamental factors that defines a country. Decades without one have distorted Israel’s thinking.
It is self-evident that, just as a person cannot build in an area that he does not own, a country cannot build settlements outside of its borders. And yet Israel has settled hundreds of thousands of its citizens in areas that, according to its laws, are not part of the State of Israel.
It is self-evident that any couple can marry “without regard to religion, race or gender.” And yet in Israel a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman cannot legally marry. It’s self-evident that there is no arbitrary discrimination, and yet it’s enough to use the magic words “I’m a religious woman” or “I’m an ultra-Orthodox man” and the obligation to serve in the military evaporates.
It’s self-evident that the education provided to children be based on democracy and equality. And yet in Israel, 52 percent of first-graders defined as Jews study in various religious school systems that teach students things like “You are considered a human being and the other nations of the world are not considered human beings.”
They are taught that a non-Jew is not a human being, and that anyone who kills a non-Jew is not supposed to be killed by human hands; that women are inferior, and it is an obligation that males and females be separated; and that secular people, or anyone with secular family members, cannot enter these schools.
It is self-evident that racist education cannot be funded by the government and is illegal. And yet most of the country’s first-graders receive such “compulsory education” from their government.
The results of this nightmarish experiment are self-evident. In the most recent elections, 35 percent of voters defined as Jews cast their ballots for avowedly racist parties – Yisrael Beitenu, Shas, National Union and their friends.
Critics in the Israeli media wake up only when mistakes are made. That is why – after initially cheering the declaration that “the flotilla will not pass” – they changed their tune following the imbroglio, turning into advocates of the twisted logic “be smart, not right.” But what justice is there in an attack on civilians by soldiers on the open seas?
Like the territories, international waters are not Israel; they are outside its borders. A Turkish ship on the open sea is, in effect, a floating Turkish island. An Israeli attack on such an island is not all that different from sending the Israel Defense Forces to take on demonstrators at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. There, too, unpleasant people who are not friends of Israel can sometimes be found.
Turkey, which is a member of NATO, was not in a state of war with Israel before the attack. Attacking its citizens on territory that is by definition Turkish is another expression of the Israeli lunacy that lacks any kind of boundaries.
An attack beyond the border must be reserved for extreme cases involving a military target that represents an entity fighting against the country and when citizens are in danger. But civilian ships, that are not carrying weapons, but are bringing civilian aid to a population that is denied chocolate, toys and notebooks, are not nuclear reactors in Iraq, Syria or Iran.
A person who grows up without external borders tends to create distorted internal borders. That is the reason for the attack on Arab MK Hanin Zuabi and her colleagues. While there were certain Arab public figures who went too far in their statements, joining a civilian aid flotilla is one of those legitimate acts which are supposed to be self-evident.
And yet, what was self-evident became betrayal. And citizenship, one of the unconditional foundations of existence, has turned into something that can be revoked – in this case on the basis of ethnicity, a tactic used in fascist regimes. The street has returned to the atmosphere that prevailed under “responsible” opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and led to the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – and the next murder is in the air.
The Israeli deed at sea is liable to reach The Hague. The problem is that Israel has genuine enemies who want to destroy it. A country that does not do everything in its power to accumulate legitimacy, along with turning Iran into an entity that is losing legitimacy and can therefore become a target of activities to undermine it, is a country losing its basic survival instinct. Without borders, it turns out, you lose even that.
Young Israelis who have grown up without borders are now dancing and singing “In blood and fire we will expel Turkey” and “Mohammed is dead.” If this keeps up, Israel will not make it to The Hague. The entity gradually replacing the State of Israel is liable not to exist long enough to get there.
AP Delegates walk after posing for a group picture inside the Ottoman-era Giragan Palace, the venue of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia in Istanbul, Turkey. Photo: AP
As this rain-soaked city hosted the third summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), it was clear that Israel, at the receiving end of global condemnation for last week’s attack on an aid ship trying to sail to the Gaza Strip, faced further isolation for its “brazen act” that killed nine peace activists.
While the Gaza attack dominated the conference that concluded on Wednesday, challenges and threats such as terrorism, organised crime, elimination of weapons of mass destruction and curbing of drug trafficking and trans-boundary crimes also figured in the speeches of leaders and Ministers from 20 countries that attended the three-day summit.
As Turkey took over the CICA chairmanship from Kazakhastan, the grouping welcomed into its fold Vietnam and Iraq and granted the observer status to Bangladesh. The CICA also provides a platform for the nations in the high-tension regions of Asia that have become “hotspots” — be it Korea, Afghanistan, Israel or Iran.
There was an unforgiving mood towards Israel at the summit for its act of brazen aggression. The attack on the aid ship “cannot be forgotten” by his country, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said at the end of the summit, which brought together Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
A final declaration of the grouping, however, omitted any reference to Israel, which as a fellow member objected to it. But a separate declaration said: “All member-states, except one, expressed their great concern for and condemnation of the actions undertaken by the Israeli defence forces against an international civilian flotilla transporting humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.” The leaders also stressed the immediate need for lifting the four-year-old blockade.
As pointed out by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the tragedy of Gaza should remind the international community of the need for highlighting the plight of the people due to the lack of food, electricity and freshwater. “Like Afghanistan, Gaza is a test case before us,” he told the conference on the opening day.
Iran’s nuclear programme and the Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal on the proposed exchange of Iran’s low-enriched uranium with nuclear fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor were also discussed. “Given the already volatile situation in the region, there is no other viable and lasting solution, but a diplomatic one. We have intensified our efforts to promote a negotiated solution through diplomacy,” Mr. Davutoglu said.
Almost all the leaders agreed that most challenges to global security were emanating from Asia, and the top issues were the situation in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. They also agreed that they had a stake in a sovereign, democratic and stable Afghanistan.
Acknowledging the tough task ahead for the international community in rooting out terrorism, India pointed out that terrorists adapted themselves to countering the cooperative efforts of the States at tackling terrorism. “Distinctions among the terrorist organisations have become blurred, given the ease with which they blend together, both operationally and ideologically,” said Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma, who attended the conference as the Prime Minister’s special envoy. India has been a CICA member since the grouping came into being in 1992.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi called for an international cooperative approach to tackling terrorism through real-time intelligence sharing and addressing its root causes that were being exploited by terrorists to radicalise the youth.
Though CICA has so far been a low-key platform, the Istanbul summit, which came after the Gaza attack, saw the multi-national forum becoming a global talking point. It also provided Turkey with a greater role and profile in hosting it and forging solidarity among the CICA members in denouncing Israel.
The CICA members are Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Palestine, the Republic of Korea, Russia, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan.
The observers are the United Nations, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the League of Arab States.
Lebanese newspaper reports Ankara may supervise Gaza crossings as part of a deal to repair ties between Israel and Turkey.
The Palestinians would support any move that would lift the Gaza blockade, including Turkey’s possible involvement, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Saturday.
Fayyad’s comments came after the Lebanese Ad-Diyar newspaper quoted an Arab diplomatic source earlier Saturday, saying that Turkey could be given a central role in supervising the border crossings with the Gaza Strip as part of a deal to repair ties between Israel and Turkey.
The relationship between Israel and Turkey has deteriorated dramatically since the IDF raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla on May 31 in which nine people, including eight Turks and one Turkish-American, were killed.
“The Palestinian Authority welcomes any mediation that would lift the siege off Gaza,” Fayyad told reporters, saying that alleviating the Strip’s condition was “a general Palestinian interest, and doesn’t strengthen this or that faction.”
The Palestinian PM also said that according to “international agreements, all of Gaza’s border crossings should be opened, and not just the Rafah crossing,” thus referring to the temporary opening of Gaza’s southernmost border crossing announced by Egypt in the wake of the flotilla raid.
According to the Ad-Diyar report, a new deal could see Turkey supervising all humanitarian aid entering Gaza, as well as committing to the blocking of weapons and money destined for Hamas.
In this position, Turkey would play a meaningful role in lifting the blockade of Gaza and a central figure in the Middle East which will enable the Islamic country to mediate between Israel and the Arab world in the future, as Turkey has sought in the past.
The report has not yet been validated by Turkish or Israeli officials.
In his talk with reporters, Fayyad also expressed his hopes that the proximity peace talks with Israel would lead to direct negotiations which would, eventually, lead to the declaration of an independent Palestinian state.
The top PA official responded to criticism over the PA’s boycott of settlement goods, saying that it was not an attempt to hurt Israel but a confiscation of goods produced in the settlements, who he said were considered an obstacle to peace.
On Friday Turkish President Abdullah Gul told the French daily Le Monde that Israel must make amends to be forgiven for a commando assault on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, including apologizing for the attack and paying compensation.
Gul added that if Israel made no move to heal the rift, then Turkey could even decide to break diplomatic relations.
In an interview published on Friday, Gul said the Israeli attack at the end of May, which killed nine activists, was a “crime” which might have been carried out by the likes of al-Qaida rather than a sovereign state.
“It seems impossible to me to forgive or forget, unless there are some initiatives which could change the situation,”Gul was quoted as saying by Le Monde.
Asked what these might be, he said: “Firstly, to ask pardon and to establish some sort of compensation.” He added that he also wanted to see an independent inquiry into the botched raid and a discussion on lifting Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
Asked if Turkey might break relations with Israel if they did nothing, Gul said: “Anything is possible.”
Activists dressed as Israeli pirates protest 43 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Tel Aviv, 5 June 2010. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)
Is it possible to be shocked and yet not be surprised? Israel’s stupidity and disregard for human life is nothing new. It is a recurring theme in the life of the Jewish state from its very inception. Surely as the destruction in Gaza remains untouched 18 months after the murderous attacks that began on 27 December 2008 there can be no surprise at Israeli brutality. Yet as the news unfolded and the images of the Israeli assault on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza began to unravel a sense of shock was expressed everywhere.
Israel too is shock stricken. Not by the sheer brutality of its forces, or by the injustice of the siege on Gaza but by the public relations blunder and fact that this “military mission” was a failure. Once again Israeli commandos are shown to be weak and helpless. How could the decision-makers not see that this would damage Israel’s image in the eyes of world and even worse, in the eyes of Israel’s enemies?
Israeli foreign ministry officials claim that Europe and the rest of the world have increased their diplomatic assault on Israel. They claim the world is emboldened by the fact that the American stand in support of Israel has weakened. This they will say is the fault of US President Barack Obama, a president Israelis never cared for anyway. The notion that the world is coming to a point where it is unable to bear the racism and brutality of Israel as a state never enters the conversation. Israeli talking heads will not apologize, will not stray from the official line: we, Israelis are right and they, everyone else are wrong; we are good and they are evil; we are victims of age-old anti-Semitism and they are hateful, violent Muslims intending to kill innocent Jews.
Lives were lost due to a cowardly reaction of trained assassins who were sent to a mission for which they were clearly unprepared, so in a way one can claim that the killers themselves are not to blame, those who sent them are. In the murky relations between the military and the civilian government in Israel it is quite common to fault the lowest person on the totem poll and more often than not it is the military. In this case the mission was an act of piracy aimed at a very determined group of activists who had no intention of backing down. The fact that this particular group of activists took on this difficult and dangerous mission should have in itself been a warning to the Israeli officials that they would not back down and would put up a fight.
There can be no argument as to the courage displayed by the activists aboard the ships as armed pirates with an overwhelming military power attacked them. The pirates, trained Israeli commandos who are known for their brutality and total lack of regard for human life, were armed to the teeth and had the support of the Israeli navy, air force and ground forces. Yet as they boarded the ships they were met with a justifiably angry and clearly determined crowd who were not willing to let go of their boats and cargo. Tragically some of them paid for this determination with their lives.
Will this tragedy bring any change? Clearly the only thing that can bring change is a strategic decision by President Obama to divorce the United States from the dysfunctional relationship with Israel. When the president decides that it is time to end the Israeli war on Palestinians he will engage in a head-on collision with Israel and its American bully, the influential pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC. It is no secret that advisers with Zionist prejudice surround the president and naturally one is forced to wonder if a strategic shift of such magnitude is possible. Still, if one judges by the fear expressed in Israel perhaps there is some change, some outrage among the president’s men.
It is not unlikely that when Americans get tired of paying $10 million per day of their hard-earned money to the State of Israel that the president will act. The question is how many innocent Palestinian lives will be lost until that happens.
Miko Peled is a writer and Israeli peace activist living in San Diego. His father was the late General Matti Peled, his grandfather Avraham Katsnelson signed the Israeli declaration of independence and his niece Smadar was killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem. He is the co founder of the Elbanna-Peled Foundtion. For more information or to respond, go to mikopeled.wordpress.com
Saudis practiced standing down anti-aircraft systems to allow Israeli warplanes passage for attack on Iranian nuclear sites, the London Times reports.
Saudi Arabia has practiced standing down its anti-aircraft systems to allow Israeli warplanes passage on their way to attack Iran’s nuclear installations, a British newspaper reported on Saturday.
The Saudis have allocated a narrow corridor of airspace in the north of the country that would cut flying time from Israel to Iran, the London Times reported.
“The Saudis have given their permission for the Israelis to pass over and they will look the other way,” the Times quoted an unnamed U.S. defense source in the area as saying. “They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren’t scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the [U.S.] State Department.”
Once the Israelis had passed, the kingdom’s air defenses would return to full alert, the Times said.
Despite tensions between them, Israel and Saudi Arabia share a mutual hostility to Iran.
“We all know this. We will let them [the Israelis] through and see nothing,” the Times quoted a Saudi government source as saying.
According to the report, the four main targets for an Israeli raid on Iran would be uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, a gas storage development at Isfahan and a heavy-water reactor at Arak.
Secondary targets may include a Russian-built light water reactor at Bushehr, which could produce weapons-grade plutonium when complete.
Even with midair refueling, the targets would be as the far edge of Israeli bombers’ range at a distance of some 2,250km. An attack would likely involve several waves of aircraft, possibly crossing Jordan, northern Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Aircraft attacking Bushehr, on the Gulf coast, could swing beneath Kuwait to strike from the southwest, the Times said.
Passing over Iraq would require at least tacit consent to the raid from the United States, whose troops are occupying the country. So far, the Obama Administration has refused this.
On Wednesday the United Nations passed a fourth round of sanctions against Iran in an attempt to force it to stop enriching uranium. But immediately after the UN vote, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed the nuclear program would continue.
Israel hailed the vote – but said sanctions were not enough and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to rule out a raid.
Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert, is believed to have held secret meetings with high-ranking Saudi officials over Iran.
President threatens Israel’s security with his statements, acts, and silence Yiron Festinger
Published: 06.12.10, 12:27
While tens of thousands of Turkish protestors chant anti-Semitic Nazi-style battle cries, on top of Prime Minister Erdogan’s wild incitement (which even outdid Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric,) and while all Muslim world radicals join forces in a venomous, unprecedented anti-Israel campaign, the deafening silence of the Obama-led United States is especially conspicuous.
This is the same US Administration that only months ago raised a hue and cry over the “grave insult to America” as result of the declaration of Ramat Shlomo construction, a neighborhood in no-man’s land that is not even located in east Jerusalem, turning the affair into a direct, hypocritical, deliberate, and ugly confrontation with the Israeli government.
Islamic Terror
Yet as it turns out, the calls for Israel’s destruction in the wake of the Turkish incitement campaign do not constitute an “insult” for America. They are merely a great “success” for Obama’s policy of currying favor with radical Islam; in the president’s view, as long as the protestors burn Israeli flags rather than American flags, his “success” is proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
Ever since he emerged from the radical margins of the American Left and managed to win the presidency on the strength of his rhetorical talents, Obama had been acting methodically in order to undermine America’s status as the world’s lone superpower. He has been doing it by neutralizing the use of force, utilizing international institutions, over-legalization, endless chatter about human rights, and so on and so forth. This delusional liberal policy views the US as the reason and cause for the globe’s problems, rather than as the most successful enterprise in human history, as historian Paul Johnson noted.
A side observer could examine the madness that has overcome America’s leadership with curious consternation, yet we Israelis do not have the privilege to play the role of side observers. Every Obama move has a significant effect for us and undermines our very existence. This ranges from statements defining terror as a manmade disaster, to the observation that there is no such thing as radical Islam and that it has no connection to attempted attacks in the US, as declared by Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder.
Meanwhile, the president’s counter-terrorism advisor argued that Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam” and that terrorists are “victims of political, economic and social forces.”
On top of this, we see the US Administration’s denial and the turning of a blind eye to actual terror acts. This happened in respect to the doctor who murdered 13 US soldiers and wounded dozens of others, while shouting “allahu akbar”; officials claimed he is no terrorist, even though he maintained ties with al-Qaeda, and that the attack was motivated by rage; if that’s the case, Israel’s prisons are full of enraged people who aren’t terrorists.
Most hostile president in US history
Then there is the desire to bring to justice CIA investigators for using harsh interrogation techniques against the masterminds of the Twin Towers attacks – that is, ticking time bombs who revealed further conspiracies of that sort during their interrogation. Where does this leave our Shin Bet investigators then, and who will be finding themselves in the International Court of Justice in The Hague first?
In the pathetic, miserable speech delivered by Obama in Cairo, where he embarrassed the Egyptian government by demanding that the Muslim Brothers – the spiritual father figures of al-Qaeda – also be invited to hear him wax poetic, the president in adopted fact Ahmadinejad’s thesis: The Jews suffered in the Holocaust and the Palestinians have been suffering ever since then. Israel was established because of the Shoah.
The only thing left shrouded in fog is the conclusion that stems from this distorted view, expressed by Ahmadinejad and accepted by European Union leaders behind closed doors: Israel’s establishment was a historical mistake, and it is not too late yet to turn back the wheel.
All of the above was further supplemented by the weak policy vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclearization effort, to the point where even Syrian President Assad dared say that America no longer exists in the Middle East, and is being replaced by Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Meanwhile, the US Administration allowed repeated UN votes against Israel, as well as the calls for the Jewish State’s nuclear disarmament.
Prime Minister Netanyahu should not be envied over the challenge posed by the most hostile president in US history; a president who makes the anti-Semite Jimmy Carter look like a Righteous Gentile. However, we should be calling a spade a spade and informing the public of the truth, even if this truth is disturbing, painful, and bitter.
We must make it clear to our many supporters in the US that this president, by viewing America and its ally Israel as the reason for all the world’s problems, threatens our very existence here. We should not be surprised to see the anti-Semitic franticness and ecstasy that has taken hold in the Muslim world, to the point where even moderate Arab states headed by Egypt feel threatened by America’s policy, prompting Vice President Biden to arrive for a reassuring visit.
Top Bush Administration official Elliott Abrams argued that another Islamist attack on US soil may change Obama’s policy somewhat. Yet the only change we can expect in such case would be blaming Israel as the direct cause for the “justified Muslim rage” against the US,” thereby only radicalizing the hostile policy of the serving president.
Israel has tens of millions of mostly non-Jewish supporters in the US, Abrams said. It would be good to make the grave results of his actions clear to them immediately, as well as the kinds of grave dangers that threaten our very existence because of his policy.
It works. Try it, if you don’t believe me – stick your head deep into the hot sand, and the world and its strife disappear. So it is no wonder Israel has taken to this ploy, when the story of Nuclear Apartheid has come out yesterday. Even the quality daily Haaretz is playing it cool, and relegates this story to the ‘dog with three eyes’ pages. If only it was that easy to make reality disappear… this story will stick to Peres the war-monger like dog-shit to a drunk. Despite this, try and find this story on the BBC. Or in the US papers. Or in the Israeli ones. Good luck!
Life, of course, is unfair, as we all know. The Dubai affair is hardly forgotten, and they are hit with the Anat Kamm saga; This has hardly started when the gag on the arrest of the rights activists Makhoul and Said is broken. Hardly di anybody time to relax, and this Nuclear Apartheid Brotherhood (NAB) is exploded upon them. When isa Zionism to have a break?
No, they can’t. From now on, the lethal radiation of nuclear apartheid will stick to them, will announce them everywhere.
Israel must abandon its obfuscations on nuclear weapons to move towards a true nuclear settlement in the Middle East
Tuesday 25 May 2010
Israel has long based its security policy on the preservation of its monopoly of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. It seems to regard this monopoly as an entitlement so self-evident as to need no examination, whether at home or abroad, and has invented a doctrine of ambiguity, under which it neither denies nor confirms its nuclear status, as a means of preventing, or at least staying aloof from, any discussion. Among the many matters which Israel has concealed, documents suggest, was a readiness to consider the transfer of nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa, something at variance with Israel’s insistence that it has always been a responsible state.
But the great value of the research into the dealings between Israel and South Africa which the Guardian has published this week is not simply that it puts on the record that Israel does indeed have nuclear weapons, nor that it might in the past have thought about handing such weapons to another state, but that it allows us to get beyond the “do they or don’t they?” questions to look at the fundamentals of both Israeli and American policy. In the negotiations this month on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the United States has shown some flexibility in the face of demands from states who want progress toward a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, progress which would at some stage have to include a clear Israeli acknowledgment of its nuclear weapons holdings and some degree of readiness to discuss safeguards, such as signing the non-proliferation treaty, as well as a clarification of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Israel, on the other hand, has been angered by these pressures, with prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu cancelling a visit to Washington earlier this month to avoid having to deal with them. Whether the other Middle Eastern states actually believe a nuclear-free region is attainable is unclear, but what most do believe is that highlighting and questioning Israel’s nuclear monopoly is worth doing in itself, and that it might also alter for the better the context in which negotiations with Iran take place.
Both America and Israel believe that Israel should retain its nuclear weapons while Iran should not be allowed to acquire them. With the Brazilian and Turkish scheme for the transfer of nuclear material spurned and tougher UN sanctions against Iran on the way, this is an unexamined contradiction which undermines much Middle Eastern diplomacy and cannot be for ever skirted. It is impossible to imagine even the first steps towards a true nuclear settlement in the Middle East without Israel abandoning its obfuscations on nuclear weapons and admitting, as other nuclear powers do, that security is a collective as well as an individual matter.
Israel warns it would block a fleet of nine ships carrying some 700 international pro-Palestinian activists and humanitarian supplies from reaching Gaza.
