Tag: Israel

EDITOR: Am now back home after a week in hospital, so will try and close the gap as soon as I can; bear with me…

State of denial: Robert Fisk searches for peace in Israel: The Independent

Can peace in the Middle East be achieved while both Israelis and Palestinians refuse to give ground? Robert Fisk takes a road trip through a divided land, from Ben-Gurion’s Tel Aviv villa to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the besieged Gaza Strip
There are no armed guards on the gate of Number 17 Ben-Gurion Boulevard in Tel Aviv, just a tired, two-storey villa set back from the street and an open door that leads to a dark kitchen and a little room with a cot on the floor.

There are bricks over the window above the neat little bed – to protect its owner and his wife Paula from Egyptian bombs during the 1956 Israeli invasion of Sinai, and the 1967 war – but upstairs is the bejewelled centre of this little home, David Ben- Gurion’s library of 20,000 books. I pad through this den, scribbling in my notebook any clues to the mind of this most persuasive of Israeli leaders. Most of the books are in Hebrew – on religion, histories of the Zionist movement, research on Eretz Israel – but the creator of Israel and its first prime minister was also a linguist. There are Demosthenes and Homer in Greek, a three-volume history of the Hellenistic world, Julius Caesar in French, Duff Cooper’s life of Tallyrand, George Bernard Shaw’s complete works, a history of Vichy France, Henry Picker’s Hitler’s Table Talk (in English), Freud on psychology (in German), Guy Chapman’s The Dreyfus Case, histories of Israel (including his own), a series on Jewish Influences on Christian Reform Movements. Ben-Gurion learned Spanish so that he could read a new biography of Cervantes. He loved Spinoza.

Then there are the photographs. Ben-Gurion with de Gaulle, with Kennedy and with a sad and debilitated Churchill, in 1961. Ben-Gurion wanted to read Churchill’s almost forgotten essay on Moses; Churchill’s letter to him, enclosing a copy of Thoughts and Adveures, is a little classic. “I have re-read it,” Churchill wrote, “…and I would not particularly wish it to be remembered as one of my literary works.”
But it was the set of Ben-Gurion’s quotations that caught my eye: statements on the eternal morality of the State of Israel, messages from the great man – who physically was a very little man (I opened his bedroom cupboard and there were jackets and trousers of almost midget size) – in time of war. Here is Ben-Gurion, for example, during Israel’s War of Independence – the Palestinian Arab ‘Nakba’ – when he feared that Jewish forces would destroy Muslim holy places in Jerusalem, cabling on 15 July 1948. “Further to my previous order relating to the Old City – you should see to it that the special force to be appointed for guarding the Old City uses mercilessly machine-guns against any Jew, and especially any Jewish soldier, who will try to pillage or to desecrate any Christian or Moslim holy place.” In 1967, he was boasting of how, during the establishment of the state of Israel, “we did not damage any single mosque.” Yet he was already creating myths. The undamaged mosques, he wrote in the same statement, were found in villages “without a single Moslem, as all of them had already fled during the [British] Mandatory rule and before the declaration of the State…” Amid the detritus of Ben-Gurion’s life, his thick-framed spectacles, his Quink fountain pen ink (“permanent black”), the willow-pattern plates, the original 1951 Marc Chagall sketch of a rabbi with a harp, the old transistor radio in the shelter – we shall forget the elephant tusk from the president of Gabon – there are musings on the morality and nobility and purity of arms of Israel’s army. “The fate of Israel depends on two factors: her strength and her rectitude.” And again. “The State of Israel will not be tried by its riches, army or techniques, but by its moral image and human values.”

During the blood-soaked Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, an event which marked the decline of that rectitude and moral image, a wonderful Doonesbury cartoon depicted a press conference in which an anonymous voice asked an Israeli spokesman: “What has become of the Israel we knew and loved?” And the immediate rejoinder to the questioner? “Come off it, Yasser!” For in a sense, the lugubrious Arafat did adhere to Ben-Gurion’s myth-making. In the end, he even signed up for peace with the state which had already taken 78 per cent of the land he called home. He was a super-terrorist who became a super-statesman and then – after refusing to submit at the final Camp David meeting – became a super-terrorist again.