Turkey urged Israel on Tuesday to lift its blockade of Gaza and allow a Turkish-led convoy of ships carrying humanitarian aid to enter the Hamas-controlled enclave.
Israel and Egypt closed Gaza’s borders after Hamas took control of the territory in 2007 and refused to forswear violence against the Jewish state. Gaza’s 1.5 million people face shortages of water and medicine.
An international flotilla carrying some 10,000 tons of medical equipment, housing material and other supplies is expected to reach Israeli waters by Friday, according to a Turkey-based humanitarian aid group leading the effort.
Speaking to reporters at a news conference during a UN meeting on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said his government had been in touch with Israel about the aid convoy.
“Acting calmly is necessary rather than raising already heightened tensions,” he said. “The blockade on Gaza should be lifted.”
He added: “We don’t want new tensions … We believe Israel will use common sense towards this civilian initiative.”
The Israeli government is under international pressure to relax its blockade, which the United Nations says punishes people in Gaza over the policy of Islamist Hamas, which is pledged to Israel’s destruction.
Israel warned Tuesday that it would block the fleet of nine ships carrying some 700 international pro-Palestinian activists.
A similar, but smaller, aid flotilla was prevented by Israeli authorities a year ago. Five others have made it to Gaza in recent years.
Israel argues the blockade is necessary to keep violent elements in the Gaza Strip from rearming themselves with the tools to shoot rockets into Israel.
Israeli media reported authorities saying the ships would be boarded before they could reach Gaza. Any activists on board would be arrested.
Israeli authorities have urged the convoy’s organizers to bring their goods to Gaza via a pre-approved border crossing. Organizers have said no such offer has been made.
“Ships that make their own way to Gaza don’t do anything to help the people there,” said Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Palmor said Free Gaza is “less interested in bringing help, than with advancing their radical agenda, which plays into the hands of Hamas.”
Turkey, the only Muslim member of NATO, is one of Israel’s closest allies in the Middle East but relations have soured, in part due to Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s frequent criticism of the Jewish state’s Palestinian policies.
Robert Serry, the UN’s special co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process, said the blockade could only embolden militants.
“I am particularly concerned that the current closure creates unacceptable suffering, hurts forces of moderation and empowers extremists. I call for the closure policy to end,” said Serry, who also serves as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon’s representative to the Palestinian Territories.
The convoy, organized by the Istanbul-based Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), includes vessels from Britain, Greece, Algeria, Kuwait, Malaysia and Ireland.
It is carrying some 20 million euros worth of supplies, making it the largest ever to the Palestinian Territories, Salih Bilici, spokesman for the pro-Palestinian IHH, told Reuters.
“Part of this mission is to draw attention to the suffering of the people of Gaza,” Bilici said. “We are not concerned that our safety is at risk, because we are a humanitarian group without political aims.”
The group is determined to deliver the aid directly to Gaza, rather than leaving it with Israeli authorities, Bilici said.
Tuesday, 25 May 2010
Revelations in Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s book that talks between Israel and South Africa on the sale of missiles and warheads took place a generation ago have turned a harsh new spotlight on Israel’s long-held policy of ambiguity over its nuclear arsenal.
But while they come just as Israel faces renewed pressure to come clean about its status as a nuclear military power at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference in New York it would be a mistake to think that the game is yet up for that policy, which still enjoys wide, if not unanimous, acceptance in Israel itself.
Reaction in Israel suggests a media willingness to accept the denial by Shimon Peres, now the country’s President, that Israel was trying to sell nuclear weapons to South Africa – and in the process arguably obscuring the undeniable – and to many abroad – highly embarrassing fact of the shadowy links between the two governments at the time.
Israeli journalists routinely refer archly to “foreign reports” that the country has long had a nuclear arsenal. In a recent such article, the prominent Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit articulated the views of many when he defended “the umbrella of opacity” protecting Israel. He argued that in the past at least the world – being then “moral rather than moralistic” – knew that having seen a third of Jews murdered in the Holocaust it could not do so again; and that it recognised that since Israel as a nuclear power had acted with “deliberation and composure” its nuclear reactor at Dimona had “stabilised the Middle East” by preventing Israel’s many wars turning into an all out “catastrophe”.
Yet the world was not always so sure. A fascinating article three years ago, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed how Richard Nixon overcame the severe doubts of many in the US administration – shared by Nixon’s predecessors Kennedy and Johnson – to allow Israel to proceed with its secret nuclear weapons programme. His own Defence Secretary, Melvin Laird, fearing among much else that it would encourage proliferation, warned him bluntly in March 1969 that the programme was “not in the US’s interests and should… be stopped”. Yet the deal under which Israel could proceed without admitting it was doing so was struck that September at a one-to-one meeting between Nixon and the then Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, the exact details of which can only be guessed at till this day.
The authors concluded by arguing that it was time to revise the Nixon-Meir accord, which was “burdensome for the US not only because it is inconsistent with US values of openness and accountability but also because it provokes claims about double standards in its non-proliferation policy”. And it pointed out that without open acknowledgement by Israel of its nuclear status it was impossible to include it in an updated NPT agreement, let alone discuss ideas like a nuclear-free Middle East.
There has long been speculation that Israel observed, if not jointly organised with South Africa, a test of a nuclear weapon in 1979. Perversely, that might have provided a motive for close military ties with the apartheid regime, since Israel’s agreement not to test a weapon was part of its accord with the US.
But either way, and even if Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister at the time of Mr Peres’s 1975 talks with PW Botha would not have signed off on a nuclear arms sale, the meetings reinforce the sense of a bond in those years between the governments of Israel and that of South Africa – whose apartheid regime Israel had rightly and roundly condemned in its early years. It was a dark period in Israel’s foreign relations which it would do well now to acknowledge and disavow.
The current government, which has the required majority, can translate past military triumphs into a solution to the Mideast conflict.
By Yoel Marcus
Same old song for 18 years
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but the day on which the massive Home Front drill began marked the 10th anniversary of Israel’s hasty retreat from Lebanon, after 1,216 fatalities and a bitter taste of failure. That wretched war had many names, but most of all it was called “the war of deceit,” because the cabinet was led astray. Those who led us to war promised a 48-hour operation but ended up going all the way to Beirut. The war, in its different phases, lasted 18 years.
High school graduates destined to serve in Lebanon composed the most cynical war song ever heard in Israel’s wars – “come down airplane, take us to Lebanon, we’ll fight for Sharon and return in a coffin.”
The generals at the time turned the supposedly brief operation into an ongoing campaign. The excuse for going to war was the assassination of our ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, by an agent of Abu Nidal’s. When Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan was told that Abu Nidal not only didn’t belong to the PLO, which was based in Lebanon at the time, but didn’t work for the PLO either – he responded at the cabinet session: “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal, we’ve got to screw the PLO.”
As time went by the voices calling for getting out of Lebanon grew stronger. It was reminiscent of a story Pinhas Sapir once told. His son returned home on Saturday all bruised. He said he had played soccer and someone kicked him in the face. Sapir replied: “I didn’t ask you why you were bruised, but why you were there at all.”
What happened to us in Lebanon was similar to our experience in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. We were accused of the Sabra and Chatila massacre, which the whole world denounced. No prime minister and no chief of staff dared to suggest getting out of Lebanon, even when it was clear that instead of the PLO we had gotten Hezbollah.
Ehud Barak was the only prime minister who had the required moral fortitude and strength to do what all his predecessors did not dare to – evacuate Lebanon overnight, contrary to senior officers’ opinions. One of those officers, Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, said in closed meetings that a slapdash withdrawal would harm Israel’s deterrent power.
Barak submitted the proposal to the cabinet and secured its approval for immediate implementation that night. The pictures of retreat and abandoning some of the SLA combatants and part of the weapons were not flattering. The other side of the fence became a tourist attraction to various Israel-haters, who came to throw stones at the fence.
To this day the IDF’s nocturnal desertion remains controversial. Opponents say the rushed exit did not prevent the Second Lebanon War, which brought the long-range missile threat to the heart of Israel’s Home Front.
The extreme right wing still holds that flight from Lebanon responsible for Hezbollah’s increased power and its threat on Israel’s soft underbelly. Nobody wants to see the convoy of civilians fleeing from the center of the country southward again. Some Palestinians say that a dramatic flight like the exit from Lebanon could happen from the territories as well one day.
Not realistic, you say? Didn’t Arik Sharon evacuate the Gaza Strip settlements? If he did so, as he explained, to wake the people up from the Greater Land of Israel dream, he didn’t altogether succeed. On the contrary, he strengthened Hamas, which intensified the Qassam rocket fire and dragged us into another war, Operation Cast Lead, which blemished our image in the world and did nothing to speed up an agreement with the Palestinians.
The lesson to be learned from this is that a military triumph does not necessarily lead to a decisive diplomatic outcome. History teaches that in the absence of a decisive diplomatic outcome, the next war is written on the wall. The First World War and the oppression of defeated Germany generated the Second World War. The Six-Day War was brilliant from the military standpoint, but in the absence of a peace agreement, it generated the Yom Kippur War.
Sadat never dreamed of conquering Israel, but aimed at reaching an agreement with it. Fortunately for him and for us, the U.S. administration had at the time people like Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger in it, who put an end to the Vietnam War, opened a door to the People’s Republic of China and cracked a window to peace with Egypt.
The conclusion is that even if 43 years have elapsed since the Six-Day War victory, it is not too late for this government, which also has the required majority, to translate that military triumph into a peace agreement.
UN conference aimed at international non-proliferation is reportedly close to agreement
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
Monday 24 May 2010 21.00 BST
Israel’s nuclear dealings with the apartheid regime in South Africa date back more than three decades but they continue to resonate in global talks in New York this week.
A UN conference aimed at bolstering and modernising the international non-proliferation regime is reportedly close to an agreement on measures aimed at a ban on nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.
Those measures would include the calling of a conference on establishing a WMD-free zone by 2012, potentially involving Israel and Iran, and leading to further steps to provide mutual security guarantees if all parties agreed. A co-ordinator would be appointed by the UN to arrange that conference.
If the drafts circulating at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference are approved by the end of the week, it would mark a significant victory for Egypt and other Arab states who have long argued that Israel has not been subjected to the same pressure as Iran or Syria, despite its development of a secret nuclear arsenal. “Agreement on this issue is in sight. “Even in the whole conference does not agree on an action plan, the P5 [five permanent security council members] and the Arab states would continue to work on it,” said Daryl Kimball, head of the Arms Control Association. “The Guardian’s report about discussions between Israel and South Africa regarding nuclear [weapons] further reinforces the fact that Israel is outside the NPT and possesses nuclear weapons.
“The calls from other countries in the region, that Israel join the NPT, become all the more legitimate when such documentary evidence becomes available, and the steps being pursued at the NPT conference for pursuing a WMD-free zone become more relevant.”
Israel is not a signatory to the 1968 NPT agreement, and is not taking part in the negotiations. But according to sources at the conference, the Obama administration held high-level discussions with Israel at the weekend to persuade it to go along with plans for the 2012 conference, on the understanding it would not be compromising its security. Although the apartheid regime is long dead, and its nemesis, the ANC, is in office, there are unanswered questions about the South African weapons programme. Documentation and equipment was destroyed before power was passed to a majority-elected government. When officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were allowed into South Africa in 1993 to inspect the remnants, it was on condition they would not ask what countries had provided assistance. “We asked and we got few answers,” Robert Kelley, of the IAEA, said. “It was like they pulled out an index card and read out a pre-prepared response.”
David Albright, head of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said: “On the positive side, the fact that Israel stopped doing these illicit black market deals in the 1990s as a result of US pressure, shows that pressure works. We don’t have to worry about Israeli proliferation anymore. What we want to see is that kind of pressure working on countries like Pakistan
“It also shows how critical this kind of assistance is to countries who are seeking to develop nuclear weapons. It shows they really need that help.”
Blockading Gaza has caused nothing but distress. Limiting imports of fruit, vegetables and cement will not succor Gilad Shalit, and the Hamas regime remains strong.
We will soon mark five years since Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip, but Gaza refuses to disengage from Israel. Border incidents continue, Gilad Shalit is still in captivity, and the 1.5 million Palestinians who live beyond the border fence remain under blockade.
Neither Hamas nor Israel is interested in escalating the military conflict, which remains limited to sporadic rocket fire met by air force strikes. The other two issues, Shalit and the blockade, are being dealt with on the level of propaganda and public relations.
Negotiations over a prisoner exchange for Shalit remain stalled. Instead of restarting them with an eye toward reaching a compromise that would bring the abducted soldier home, the Netanyahu government is merely seeking to burnish its image while keeping public pressure to return him in check.
On Sunday, the cabinet decided to support a bill that would toughen prison conditions for Hamas prisoners incarcerated in Israel. The bill addresses the anger felt by many Israelis over the fact that Shalit is held in isolation and kept from receiving visitors, while Hamas inmates can watch television and pursue university studies.
Yet the bill is little more than a distraction from the main issue. It is very doubtful that Hamas – which has made no concessions on Shalit despite the closure, the air strikes and Israel’s offensive in Gaza last year – will give up now just so that its people can watch comedy shows and Al Jazeera. A Haaretz report found that most of the bill’s provisions are immaterial in any case: Prisoners from Gaza have been prevented from receiving family visits for the last three years, and the new law would not change their condition one bit.
The government is handling the blockade the same way: using it as a means of exerting pressure on the Hamas regime and presenting it to the Israeli public as a reasonable response to Shalit’s ongoing captivity. But the closure has resulted in humanitarian distress for much of the population and must be ended. Limiting the import of fruits, vegetables and cement to Gaza does not provide succor to Shalit, and the Hamas regime remains strong.
Yet Jerusalem continues to view the siege simply as a public-relations problem, and is currently readying to intercept the aid fleet of pro-Palestinian activists that is now on its way to protest the closure. Instead of allowing Gazans to rebuild, Israel is setting up a televised confrontation between the navy and unarmed civilians.
Shalit deserves serious negotiations that lead to his release. Residents of Gaza deserve to have their plight eased. Gaza will not disappear, despite the disengagement and the closure. And it warrants more serious treatment from Israel’s government.
Shimon Peres dismisses claims relating to secret files but US researcher says denials are disingenuous
Chris McGreal in Washington, Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem and David Smith in Johannesburg
Monday 24 May 2010 23.13 BST
Shimon Peres (left), whose office says Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons with South Africa, pictured with Ariel Sharon in Egypt in 1975. Photograph: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, today robustly denied revelations in the Guardian and a new book that he offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa when he was defence minister in the 1970s.
His office said “there exists no basis in reality” for claims based on declassified secret South African documents that he offered nuclear warheads for sale with ballistic missiles to the apartheid regime in 1975. “Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons with South Africa. There exists no Israeli document or Israeli signature on a document that such negotiations took place,” it said.
But Sasha Polakow-Suransky, the American academic who uncovered the documents while researching a book on the military and political relationship between the two countries, said the denials were disingenuous, because the minutes of meetings Peres held with the then South African defence minister, PW Botha, show that the apartheid government believed an explicit offer to provide nuclear warheads had been made.
Polakow-Suransky noted that Peres did not deny attending the meetings at which the purchase of Israeli weapons systems, including ballistic missiles, was discussed. “Peres participated in high level discussions with the South African defence minister and led the South Africans to believe that an offer of nuclear Jerichos was on the table,” he said. “It’s clear from the documentary record that the South Africans perceived that an explicit offer was on the table. Four days later Peres signed a secrecy agreement with PW Botha.”
While Peres’s office said there are no documents with his signature on that mention nuclear weapons, his signature does appear with Botha’s on an agreement governing the broad conduct of the military relationship, including a commitment to keep it secret.
Today politicians and academics in South Africa said the apartheid regime’s cooperation with Israel was an “open secret” and they welcomed the current government’s move to declassify sensitive documents which provided details of key meetings.
Steven Friedman, the director of Centre for the Study of Democracy at Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg, said: “There was a close cooperation on a range of issues. In the 1970s and 1980s there was a sudden influx of Israeli nuclear scientists. We knew there was extensive military cooperation.”
Professor Willie Esterhuyse, who played a critical role in opening and maintaining dialogue between the apartheid government and the ANC, said: “Most of us knew there was close cooperation on nuclear research with not just Israel but also the French. But we had no factual evidence. We eventually figured out it was more than just rumours, but we never knew the precise details.”
Opposition politicians praised the post-apartheid government for resisting attempts by the Israeli authorities to prevent the documents from becoming public. David Maynier, the shadow defence minister, speculated that the ANC government had decided it would not be damaged by releasing the documents.
“It did not take me entirely by surprise, because I think it was a pretty open secret there was extensive cooperation between South Africa and Israel. But before now the details were super-secret,” he said.
The South African documents obtained by Polakow-Suransky and published in today’s Guardian, include “top secret” South African minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries as well as direct negotiations in Zurich between Peres and Botha.
The South African military chief of staff, Lieutenant General RF Armstrong, who attended the meetings, drew up a memo laying out the benefits of South Africa obtaining the Israeli missiles – but only if they were fitted with nuclear weapons.
Polakow-Suransky said the minutes record that at the meeting in Zurich on 4 June 1975, Botha asked Peres about obtaining Jericho missiles, codenamed Chalet, with nuclear warheads.
“Minister Botha expressed interest in a limited number of units of Chalet subject to the correct payload being available,” the minutes said. The document then records that: “Minister Peres said that the correct payload was available in three sizes”.
The use of a euphemism, the “correct payload”, reflects Israeli sensitivity over the nuclear issue. Armstrong’s memorandum makes clear the South Africans were interested in the Jericho missiles solely as a means of delivering nuclear weapons.
The use of euphemisms in a document that otherwise speaks openly about conventional weapons systems also points to the discussion of nuclear weapons.
In the end, South Africa did not buy nuclear warheads from Israel and eventually developed its own atom bomb.
The Israeli authorities tried to prevent South Africa’s post-apartheid government from declassifying the documents.
Peres’s angry response to the revelations is unusual, because of Israel’s policy of maintaining “ambiguity” about whether it possesses nuclear weapons. The Israeli press quoted anonymous government officials challenging the truth of the documents.
Polakow-Suransky said it is possible Peres made the offer without the approval of Israel’s then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. “Peres has a long history of conducting his own independent foreign policy. During the 1950s as Israel was building its defence relationship with France, Peres went behind the back of many of his superiors in initiating talks with French defence officials. It would not be surprising if he broached the topic in discussions with South Africa’s defence minister without Rabin’s authorisation,” he said.
Polakow-Suransky’s book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, is published in the US on Tuesday.
Politician at heart of Israel
Shimon Peres, the man at centre of allegations over nuclear links with apartheid South Africa, has spent decades in government in various cabinet posts, including defence and foreign, as prime minister and now as Israel’s president.
Born in Poland in 1923, he and his family moved to Palestine under the British mandate when he was 11. Many of his relatives were murdered in the Holocaust.
In 1947, he joined the Haganah, the Jewish force fighting for Israeli independence. He was placed in charge of personnel and arms purchases.
He Peres rose quickly through the political world in the years immediately after independence, becoming Ddirector general, at 30, of the defence ministry. In the following years, he played a leading role in building strategic alliances and developing arms deals. One of the most important early on was with France, which played a crucial role in the development of Israel’s nuclear programme. Later, as relations with Paris cooled, he was at the forefront of building links with apartheid South Africa.
Peres was first elected to the Knesset in 1959. He persistently challenged Yitzhak Rabin for the Labour party leadership, only becoming leader in 1977 after Rabin was forced out over his wife’s illegal foreign bank account. He became the unofficial acting prime minister but lost the subsequent general election.
Peres, as foreign minister, won the Nobel peace prize in 1994 with Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the negotiations that produced the Oslo accords.
After Rabin’s assassination in 1995, he became PM and lost the subsequent election. In 2005, he quit Labour to back Ariel Sharon’s new Kadima party. Two years later, the Knesset elected Peres president. Peres married Sonya Gelman in 1945. They have three children.
Our farewell picnic to Ezra Nawi before his prison term for peaceful protest carried a new message to most Israeli picnics
Neve Gordon
Tuesday 25 May 2010 11.00 BST
Picnics, like almost everything else in Israel, are often political. Oz Shelach underscores this point in his collection of short stories, Picnic Grounds, where he describes how a history professor takes his family on a picnic in the pine forest near Givat Shaul, a Jerusalem neighbourhood.
The professor teaches his son some of the camping skills he learned while serving in the Israeli military, using old stones to block the wind and to protect the newly lit fire. The stones, we are told, are the remains of a village known as Deir Yassin.
Although Shelach does not say as much, Deir Yassin was a Palestinian village located on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The Jewish neighbourhood, which now stands in its place, was built not long after Israeli paramilitary forces evicted its Palestinian residents, massacring an estimated 100 men, women and children out of a total population of 600.
Shelach does not recount this history; he simply describes how the father builds a fire with his son and then ends the story by noting that the history professor “imagined that he and his family were having a picnic, unrelated to the village, enjoying its grounds, outside history”.
Many picnics in Israel take place in pine forests that were planted to cover the remains of hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. Wittingly or unwittingly these gatherings have a political effect, since the people enjoying their leisure time on these sites reenact the historical suppression of the Palestinian Nakba.
This past Saturday I also went on a picnic with my family, but in stark opposition to most Israeli picnics it tried to enact a remembering by exposing the continued domination and expulsion of Palestinians. We joined a group of Jews and Palestinians from Ta’ayush in the south Hebron desert to break bread together and bid farewell to Ezra Nawi, who the following day began serving a jail sentence for resisting Israel’s occupation.
We chose this spot because almost a decade ago the Palestinian cave dwellers who lived there were expelled from their ancestral land by Jewish settlers from Susya; these settlers were supported by the Israeli government, military and courts. Nawi and other Ta’ayush activists have, over the years, aided the expelled Palestinians to return to the last swathe of land they can still call their own. Today there is a small village made up of more than 10 tents, a few caves, several scores of sheep and chicken and a solar and wind-based electricity system.
Located just a few kilometres from where we sat is Um el-Hir, another small Palestinian village where in 2007 Nawi was arrested for protesting against the demolition of a tin shack. While the entire protest was filmed, the border police officers claimed that Nawi attacked them during the few seconds that he ran into the shack and that consequently were not captured on video.
Two points need to be stressed. First, the movie clearly shows how a few minutes earlier Nawi took a rock out of the hands of a Palestinian woman and threw it on the ground so that she would not use it against the police. Second, anyone who is familiar with the Israeli border police knows that if Nawi had actually attacked the officers it is unlikely that he would have been able to walk out of the shack.
Claims like these did not persuade judge Eilata Ziskind, who convicted Nawi. Based solely on the officers’ testimonies, Ziskind sentenced Nawi to a month in jail and an additional three years probation, during which if he is caught insulting an officer, disturbing the public order, participating in an illegal protest, etc, he will immediately be imprisoned for six more months.
This sentence is not a minor matter. The Israeli court has basically decreed that the only legitimate way to oppose the occupation is by standing on the side of the road with some kind of placard. Any form of civil disobedience or direct action, like lying in front of a bulldozer that is building the annexation barrier or demolishing a house, picking olives in a grove or walking Palestinian children to school in an area that has been classified a closed military zone, is now subject to harsh punishment.
Thus, Nawi’s conviction points to a relatively recent development regarding the restriction of resistance, to extremely passive modes of protest. And, in some cases, even these kinds of protests are prohibited, as in Sheikh Jarrah where activists are repeatedly arrested simply for demonstrating against the seizure of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.
As Nawi put it during the picnic, in a country where laws are immoral, civil disobedience is obligatory; therefore, he continued, it will not be long before more of you will join me in jail. As he walked away, I looked towards the soldiers who stood gazing at us from a nearby hill, wondering whether soon picnics, too, will be considered acts of civil disobedience.
Until the debacle over the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, it was hard to find an Australian politician who did not support Israel.
By Amir Oren
Dor Shapira, a young, low-ranking diplomat, had a privilege yesterday normally reserved for ambassadors: a visit to the secretary of his host country’s foreign ministry – albeit not under the best of circumstances.
Shapira, officially the spokesman and cultural attache, is the third-ranking diplomat at Israel’s embassy in the Australian capital of Canberra. Normally, the secretary of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Dennis Richardson, would have spoken to ambassador Yuval Rotem, but he is in Jerusalem. And consul Eli Yerushalmi is in New York for family reasons. Shapira is the next in line.
Richardson called Shapira to the ministry as Foreign Minister Stephen Smith was informing parliament of the expulsion of an embassy staffer. Smith did not identify the person by either name or occupation. But anyone who recalls Britain’s recent expulsion of an Israeli embassy staffer – the Mossad representative – will know who the person is.
Israel did not know about the expulsion in advance: Smith timed the meeting between Richardson and Shapira so that parliament would hear the news first. When was the last time the Knesset had a similar honor?
Other countries in a new and unofficial alliance – those whose passports were allegedly forged by Israel, meaning Britain, France, Germany and Ireland – were also informed, as was the United Arab Emirates.
It took Richardson only 10 minutes to complete his task. He gave Shapira only the official announcement, with no verbal additions. The atmosphere was also official, leaving no room to misunderstand Australia’s position.
But Smith told reporters that the expulsion of the Mossad man – “or woman” – was not the only step, nor necessarily the last one. There will be a cooling of ties between the two countries’ intelligence services, which may affect intelligence cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program. If there is a third incident of allegedly forged Australian passports (the first was in 2003 ), Australia’s response will be even harsher.
Israel had sought to prevent the expulsion. And when weeks passed after Britain announced its expulsion, the illusion that Australia would forget about the issue, or at least downplay it, grew.
Smith partly explained the delay yesterday. He said that first, the federal police investigated, and concluded that the four Australian-Israelis were innocent victims of identity theft. Then, last month, David Irvine, who heads the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, came to Israel, but Israel said nothing of substance. Finally, all the relevant Australian bodies met and recommended the expulsion.
Despite the Australians’ methodical probe, Israel hastened last night to blame the expulsion on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, saying he was trying to divert attention from other problems. This is a typical explanation for anyone who refuses to accept responsibility for failure.
Until now, Rudd’s attitude toward Israel has been very positive. Smith, whose constituency in Perth includes 9,000 Jews, is also friendly to Israel, and yesterday, he said that Australia’s support for Israel in the United Nations and other forums will not be affected.
Lately, there have not been any top-tier Australian politicians who were not supportive of Israel. It thus requires special talent to transform Australia into a country that feels obligated to take steps against Israel. Yet one person in Israel has that talent. And this time, it is not Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
The person who managed to get Israel in trouble with Australia, Britain and the other embittered countries is the head of Mossad, Meir Dagan. But what does Dagan care about Rudd, Smith or Irvine? So long as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in his pocket, the world can go to hell. And if it does not do so on its own, Dagan will show it how.
Canberra to expel Mossad rep after investigation reveals that four of the suspects in Mabhouh killing used Australian passports.
Australia announced yesterday that it intends to expel an Israeli diplomat from Canberra as a result of its investigation into the use of forged Australian passports during the alleged assassination of senior Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January.
The head of Australia’s Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO ), David Irvine, paid a secret visit to Israel earlier this month as part of an investigation into the use of forged Australian passports. Irvine’s conclusions swayed the government in Canberra to decide that Israel was behind the passport forgery, and yesterday Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told parliament that the Mossad liaison officer in Australia would be asked to leave the country.
An investigation into the Mabhouh assassination revealed that four of the suspects had carried forged Australian passports. Australia initiated an investigation with the participation of the federal police, the relevant ministries and the country’s internal security and intelligence service.
Smith told parliament that police investigators had traveled to Israel from Australia and presented him with a report on the matter on April 9. The police report was not unequivocal as to Israel’s involvement in forging the passports, and the country’s two intelligence services were asked to offer an opinion.
In his report to parliament, Smith said that Irvine was dispatched to Israel for several meetings with senior figures in Israel’s defense establishment. On May 19 a final report was issued by the Australian intelligence services, placing responsibility for the forgeries on Israel. The report concluded that Australian citizens whose passports were forged had not been involved in the assassination of Mabhouh, but had fallen victim to identity theft.
Another conclusion was that the forgery was exceptionally professional and was carried out at a quality level that only a governmental intelligence agency is capable of performing.
After receiving the report, the Australian security cabinet met and approved Foreign Minister Smith’s recommendation to expel the Mossad liaison officer in the country.
Israel’s ambassador to Canberra, Yuval Rotem, was in Israel at the time, so a low-ranking diplomat was invited to the Australian Foreign Ministry, where he was informed that the individual would have to leave the country within a week. Following the decision, Smith informed the foreign ministers of Britain and the United Arab Emirates, as well as those of France, Germany and Ireland, whose passports were also allegedly used during the assassination.
In an unusual act, Australia informed the U.S. administration in advance on the content of its intelligence services’ report and the decision to expel the Mossad liaison officer. Smith explained the action by saying that the U.S. has close ties with Israel and is an ally of Australia.
Speaking to reporters, Smith said that relations between the two countries will enter a “cooling-off period,” and that cooperation on intelligence and defense matters would be limited. He added that the decision was made more with sadness rather than anger, noting that the two countries are friends but Israel’s action was an unfriendly one. The Australian foreign minister said it would be necessary to rebuild confidence and trust.
The Australian announcement was received with shock in Israel, and sources at the Foreign Ministry described it as “a very serious crisis.”
“Israel expresses sadness at this Australian step, which is not in line with the nature and quality of ties between the two countries,” a statement issued by the Foreign Ministry read.
For its part, Australia appears to be seeking to contain the crisis. Smith stressed that the action against Israel affects only the security-intelligence aspect of the mutual relations, and will not alter Australia’s stance toward Israel or the conflict in the Middle East. Smith said that Australia will not stop supporting Israel in UN votes.
Ten years ago, Israel’s tanks trundled out of southern Lebanon after keeping a presence there for 20 years, battling both Palestinian and Lebanese fighters.
The withdrawal was welcomed by most Lebanese, but it left the mainly Christian militia, which fought alongside the Israelis, vulnerable to investigation by the Lebanese authorities. Many of them sought refuge in Israel.
Al Jazeera’s Jacky Rowland reports from the Israel-Lebanon border where the legacy of the war has made it dificult for some families to rebuild their lives.
By Natalia Antelava
BBC News, south Lebanon
Every day 70-year-old Abu Ali Shami looks at Israel from his olive grove. The barbed wire, which is only a metre away, reminds him of what life was like when Israeli soldiers were stationed on the Lebanese side of the barbed wire fence.
“We were powerless,” Abu Ali Shami says. “There was so much injustice, if felt like we lived in a big prison.”
Like all residents of Kfar Kila, a village on the Lebanese-Israeli border, Abu Ali Shami still remembers restrictions on travel and the climate of fear, enforced not only by the Israeli military but also their Lebanese collaborators.
“We were so happy when they left,” remembers Abu Ali, another villager in Kfar Kila. “They withdrew in the middle of the night and it felt as if we finally had our country back.”
Ten years on since the withdrawal, the UN together with the Lebanese army patrol the border area. But flapping in the breeze along the fence are yellow and green flags of Hezbollah. Waving next to them is the flag of the group’s biggest foreign backer – Iran.
It is Hezbollah that has real control over what happens in southern Lebanon and many villagers say they like the arrangement.
“It’s the resistance, its weapons and [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah who make us feel safe here,” says Fawwaz Mohammed. “Without the resistance we could never be free.”
‘Victories’
Hezbollah is staging a series of events marking the 10th anniversary of the Israeli withdrawal, and what it sees as its victories since then – particularly the most recent war with Israel in 2006. Among them is the opening of a new war museum just a short drive away from the border.
Israel fears stronger Hezbollah 10 years after pull-out
The museum showcases hundreds of pieces of weaponry and equipment. The museum cost more than $3m to build. This was raised, according to Hezbollah, entirely from private donations.
“It’s a commemoration of our fighters, of our martyrdom and also this museum is the way of reminding the new generation about sacrifices that they made,” says the group’s spokesman, Dr Ibrahim Moussawi.
As a guide leads visitors around the museum through an elaborate network of underground tunnels, he describes the battles and the living conditions of the Hezbollah fighters.
Almost all of South Lebanon is riddled with similar bunkers, it is believed that Hezbollah uses them to keep its weapons and train its guerrillas.
But the guide brushes off all questions about the real tunnels: “It’s a secret,” he laughs.
While Hezbollah remains extremely secretive about its military, the museum is in many ways, a sign of just how much the group has evolved over the last 10 years.
Politics and military
Today, it is arguably the most powerful militia in the Middle East and inside Lebanon it also functions as a sophisticated political organisation which has won elections, which has a track record of doing serious social work, and which is clever at marketing itself.
Hezbollah’s growing military might, fuelled by funding from Iran, is a serious concern for Israel and its allies.
Israel and Washington have recently accused Syria of transferring long range scud rockets to Hezbollah. The allegations sparked off a new cycle of mutual accusations, and speculation about another war.
The Lebanese Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, was among those to deny the allegations that there were scud rockets in Lebanon, but Hezbollah never issued a denial.
In fact many in Lebanon believe that the group does have some sort of long-range missile, if only because in some of his recent speeches the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has threatened to hit targets deep inside Israel.
“I don’t know what kind of rockets Hezbollah has, but what I do know is that Hassan Nasrallah does not make empty threats. Israel knows that, which is why they are worried,” says Beirut-based analyst Rami Khoury.
And yet, despite all the talk of war, tensions and mutual accusations – or partly because of it all – the situation, Rami Khoury believes, is currently under control.
“What we have now is a situation of quite good mutual deterrence. Nobody is going to give up or surrender to the other side. At the same time, both sides know that if they start a war, it will be ferocious and it will kill many civilians,” says Rami Khoury.
Those who are celebrating disclosures about Richard Goldstone’s relationship with apartheid-era South Africa ought to read a new book about Israel’s ties with that regime.
By Akiva Eldar
The “sexy” story of the nuclear dealings between Israel and South Africa, as told in a new book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky (“The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa” ), diverted attention from the book’s other revelations about the intimate relations between the Jewish state and the racist regime.
The author, a senior editor at the important journal “Foreign Affairs,” noted that Israel was not the only country to have violated the embargo on South Africa. Other members of this dubious club included several “enlightened” nations, among them Arab oil states. But with Israel, the relationship went far beyond security and economic interests and became a sturdy friendship.
Polakow-Suransky relates that in November 1974, Shimon Peres, who at the time was minister of defense in then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s first government, returned from a secret visit to South Africa. Peres wrote to thank his hosts for their contribution to establishing a “vitally important link between the two governments.” Peres continued: “This cooperation is based not only on common interests and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and refusal to submit to it.”
This is the same Peres who not long ago said that former South African judge Richard Goldstone is “a small man, devoid of any sense of justice.”
Twelve years later, on a visit to Cameroon, Peres, who was then prime minister, asserted: “A Jew who accepts racism ceases to be a Jew.” And to prevent misunderstandings, he added: “A Jew and racism do not go together.” It was at about that time, Polakow-Suransky wrote, that several of Israel’s most lucrative defense contracts with the white minority regime came into effect.
According to Polakow-Suransky, trade between the two countries – and especially security cooperation – continued to flourish even after Israel’s first unity government decided in 1987 to impose sanctions on South Africa.
Then as now, “security considerations” cast a spell on the media. The author cites an editorial published by Haaretz during the 1973 Yom Kippur War: “No political fastidiousness can justify the difference between one who has been revealed a friend and one who has betrayed friendship in our hour of fate.” The editorial related to South Africa’s decision to provide essential replacement parts for Israel’s Mirage fighter planes at a time when many black African countries that had benefited from Israeli aid programs were cutting ties with Israel.
Those on the right and in the media who are celebrating Goldstone’s relationship with the apartheid regime would do well to read this book attentively.
A question of money
Settlers and their supporters have assailed the Palestinian Authority for having the gall to tell residents of the territories to stop expanding the settlements. To this, the proper response is: Remove the blindfolds from your eyes.
On a rightist Internet site that encourages the use of Jewish labor, Elyakim Levanon, the rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, wrote: “Here, Arabs do not come in to work. Here, only Jews work.” He reported that in some settlements, this rule is very strictly observed, while in others, it is less so. The rabbi found support for not employing Arabs in the weekly Torah portion and concluded with a practical recommendation: “Perhaps you pay a bit more, but you get quality work. We will be glad to be rid of them.”
But Levanon’s fellow settler rabbis – David Hai Hacohen, David Dudkevitch, Haim Grinshpan and Eliezer Melamed – are not relinquishing Arab labor so easily. They claim that if people at the Har Bracha settlement insisted on employing Jewish workers, the settlement would not expand at the necessary pace of several dozen homes annually.
“When the question arose as to whether to employ Arabs, who perhaps hate us, and continue to build at the necessary pace, or not to employ them and not build at the necessary pace,” wrote these spiritual leaders, a rabbinical ruling was handed down to continue to build with gentile laborers, and when necessary, even with Arabs.
Alongside the general principle of preferring Jewish laborers, the rabbis also addressed the matter of the pay. They considered the question of “whether it is necessary to prefer the Jew in every case, even if his price is double, or is there a definition whereby up to a difference of a certain percentage, the Jew should be preferred, but beyond that percentage, there is no obligation to prefer the Jew?”
In principle, the rabbis answered, “The commandment is incumbent upon the individual [contractor] to seek ways to employ more Jewish workers while advancing his business toward greater efficiency and profitability.”
But until such time as the individual finds a way to fulfill the commandment that workers of your own city take precedence, they leave the responsibility on the state’s doorstep: “In principle, it seems it is the responsibility of the Jewish state to see that every Jew has a respectable living.” Thus as long as the state does not see to providing them with cheap Jewish labor, ruled the rabbis, “it is not possible to impose this obligation on the individual employer, who must compete in the market against competitors who employ far cheaper workers.”
The El Matan outpost
In a column on June 6, 2009, I wrote that work in the vicinity of El Matan was being carried out on private land belonging to the village of Tulat. I want to clarify that the work is being done on state land that is under the jurisdiction of the settlement of Ma’aleh Shomron. It was not my intention to claim that the synagogue there was built on private land belonging to any particular resident of the village of Tulat, and it was certainly not my intention to harm the inhabitants of El Matan.
The term “state land” refers to approximately 1 million dunams that the state has expropriated in the West Bank under a law dating from Ottoman times. A large part of this land was earmarked for building settlements exclusively for Jews.
EDITOR: The Success of the BDS campaign is getting to Israel’s guts!
The following hysterical article is evidence not just of the state of irrationality that Israeli society and its elites are now in, but also very clear evidence of the success of the campaign, and all those who tols us for years that it cannot succeed (including our great friend Chomsky) should now seriously rethink their positions and join the BDS camp!
By Karni Eldad
The Mishor Adumim industrial zone in the West Bank is home to a cosmetics plant that sells 70 percent of its products to Palestinians. Recently, however, there has been a slight turnaround in relations between the factory and its customers. The Palestinian Authority ruled − in a presidential order, not the small-scale campaign of a few − to stop buying Israeli products manufactured east of the Green Line.
How is such an order enforced? Simple. The life of the factory sales manager is threatened, and he is then given an offer he can’t refuse: sell the factory at a ludicrous price, and we’ll transfer it to PA control, because we won’t be buying your products in any case.
Those who silently stood by as Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad burned Israeli goods made in the West Bank simply accepted the presidential decree. Moreover, the PA recently established a “National Honor Fund” to finance its boycott activities, to which it injects $150,000 a month. Whence the money? International donations meant to support political institutions.
Israel remained silent last month when the so-called “committee against distributing settlement goods” confiscated and destroyed 7.5 tons of watermelons grown in West Bank fields. Israel stays mum when the Arabs work to impose an economic embargo on settlement products, and when the PA imposes the same on Israeli mobile phone companies, which are not centered in the West Bank. It is indeed remarkable that the cellular boycott has been put in place exactly when the son of a high-ranking PA official is launching a company that will distribute the same services.
Amid the presidential order on settlement-made goods, Palestinians have been forbidden to work in the factories producing these goods or in construction in settlements. For now, the order applies only to new workers, but veteran employees have been offered one month’s pay from the PA as an incentive to quit.
In the wake of the accursed Oslo Accords, the 1994 Paris Protocol was signed, establishing interim economic ties between Israel and the PA. The boycott against settlement merchandise is a clear violation of this agreement, by which both sides pledged not to undermine the other’s economy.
The same agreement also determined customs and tax issues between Israel and the Palestinians. When a Palestinian individual or company imports merchandise from abroad, Israel collects customs taxes and transfers them to PA coffers. In total, more than $1 billion is collected annually. Reason dictates that in the case of such a flagrant violation of the Paris Protocol by the Palestinians, we should collect the money lost by Israeli companies due to the boycott by recouping it from customs money we transferred to the Palestinians. Such a move requires no law, only a modicum of national honor − and it’s a step that could bring the economic embargo to an immediate end. At a recent meeting of the Knesset Finance Committee, Manufacturers Association President Shraga Brosh − hardly viewed as a staunch rightist − proposed another solution: barring the export of Palestinian goods from Israeli ports.
With Israeli manufacturers facing closure in the face of a Palestinian presidential order, I would expect to hear an outcry from lawmakers from every hue of the political spectrum. The Palestinians’ blatant violation of the Paris Protocol is an affront, but silence in the face of it is a crime.
Official reportedly prevented from taking up embassy post after Israel refuses to commit itself not to misuse British passports
The father of Palestinian militant Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was assassinated in Dubai, with his photograph. Israel has never admitted any role in the killing Photograph: Hatem Moussa/AP
Britain has refused to allow Israel’s Mossad secret service to send a representative back to the country’s London embassy following the row over the killing of a Hamas operative by agents using forged UK passports.
Israel’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper reported yesterday that the Foreign Office is digging in its heels because Israel is refusing to commit itself not to misuse British passports in future clandestine operations.
Neither Britain nor Israel gave any details of the embassy official who was ordered to leave the country in March after an investigation by the Serious Organised Crime Agency showed that the Mossad was behind the passport theft.
But the official was understood to be an intelligence officer who was known to the UK authorities and worked as official liaison with Britain’s MI6. There was no suggestion the officer was personally involved in the passports affair.
Israel has never admitted any role in February’s Dubai assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was described as a key figure in smuggling Iranian weapons into the Gaza Strip on behalf of the Palestinian Islamist movement. It has abstained from signing any material that might be construed as a confession.
Britain had made clear in public statements and private meetings with the Israelis that it expected formal guarantees that there would be no repeat of the passport cloning. The real documents belonged to Britons living in Israel.
Forged or stolen Irish, Australian, French and German passports were also used by the hit squad, whose operation – including the use of elaborate disguises – was extensively recorded by CCTV cameras in the emirate.
Israel conspicuously refrained from retaliating for the expulsion of the Mossad officer, apparently accepting that it was no more than a slap on the wrist before a return to business as usual.
The Mossad and MI6 are known to have a close working relationship especially over terrorism – despite political differences over the peace process, settlements and the Palestinians between the UK and Israeli governments. Iran’s nuclear programme is likely to be another high-priority issue of common concern.
Yediot reported that Israeli security officials were concerned about the breakdown in relations between the two agencies. “It is estimated that the affair will only be resolved, if at all, after this week’s UK general elections,” the paper said.
The Foreign Office said it had not been approached by the Israelis about a replacement for the expelled official. “However we look to Israel to rebuild the trust we believe is required for the full and open relationship we would like,” said a spokesman. “We have asked for specific assurances from Israel, which would clearly be a positive step towards rebuilding that trust. Any Israeli request for the diplomat to be replaced would be considered against the context of these UK requests.”
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in his hotel room in Dubai on 19 January
Israel is yet to replace a diplomat expelled after forged British passports were used in the killing of a Hamas leader, it has emerged.
The Foreign Office said no request had been made to replace the official, but added that “specific assurances” would be sought from Israel if one was made.
The Israeli Embassy in London refused to comment on the situation.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in Dubai in January, allegedly by Israeli agents using forged foreign passports.
It is believed the fake passports – 12 of them British – were used in the plot to murder Mr Mabhouh, the founder of Hamas’s military wing, in his hotel room in Dubai on 19 January.