The truth is that Israel has destroyed many mosques, that the original Palestinian Arab victims of the 1947-8 war did not all flee, as Ben-Gurion suggested; many, like the doomed men and women of the Deir Yassin massacre, were murdered in their villages. The Israeli army, to some of us who have watched it in action, is a rabble, little different from the Arab armies of the Middle East. The numbers of civilian dead in the Gaza war were as much an outrage as the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1982 when Israeli soldiers watched – quite literally – as the Lebanese militia they had sent into the refugee camps eviscerated the Palestinian civilians inside. Foreign journalists continue to prattle on about the supposed purity of Israel’s soldiers.

“Israel has already proved itself the most restrained nation in history. It has set an all-time record for restraint,” one Robert Fulford waffled in the Canadian National Post in January last year, at the height of the Gaza slaughter, when even Tzipi Livni admitted Israel’s soldiers had been allowed to “go wild”. Israel’s own rightist correspondents still portray the outside world as a dark, malevolent planet in which every criticism of Israel emerges from endemic anti-semitism, in which Nazism did not die in the embers of Berlin in 1945. The Jerusalem Post, bashes the drum of racism almost daily. “Berlin Holocaust studies professor slammed for defending Nazi mentor.” “Weisenthal slams Ukraine award to nationalist linked to Nazis.” “Dershowitz: Goldstone is a traitor to the Jewish people.”

I don’t doubt that Stepan Bandera’s Ukrainian nationalist movement was a dodgy bunch of racists – and its original adherents were indeed anti-semitic murderers in the Second World War – but where does this end? The Simon Weisenthal Centre – named after a truly honourable man whom I once met in Vienna as he campaigned for Gypsy as well as Jewish victims of the Nazis – is the same organisation which is now proposing to build a ‘Museum of Tolerance’ on an ancient Muslim graveyard in west Jerusalem. And poor old Richard Goldstone, a Jewish jurist and another honourable man whom I met in the Hague when he was investigating war crimes in ex-Yugoslavia, is a ‘traitor’ because he said that Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes in Gaza; in other words, Goldstone – for this is the point – should have allowed his ethnic origins to rule in Israel’s favour rather than abide by the rule of law.

Last week, in the dog-day resort of Herzliya, I attended much of the vast conference of Israel’s great and good – or at least the largely right-wing variety – to find out how they now saw the country that was founded amid such danger by Ben-Gurion 62 years ago. It was the same old story.

“The Palestinians are the ones who are today the naysayers” – this from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘security advisor’, Uzi Arad – and the Goldstone Report had now become part of an insidious campaign against Israel, an attempt to “delegitimise” (this is the newest cliché) the state. There were boycotts of Israeli goods. Bonfires were made of Israeli products. “I do not know anyone whose stomach does not turn” at such a sight, said Arad.

Michael Hoenlein, vice-chairman of the immensely powerful Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, ann- ounced that Obama’s “engagement” with Syria and Iran had failed. Obama’s administration had been “supportive” over Goldstone (i.e. gutlessly supine in criticising a report which it had not even read). Obama now realised it had to work with Israel. There was unanimous consent in the US Senate over Iranian sanctions. No-one mentioned settlements or colonies. I was reminded of Hannah Arendt’s observation that the congress of World Zionist Organisation’s American section in October 1944 would “embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished”. She went on: “This is a turning point in Zionist history… This time the Arabs were simply not mentioned in the resolution, which obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship.”

For the whole article, please use the link above

EDITOR: The new victims – the Israeli mock0-left and their comeuppence

In many years of the conflict, we have not heard Naomi Chazan and her followers uttering such excited noises as they now do. It may well be that they were so quiet, because it was mere Palestinians who were getting treated roughly, of course. Now, that Ms Chazan has been sacked from her job in Israel’s most right-wing paper, the Jerusalem Post, there is much commotion and accusations of McCarthyism; well, did this just start last week, really? Did Ms Chazan had much to say about the rightist and extereme positions taken by the same paper all those years? Dis Prof. Chazan go on strike or demonstrate when Palestinian universities like Bir Zeit were closed by the IOA (Israel Occupation Army) for more than four years? It seems that the degeneration of the social structure is better noticed when it affects the well-heeled sectors of the Jewish elite.