Dubai officials said they were “99% certain” that agents from Mossad, the Israeli secret service, were behind the killing.
We look to Israel to rebuild the trust we believe is required for the full and open relationship we would like
Foreign Office
The names and details on the UK passports used by eight of the 12 suspects belonged to British-Israeli citizens living in Israel – all of whom have denied involvement in Mr Mabhouh’s murder.
Their passports had been copied and new photographs inserted.
During the ensuing diplomatic row, in March, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said there were “compelling reasons” to believe Israel was responsible for the forgeries.
He said the misuse of British passports was “intolerable”.
Israel’s ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, said he was “disappointed”, but Israel confirmed there would be no tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsion.
Israel has previously said there is no proof it was behind the killing at a Dubai hotel.
The name of the expelled diplomat has not been released.
‘Specific assurances’
Several newspapers have reported that the person expelled was a Mossad representative and claimed that UK authorities are now preventing Israel from replacing the individual until it agrees not to use British passports in the same way again.
The Foreign Office said: “We have had no approach from the Israelis about a replacement. However we look to Israel to rebuild the trust we believe is required for the full and open relationship we would like.
“We have asked for specific assurances from Israel, which would clearly be a positive step towards rebuilding that trust. Any Israeli request for the diplomat to be replaced would be considered against the context of these UK requests.”
Dubai police said forensic tests showed Mabhouh was drugged with a quick-acting muscle relaxant and then suffocated.
Earlier reports had said he may have been strangled or killed by a massive electric shock.
“Proximity talks” were meant to have begun, but the start has been delayed
US Middle East envoy George Mitchell has met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the start of indirect talks with the Palestinians.
The three-hour meeting in Jerusalem was described as “good and productive” by the US state department.
But no announcements were made and Israeli officials have said the two are to meet again on Thursday.
Mr Mitchell is due to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Friday in Ramallah.
The meeting with Mr Netanyahu had been planned as the start of “proximity talks” but the Palestine Liberation Organisation has still to agree to them.
The PLO said it would meet on Saturday to finally decide if talks can proceed.
Mr Abbas has said the talks need to immediately grapple with the toughest issues at the heart of the conflict.
He said first on the agenda should be the borders of a future Palestinian state.
But the issue, connected to the building of Jewish-only neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, has been a stumbling block.
The talks were delayed in March by a row which strained Israeli-US relations.
The Palestinians pulled out after an announcement that Israel had approved plans for new homes in the East Jerusalem settlement of Ramat Shlomo during a visit to Israel by US Vice-President Joe Biden.
Earlier Obama administration adviser David Axelrod said the issue of Jerusalem would come at the end of the programme for talks.
Israel has occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 1967. It insists Jerusalem will remain its undivided capital, although Palestinians want to establish their capital in the east of the city.
Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements in the West Bank, among a Palestinian population of about 2.5 million.
The settlements are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
Israel and the Palestinians must show restraint in the wake of a recent bout of violence, a U.K. official said Friday, just hours after Israel war planes struck the Gaza Strip in retaliation of recent rocket fire.
A spokesman for the U.K. Foreign Office said that London was “concerned by today’s strikes and the escalation of violence in Gaza and southern Israel over the past week.”
Talking to the U.K. newspaper The Telegraph, the official called “on all parties to show restraint,” adding that Britain encouraged “Israelis and Palestinians to focus efforts on negotiation and to engage urgently in US-backed proximity talks.”
Earlier Friday, a Qassam rocket was reported to have been fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, a report which the IDF Spokesman’s Office said was the result of a false alarm.
At least 35 rockets were fired at Israel over the course of March.
Also Friday, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh called on the international community must intervene in the latest cycle of violence between Gaza and Israel in order to avoid a possible escalation.
Haniyeh urged the world must stop “the escalation and aggression,” according to a Channel 10 report. He was likely referring to the Israel Air Force strikes, which destroyed what an Israel Defense Forces spokesman described as Palestinian munitions sites.
“We are contacting the other factions in order to reach an internal consensus as to the measures we may take in order to protect our people and strengthen our unity,” Haniyeh told reporters in Gaza.
Friday’s IAF air strikes were Israel’s response to a Palestinian short-range rocket that was fired across the border into Israel on Thursday, an IDF spokesman said. The attack, which went unclaimed by any Palestinian faction, caused no damage.
Four air strikes blew up two caravans near the town of Khan Younis, witnesses and Hamas officials said. There were no casualties.
A fifth missile hit a cheese factory in Gaza City, setting it on fire, witnesses and Hamas officials said. Hospital officials said two children were slightly wounded by flying debris.
Helicopters struck twice in the central refugee camp of Nusseirat, destroying a metal foundry. There were no casualties.
An IDF spokesman confirmed the attacks, saying they had targeted two weapons-manufacturing plants and two arms caches.
Last Friday, Major Eliraz Peretz and Staff Sergeant Ilan Sviatkovsky were killed while pursuing a group of Palestinian militants trying to lay mines near the border fence. Two other soldiers were wounded in the incident, and two militants were killed.
Three children injured in Israeli air strikes after Palestinian militants step up rocket attack
Palestinians walk past what Hamas officials say is a cheese factory destroyed in an Israeli air strike. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/REUTERS
Israeli jets and helicopters have attacked Gaza, injuring three children and hitting what the Israeli military said were weapons manufacturing and storage sites.
The attacks continue the escalation in violence around Gaza in recent weeks. A day earlier Israeli had dropped leaflets in southern Gaza warning of an attack.
The number of rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian militants has begun to increase and a week ago two soldiers and two Palestinian gunmen were killed in the most serious clashes on the border for more than a year.
There were at least seven Israeli missile strikes overnight. Two caravans near the southern town of Khan Younis were hit as well as a cheese factory in Gaza City and a metal foundry in the Nuseirat refugee camp, according to reports. Hamas said a complex it built for making movies was damaged, the Associated Press reported.
The Israel defence forces (IDF) said a rocket was fired into southern Israel on Thursday and there were nearly 20 rocket and mortar attacks in March. Two weeks ago a rocket killed a Thai worker in Israel.
“The IDF will not tolerate any attempt to harm the citizens of the state of Israel and will continue to operate firmly against anyone who uses terror against it. The IDF holds Hamas as solely responsible for maintaining peace and quiet in the Gaza Strip,” the military said.
Britain today called for restraint and urged Israel and the Palestinians to renew talks. A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: “We are concerned by today’s strikes and the escalation of violence in Gaza and southern Israel over the past week. We encourage Israelis and Palestinians to focus efforts on negotiation and to engage urgently in US-backed proximity talks.”
Hamas, the Islamist movement that won Palestinian elections four years ago and controls Gaza, has tried in recent months to curb rocket fire. But it also said its fighters were involved in a gun battle a week ago in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and released video footage apparently taken during the fight.
Today Hamas said it had contacted armed groups in Gaza in an apparent attempt to rein in their attacks.
A statement by the Hamas government accused Israel of an escalation against the territory. But it also said the Hamas government was “making contact with the factions to safeguard internal agreement”.
Israel led a devastating war into Gaza in January last year that killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians. Thirteen Israelis died. For months afterwards the area was quiet, with both sides apparently keen to prevent further fighting.
Israel is continuing a tight economic blockade on Gaza, preventing exports and limiting imports to a small number of aid and food items.
EDITOR: Democracy of Silence
For over three months Israel has silenced this bizarre affair, in which the army and the judges operate illegally, in order to silence two journalist who have found the evidence that the IOF murders Palestinians despite a High Court order to the contrary. In this democracy, you are allowed to say what you want, until you find yourself in jail, at which point even the papers are not allowed to writye about it – the Israeli papers have not yet reported this latest news…
‘Haaretz’ writer fled to London fearing charges over exposé on Palestinian’s killing
By Kim Sengupta, Diplomatic Correspondent
Friday, 2 April 2010
An Israeli journalist is in hiding in Britain, The Independent can reveal, over fears that he may face charges in the Jewish state in connection with his investigation into the killing of a Palestinian in the West Bank.
Uri Blau, a reporter at Israel’s liberal newspaper, Haaretz, left town three months ago for Asia and is now in London. Haaretz is understood to be negotiating the terms of his return to Israel with prosecutors, according to an Israeli source, who declined to be identified, because of the sensitivity of the situation.
The news of Mr Blau’s extended absence comes just days after it emerged that another Israeli journalist, Anat Kam, has been held under house arrest for the last three months on charges that she leaked classified documents to the press while completing her military service.
Although no media outlet or journalist has been specifically named as the recipient of the classified information, there is speculation on Israeli blogs that Ms Kam gave documents to Mr Blau that formed the basis of a story he wrote in November 2008.
In his article for Haaretz, Mr Blau reported that one of two Islamic Jihad militants killed in Jenin in June 2007 had been targeted for assassination in apparent violation of a ruling issued six months earlier by Israel’s supreme court. While not outlawing assassinations in the West Bank altogether, the ruling heavily restricted the circumstances in which they were permissible, effectively saying that they should not take place if arrest was possible.
In an unusual move, Israel has placed a gagging order on national media, preventing them from reporting any aspect of the Kam case. Israel’s Channel Ten and Haaretz are expected to challenge this order on 12 April.
According to the court order, Ms Kam, 23, is being held on “espionage” charges. It alleges that she passed classified documents to a male journalist while working as a clerk in the Israel Defence Forces Central Command during her military service.
She was arrested more than a year after Mr Blau’s report, which was cleared by military censors at the time of publication, when she was working for the news service Walla, until recently owned by Haaretz.
Ms Kam denies all the charges. Her trial has reportedly been set for 14 April and she could face a lengthy prison sentence if convicted. Mr Blau did not respond to requests for comment; his friends and colleagues refused to discuss the case in detail.
Dov Alfon, Haaretz’s editor-in-chief, said in an emailed statement: “Haaretz has a 90-year-long tradition of protecting its reporters from government pressures, and Uri Blau is getting all the help we can provide him with.”
The move to gag Israel-based media has sparked fevered debate on Jewish blogs, which have freely reported the story. Bloggers have railed against the blackout, saying it represents a critical challenge to the freedom of the press.
“I do not believe that a citizen can be arrested and tried for suspected security offences right under our noses without anyone knowing anything about it,” wrote former Haaretz editor Hanoch Marmari in an eloquent cri de coeur on the Seventh Eye website.
“Trials do not take place here in darkened dungeons, nor do we have show trials behind glass or chicken wire. I have no doubt that such a strange, terrible and baseless scenario cannot take place in such a sophisticated democracy as our own.”
Woman faces treason trial after allegedly leaking documents that suggest military breached court order on West Bank assassinations
Anat Kam is accused of copying documents while she was a soldier on her national service and passing them on to Ha’aretz.
An Israeli journalist has been under secret house arrest since December on charges that she leaked highly sensitive, classified military documents that suggest the Israeli military breached a court order on assassinations in the occupied West Bank.
Anat Kam, 23, goes on trial in two weeks on treason and espionage charges and could face up to 14 years in jail. A court-imposed gagging order, proposed by the state and more recently by the defence, is preventing media coverage of the arrest and charges in Israel.
Kam is reportedly accused of copying military documents while she was a soldier on national service and then passing them to an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. Kam denies the charges. Her lawyers declined to respond to repeated requests for comment.
A Haaretz journalist, Uri Blau, who has written several stories critical of the Israeli military and who has been linked in internet reports to the case, has left Israel and is now in London, apparently for fear he will be targeted for his reporting. Haaretz and Channel 10, an Israeli television station, will challenge the media gagging order at a hearing on 12 April, two days before Kam’s trial is due to start at the Tel Aviv district court.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which reported the story from New York this week, said the investigation into Kam was jointly conducted by Israeli military intelligence, the police and the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service. The Israeli military declined to comment on the case.
During her military service, Kam reportedly worked in the office of a senior Israeli general and is accused of copying classified documents from the office. After her time in the army she became a journalist, working for the Israeli news website Walla, which was previously partly owned by Haaretz but entirely editorially independent. Reports suggest she is accused of leaking the documents to Haaretz.
Attention has focused on an investigation Haaretz published on the Israeli military’s assassination policy in November 2008, written by Uri Blau and headlined “Licence to Kill”. He reported that the military, the Israel Defence Force, had been carrying out assassinations of Palestinian militants in the West Bank in contravention of an Israeli high court ruling, which said efforts should be made first to arrest suspected militants rather than assassinating them.
The story described meetings in the spring of 2007 in which senior Israeli generals discussed a mission to assassinate Ziad Subahi Mahmad Malaisha, a senior leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The army chief, General Gabi Ashkenazi, allegedly approved the operation but said Malaisha’s car was not to be attacked if there was “more than one unidentified passenger” in it.
Malaisha and another Islamic Jihad leader were killed by the military in June that year, and the military claimed at the time that the militants had first opened fire at the soldiers.
One of the generals involved in the meetings, Major-General Yair Naveh, was quoted in the story as defending the killings as legal. The AP reported that Kam served in Naveh’s office during her military service.
The Haaretz piece was accompanied by copies of military documents but it was approved by the military censor before publication, the Guardian understands. The story was published more than a year before Kam was arrested and was followed by several other articles by Blau that were similarly critical of the military.
Dov Alfon, editor of Haaretz, said: “Uri Blau is in London. He will be there until his editors decide otherwise. We are ready to continue to keep him in London as long as needed. Uri Blau published a lot of articles in Haaretz. All of them are dynamite stuff and it is clear of course that the authorities are not satisfied with these kind of revelations in a major newspaper.
“We understand this but we also understand that Israel is still a democracy and therefore we intend to continue to publish whatever public interest demands and our reporters can reveal.”
EDITOR: The trend is now setting, and gaining pace!
A number of international moves to limit dealing with Israel is signaling the growing disenchantment with Israel, and a more robust attitude towards its illegal occupation and its iniquities. More action is taken daily against it, not just by political organisations on the left, but now also on behalf of governments which are on the whole supportive of Israel. This is likely to continue and deepen, as Israeli atrocities worsen.
A group of British lawmakers are expected to call Tuesday for the reevaluation of arms deals with Israel after a recently published report claimed that British weapons were “almost certainly” used in Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, The Guardian reported.
“It is regrettable that arms exports to Israel were almost certainly used in Operation Cast Lead,” the U.K. daily The Guardian quoted the Commons committee on strategic export controls report.
“This is in direct contravention to the U.K. government’s policy that U.K. arms exports to Israel should not be used in the occupied territories,” the report said.
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In April 2009 Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband said that the U.K. would review all its weapons exports to Israel, in the wake of the Israel Defense Forces’ recent offensive on the Gaza Strip.
According to the report, U.K. arms deals with Israel in 2008 totaled at over £27.5 million, and over £4 million worth of government exporting licenses, the Guardian reported.
The equipment the U.K. sold to Israel which probably included components in cockpit displays in United States F-16 combat aircrafts and other parts installed in the U.S. Apache helicopters purchased by Israel and used during the Gaza offensive, the report concluded.
Miliband told the British Parliament shortly after the war in Gaza that all export licenses would be reviewed in light of the war in Gaza, which ended in mid-January.
A cross-party group of MPs will call today for a review of the way arms sales are approved after the government admitted British equipment was “almost certainly” used in the assault on Gaza last year.
“It is regrettable that arms exports to Israel were almost certainly used in Operation Cast Lead [the attack on Gaza],” the Commons committee on strategic export controls says in a report published. “This is in direct contravention to the UK government’s policy that UK arms exports to Israel should not be used in the occupied territories.”
The MPs say they welcome the government’s subsequent decision to revoke five export licences for equipment destined for the Israeli navy but “broader lessons” must be learned from a review to ensure British arms exports to Israel are not used in the occupied territories in future.
After the attack on Gaza, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, told the Commons that all future applications for arms-related exports to Israel “will be assessed taking into account the recent conflict”. He said Israeli equipment used in the attack on Gaza “almost certainly” contained British-supplied components included in cockpit displays in US F-16 combat aircraft sold to Israel, and components for the fire control and radar systems, navigation equipment and engine assemblies for US Apache helicopters.
The equipment also included armoured personnel carriers adapted from Centurion tanks sold to Israel in the late 1950s and components for the guns and radar in Israeli Sa’ar-class corvettes which took part in the operation.
Miliband said the government was looking into all existing licences to see whether any of them needed to be reconsidered. He added that he believed British export controls were amongst the strongest and most effective in the world.
Government-approved arms exports to Israel were worth more than £27.5m in 2008, according to the the report. Government departments approved nearly £4m worth of export licences for weapons and equipment with dual military and civil uses in the nine months after the Gaza attack, according to official statistics.
Though this suggests a significant drop, the figures show Britain was continuing to sell Israel a wide range of military equipment, including small-arms ammunition and parts for sniper rifles.
Most of the equipment was components for large items, including parts for ground-based radar, military aircraft engines, military aircraft navigation equipment, military communications and unmanned drones.
Among approved exports were remote ground-sensor systems, electronic warfare equipment “components for sniper rifles”, “small arms ammunition” and “test equipment for recognition/identification equipment”.
The report also reveals that the government decided to revoke a number of licences for arms sales to Sri Lanka. It says it regrets British arms were sold to Sri Lanka during ceasefire periods in the conflict with Tamil Tiger rebels.
Amnesty International called on the government to act swiftly to close loopholes allowing “brass-plate” companies registered in the UK to trade arms to countries where human rights violations were committed.
It backed the committee’s call for a robust international arms trade treaty. Amnesty International’s arms programme director, Oliver Sprague, said: “World leaders and campaigners have worked far too hard on the treaty for it to become a worthless piece of paper that will do little to protect people from armed violence.”
The biggest Swedish pension fund has barred Israeli defense electronics company Elbit Systems from its investment portfolios on ethical grounds, Israel Radio reported Monday.
Following the lead of Norway’s state oil fund, the Första AP-Fonden pension fund said it had banned investment in Elbit because the Israeli company had built and is operating a surveillance system for the much debated West Bank separation barrier.
Critics of the controversial barrier argue that it is an illegal attempt to annex Palestinian land under the guise of security and that it severely restricts Palestinians who live nearby, particularly their ability to travel freely within the West Bank and to access work in Israel. Proponents, however, argue that the barrier has greatly reduced the incidence of suicide bombers coming from the West Bank and carrying out terror attacks within Israel.
According to the Swedish website the Swedish Wire, the pension fund said in a statement that “the Ethical Council recommended that Elbit Systems Ltd. should be excluded from each portfolio because it deems that the company can be linked to violations of fundamental conventions and norms.”
In its annual report, the ethical council wrote that “the Council has noted that both the European Union and the Swedish government consider the part of the separation barrier being built on West Bank to be illegal under international law. This position is also supported by the advisory opinion from 2004 by the International Court of Justice regarding the separation barrier.”
Israel has so far completed 413 kilometers (256 miles) of the planned 709-kilometer (435-mile) barrier, according to UN figures.
The Swedish fund, which only had small investments in Elbit according to its ethics council chairwoman Annika Andersson, said that Grupo Ferrovial, PetroChina, Thales and Yahoo had successfully addressed its concerns about ethics violations.
Last September, Norway’s state pension fund, one of the world’s biggest investors, also banned Elbit from its portfolio, prompting the Israeli Foreign Ministry to summon Norway’s ambassador in protest at the move.
Well, we all know Passover id supposed to be about freedom. Or so were are told. Now many Jews will sit tonight and sing lovely songs about freedom, end to slavery and suffering, and what not. Most of them will not for a moment think that it is not the Jews today who are in slavery, but the Palestinians; It is not the Jews who will go short on food, medicines, water, housing, gas, electricity, but again, the people of Gaza. It is not the Jews whose children will be taken by the soldiers to the many prisons, but again, the Palestinian children.
So, if there was some humane message in the Passover myth, it is lost on the very people who should know better, who should know that any nations which occupies, brutalizes and oppresses another nation, is not itself free. There no freedom to the occupied, or the occupier.
By Akiva Eldar
One of the harshest of the 10 plagues has smitten the children of Israel this Passover, and they are stumbling about in pitch darkness, bumping blindly into anyone in their way as they head toward the edge of the precipice. Warm friends, cool friends, icy enemies: Jordan and Turkey, Brazil and Britain, Germany and Australia – it’s all the same.
And if that’s not enough, the myopic Jewish state also has gone and collided head-on with the ally that offers existential support. Israel has become an environmental hazard and its own greatest threat. For 43 years, Israel has been ruled by people who have refused to see reality. They speak of “united Jerusalem,” knowing that no other country has recognized the annexation of the eastern part of the city. They sent 300,000 people to settle land they know does not belong to them. As early as September 1967, Theodor Meron, then the legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, said there was a categorical prohibition against civilian settlement in occupied territories, under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Meron – who would become the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and is now a member of the Appeals Chamber for both that court and a similar one for Rwanda – wrote to prime minister Levi Eshkol in a top-secret memorandum: “I fear there is great sensitivity in the world today about the whole question of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, and any legal arguments that we try to find will not remove the heavy international pressure, from friendly states as well.”
It is true that for many years, we have managed to grope our way through the dark and keep the pressure at bay. We did so with the assistance of our neighbors, who were afflicted with the same shortsightedness.
On Sunday, however, the Arab League marked the eighth anniversary of its peace proposals, which offer Israel normalization in exchange for an end to the occupation and an agreed solution to the refugee problem, in accordance with UN Resolution 194. But Israel behaves as if it had never heard of this historic initiative. For the last year, it was too busy realizing its dubious right to establish an illegal settlement in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, turning a blind eye to reality, has tried to persuade the world that what applies to Tel Aviv also applies to Sheikh Jarrah. He simply refuses to see that the world is sick of us. It’s easier for him to focus on his similarly nearsighted followers in AIPAC. Tonight they’ll all swear “Next year in rebuilt Jerusalem” – including the construction in Ramat Shlomo, of course.
Hillary Clinton is not Jewish, but it was she who had to remind the AIPAC Jews what demography will do to their favorite Jewish democracy in the Middle East. A few days earlier, she had come back from Moscow, where she took part in one of the Quartet’s most important meetings. Israeli politicians and media were too busy with the cold reception awaiting Netanyahu at the White House. They never gave any thought to the decision by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations to turn Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s state-building plan from a unilateral initiative into an international project.
The Quartet declared that it was backing the plan, proposed in August 2009, to establish a Palestinian state within 24 months. This was an expression of the Palestinians’ serious commitment that the state have a just and proper government and be a responsible neighbor. This means Israel has less than a year and a half to come to an agreement with the Palestinians on the permanent borders, Jerusalem and the refugees. If the Palestinians stick to Fayyad’s path, in August 2011, the international community, led by the United States, can be expected to recognize the West Bank and East Jerusalem as an independent country occupied by a foreign power. Will Netanyahu still be trying to explain that Jerusalem isn’t a settlement?
For 43 years, the Israeli public – schoolchildren, TV viewers, Knesset members and Supreme Court judges – have been living in the darkness of the occupation, which some call liberation. The school system and its textbooks, the army and its maps, the language and the “heritage” have all been mobilized to help keep Israelis blind to the truth. Luckily, the Gentiles clearly see the connection between the menace of Iranian control spreading across the Middle East and the curse of Israeli control over Islamic holy places.
Monday night, when we read the Passover Haggadah, we should note the plague that follows darkness. That may open our eyes.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Monday warned that Hamas that Israel would react harshly to any escalation along its border with the Gaza Strip.
“The enemy in the Gaza Strip has paid and will continue to pay a heavy price if it tries to shake the equilibrium along the border,” Barak said.
His comments as he visited troops from the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani Brigade who took part in an exchange of fire that killed two of their comrades at the border this weekend.
Likud minister Gilad Erdan Also called for Israel to react strongly to the incident.
“There must be a clear and decisive response, although at this stage there is not a need for a wide-ranging operation on the scale of Cast Lead,” Erdan told Israel radio on Monday, refering to Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza last year, in which some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued his own warning on Sunday, saying Israel would retaliate against any attack on its citizens or soldiers and that Hamas would be made to be held accountable for actions.
The two deaths in Gaza clashes on Friday have increased concern in the IDF that Hamas is trying to alter the situation along the Gaza Strip border fence, possibly by targeting of Israeli patrols.
“Israel’s policy of retaliation is forceful and decisive,” Netanyahu said during the weekly government meeting in Jerusalem, asserting that Israel would “retaliate decisively against any attack on our citizens and soldiers.”
“This policy is well-known and will continue. Hamas and the other terror organizations need to know that they are the ones that are responsible for their own actions,” Netanyahu said.
MI6 suspects that airline staff working for Mossad may have copied passports of Britons flying to Israel, News of the World reports, adding authorities also concerned about security searches carried out on British officials attending terrorism conference in country last September
The British secret intelligence service (MI6) suspects that airline staff working for the Israeli secret service Mossad may have copied thousands of British passports, some of which were used in the assassination of senior Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, the News of the World tabloid reported Sunday.
According to the report, British authorities are also concerned about security searches carried out on British officials attending a terrorism conference in Israel last September.
MI6 believe that Britons flying to Israel have been targeted for months and their documents have been cloned, the newspaper said, adding that the Foreign Office held top level talks last week on whether to issue a warning against travelling with certain airlines.
The forging method was already revealed last week in a statement made by the British government to the parliament after the use of British citizens’ identities in the Dubai assassination was revealed. According to the statement, 12 passports used by the assassins were cloned in different airports while the British nationals were on their way to Israel. They were taken away for “examinations” which lasted 20 minutes each.
In addition to the investigation into the falsification of British passports, the United Kingdom authorities are also checking whether Israeli intelligence elements took advantage of a visit to Israel by British security officials in order to clone their passports.
British police sources said the officials had undergone strict security checks upon arriving in Israel.
“It was said to be routine but the searches did not apply to all nations,” a source told the newspaper. “There is now a real concern that some of these high-ranking officers and officials have also had documents cloned.”
The UK expressed its discontent after Dubai authorities revealed that British identities were used in the assassination and launched an investigation into the matter. One of the moves taken against Israel was the decision to expel an Israeli diplomat serving in the kingdom, which was said to be the Mossad representative in London.
It was also reported that Israel would not be allowed to replace its Mossad representative in London should it not provide Britain with a public assurance that UK citizens’ passports will never be used again for secret operations.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told lawmakers last week that Israel’s actions had put British nationals at risk and showed a “profound disregard” for Britain’s sovereignty. He said the fact that Israel is a longtime ally with close business, personal and political ties to Britain “adds insult to injury” in this case.
Miliband noted that a thorough British investigation concluded that Israel was behind the forging of British passports used by the alleged assassins in Dubai.
There was talk in the Israeli media on an attack planned for the spring for along time now, at least since the summer of 2009. The pundits seem to differ about its location, arguing the toss between Gaza and Lebanon, with some speaking of both. The events of the weekend in which the IOF lost two of its soldiers to Hamas, seem to be confirming such rumours; it was the IOF which moved across into Gaza on this occasion, seeking a conflict actively, and following it with tanks, artillery air-force and navy bombardments. Even the US in Vietnam has not used such force to crack a nut, and in pure military terms the whole episode is bizarre, and bears the signs of a trap set by Hamas into which the IOF was lured. While it is difficult to see what more can be achieved by another full scale attack on Gaza, this is not something which might hold Israel back from executing such a folly, with its cost to the Palestinian population being even more devastation than the 22 Day invasion last year. While Steinitz is on the extreme right of the Israeli Knesset, Like Lieberman, he is at the heart of Netanyahu’s government, and used as his speaker on many occasions.
Israel will retaliate against any attack on its citizens or soldiers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, adding that Hamas would be made to be held accountable for actions.
The PM’s comments come following the death of two soldiers in Gaza clashes on Friday, which increased concern in the Israel Defense Forces that Hamas is trying to alter the situation along the Gaza Strip border fence, which will result in their targeting of Israeli patrols.
“Israel’s policy of retaliation is forceful and decisive,” the PM said during the weekly government meeting in Jerusalem, asserting that Israel would “retaliate decisively against any attack on our citizens and soldiers.”
“This policy is well-known and will continue. Hamas and the other terror organizations need to know that they are the ones that are responsible for their own actions,” Netanyahu said.
A statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office on Sunday also referred to recent anonymous quotes reportedly originating from Netanyahu aides attacking U.S. President Barack Obama’s policy in the Middle East.
“The prime minister emphatically rejects the anonymous quotes about President Obama that a newspaper attributed to one of his confidants, and he condemns them,” the statement said.
Netanyahu was at pains to hammer home the message, telling reporters at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting: “I have heard over recent days anonymous and improper remarks in the media about the U.S. administration and American president.”
“I want to say clearly, these comments are unacceptable to me. They do not come from anyone representing me. The relations between Israel and the United States are those of allies and friends, and are based on tradition spanning many years.”
On the stalled peace talks with the Palestinian Authority the PM said that Israel continued to see a “Palestinian lack of flexibility. There are no signs of them becoming more moderate.”
“I don’t expect the discussions and declarations in the Arab League will make the process any easier,” Netanyahu added, saying that nonetheless Israel would “maintain a restrained framework for negotiations and continue our dealings with the American administration in an attempt to renew talks.”
Netanyahu’s statement came after Likud Minister Yuval Steinitz told Israel Radio earlier Sunday that Israel would reoccupy Gaza if it felt it had no other choice.
Finance Minister Steinitz said that Israel must deal with Hamas, and may have to reenter Gaza to destroy the regime.
“Israel won’t allow Hamas to arm with long-range missiles,” Steinitz said.
Major Eliraz Peretz and Staff Sergeant Ilan Sviatkovsky were killed Friday while pursuing a group of Palestinian militants trying to lay mines near the border fence. Two other soldiers were wounded in the incident, and two militants were killed.
Any change along the fence may present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with the first military challenge of its tenure. For the past year the situation has been calm, in great part as a result of the two wars conducted by the Olmert government: the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead.
Intelligence sources in Israel have recently raised the question whether Hamas was turning a blind eye to the rocket attacks, a possible change of tactics. Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Channel 2 on Saturday that Hamas is trying to change the “rules of the game” in Gaza, and will have to pay the price for this.
Spokesmen on behalf of Hamas claimed Friday evening that their gunmen acted defensively after an IDF force entered their area. In this they hinted that there was no change in policy from the point of view of Hamas. Responsibility for the incident was also claimed by three smaller factions in the Gaza Strip, including Islamic Jihad.
It is possible that Hamas was involved in the incident, in the mortar fire that was used to support the Palestinian gunmen during the exchanges of fire.
The incident comes at a convenient time for Hamas, on the eve of the Arab League summit, but for Netanyahu the timing is terrible, with pressure from the Americans and the international community on the need to alleviate the Israeli siege on the Strip.
In the interivew with Israel Radio, Steinitz also slammed the U.S. administration, saying the pressure it is putting on Israel is just worsening the situation.
“American pressure isn’t conductive and isn’t fair, because the Netanyahu government made two enormous gestures toward the Palestinians: The opportunity to improve the Palestinian economy, and the settlement freeze,” he said.
“The United States needs to understand that the atmosphere it created in the Middle East, that Washington is now less friendly to Israel, isn’t making the Palestinians more willing to compromise, it further adds to their rejection of the peace process.”
Stenitiz also stressed that it is necessary to make it clear to the Americans that they must focus on solutions to the Iranian nuclear threat.
The future of Jerusalem is one of the most emotive issues in the Middle East
By Jeremy Bowen
The Middle East is full of talk of war. Not today, tomorrow or perhaps even next year but the horizon is dark, and people who have to live with the Middle East’s grim collection of smouldering problems are finding it hard to look ahead with anything other than foreboding.
By the end of this year, if sanctions have not persuaded Iran to stop what many countries insist is a nuclear weapons programme, the war party in Israel will be pushing for military action.
South Lebanon is once again looking like a tinderbox.
Insults and threats have been bandied back and forth between Syria, Israel and Hezbollah.
In Washington DC, where I have been this week, analysts say Syria has been shipping bigger and better weapons to Hezbollah, its Lebanese ally. ‘Disastrous visit’
Israel assumes that there will be another war in Lebanon, and has been training its army to win it, which it could not do last time in 2006.
TIMELINE: ISRAEL-US ROW
9 Mar: Israel announces the building of 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem during visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden.
Mr Biden condemns the move
11 Mar: Mr Biden says there must be no delay in resuming Mid-East peace talks, despite the row
12 Mar: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the Israeli move is “deeply negative” for relations
15 Mar: The US says it is waiting for a “formal response” from Israel to its proposals to show it is committed to Mid-East peace
16 Mar: The US envoy to the Mid-East postpones a visit to Israel
17 Mar: President Obama denies there is a crisis with Israel
22 Mar: Hillary Clinton tells pro-Israel lobby group Aipac Israel has to make “difficult but necessary choices” if it wants peace with Palestinians.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu tells Aipac Israel has a “right to build” in Jerusalem
23 Mar: Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu meet behind closed doors with no media access
23 Mar: Jerusalem municipal government approves building of 20 new homes in East Jerusalem
24 Mar: Mr Netanyahu ends Washington trip talking of a “golden” solution amid US silence
And then there is the crisis between the United States, Israel and the Palestinians.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s disastrous visit to Washington DC has exposed just how bad this crisis and current US-Israeli relations are.
What is even more serious is that it is centred on the future of Jerusalem, which is about the single most emotive issue in the entire Middle East.
Mr Netanyahu returns home weakened, though his ministers are declaring their support. US President Barack Obama seems to see him as part of the problem.
The precise details of what happened in Washington between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu are emerging only slowly.
But it is clear that the Americans want Israel to freeze building for Jews in those parts of the holy city that Israel occupied and annexed in 1967.
The Obama administration has concluded that it will be impossible to negotiate peace while Israel continues to settle its people on occupied land.
Mr Netanyahu insists, long and loud, that he wants a peace deal if it guarantees Israeli security.
The Americans agree with that, but not with his insistence that Israel has the right to build whatever and wherever it wants in Jerusalem.
Israel’s claim that that the city is its sovereign capital is not accepted by its allies. Political vacuum
The Americans want to start peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Their plan was to wring concessions out of Mr Netanyahu while he was in Washington that they could take to the Palestinians to persuade them to take part.
The president of the Palestinian authority, Mahmoud Abbas, pulled out after the Israelis announced a big building project at the Ramat Shlomo settlement in occupied East Jerusalem.
The US Vice-President Joe Biden was in Jerusalem at the time to get the talks going. Embarrassed and angry, he condemned Israel’s plans.
Mr Netanyahu’s visit to Washington – far from ending the crisis between Israel and its most important ally – seems to have made things worse.
What is now forming around the row over Jerusalem is an old-fashioned Middle Eastern political vacuum.
When there is no political process to absorb some heat and give people even a glint of hope for the future, the result tends to be violent.
King Abdullah of Jordan, whose father made peace with Israel in 1994, has told newspapers in Amman that Israel needs to decide between war and peace. American pressure
If it wants peace, he says it has to stop settling Jews on occupied land.
The US State Department and the White House employ many Middle East experts who know that even if they manage to start negotiations the chances of success are low.
They are trying anyway, because the alternatives seem much worse.
But the reality is that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are in good shape to negotiate, even assuming that they want to try (in fact they have only dabbled with the idea because of American pressure).
Mr Netanyahu’s coalition government depends on the votes of nationalists who want no compromise with the Palestinians.
Mr Abbas is isolated and weak. It is hard to see how he could deliver any agreement he made when the Palestinian national movement is split down the middle between Fatah, his faction, and Hamas, which controls Gaza.
Mr Obama has declared that Middle East peace is a strategic priority for the United States.
But just glance across the region, from Jerusalem to Beirut, then on to Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran and further east to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Never mind making peace, just avoiding war in the places that are not already fighting is going to be hard enough, and perhaps impossible.
Israel prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu ran into a storm of criticism over his dispute with the White House.
Israeli PM under fire from press at home after dispute with US over new settlements in East Jerusalem Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP
The last week must rank as the worst of Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s second term as Israeli prime minister. It produced headlines no leader would want to read, even allowing for the sometimes excitable tone of the Israeli press: “Ambush in the White House”, “A hazing in stages” and “With his back to the wall.”
Netanyahu flew to Washington a week ago hoping to mend fences after an extraordinary rupture in relations but found only a frosty reception. Then Britain expelled an Israeli diplomat from London in anger at the “intolerable” forging of British passports for the hit squad who assassinated a Hamas man in Dubai. Hours later Netanyahu had a low-key meeting with Barack Obama that ended in serious disagreement and without the usual courtesy of a photographed handshake.
Perhaps it was inevitable that an American president who gave such a firm commitment to tackling the Middle East conflict so early in his term would eventually run up against one of the most rightwing coalition governments in Israel’s history.
Some in Israel are encouraged by the Obama administration’s strong words and its continued pressure for a halt to Jewish settlement-building in East Jerusalem. In its weekly newspaper advert on Friday, the peace group Gush Shalom pleaded with Obama: “Now heal us please from the malignant occupation. Many in Israel will be grateful.”
But this is not a majority view. More common is the sense that the world does not understand or sympathise with Israel, a feeling summed up by one Israeli newspaper columnist who wrote: “The US is abandoning us and effectively turning into Europe. From now on, we are completely alone.” Two opinion polls suggest many Israelis want their government to continue building settlements in East Jerusalem, even if it brings a rift with the Americans.
For years US governments have called on Israel to stop expanding its Jewish settlements in occupied territory – a settlement freeze is even a key plank of the roadmap introduced during the Bush presidency. But it is the Obama administration that has pushed hardest on it, so far without success. Netanyahu has introduced a partial, temporary curb on building in the West Bank, but insists building will continue in Jerusalem. “Jerusalem is not a settlement. It’s our capital,” he said. It is not the view of the international community, which does not recognise Israel’s occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem in the wake of the 1967 war.
Netanyahu’s position, together with his heavily circumscribed vision of a future Palestine, has meant no return to peace talks. But the more settlements are built and serious negotiations avoided, the less possible any conflict-ending, two-state peace deal becomes. And the fate of Jerusalem in particular is crucial to a broader agreement.
For now Netanyahu’s coalition is in robust form, unusually so for an Israeli government, and is backing its prime minister. But soon, like others before him, he may find himself forced to choose between maintaining the relationship with Israel’s greatest ally, the Americans, or maintaining the loyalty of his coalition, without whom he would be lost.
Opposition chairwoman tours Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, uses opportunity to slam PM on various issues. ‘We have a prime minister who succumbs to every political whim,’ she says
Kadima Chairwoman Tzipi Livni toured the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon Sunday along with other faction members, following the decision to relocate the hospital’s emergency room due to the discovery of ancient tombs in the site.
“My visit here is part of a battle for Judaism and not against it, as well as for the values of Israel as a Jewish and democratic country.”
Livni further added, “The story is not about the bones found here, but the decision-making process. We have a prime minister who succumbs to every whim of every political partner, and the entire public is paying the price for it.”
Livni also used the opportunity to slam Netanyahu for mounting tensions between Israel and the US and the government’s conduct in the international arena. “This Passover eve, every person should ask himself what has changed: The status of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, the status of women pushed to the back of the bus and the rights of patients, which have been pushed aside.
“We need different leadership and different policy as well as an organized point of view with which to go to the US – instead of pushing Israel into a corner and say that the whole world is against us.”
In the backdrop of calls to add Kadima to the government in order to help solve the crisis with Washington Livni said, “The prime minister has chosen his natural partners for survival. He has no vision and for this reason his government is not trusted by the public and by the world.” The Kadima chairwoman also stressed she has no intention of joining the government in order to stabilize it. “For that to happen one needs different leadership and different policy.”
State responds to petition
Following attempts to change the government’s decision regarding the Barzilai hospital, the State Prosecutor’s Office filed its response with the High Court of Justice Sunday to a petition by the Movement for Quality Government in Israel.
The State rejected the claim suggesting biased conduct on the part of the examination team tasked with addressing the tombs affair.
“The factual infrastructure at the base of the petition is inaccurate. The movement did not exhaust all procedures before filing the motion and was quick in doing so before being given a response from the Prime Minister’s Office to a letter issued a day earlier,” the State’s response noted.
March 27th, 2010, by Carol Sanders
In the West Bank, there is a two-tiered system of justice, including for minors. For settler children, justice is administered according to Israeli domestic law, with all the due process protections that affords. They cannot be charged as adults until they reach 18, in accordance with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a signatory. For Palestinian children, military law applies, and that pretty much means due process, and the tenderness of their years, is irrelevant. Their childhood itself is cut short, both by the circumstances of the Occupation and the letter of military law. Until recently, they could be charged as adults as young as 12 years of age. A recent military order “reformed” that anomaly by setting their age of majority at 16 –still two years earlier than their settler counterparts, and two years younger than required by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. But the reality is that children as young as 12 continue to be arrested and imprisoned in adult military jails. In the majority of cases the soldiers who arrest them say that the children were throwing stones, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
Defence of Children International-Palestine reports that arrests of children have been increasing . Presently approximately 350 West Bank children under 17 are being held in Israeli prisons. Defence of Children provides testimonies of the children, detailing the brutal circumstances of their detention and interrogation, and their confinement with adult prisoners. Urgent appeals on behalf of the children are issued by Defence of Children, including in the case of masse arrests (17 children taken in a night raid from Al Jalazun Refugee Camp near Ramallah), and the transfer of children to prisons within Israel, where family members cannot visit because of restrictions on movement of people under Israel’s military Occupation.
If there’s a photo the White House should issue after Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit, it’s a group portrait of the prime minister, his Iraqi counterpart and the president of Afghanistan embracing Barack Obama together.
They are all heads of governments attached to the U.S.’s umbilical cord. They all experience insecurity in the region, and the world is concerned about each of the three’s security. Washington manages domestic policy for each of them, since each poses a danger to American foreign policy. In Iraq, Washington is involved in disagreements among Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds. In Afghanistan, Washington dictates conditions to the president to help advance its war against Al-Qaida. And when it comes to Israel, the United States showed clearly last week that it will not allow domestic Israeli politics to interfere with American foreign policy.
The group photo is a fitting picture of how Israel’s situation has deteriorated during Netanyahu’s short term in office. We’re not talking about yet another clumsy Israeli foreign minister whom no one wants to meet, or irksome building permits. Netanyahu poses a threat to Israeli security because he tips the balance of U.S.-Israeli relations, which are essential for our survival. And not only these relations. If Washington gives Israel the cold shoulder, it will be showing the way for other important countries, from Britain to Egypt and Brazil to Turkey, to do the same. Israel is no longer an exotic citron, but has been exposed as just another lemon.
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We may mock Netanyahu for the impolite reception he received in Washington; we can snipe about the late hour of his meeting with Obama, past Israeli television’s prime time, and ask why Obama abandoned the talk for dinner with his children. But then we remember that this isn’t some other country’s prime minister who is being kicked around; this danger on wheels is our own.
In a properly-run country, concerned about its own survival, thousands would have met the prime minister on his return, calling for his resignation. In such a country, gangs of squatters who steal land and buildings in Jerusalem would be considered organizations opposed to the nation’s security interests. They would be taken to court, at least. In Israel, they are a symbol of national pride.
This arrogant government is sure that ever since it annexed the occupied territory in Jerusalem, it granted Israel control for all eternity. Jordan’s King Abdullah can tell the lovers of eternity what happened to the so-called legal annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Jordan. This is the same Jordanian East Jerusalem that Washington will recognize as the capital of Palestine.
For generations the settlers have been blamed for posing an obstacle to peace, for acting against the policy of the government, which, poor soul, can’t stand up to these bullies. And so, while Washington believed that the Israeli government wanted to take action against such subversive organizations but had problems, it showed restraint, gave in a little about the construction freeze, patted Netanyahu on the shoulder and granted extensions to the government so it could manage its own affairs.
There is no longer any basis for this approach. The Israeli government, and the seven wonders in charge of it, are inseparable from the bullies. And so Washington had to conclude that the government and prime minister were simply lying.