Naomi Chazan’s limp brand of liberal politics was always based on her being part of the Zionist enterprise, and what she and her friends always tried is to make things look better – to improve Israel’s image abroad, mainly. For that role, she was invaluable. Well, the style has changed, and she is no longer crucial in that role, it seems. So now she has noticed quite a lot of worrying signs… it is amazing how such sacking sharpens one’s perceptive skills:

The new McCarthyism sweeping Israel: The Independent

To disagree with the state is to ‘delegitimise’ the state: that is the increasingly strident response of the country’s political and military establishment to those who dare to criticise its conduct

It’s hard, sitting on the other side of the office table from which Naomi Chazan is picking at her modest hummus and salad snack lunch, to believe that the amiable 63-year-old university professor with a self-deprecating sense of humour has suddenly become the most discussed, not to say demonised, woman in Israel.

Ms Chazan is president of a long-established agency with large numbers of Jewish donors in the US and Britain, which is committed to fighting for “social justice and equality for all Israelis”. The New Israel Fund has over the last 30 years disbursed some $200m to around 800 charitable, social and human rights groups, and justly claims much of the credit for building modern Israel’s still vibrant civil society.

But in the last fortnight the former Knesset member who by her own account loves her native Israel “without reservation” has been sacked as a columnist on the Jerusalem Post after 14 years, had rowdy demonstrators outside her house brandishing a chilling caricature of her with a horn obtruding from her forehead, and most far-fetched of all, been accused, in a newspaper article circulated to foreign journalists by the Government Press Office, of “serving the agenda of Iran and Hamas”.

The onslaught has prompted Nicholas Saphir, the Jewish businessman who runs the New Israel Fund in the UK, to warn that the “Jewish values of social justice and our duty to tikkun olam (repairing the world) have come under serious threat in the state of Israel”.

The row has come to symbolise a new mood of establishment intolerance in Israel towards criticisms by Israeli human rights groups of such episodes as last year’s military operation in Gaza. This harsh new mood has been fuelled by ministers, right-wing politicians and military figures who have closed ranks behind accusations that the UN-commissioned report into the war, led by Richard Goldstone, which accused both sides of war crimes, is being used to “delegitimise Israel”.

The NIF’s travails began when a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu provoked accusations of latterday McCarthyism by charging that “without the NIF there could be no Goldstone report and Israel would not be facing international accusations of war crimes”. It is a charge which Abe Foxman, director of the US-based Anti- Defamation League and no great friend of the Israeli left, told New York Jewish Week was “absurd”.

Ms Chazan does not herself talk about McCarthyism –though several of her agency’s defenders, including Isaac Herzog, a Labour party minister in the governing coalition, have done so. But she told The Independent: “Every country has its own version of things but the general climate is very problematic. It’s ugly.” She said the mood reminded her of the hate-laced run-up to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in November 1995. “But it’s different, because that was an avowedly political disagreement. This is the beginning of a rather systematic campaign against really the very essentials of Israeli democracy.”

Ms Chazan cites the arrests of Israelis at demonstrations against the encroachment of Jewish settlers in the Arab East Jerusalem district of Sheikh Jarrah. And the interrogation and fingerprinting last month of her friend Anat Hoffman, of the reform group Religious Action Centre, who for 20 years has challenged ultra-Orthodox control of the Western Wall by seeking to entrench the right of women to pray in shawls there.

“There is an assault on the basics of law and order but most important I see this as part of a very pernicious attempt to stifle alternative voices, and most seriously to equate criticism with betrayal. And there is a very strong political underpinning to that. I would go further … behind this [is] a group of people who don’t want a political settlement. They don’t want peace, so they’re trying to delegitimise the human rights movement.”

She says that Im Tirtzu “expropriated” the term Zionism while “probably acting in the most anti-Zionist way I can imagine. They forgot to read the [1948] Declaration of Independence which talks of equality of all citizens of race, colour, creed, gender, nationality, etc. They also forgot the chapters in the Declaration where Israel extends its hand to its neighbours, they forgot basic democratic principles. They are hellbent to denounce anyone who dissents from the government line. Or dissents from their definition of what being a loyal Israeli is. That is ridiculous. Democracies are all about disagreements.”

She herself is a Zionist? “Right now they debased the term. Am I someone who believes that Israel has the right to exist as a democratic state with a Jewish majority? My answer is a resounding yes. Just as the Palestinians have the right to a Palestinian state with a Palestinian majority alongside Israel. And I think in that regard I express the view of the vast majority of Israelis.”