Washington’s main interest is no longer whether the peace process will advance, because there are no guarantees that even direct talks with the Palestinians will end in an agreement. Washington’s interest is to preserve its standing in the world against a small state and its crafty government, which made it a laughing stock. This will be a true test of the United States’ ability to apply foreign policy. What is good for Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington figures, will also suit Israel now, because if Israel rebuffs Washington, Iraq and Afghanistan will, too.
And so the American formula is the same for all three. The United States will take care of the security of Israel/Iraq/Afghanistan, but security will not be measured only in the number of weapons sold to them, but also in the creation of conditions that will avoid the need to use them. To a certain extent, it will also be measured by these countries’ willingness to agree to U.S. policy. In this way, a new condition has been created that should have been applied a long time ago. According to it, any country that is willing to harm the international standing of the United States is gambling on its own security. This is not a threat, but a clarification.
Israel denies that the new homes are being built illegally
Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu has moved to ease tensions with the US, describing the two countries’ relations as those of “allies and friends”.
Mr Netanyahu also dismissed reports one of his confidants called US President Barack Obama a “disaster” for Israel.
The US has criticised the building of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, which prompted the Palestinians to pull out of US-brokered indirect peace talks.
The row has caused one of the worst crises in US-Israeli ties for decades.
In the wake of a controversial visit to the US, Mr Netanyahu said on Friday that his policy on East Jerusalem would not change, despite US pressure on Israel to announce a freeze on building Jewish homes there.
A best-selling Israeli newspaper then quoted an unidentified aide as saying: “You could say that Obama is the greatest disaster for Israel – a strategic disaster.”
But the prime minister, speaking before he briefed the cabinet on his US trip, condemned these comments as “unacceptable”.
“They do not come from anyone representing me. The relations between Israel and the United States are those of allies and friends, and are based on tradition spanning many years.”
Re-occupy Gaza?
Tension has also been mounting in Gaza in recent days, with two Israeli soldiers and two Palestinian militants reportedly killed in the worst clashes for more than a year.
At the cabinet meeting, Mr Netanyahu stressed that Israel would provide a “firm and decisive” response to any attack from the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Israel pulled out in 2009 after a which left hundreds of people dead.
Israel insists that Jerusalem will remain its undivided capital.
Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
They are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
The Middle East quartet – the US, EU, UN and Russia – has called for final status negotiations to reach a comprehensive peace deal within two years.
Editor: Wishful thinking?
While Gideon Levy is, as usual, totally accurate about the Israeli lie-machinery and obfuscation tactics, he is rather wishful about Obama, I feel. He writes as if he wished Obama to take his advice, but how likely is that? To see the Obama move in the the terms describd here, is to give him credit he has not earned, and is unikely to justify.
By Gideon Levy
If Israel had a real peace camp, if the silent majority had broken its sickly silence, if more Israelis approached the situation as a collective rather than individuals yearning for the next holiday or car, if more Israelis refused to accept blindly the deceptions of Israeli diplomacy and propaganda, Rabin Square would have been filled with demonstrators yesterday. Among the banners and flags, one sign would have stood out in this hour of risks and fateful decisions: “Thank you, friend.” Thank you, Barack Obama, friend of Israel.
The tidal wave of slurs and slanders, the unitary portrayal of Obama as someone trying to subjugate and humiliate Israel should have been answered with a dissenting voice saying that Obama was doing exactly what a true friend would do. Yes, it’s unpleasant, but after 43 years there’s just no other way. After a regrettable one-year delay and despite constant doubts and question marks, there now seems to be a chance that the 44th president of the United States will prevail where all his predecessors failed. There’s a chance Obama will pull Israel out of the crisis it created and work to achieve a better future, a future where it will claim what’s its own, but only what’s really its own.
The first step is encouraging and hope-inspiring. Among Obama’s modest demands – a construction freeze in Jerusalem and extending the freeze in the settlements, two basic conditions for “negotiations without preconditions” and for anyone who really wants a two-state solution – there’s a demand that the Israelis themselves should have made long ago.
Obama is asking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and through him every Israeli, to finally speak the truth. He’s asking Netanyahu and the rest of us: What on earth do you actually want? Enough with the misleading answers; the moment of truth is here. Enough with the tricks – a neighborhood here, a settlement expansion there. Just tell us: Where are you heading? Do you want to go on receiving unprecedented aid from the United States, do you want to become part of the Middle East, do you want to achieve peace?
If you do, please start behaving accordingly, including halting all construction in all settlements, everywhere, for all time, and begin evacuating them instead. Any action by Israel would be reminiscent of the three no’s of Khartoum: No to ending the occupation, no to peace, no to friendship with America.
Obama’s demands are minimal. Not just continuing the construction freeze, but dealing with the core issues, a two-year deadline to reach a solution and the demand that Israel speak the truth to others and itself. All these things should have been obvious if Israel were really aiming for a solution. Earlier presidents let Israel off and did not press for answers. Obama, faithful for the time being to the great promise he made when he was elected, is no longer willing to put up with the deceit. We now need to see if he’ll withstand the pressure and keep up his pressure on Israel.
The Israelis should be thankful to Obama for holding a mirror in front of them and saying that this is how your continuous deception looks. The Israelis should be just as thankful to Obama for being the first president ready to make Israel pay for its responsibility in maintaining the status quo. This is an American innovation supported by a shifting mood in world politics.
Take heed: The world is beginning to demand that Israel take responsibility for its actions in Dubai and Sheikh Jarrah, in Operation Cast Lead and Ramat Shlomo. From America and Europe, the time of responsibility and payback has arrived.
After 43 years of a vicious occupation, these, too, are minimal demands. Obama didn’t humiliate Israel. Israel humiliated itself for a generation, thinking it could do whatever it wanted – talk peace and build settlements, entrench an occupation and still be considered a democracy, while living on American support and rejecting its requests. Since all of Obama’s demands should have come from Israel itself, Obama is merely acting the way a friend should act. And for that he deserves those three words, from the bottom of our hearts: Thank you, friend.
International agencies, inspectors and western intelligence officials believe Tehran is planning to build more nuclear enrichment sites in defiance of international demands, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
Quoting anonymous sources from several governments and international agencies, the Times reported that United Nations inspectors were looking for evidence of two such sites.
The Times reported that inspectors were tipped off by an interview given by Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, who told the Iranian Student News Agency in recent weeks that construction could start on two new enrichment sites after Iranian New Year on March 21.
“God willing,” Mr. Salehi was quoted as saying, “we may start the construction of two new enrichment sites” in the Iranian new year, the Times reported.
U.S. President Barack Obama in September revealed evidence of a hidden enrichment site at Qum.
The Times went on to report that American officials had disclosed that Israel has pressed the case in talks with the U.S., saying that evidence points to what one senior official called “Qum look-alikes.”
The U.S., France and Britain are pushing Russia and China to back a new round of United Nations sanctions against Iran, which they suspect is developing nuclear weapons. The issue will be at the top of the agenda of foreign ministers from the G8 countries – U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Germany and Russia – in Ottawa Monday and Tuesday.
Published: March 26, 2010
After taking office last year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel privately told many Americans and Europeans that he was committed to and capable of peacemaking, despite the hard-line positions that he had used to get elected for a second time. Trust me, he told them. We were skeptical when we first heard that, and we’re even more skeptical now.
All this week, the Obama administration had hoped Mr. Netanyahu would give it something to work with, a way to resolve the poisonous contretemps over Jerusalem and to finally restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. It would have been a relief if they had succeeded. Serious negotiations on a two-state solution are in all their interests. And the challenges the United States and Israel face — especially Iran’s nuclear program — are too great for the leaders not to have a close working relationship.
But after a cabinet meeting on Friday, Mr. Netanyahu and his right-wing government still insisted that they would not change their policy of building homes in the city, including East Jerusalem, which Palestinians hope to make the capital of an independent state.
President Obama made pursuing a peace deal a priority and has been understandably furious at Israel’s response. He correctly sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a factor in wider regional instability.
Mr. Netanyahu’s government provoked the controversy two weeks ago when it disclosed plans for 1,600 new housing units in an ultra-orthodox neighborhood in East Jerusalem just as Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. was on a fence-mending visit and Israeli-Palestinian “proximity talks” were to begin.
Last year, Mr. Netanyahu rejected Mr. Obama’s call for a freeze on all settlement building. On Tuesday — just before Mr. Obama hosted Mr. Netanyahu at the White House — Israeli officials revealed plans to build 20 units in the Shepherd Hotel compound of East Jerusalem.
Palestinians are justifiably worried that these projects nibble away at the land available for their future state. The disputes with Israel have made Mr. Obama look weak and have given Palestinians and Arab leaders an excuse to walk away from the proximity talks (in which Mr. Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, would shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah) that Washington nurtured.
Mr. Obama was right to demand that Mr. Netanyahu repair the damage. Details of their deliberately low-key White House meeting (no photos, no press, not even a joint statement afterward) have not been revealed. We hope Israel is being pressed to at least temporarily halt building in East Jerusalem as a sign of good faith. Jerusalem’s future must be decided in negotiations.
The administration should also insist that proximity talks, once begun, grapple immediately with core issues like borders and security, not incidentals. And it must ensure that the talks evolve quickly to direct negotiations — the only realistic format for an enduring agreement.
Many Israelis find Mr. Obama’s willingness to challenge Israel unsettling. We find it refreshing that he has forced public debate on issues that must be debated publicly for a peace deal to happen. He must also press Palestinians and Arab leaders just as forcefully.
Questions from Israeli hard-liners and others about his commitment to Israel’s security are misplaced. The question is whether Mr. Netanyahu is able or willing to lead his country to a peace deal. He grudgingly endorsed the two-state solution. Does he intend to get there?
For Israel’s hawkish premier, the issue is not halting illegal settlement expansion, but increasing it less conspicuously, writes Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah
Netanyahu addressed the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in Washington this week
While claiming to have a genuine desire for the resumption of “peace talks” with the Palestinian Authority (PA), Israel has been murdering Palestinian civilians in the streets of the West Bank in a clear overreaction to recent Palestinian protests against Israeli transgressions against Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem.
Eyewitnesses reported that trigger-happy Israeli troops shot had killed two young Palestinians who were trying to access their land near the northern West Bank town of Nablus. Initially, the Israeli army claimed the two tried to attack heavily armed soldiers with pitchforks, a claim rejected by the Ramallah- based Palestinian government that described the killings as “cold-blooded murder”. An Israeli army spokesman later said the circumstances surrounding the two deaths were vague and that an investigation into “the incident” would be carried out.
Ghassan Al-Khatib, head of the Palestinian Government Press Office, accused the Israeli occupation army of murdering Palestinians in order to provoke a new uprising — or Intifada — that would divert the world’s attention from the belligerent discourse adopted by the Netanyahu government. “We look at this as part of the Israeli escalation. It could have been treated in a completely different way. But the Israelis have been escalating, and this is something the prime minister [Netanyahu] has been warning.”
More ominous remarks came from Mahmoud Al-Alul, a senior Fatah leader based in Nablus. He told some 2,000 mourners that, “nobody can imagine that we can stand with our hands tied vis-à-vis what is happening.” A day earlier, two more Palestinians were killed and others injured when Israeli troops opened fired on Palestinian youths protesting against Israeli provocations at Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest shrines. The Israeli army claimed it used rubber bullets, though they can also prove fatal.
The latest killings in the West Bank coincided with visits to the region by EU Foreign Policy Director Catherine Ashton and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki- Moon. Both visited Israel and the occupied territories, including the blockaded Gaza Strip, voicing their solidarity and sympathy with tormented Gazans, many of whom are homeless having had their houses destroyed during Israel’s brutal onslaught against the coastal enclave last year.
Hoping that the two important visitors would not submit a “negative” report when they return to their respective bases in Brussels and New York, the Israeli government decided to allow them to travel to Gaza via the Beit Hanoun border terminal, also known as the Erez Crossing. Israel previously blocked repeatedly foreign officials from travelling to Gaza via Erez.
In the West Bank, Ban, escorted by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, saw firsthand how the proliferation of Jewish colonies is seriously inhibiting prospects for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. He called for a total freeze on Jewish settlement expansion, a call ignored by the Israeli government notorious for its disregard of and contempt for the UN.
In Gaza, Ban inspected destruction caused by massive Israeli bombing. He called on Israel to allow building materials to get through to Gaza, acknowledging the fallacy of the Israeli argument that Hamas could use building materials for illegitimate purposes. Ban had earlier met with the family of an Israeli prisoner, captured by Palestinian fighters near Gaza. The UN secretary-general made no mention of the thousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons and detention camps.
Both Ban and Ashton left Israel-Palestine with a negative impression about the extent to which the Netanyahu government is willing to engage in a genuine peace process that would end the military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Prior to his departure for the US in order to address a major conference of the Jewish lobby and to attempt to mend fences with the Obama administration, Netanyahu told his cabinet and party caucus that settlement expansion would continue unabated. He added that Israel would have to carry out its settlement schemes “quietly, stealthily, and without making a big noise”.
As to recently declared plans to build 1,600 additional settler units in Arab East Jerusalem, Netanyahu vowed to keep building, regardless of what Washington says or does. “Our policy on Jerusalem is the same policy followed by all Israeli governments for the past 42 years. Building in Jerusalem is the same as building in Tel Aviv.”
Netanyahu’s remarks on Jerusalem were rejected by European foreign ministers meeting in Brussels this week. Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn was quoted as saying that the EU was very disappointed by the position of the Israeli government. “I think I can say very clearly that Jerusalem is not Tel Aviv,” he said.
Faced with an uncharacteristically determined American stance on the issue of settlement building, and dismayed by a growing negative impression in Europe — including with close allies such as Germany — about his government’s true intentions, Netanyahu is expected to undertake a number of “goodwill gestures” towards the PA in order to enhance his government’s image in Washington and Europe.
According to Israeli media, Netanyahu might agree to “discuss” all outstanding issues with the Palestinians, release a few hundred Fatah-affiliated prisoners, and allow the entry into Gaza of a limited shipment of building materials as demanded by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Nonetheless, the Israeli premier has refused to revoke plans to build 1,600 settler units in the Ramat Sholomo colony in East Jerusalem. To avoid the kind of embarrassment accompanying the recent visit to Israel by US Vice- President Joe Biden, when Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yeshai announced the new settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian town, Netanyahu promised a better “oversight system” for the future.
Netanyahu’s tactics suggest he is convinced that the recent tension with Washington is over the timing, not the content, of the settlement expansion announcement. In addition, Netanyahu is trying to achieve two tactical goals. First, return the proverbial ball to the Palestinian court; second, replacing the “Iranian subject” on the top of US agenda while relegating the “Palestinian subject” to a secondary status. Netanyahu may even be harbouring further ambitions, including the acquisition of laser-guided bunker-busters from the US, which Israel could use in an attack on Iranian nuclear installations.
As Netanyahu headed for Washington, US Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell — who returned to the region this week — urged “both sides to show restraint”. Mitchell was evasive and noncommittal about the issue of settlements, stressing that the important thing was to resume peace talks, even without clear guidelines. Recently, General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command in the Middle East, was quoted as criticising Mitchell’s mission in the region, suggesting that the American diplomat was “too old, two slow and too late”.
Obama Still Doesn’t Have the Stomach to Confront Israel
By JONATHAN COOK, Counterpunch, March 25, 2010
Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in the United States this week armed with a mandate from the Israeli parliament. A large majority of legislators from all of Israel’s main parties had supported a petition urging him to stand firm on the building of Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem — the very issue that got him into hot water days earlier with the White House.
Given the Israeli consensus on Jerusalem, there was no way Mr Netanyahu could have avoided rubbing that wound again in his speech on Monday to the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobby group.
He told the thousands of delegates: “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.”
Citing his own policy as inseparable from all previous Israeli governments, he added: “Everyone knows that these neighbourhoods will be part of Israel in any peace settlement. Therefore, building them in no way precludes the possibility of a two-state solution.”
Mr Netanyahu’s speech appeared consistent with the new approach agreed byboth sides to end this particular debacle. According to the US media, a policy of “Don’t ask and don’t tell” has been adopted to avoid making East Jerusalem an insurmountable obstacle to negotiations.
It will be telling how the US administration responds to the latest approval by Israeli planning authorities of a housing project at the Shepherd’s Hotel in East Jerusalem – this time in the even more controversial area of Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian community slowly being taken over by Jewish settlers backed by the Israeli courts.
The White House has eased its stance chiefly because Mr Netanyahu has climbed down on two issues of even greater importance to the administration.
First, he has agreed to make a “significant gesture” to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, probably in the form of a prisoner release. That is the carrot needed to bring Mr Abbas to the peace talks overseen by George Mitchell, the US special peace envoy.
And second, Mr Netanyahu has conceded that Israel will discuss the “core issues” of the conflict – borders, Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees – ensuring that the negotiations are substantive rather than formal, as he had intended.
Those concessions – if Mr Netanyahu delivers on them – should be enough to break up his far-right coalition, a prospect the White House craves. The US administration wants Tzipi Livni, the leader of the centrist opposition, to join Mr Netanyahu in a new, “peacemaking coalition”.
If Mr Netanyahu could wriggle out of this bind, he would do so. But his ace in the hole – harnessing the might of AIPAC and its legions in Congress to back him against the White House – looks to have been disarmed.
Comments last week by Gen David Petraeus, the head of the US Central Command, linked Israel’s intransigence towards the Palestinians to the spread of a hatred that endangers US troops in the Middle East. That left the AIPAC hordes with little option but to swallow their and Mr Netanyahu’s pride, lest they be accused of dual loyalties.
In the words of Uri Avnery, a former Israeli legislator: “This is only a shot across the bow, a warning shot fired by a warship in order to induce another vessel to follow its instructions. The warning is clear.”
And the warning is that Mr Netanyahu must come to the negotiating table to help to establish a Palestinian state whatever the consequences for his coalition.
But it would be unwise to assume that the crisis over settlement building in East Jerusalem indicates that the Obama administration plans to get any tougher with Israel on the form of such statehood than its predecessors.
Ms Livni, unlike Mr Netanyahu, may wish to find a solution to the conflict – or impose one – but her terms would be far from generous. The White House knows that she, too, is an ardent advocate of settlements in East Jerusalem. When she broke her silence on the crisis last week, it was to emphasise that, by “acting stupidly” in stoking a row with the US, Mr Netanyahu had risked “weakening” Israel’s hold on Jerusalem
Instead, the signs are that Barack Obama could be just as ready to accommodate the Israeli consensus on East Jerusalem as the previous Bush administration was in backing Israel’s position on keeping the overwhelming majority of West Bank settlers in their homes on occupied Palestinian land.
Shimon Peres, the Israeli president who is much favoured in Washington, has outlined a “compromise” to placate the Americans. It would involve a peace deal in which Israel keeps the large swaths of East Jerusalem already settled by Jews, while the Palestinians would be entitled to the ghettos left behind after four decades of illegal Israeli building.
In her own AIPAC speech, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, hinted that such a solution might yet be acceptable to the administration. The recent US condemnation of settlement building, she said, was not “a judgment on the final status of Jerusalem, which is an issue to be settled at the negotiating table. This is about getting to the table, creating and protecting an atmosphere of trust around it — and staying there until the job is finally done.”
Having lost patience with Mr Netanyahu’s lip service to Palestinian statehood, the White House appears finally to have decided its credibility in the Middle East depends on dragging Israel — kicking and screaming, if needs be — to the negotiating table.
Mr Obama may hope that the outcome of such a process will make US troops safer in Iraq and strengthen his hand in the stand-off with Iran. But it remains doubtful that the US actually has the stomach to extract from Israel the concessions needed to create that elusive entity referred to as a viable Palestinian state.
Regional leaders meeting in Libya have been united in their condemnation of Israel’s settlement activity in occupied Palestinian land.
The Arab League summit began on Saturday in the Libyan city of Sirte, with Amr Moussa, the Arab League chief, warning that continued Israeli settlement building would end efforts to revive the Middle East peace process.
“We have to study the possibility that the peace process will be a complete failure,” Moussa said in his opening speech to the two-day annual summit.
“It’s time to face Israel … We have accepted an open-ended peace process but that resulted in a loss of time and we did not achieve anything and allowed Israel to practise its policy for 20 years.”
Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as a joint capital for a future state, has been a particular point of focus for delegates.
Jerusalem’s significance
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, reiterated that Israel’s settlements were illegal under international law, and called for Jerusalem to be part of peace negotiations.
“Jerusalem’s significance to all must be respected, and it should emerge from negotiations as the capital of two states,” he said at the meeting’s opening session.
Ban also called for Arab leaders to support US-led efforts to facilitate indirect “proximity” talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
The Palestinians pulled out of the talks in reaction to Israel’s announcement it would build 1,600 settlements on occupied land.
The Israeli move has also caused a rift between Israel and Washington as it came during a visit to Israel by Joe Biden, the US vice-president.
“I urge you to support efforts to start proximity talks and direct negotiations. Our common goal should be to resolve all final status issues within 24 months,” Ban said.
But Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, ruled out taking part in the talks unless Israel stops building settlements.
“We cannot resume indirect negotiations as long as Israel maintains its settlement policy and the status quo,” he said in his speech.
The warnings over Jerusalem were echoed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, who called Israel’s policy of considering Jerusalem as its united capital “madness”.
“Jerusalem is the apple of the eye of each and every Muslim … and we cannot at all accept any Israeli violation in Jerusalem or in Muslim sites,” he said.
Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, called the declarations coming out of the summit “aggressive”, saying that the arguments put forward were based on “very selective opinions”.
“We say strongly and firmly that we have a legal right to build in Jerusalem and those that seek to enshrine the 1949 Armistice Lines, the so-called ‘Green Line’ as a border have not understood history nor legal precedence,” he said.
“We call on the Palestinian Authority to cease living in delusions of forcing Israel to the pre-1967 lines and to come and join us at the negotiation table without preconditions.”
‘Playing with fire’
Many Arab leaders have been angered by the opening of a restored 17th century synagogue near the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, home to Islam’s third holiest site.
They see such acts as a clear intention by Israel to “Judaise” Jerusalem and undermine chances for a peace agreement with the Palestinians who consider East Jerusalem the capital of their future state.
Holy Land Grab
Jordan’s King Abdullah warned that Israel was “playing with fire” and trying to alter the identity of Jerusalem.
Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, described tensions with Israel as a “state of no-war, no-peace”, and said his country was ready if “war is imposed” by Israel.
Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, opened the summit with an unusually short speech in which he said that Arabs were “waiting for actions, not words and speeches”.
The Libyan leader, whose country is hosting this year’s summit, has said he wants the meeting to be one of unity and the issue of Jerusalem has proved a unifying factor.
“The whole issue of Israeli actions has been under intense discussions, particularly in light of what has happened in that region in recent days,” Mike Hanna, Al Jazeera’s correspondent reporting from Sirte, said.
“Very clearly the issue of Jerusalem has been brought up and focused on because it is the one issue that would be very difficult for the international community as a whole to ignore.
“If, for example, resolutions would go to the UN General Assembly or the Security Council … on the question of East Jerusalem and Israeli occupation, it is very difficult for international bodies – or countries such as the US – to veto or abstain over something they’ve already condemned.”
Arab leaders are expected to ratify an agreement drafted by their foreign ministers to raise $500m in aid to improve the living conditions for Palestinians in Jerusalem as part of a “rescue” plan for the city.
A senior Palestinian official said the money would go towards improving infrastructure, building hospitals, schools, water wells and providing financial support to those whose houses have been demolished by Israeli authorities.
The leaders are also due to discuss a number of strategies, including keeping a record of what they consider to be Israeli “violations” in Jerusalem to refer them to higher bodies such as the International Criminal Court, based in the Hague in the Netherlands.
The last Arab League summit, held two years ago, was hosted by Qatar.
Tim Franks
As relations between Britain and Israel continue to unravel, in Jerusalem many Israelis feel that the outside world still fails to understand the problems – and threats – their country is facing.
Uzi Arad is a very important man. He’s now the director of Israel’s National Security Council, and National Security Adviser to the prime minister – a position he’s held since Benjamin Netanyahu took office.
Uzi Arad has a reputation for fighting fiercely and territorially among the sharp edges that exist at the height of the Israeli power pyramid.
He was always hospitable whenever I, on occasion, used to visit him at home – before he took up his current job.
He’d spent more than 20 years in Mossad – Israel’s secret intelligence service, and before he was appointed one of its directors, he was stationed for a time in London.
Once, at his house, he took me into his expansive library. He reached onto a shelf and extracted a book called Mandarin – the memoirs of the British diplomat Sir Nicholas Henderson.
Uzi Arad opened the inside front cover. There, in green ink, was an inscription: “To Uzi, with the thanks and appreciation of your British friends for your co-operation and help and best wishes for the future.”
The message was signed C – the initial that has always denoted the head of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service.
‘Doesn’t look good’
Such cordiality evaporated this week with the expulsion of a senior Israeli London-based diplomat who, by common consent, appears to have been the Mossad London station chief.
The Government’s anger was stoked by the apparent use of fake British passports in the assassination of the top Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January.
In the careful language of the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, the Serious Organised Crime Agency “was drawn to the conclusion that the passports used were copied from genuine British passports when handed over for inspection to individuals linked to Israel, either in Israel or in other countries”.
It doesn’t take much for the gales of public opinion to blow in Israel – and barely had David Miliband finished his statement in Westminster than the gusts a continent away began whipping.
A right-wing Israeli Member of Parliament reached into strangely Maoist terminology, and called the British “dogs”.
A commentator in a right-of-centre newspaper argued that “millions of Muslims live in Britain, and Gordon Brown needs their votes in the upcoming elections”.
At the other end of Israel’s brightly coloured political spectrum, a resident of one of the country’s most stalwartly socialist kibbutzim, or rural collectives, e-mailed me to say that “if Israel was directly or indirectly involved in the Dubai incident then there’s no limit, apparently, to the arrogance and stupidity of this regime/administration”.
But between the howls and harrumphs there were quieter noises. Some dwindled quickly into silence, and I found the voices I normally turn to in the Israeli intelligence community politely declining to speak or hanging up after the briefest of “it doesn’t look good” comments.
One diplomat with a close connection to London did allow himself to be slightly more phlegmatic. “This is a standard dance the British have to go through,” he told me.
“Of course, they won’t admit it. They’ll sell it hard. But I see no reason for them or for us to shift gears over bilateral co-operation.” Fundamental point
What is clear is that few Israelis are shedding tears for Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
On a street-corner in Jerusalem, half-way between the prime minister’s residence and the official home of the president, Eitan was drawing heavily on a cigarette, outside his shop.
“Personally, I don’t like violence,” Eitan told me. “But the thing is, Hamas doesn’t want to talk. And if someone is going to hit you, then sometimes you have to hit them first.”
Behind Eitan’s shrug is a wide belief in Israel that the rest of the world doesn’t quite get it – that Israel is the only homeland the Jews have, that it’s small and that it’s trying to survive in a hostile neighbourhood.
It’s that feeling which fuels the declamation “Jerusalem is not a settlement”, repeated this week in Washington by Benjamin Netanyahu – and that the Israeli government will carry on building in the city wherever it chooses, even if that means the occupied territory of East Jerusalem, amid growing American displeasure.
And that is the much more fundamental point here.
There may be a moment of iciness between Britain and Israel over the forged passports.
Mossad London station chiefs may not, in the near future, receive cosy book inscriptions from the boss of MI6.
But Israel’s belief in its exceptionalism, and the impatience currently shown by two of its closest allies, may point to a deeper rupture.
Editor: Achitofel’s advice – The voice of unreason
Somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, stands proud Alan Dersowitz, untouchable by events, rising among the hard liners of AIPAC, forever ready to have a fight with anyone around, supporting Israel to the bitter end of Palestine. His advice is sure to get the whole world intoa quagmire which only he knows how to get out of… this is the true voice of Israeli politics of confrontation, and he is a better Amabassador than the official one.It is interesting that even Dersowitz is against the settlements, according to himself… so who in his right mind supports the ocupation and settlements in the US, you wonder?
The American administration has been paying for this colonial effort, indirectly, giving Israel over 3 Billion dollars in ‘civilian aid’ every year. That’s who.
By Akiva Eldar
Law professor Alan Dershowitz, a well-known attorney in the American legal world, has made a name for himself representing celebrity clients such as O.J. Simpson, Jonathan Pollard and Mike Tyson. His lectures are seen as some of the most fervent speeches made in Israel’s defense, while his books, including “The Case for Israel,” have become bestsellers – particularly among Israel’s supporters. He also played a pivotal role in attacking Justice Richard Goldstone’s report on last year’s Israeli offensive into Gaza.
Dershowitz traveled last week from Harvard University to Washington to participate in the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He also followed the clash unfolding between Barack Obama, his president, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of his favorite client, with concern.
How do you interpret the cool to frosty reception Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received at the White House?
It’s clearly part of the Obama administration’s strategy to increase pressure on Israel. After all, they praised Netanyahu’s offer to end building in the West Bank, without him committing to ending building in parts of Jerusalem certain to remain an integral part of Israel under any agreement. In the White House they think they can have more influence on Israel than on the Palestinians. But this seems to be backfiring, because the Palestinians now believe they can demand more and more pre-conditions for starting talks. What Obama has to realize is that he is dealing with Israel, a democracy to which you can not always dictate specific terms. Israel can’t make peace without the clear support of the United States. The Israeli voters supported Ehud Barak’s very generous offers in 2000/2001 largely because they trusted Bill Clinton. Mistrust of Barack Obama will make it more difficult to persuade Israelis to take risks for peace.
Obama is surrounded by Jewish advisors who understand how Israel works, and even has a senior advisor with an Israeli background.
The fact that Obama has advisors who are Jewish simply gives him a better cover to be tough on Israel. On the other hand, he doesn’t have close Palestinian advisors who are familiar with the other side. I’m afraid this is bringing the parties further apart rather than closer together.
Could the rift between the administration in Washington and the Israeli government cause a split in the Jewish community, between Obama’s supporters and supporters of Israel?
No – the Jewish community is solidly behind Israel on security issues and largely behind Israel on building in Jewish neighborhoods in North Jerusalem that will remain part of Israel in any agreement. On the other hand, the issue is lessening support for Obama among Jewish supporters of Israel.
If you were Netanyahu’s attorney, how would you advise him to end this crisis?
I would suggest that he make the following announcement: “We do not believe that new building in Jewish sections of Jerusalem is a barrier to peace. We believe that the Palestinian’s unwillingness to engage in unconditional direct talks, coupled with their unwillingness to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, is the primary barrier to peace. To prove our point, and without waving any rights in Jerusalem, we will announce a three-month suspension of all building permits in all disputed areas of Jerusalem in order to see whether that brings the Palestinians to the peace table and whether they are prepared to engage in good faith direct negotiations. If the Palestinians will then be prepared to engage in good faith direct negotiations, the suspensions will continue until the negotiations are complete. If not, we will return to the status quo.”
That would be a test of the Palestinians’ good will – a test I hope they will pass, but believe they will fail.
How would you advise Obama?
I would tell him that the process cannot be unilateral and that there must be mutual concessions. For example, the Obama administration has falsely blamed the naming of a Ramallah square after a terrorist who murdered Jews on Hamas, rather than on the Palestinian Authority. The Obama administration has to make as substantial demands of the Palestinians as it does of the Israelis. If you think this crisis is severe, you should know it is nothing compared to what could happen with regard to the Iranian issue at some future date. I’m afraid [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is one of the happiest men these days thanks to the many incidents between the United States and Israel. [PA Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas, by the way, is also pretty happy.
Would you disagree that this crisis – along with earlier ones and ones that will likely follow – stems from the Israeli settlement policy?
I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy. Accordingly, the settlements should not be a major cause of disagreement between Israel and the United States, despite their differences over this issue. Nonetheless, I hope Israel will stop building in the West Bank and in those sections of Jerusalem which are likely to become part of a Palestinian state.
I am deeply concerned that, without peace and a two-state solution, the Jewish and democratic nature of Israel is in danger. That’s why I have opposed Israel’s settlement policy since 1973, and that’s why I have favored a two-state solution since 1967.
Do you believe that Obama is a friend of Israel and is truly committed to his promise not to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons?
I believe Barack Obama is committed to Israel’s security. He is also committed to the two-state solution and the peace process.
I hope he understands that unless Israelis – and the rest of the world – believe that he will do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, many Israelis will be unwilling to take significant risks for peace. I will remain committed to Obama so long as he continues to support Israeli security unequivocally. Obama’s historic legacy will be based on whether he succeeds in preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. If such weapons are obtained on his watch, history will remember him as it remembers Neville Chamberlain, despite anything else he might achieve in terms of domestic American policy.
You’ve made no secret about your criticism of the left-wing Jewish organization J Street. Why are you so disturbed by Jews who support peace?
I am a peace supporting Jew. I think J Street performs an important function, as it represents many left-leaning young Jews. My criticism is that it would be better if they work within the context of AIPAC. The pro-Israel lobby could then speak with one voice, especially during a time of conflict between the United States and Israel, and especially on undisputed issues – like Iran, responding to rocket attacks, anti-terrorism measures, etc. I myself have had significant disagreements with the Israeli government on a number of issues, such as the settlements. At the same time, I emphasize the 80 percent of Israeli policies that have widespread support across the political spectrum. When I wrote “The Case For Peace,” my book received endorsements from prime minister Ariel Sharon and [writer] Amos Oz, because I dealt with the agreed 80 percent. J Street, on other hand, tends to focus on the 20 percent, where there is significant disagreement. That is perfectly okay for an Israeli newspaper, like Haaretz, or for Israeli domestic organizations. But it weakens pro-Israel advocacy considerably, particularly at a time when the pro-Israel community in the United States must continue to pressure the Obama administration to de-escalate this conflict.
Can you describe what happened when you debated the representative from J Street at the AIPAC conference?
Here is what happened: I was standing with professor Irwin Cotler, the former attorney general of Canada, having a conversation. A gentleman asked me if I would like to be interviewed by the correspondent from Haaretz. I said yes. He then went over to the correspondent and asked her whether she wanted to interview professor Dershowitz. She said yes, asked me several questions, and wrote down the answers on her notepad. She then turned to the J Street representative and asked him whether he had any response, which he then provided. Following that, a polite debate ensued, I did not break into a conversation. The entire episode was videotaped and witnessed by over 100 people.
Miliband demands assurances that identity cloning will never happen again
By Kim Sengupta, Defence Correspondent
The Israeli government will not be allowed to replace the senior Mossad station chief expelled from London over the cloning of British passports used in the assassination of a Hamas commander unless it offers a public assurance that UK citizens’ documents will never be used again for clandestine operations. The Foreign Secretary David Miliband wants his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, to make the pledge. British diplomatic officials are insisting the situation is not negotiable.
Israeli media outlets have claimed that another operative would be sent soon to take the place of the Mossad official working at the Israeli embassy in London, who was asked to leave after a UK investigation concluded that there was evidence that British passports used by an assassination squad were cloned by Israel.
An Israeli hit team used the British and other countries’ passports to travel to Dubai to murder the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, it has been claimed. A British inquiry established that the documents were cloned at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport and Israeli officials made surreptitious calls to check the travel plans of those whose identities had been stolen.
The Israeli government has shown no signs so far that it will acquiesce in Mr Miliband’s demand that it pledge that “the state of Israel would never be party to the misuse of British passports in such a way”. Such a declaration would be tantamount to an admission of Israel’s guilt in the killing of Mr Mabhouh, something it denies. Mr Lieberman said: “There is no proof of Israeli involvement in this affair.”
However, the Israeli government has also indicated that it will not retaliate by expelling a British diplomat. Officials privately acknowledge that the removal of the Mossad official, although damaging for relations between the two countries, will not impact too severely on the Israeli intelligence agency’s work in the UK.
During a previous confrontation in 1988 when another Mossad agent, Arie Regev, was expelled from the UK, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered a temporary ban on the exchange of intelligence. Mr Miliband’s statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday, announcing the expulsion of the Israeli diplomat, made no mention of a halt in information sharing.
Israel’s mass-circulation newspaper Yediot Aharonot said that the Israeli government has got off lightly in the affair: “Whoever forged the British passports knew that he might have to pay the price. And the price set by the British was a clearance-sale price.”
However, Israeli government officials say they are reconciled to other countries following Britain’s lead. Australia, France, Germany and Ireland are all investigating the use of their citizens’ passports in the assassination and, it is expected, will announce sanctions. In the Australian capital, Canberra, the Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, said the Australian Federal Police would receive the report compiled by the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency. “We take the misuse of Australian passports very seriously,” he said.
LONDON — In a rare move by a friendly government, Britain expelled an Israeli diplomat on Tuesday to rebuke the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for what it says was the fraudulent use of a dozen fake British passports in the assassination of a Hamas official in a Dubai hotel earlier this year.
David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said there were “compelling reasons” suggesting that Israel was behind the misuse of the British passports and called Israel’s actions “intolerable.”
“The fact that this was done by a friendly country only adds insult to injury,” he said in remarks to the House of Commons. “The actions in this case are completely unacceptable and they must stop.”
A host of other lawmakers used even harsher language to excoriate Israel on the floor of Parliament, calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, urging criminal prosecution of those involved and going so far as to say that Israel was becoming a “rogue state.”
The British decision to expel the diplomat is a new turn in Israel’s recent frictions with its closest Western allies. Earlier this month, the Netanyahu government announced 1,600 new Jewish housing units in East Jerusalem, embarrassing Vice President Joseph R. Biden as he visited Israel and eliciting a furious American reaction.
The Israeli government was shaken by the expulsion but chose to issue only a curt official expression of regret and to take no countermeasures against Britain, top officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were unauthorized to talk publicly.
“The relationship between Israel and Britain is mutually important,” Yigal Palmor, the foreign ministry spokesman, said by way of official reaction. “We therefore regret the British decision.”
Other officials suggested, however, that Britain should have let the issue of the forged passports die quietly out of friendship and the shared goal of fighting radical Islam. The fact that it chose to pursue the case and to take the very public step of expelling a member of the Israeli diplomatic mission in London showed ill will, they said.
In his remarks, Mr. Miliband refused calls from British lawmakers to identify the expelled Israeli official by name or title, or to say how he was connected with the faked passports. But he said that “a state intelligence service” was most likely behind the forgeries, an apparent reference to the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.
British news reports speculated that the diplomat being ordered to leave was the London station chief of Mossad, Israel’s overseas spy agency.
Officials in Dubai have accused Mossad of being behind the Jan 20 slaying of the Hamas operative, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in a luxury hotel room there.
The Dubai officials say they have identified at least 26 suspects of a suspected Israeli hit squad that traveled to Dubai on fake identities and forged British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports. Interpol has issued a wanted list of 27 people in connection with the slaying.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in Mr. Mabhouh’s killing, but Israeli officials have described the slain Palestinian as an important figure in Hamas terrorist operations against Israel, and said that he was deeply involved in smuggling arms for the Hamas government in Gaza.
On Tuesday, the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, told reporters in Brussels that Israel had been presented with no concrete proof regarding its connection to the forged passports, but he did not go so far as to deny Israel’s role.
A former senior Mossad agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his ties to the agency, said he found the British expulsion “a reasonable way to react,” and a sign that “the British are as interested as we are in trying to finish this thing as quickly as possible.”
He added that this was “not the same as 20 years ago,” a reference to the last time Britain expelled an Israeli diplomat over a Mossad operation. “Then there was a stronger feeling that we were playing around with their sovereignty. There was a buildup of things. This time, something happened and they wanted to nip it in the bud.”
On that occasion, the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered the expulsion of a Mossad agent, Arie Regev, in 1988 after he was linked to a double-agent operation run by the spy agency in Britain that involved a Jerusalem-born Palestinian conducting covert surveillance on behalf of Mossad. That case, too, involved a Mossad undercover operation that was suspected of planning the assassination of a suspected Palestinian hit man who had been active in Britain.
Mr. Miliband, himself the son of Jewish immigrants, emphasized the importance of relations between Israel and Britain on Tuesday and said the uproar over the forged passports should not be used to weaken ties between the two countries.
Officials at 10 Downing Street said that Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, met Monday with Peter Ricketts, the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office and Britain’s senior diplomat, to discuss the case. Israel’s Foreign Ministry declined to provide details of the talks.
News reports quoting British officials since the Dubai killing have said that at least 15 of the names used by those involved in Mr. Mabhouh’s killing matched those of Israeli citizens who are dual nationals of Western countries — including eight Israeli-British dual nationals. All have denied involvement, saying their identities were apparently stolen. On Tuesday, three of the victims reached by telephone refused to comment.
Mr. Miliband said the owners of the 12 passports were “wholly innocent victims” and that they would be issued new ones.
Other aspects of the Dubai operation have been exposed by the Dubai authorities’ action in releasing video sequences that the Dubai officials said were taken from the hotel’s surveillance cameras. One sequence showed two men identified by Dubai as members of the assassination team dressed in sports clothes, one of them carrying a tennis rackuet, as they followed Mr. Mabhouh and a female hotel concierge holding his plastic room key emerging from an elevator.
Officials in South Africa have said that several members of the Israeli hit team left Dubai for Johannesburg on a direct flight by Emirates Airline, the Dubai flag carrier, then flew back to various destinations in Europe before catching connecting flights back to Israel.
South African news reports have quoted South African officials as saying that they were unable to comply with Dubai’s request for closed-circuit video recordings taken as the men transited through Oliver Tambo International airport in Johannesburg because the recordings had been mysteriously wiped before the Dubai request was made.
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
The Israeli media has responded to the announcement that the UK Government is to expel an Israeli diplomat over the cloned British passports used in January’s assassination of Hamas leader Mabhoub al-Mabhouh in Dubai.
In the English Language press Amir Oren, writing in Haaretz, says the UK has dealt a blow to what he calls “Israel’s arrogance”:
“A British agent using an Israeli passport to track down an IRA cell would not meet with much Israeli sympathy. The massive use of borrowed identities of citizens of a foreign country is no different, in principle, than a plane entering that country’s air space without permission.”
At Ynet News, the website of Israel’s centrist newspaper Yedioth Ahraronot, Gerald Steinberg writes:
“The British action at this time constitutes a response to an act that caused it some embarrassment. Hence, the Mossad representative’s expulsion marks a predictable diplomatic protest, in a bid to close the case without prompting an earthquake.”
But in the right-leaning Jerusalem Post, an editorial pours scorn on the UK reaction and says Britain has “lost its moral compass”:
“But even if it had ‘compelling evidence’ from an investigation by the Serious Organized Crime Agency into the cloning of up to 15 British passports, why has the UK government now decided to publicly humiliate Israel over the affair with so drastic a response?”
A news story in the Jerusalem Post reports how a National Union party member of the Kenesset Aryeh Eldad called Britain “dogs” for expelling the diplomat.
“Eldad’s party colleague, MK Michael Ben-Ari, responded: ‘The British may be dogs, but they are not loyal to us, but rather to an anti-Semitic system, and Israeli diplomacy partially plays into their hands. This is anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism’.
In the Hebrew language daily newspaper Yedioth Ahraronot Simon Schiffer says Israel should not get too worked up about the affair:
“The affair that embarrassed the kingdom so much ended with a reasonable price: the result was that the representative of the Mossad extension in London was asked to leave … He who used forged British passports knew that it was possible he would have to pay a price. And the price the British set yesterday is a sale price.”
Elsewhere in the same paper, investigative journalist and Israeli security expert Ronen Bergman questioned why Israel would want to alienate Britain, given their support over Iran’s development of a nuclear programme:
“Between Jerusalem and London there is today a unity of interests that stems from the identical way in which the British view at least some of the central threats to the State of Israel when at the centre stands the Iranian nuke. He who listens to the way the British speak at closed forums about Iran will be very surprised by their intensity and sharpness. Was it worth it to lose all this for the liquidation of Mahmud al-Mabhouh?”
In the centrist Maariv newsapaper Maya Bengal writes that Israel was “stunned” into inaction by the decision:
“In similar situations, the country whose representative was expelled responds with the same coin, to expel a British diplomat… But this time it was decided in Jerusalem not to respond in accordance with the rules of the diplomatic game and to ‘swallow the frog’.”
24 March 2010
The forging of British passports is the work of a country which believes it can act with impunity when planning the murder of its enemies
Expulsions of Israeli diplomats from Britain are few and far between. The last one took place in 1988 and only after serial provocations – when a Mossad agent left an envelope containing eight forged passports in a German telephone box, and when, a year later, a Palestinian working as a Mossad double agent was found with six suitcases of arms and explosives in Hull. The affair was swiftly hushed up. This time, the expulsion yesterday of an Israeli diplomat over the use of cloned British passports used by a Mossad murder squad, was accompanied by an unprecedented statement by the foreign secretary, David Miliband.
He all but accused the Israeli government of participation in a criminal, terrorist conspiracy. He said that given that high-quality forgeries were made of British passports, it was “highly likely” the forgeries were made by a state intelligence service and that, taken with other inquiries from the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), there were compelling reasons to believe that Israel was responsible for the misuse of British passports. The inference was clear. If Israel as a government was responsible for the forgery of passports, it was responsible too for the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the founder of Hamas’s military wing, in Dubai.
As Mr Miliband was speaking, the gap that had opened up between the United States and Israel over its refusal to stop building in East Jerusalem, widened still further. This is land which Israel has annexed but which the rest of the world regards as occupied Palestinian territory. Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, warned that the peace talks could be delayed for another year unless Palestinians dropped their “illogical and unreasonable” demand for a full settlement freeze. The day before he said that if the Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago they could build there today, and the nearly 250,000 Jews living in neighbourhoods beyond the green line today were an “integral and inextricable” part of modern Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was not a settlement, he said, it was the capital of Israel. These are not the words of a government prepared to negotiate what all Israelis know is a central demand of final status negotiations – Jerusalem becomes the capital of a Palestinian state. King Abdullah of Jordan, one of only two Arab states that has signed a peace treaty with Israel, called the sovereignty of the holy city a red line. Israel’s statements on East Jerusalem condemn the talks before they have even begun.
Both events in London and Washington are the marks of an arrogant nation that has overreached itself. The forging of British passports is the work of a country which believes it can act with impunity when planning the murder of its enemies, while simultaneously claiming to share the values of a law-based state. Mr Netanyahu’s statements in Washington, made as he was preparing to meet Barack Obama, are the mark of a leader who thinks he can openly defy the will of Israel’s closest military ally. As Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said, continued construction in East Jerusalem undermines America’s ability to play any effective role in the peace process. She could not have been more explicit in her warning that the chances of America being able to persuade the Arab world to recognise Israel were diminishing by the month. In neither case does Mr Netanyahu see that he is eroding the very ground on which he stands.
Mr Netanyahu has to face the consequences of an ideological stand over East Jerusalem which precludes any other. Here, as in the rest of the West Bank, where the number of Jewish settlers has more than doubled since the Oslo peace accords were signed in 1993, Israel is pre-empting the shape of the final agreement by creating facts on the ground. No deal with the Palestinians can be made in these conditions.
The council urged Israel to compensate Palestinians who suffered losses during Gaza war [File: EPA]
The United Nations Human Rights Council has passed three resolutions condemning Israel over its policies in occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories.
However, the United States voted against them all.
Another resolution, calling for a fund to compensate Palestinians who suffered losses during Israel’s offensive in Gaza 14 months ago, is expected to be passed on Thursday.
One resolution on “grave human rights violations” by Israeli forces in the Palestinian territories – which was passed by 31 votes to nine, with seven abstentions in the 47-member Council – demanded that Israel end its occupation of Palestinian land, occupied since 1967.
US opposition
It also demanded that Israel stop what it called targeting of Palestinian civilians and systematic destruction of their cultural heritage, halt all military operations across Palestinian land and lift its blockade of Gaza.
The US and the European Union, whose seven members on the Council vote separately but generally in unison, opposed the resolution, with both saying it was unbalanced.
Another resolution called on Israel to stop building all settlements in the occupied territories.
The third condemned Israel for what it called systematic violation of the rights of the people of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The US voted no, while 15 countries, including EU members, abstained.
The US, which itself is in a diplomatic row with Israel over settlements which the government of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is vowing to pursue, told the Council that the three resolutions would do nothing to help peace.
It said the UN body was too often being used as a platform to single out Israel for condemnation while rights violations by other countries were ignored.
The Council is effectively dominated by a developing country bloc in which the Organisation of the Islamic Conference has a strong influence and which is routinely supported by China, Russia and Cuba.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during Washington crisis, advised PM not to capitulate in face of American pressure, Ynet learns
Did the prime minister decide not to provide a written pledge to the US during his Washington visit based on political and coalitional considerations? Ynet learned Thursday that amid the deepening rift between Jerusalem and Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Foreign Minster Avigdor Leiberman, who advised him not to agree to US demands and urged him to return to Israel for further consultations.
According to US reports, Netanyahu conveyed a sense of “panic” during the trip.
“Apparently Bibi is very nervous, frantically calling his ‘seven (top ministers),’ trying to figure out what to do,” one Washington Middle East hand said Wednesday according to the Politico website. “The word I heard most today was ‘panic.’”
Netanyahu’s visit to Washington was held against the backdrop of a serious diplomatic row between Israel and the United State, including the latest incident involving building permits in east Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
Future of Coalition
Many believe diplomatic crisis with US will force Netanyahu to invite Kadima to join coalition
After receiving a cool reception in the White House, Netanyahu met with US President Barack Obama and the two engaged in intense deliberations in an effort to reach mutual understandings before the Israeli PM left Washington. During the discussions, Netanyahu made some time for a conversation with his senior coalition partner Avigdor Leiberman.
According to information received by Ynet, the foreign minister advised the prime minister not to sign any document of understandings with the Americans, urging Netanyahu not to act under pressure, but rather ,to return to Israel and draft such a document along with his senior cabinet members.
Thursday night, several hours after returning from the United States, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak will convene with the seven senior ministers’ forum.
The prime minister seemed to have taken Lieberman’s advice and left Washington without consenting to the US Administration’s demands, saying he must first consult with his senior ministers. However, Netanyahu did not speak with Shas Chairman Eli Yishai – another senior coalition partner.
Much speculation regarding the stability of the current coalition with its existing make-up had been circulating within Israel’s political establishment. Despite the growing speculation, Lieberman did not express any concerns over the future of the coalition, saying in closed-door talks that he does not foresee any changes in its composition.
Unlike the foreign minister, a Labor party minister noted that “the government with its current composition is in danger. The question is not who will leave, but who will join.”
Another senior Likud minister said that “the picture is still not clear enough, and it is too early to engage in any speculations.”
Satisfaction – that’s what Israeli faces radiate, at least as observed by people who just came out of Ramallah or Gaza and watch Jerusalem’s busy Ben-Yehuda Street, the Ramat Aviv Mall or Ben-Gurion International Airport.
To the Israelis, nothing exists beyond the moment. It’s just like the smugness exhibited by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his private playing field, the AIPAC conference. Have our diplomats been expelled? Is the American administration angry? We’ll bow our heads for a moment, the storm will pass, and we’ll be accepted into the honorable club of the OECD. The main thing is that Israel’s obstinate policy of separation has succeeded and that two adversarial Palestinian entities has been created.
One is building its Islamic principality in an isolated enclave, bouncing around promises that the second step toward the liberation of Jerusalem and Haifa has already been taken. The other proudly hosts representatives of donor nations in its small and crowded enclaves, and tries to persuade everybody that this is the way to build a state that includes Area C, no-man’s land, Latrun, Gaza, Al-Aqsa and the approximately 70 square kilometers that Israel has annexed and calls Jerusalem.
But we Israelis know that everything is equally imaginary. We are the wizards of the status quo. We establish it as we like, moving an acre here and a military base there, until the world says it agrees. When God wants, Ramallah will also be called a holy city and Gaza will be crowned an Egyptian district capital.
That is not the way the future looks in the two separate entities. Their mutually contradictory rhetoric is based on a similar assumption: Both Gaza and Ramallah believe that change will eventually come from the outside, and that is the popular expectation as well.
The Ramallah government expects that the United States, Europe and the pro-Western Arab states will come to their senses and force Israel to do that which it has avoided since 1968: withdraw (“with slight border adjustments”) and bring the settlers back home. The Ramallah government expects that external factors will cause Israel to understand that which it does not understand on its own. There is nothing boastful about this stance; rather, it is one of compassion for the Israeli people, which has encased itself in a bubble of smugness that ignores historical processes.
More than a decade ago, during one of the futile rounds of talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Saeb Erekat allowed himself to wonder: “Aren’t the Israelis thinking about their grandchildren?” A similar question is heard from inhabitants of Gaza whose homes were destroyed and whose children were killed, as well as from Palestinian farmers in the West Bank who have had their fill of harassment from settlers. Everyone wants to know: Don’t the Israelis understand that they cannot depend forever on their economic and military superiority? That it is impossible to maintain forever an aggressive regime based on extreme inequality and privilege for Jews?
In other words, it is a request to the West: “If Israel is so important to you, save it from itself.”
That approach sees the Jewish Israeli community as an accepted part of the region, whether in one state, in two or in a federation of states. It does not matter. It proposes foreseeable time frames for implementation: two years, five years, 10. This is an approach that still preserves faith in Western common sense.
The Gaza government, meanwhile, is expecting a Muslim intifada to break out in countries near and far, which will turn the regional and the global balance of power upside down: Peoples will rise up, pro-Western governments will fall, and the new governments will not show tolerance for Western aid to Israel or the foreign element that the West has planted in the East. That scenario, too, sees Israel as the one responsible for everything that happens and might happen, but has no compassion for an entity that views 1 billion of its neighbors as unimportant. Its time frame is much longer than the compassionate scenario. Those who patiently anticipate a widespread Muslim intifada are convinced that their scenario, and not the one that expects the West to take action, is the one that will happen; after all, they are convinced, the West will not change its spots.
By Ali Abunimah, CNN – 23 March 2010
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Monday speech to America’s leading pro-Israel lobby took on added significance in light of the spat between the U.S. and Israel over the expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem.
It indicated the Obama administration blinked in the face of continued Israeli defiance, but that Israel likely faces more trouble down the road.
The row began when Israel announced 1,600 new Jewish-only homes on occupied Palestinian land on March 9, the very day Vice President Joe Biden was in the country to launch indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
In an angry phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Clinton reportedly demanded that Israel rescind the decision, among other “confidence-building measures,” to get the U.S.-brokered talks back on track.
At AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Clinton stood by the administration’s criticism but could not point to any substantive Israeli concessions.
Netanyahu, she said, had responded to her demand for concrete steps with specific actions Israel is prepared to take. But halting settlement expansion was not one of them. Indeed, before leaving Israel for Washington where he was scheduled to meet President Obama on Tuesday, Netanyahu stressed that construction anywhere in Jerusalem was the same as construction in Tel Aviv and would continue as normal.
This is a replay of the administration’s earlier cave-in. Almost a year ago, Obama sought to correct America’s long-standing, pro-Israel tilt by demanding Israel stop building West Bank settlements, which have consumed much of the land on which a Palestinian state was supposed to be established.
But bowing to pressure from Israel’s powerful U.S. lobby, the administration dropped the demand. Israel announced a fictional 10-month settlement freeze, excluding Jerusalem. Then Obama pressured Palestinians to return to the same merry-go-round of endless talks — and still, Israel pursues settlements unrestrained.
In unusually stark language, Clinton warned that Israel needed a peace deal because “the status quo is unsustainable for all sides.”
She pointed to the “inexorable mathematics of demography,” a reference to projections that Palestinians will soon be the majority population in the area controlled by Israel. Only a two-state solution, Clinton asserted, could preserve Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.”
The problem is that the administration’s plan to get to its objective of “two states for two peoples living side by side in peace” looks less credible today than ever.
On the Palestinian side, the U.S. refuses to engage with Hamas, without which no credible deal can be struck, and the anemic U.S. vision of a Palestinian mini-state cannot hope to meet the aspirations or restore the rights of millions of Palestinian refugees.
And, after two embarrassing defeats at the Israel lobby’s hands, chances that Obama will use America’s massive financial aid to Israel as leverage are close to nil, especially as midterm elections approach.
The administration’s dependence on the goodwill of the lobby was highlighted by the fact that AIPAC’s new president, Lee Rosenberg, was a key member of the national finance committee for Obama’s presidential campaign, and another AIPAC national board member, J.B. Pritzker — who got a shout-out in Clinton’s speech — was national finance chair of Citizens for Hillary.
In the closely watched race for Obama’s former Illinois Senate seat, the National Republican Senatorial Committee accused Republican Mark Kirk’s Democratic opponent Alexi Giannoulias — and by extension Obama, who is a close Giannoulias friend — of being “anti-Israel.” This may foreshadow a national GOP strategy to make unconditional support for Israeli policies more than ever a litmus test in American elections.
In this poisonous atmosphere, real progress is unlikely — the best the Obama administration can hope for is to avoid a serious blowup until it can pass the problem to the next administration.
But the situation on the ground will not wait for the United States to come to its senses; in Jerusalem and the West Bank, popular resistance is growing, in the form of nonviolent protests, to Israel’s land confiscations.
Israel’s violent response, including the arrests of civil society leaders, may cause some Palestinians to react in kind.
Globally, Israel faces a growing campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions just like apartheid South Africa did in the 1980s. A leading Israeli think tank, the Reut Institute, warned the government recently that this campaign “possesses strategic significance, and may develop into a comprehensive existential threat within a few years.”
It also stated that a “harbinger of such a threat would be the collapse of the two-state solution as an agreed framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the coalescence behind a ‘one-state solution’ as a new alternative framework.” With its aggressive settlement expansion plans, Israel has in effect chosen a one-state instead of a two-state solution — but it is indeed an apartheid state.
While the United States looks on impassively, or continues to tout a charade of a peace process, Palestinians, pro-democracy Israelis and their allies will intensify what is rapidly turning into a struggle for equal rights and citizenship for everyone who inhabits the narrow land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington this week absorbing the full wrath of the Obama administration, the Pentagon and Israel’s defense establishment were in the process of sealing a large arms deal. According to the deal, Israel will purchase three new Hercules C-130J airplanes… designed by Lockheed Martin… [and] worth roughly a quarter billion dollars.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington this week absorbing the full wrath of the Obama administration, the Pentagon and Israel’s defense establishment were in the process of sealing a large arms deal.
According to the deal, Israel will purchase three new Hercules C-130J airplanes. The deal for the three aircrafts, designed by Lockheed Martin, are worth roughly a quarter billion dollars. Each aircraft costs $70 million.
The aircrafts were manufactured specifically for Israeli needs, and include a large number of systems produced by Israel’s defense industry.
The deal will be covered by American foreign assistance funds. The Pentagon will issue a formal announcement on the matter on Thursday evening.
America and Israel have still not reached an agreement regarding the purchase of another Lockheed war plane, the F-35. It is still not clear when that deal, which is estimated to be worth more than $3 billion, will finally be sealed and carried out.
If that deal is signed in the near future, Israel will likely receive its first F-35 in 2014.
Membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes 30 of the world’s most developed countries, does not provide money or any special economic benefits. Yet it is easy to see why the Israeli government attributes great importance to Israel becoming one of its members. For Israel, membership in the OECD would mean a victory of legitimacy, and a major setback for the worldwide movement calling on Israel to be held accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people. Only democratic countries are allowed to join the OECD. With 35 percent of the population under Israel’s control and sovereignty disenfranchised, denied their basic human and civil rights and repeatedly attacked by the Israeli army, Israel is finding it increasingly difficult to portray itself as a democracy.
What appears less obvious is why the member countries would want to include Israel in the OECD. Israel’s membership would be a confirmation of Israeli policies, thus eroding the organization’s prestige while undermining the efforts of these very same countries to achieve peace in the Middle East. The OECD would be inviting the world to see how it prefers to ignore the crimes committed by Israel, and reward it instead. This would do no less than feed into the argument of extremists who claim that only violence can safeguard the rights of occupied Palestinians.
Ironically, however, the OECD seems to be working harder than Israel to facilitate the latter’s acceptance, which is expected to occur in May. Israel has refused to comply with the OECD demand to provide statistical data which applies only to the internationally-recognized parts of Israel, excluding the illegal settlements in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Yet despite Israel’s refusal, the OECD’s Committee on Statistics is acting to find ways to accept Israel anyway.
According to a leaked report, “Ascension of Israel to the Organization: Draft Formal Opinions of the Committee on Statistics” (download the PDF), the committee proposes to accept Israel based on the statistics currently available, which includes Israeli citizens in the OPT. However, it requests that Israel provide more detailed statistical data which will allow the OECD to conduct its own calculation in order to separate the OPT data from that of Israel. However, Israel will only commit to provide this data after it becomes a member of the organization. Yet as soon as Israel becomes a member, it will have the right to veto this decision, rendering the commitment an empty statement.
It should be noted that in this way the OECD is adopting the Israeli approach — an approach that eliminates the Palestinians and Israel’s effective sovereignty over the OPT, and focuses solely on Israeli citizens. This approach is tantamount to recognizing Israel’s illegal occupation, which stands in direct contradiction to international law and the foreign policies of virtually all OECD countries.
It should also be noted that the OECD takes decisions by consensus. It only takes one OECD country to oppose the integration of Israel into the organization in order to block the process. So far, not a single OECD country has voiced its intention to vote against including Israel in the organization.
The reason for that is twofold. First, there is the usual fear that any country (especially a European country), that voices its objection to Israel’s joining the OECD will be accused of anti-Semitism. Israel enjoys the unflinching support of the United States, and few European politicians have the courage to take a moral stand against either Washington or Israel.
Second, right-wing parties around the world see Israel as the Mecca of anti-immigration policies, Islamophobia and the “war on terror.” With every new line that Israel crosses in abusing the human and national rights of Palestinians, right-wing parties are emboldened to deepen their own politics of hatred toward immigrants. If Israel conducts extra-judicial assassinations, why won’t other countries be allowed to do the same? If Israel installs surveillance mechanisms that invade the privacy of its citizens, what would stop other countries from doing so also? Legitimizing Israel by inviting and facilitating its ascension to the OECD is thus a tool to legitimize the extreme measures promoted by far-right parties in Europe, which are eager to do away with democratic mechanisms and human rights of minorities in the name of nationalism and “security.”
European law clearly forbids European countries from recognizing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, as has been affirmed by the Russell Tribunal. Yet by granting Israel membership in the OECD, they will be doing exactly that. OECD members will knowingly accept Israel to the organization based on deceptive statistics provided by the latter, statistics which conceal the occupation while simultaneously treating it as a permanent fact.
Israel’s acceptance into the OECD would be a grave mistake. It will reward violations of international law, feed the extreme right wing which is growing in developed countries and render all OECD countries as accomplices in Israel’s illegal occupation.
Between March 1 and March 5, 2010, the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt was open, and 4427 people passed through the crossing, including 461 students. Of these students, 100 were returned to Gaza by the Egyptians either because Egypt believed that they would seek to remain in Egypt, or because they were missing the requisite exit documents.
According to the latest information, 502 students are presently seeking to leave the Gaza Strip in order to realize their dreams and study in universities abroad. Yet why do students in Gaza aspire to study outside the Strip? Among the reasons is the fact that in Gaza it is not possible to study certain fields, such as dentistry, occupational therapy, veterinary studies, environment preservation and democracy and human rights. In contrast, degrees in all these areas are available in the West Bank.
Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, the number of students that have received permission from Israel to study in the West Bank since 2000 stands at zero. This is due to the imposition by Israel of a sweeping prohibition on students from Gaza traveling to the West Bank in order to study there. Therefore, students from Gaza (who are able) focus on studying at universities abroad.
Since June 2007, Israel has imposed tight restrictions on the exit of students through the Erez border crossing, establishing strict criteria for the passage of students through Israel on their way to the Allenby border crossing (in Jordan) and from there to their studies overseas. As a result, students are forced to try and exit Gaza through the Rafah crossing.
Since June 2006 and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, the Rafah crossing has been officially closed and has been opened on an ad hoc and irregular basis. This is contrary to the Agreement on Movement and Access concluded in November 2005, according to which the Rafah crossing must be open to the movement of people between Gaza and Egypt.
In total approximately 1600 people, including 502 students who are eager to start their studies abroad, were not able to exit Gaza via the Rafah crossing when it opened at the start of March. They are forced instead to wait until the next time the crossing is opened.
Yet they have no way of knowing when the next time will arrive.
AMMAN, Jordan — Jordan’s king warned Israel in a rare public rebuke that it is “playing with fire” with its settlement policy, and said in comments published Thursday the Jewish state must decide whether it wants peace or war.
The comments from King Abdullah II, whose country signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, underscore the Jordanian leader’s frustration with recent Israeli announcements of new housing for Jews in disputed east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as the capital of a future state.
The Israeli plans came just as long-stalled indirect peace talks were to begin under U.S. mediation. The housing announcement enraged Arabs, and triggered sharp condemnation from Washington and the international community.
“We have warned repeatedly that Israel is playing with fire,” Abdullah said in an interview published with local newspapers.
He said Israel “must decide if it wants conflict or peace,” adding that if it is indeed peace, then Israel must take “tangible actions” toward ending settlements and returning to negotiations with Palestinians.
“People are fed up with an open-ended process that does not lead to results,” he said.
Abdullah said that a two-state solution was the “only solution” to the crisis, and warned that if no progress is made toward peace soon, then a new cycle violence will erupt for which “the whole world will pay the price.”
Despite intense pressure from the U.S. and the international community, Israel has refused to budge on the plans for 1,600 new Jewish homes in east Jerusalem, insisting the holy city is Israel’s capital and not a settlement.
During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip this week to Washington for talks with senior U.S. officials, Israel announced plans to further expand Jewish housing in the disputed part of Jerusalem.
Abdullah firmly rejected the plans, saying Jordan “condemns all Israeli measures to change the identity of Jerusalem and empty it of its Arab Christian and Muslim residents.”
Abdullah spoke ahead of this weekend’s Arab summit conference in Libya, where Arab leaders are expected to decide whet
Obama threatens our future: YNet