The NIF, excoriated by a series of right-wing columnists, has seen off- – for now – the prospect of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into its activities. And Ms Chazan welcomes the alternative prospect that a Knesset subcommittee will launch a probe of foreign funding of NGOs. But she adds: “We hope, are insisting, that they investigate the funding of all NGOs, including the NGOs of the right.”

Indeed Im Tirtzu, whose chairman was a prominent opponent of Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal of settlers from Gaza and has received funds from – among others – John Hagee Ministries, run by an ultra-conservative evangelical US pastor who has appeared to argue that the Holocaust was a good thing because it created the state of Israel.

The organisation’s accusations were based on a curious reading of the footnotes of the Goldstone report claiming that 92 per cent of those citing “non-official” Israeli sources came from human rights organisations supported by the New Israel Fund.
In fact NIF-supported groups account for only 14 per cent of citations in Goldstone, and many of these do not deal with Gaza at all, and even include references that are not critical of Israeli policy. Moreover while the main human rights organisations, from the Association of Civil Rights in Israel to the army veterans’ group Breaking the Silence, are supported by the NIF, as well as by European governments, they absorb less than 10 per cent of its funds, which also go to new Jewish immigrants, disabled, and women’s groups, among many others.
Human rights groups funded by the NIF were early advocates of an independent Israeli investigation. But the widely respected B’Tselem, for example, while tireless in highlighting Palestinian civilian deaths, has questioned the Goldstone conclusion that the Israeli military set out to target civilians. Ms Chazan strongly endorses the groups’ calls for the independent investigation which the Israeli government has so far resisted. “Israel has investigated every war since 1973. This is the first war where we have not set up an investigation. That’s hard to understand.”

Had the Netanyahu government helped to create the space for the right-wing onslaught on the NIF? “Look, it hasn’t denounced this vilification; and therefore draw your own conclusions.”

EDITOR: The right wing ‘think tank’ Reut, more to do with tanks than with thinking, and an arm of government, is discovering the new Elders of Anti-Zion:

Think tank: Israel faces global delegitimization campaign: Haaretz

Israel is facing a global campaign of delegitimization, according to a report by the Reut Institute, made available to the cabinet on Thursday. The Tel Aviv-based security and socioeconomic think tank called on ministers to treat the matter as a strategic threat. The report cites anti-Israel demonstrations on campuses, protests when Israeli athletes compete abroad, moves in Europe to boycott Israeli products, and threats of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders visiting London.

Reut says the campaign is the work of a worldwide network of private individuals and organizations. They have no hierarchy or overall commander, but work together based on a joint ideology – portraying Israel as a pariah state and denying its right to exist. Reut lists the network’s major hubs – London, Brussels, Madrid, Toronto, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley.

The network’s activists – “delegitimizers” the report dubs them – are relatively marginal: young people, anarchists, migrants and radical political activists. Although they are not many, they raise their profile using public campaigns and media coverage, the report says. The “delegitimizers” cooperate with organizations engaging in legitimate criticism of Israel’s policy in the territories such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, blurring the line between legitimate censure and delegitimization. They also promote pro-Palestinian activities in Europe as “trendy,” the report says.

The network’s activists are not mostly Palestinian, Arab or Muslim. Many of them are European and North American left-wing activists. The Western left has changed its approach to Israel and now sees it as an occupation state, the report says. To those left-wing groups, if in the 1960s Israel was seen as a model for an egalitarian, socialist society, today it epitomizes Western evil. The delegitimization network sees the fight against the former regime in South Africa as a success model. It believes that like the apartheid regime, the Zionist-Israeli model can be toppled and a one-state model can be established.

The Reut team says the network’s groups share symbols and heroes such as the Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura, American peace activist Rachel Corrie and joint events like the Durban Conference. Israel’s diplomats overseas, meanwhile, must counter the attempts to delegitimize the country. “The combination of a large Muslim community, a radical left, influential, English-language media and an international university center make London fertile ground for Israel’s delegitimization,” says Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador in London. Prosor gives many interviews to the British media and lectures at university campuses throughout the country.

Although he says he has encountered anti-Israel demonstrations on almost every campus, Prosor has told his people to increase their campus activity. “What is now happening in London universities will happen, at most, in five years at all the large universities in the United States,” he says. The Reut report says Israel is not prepared at all to deal with the threat of delegitimization. The cabinet has not defined the issue as a threat and sees the diplomatic arena as marginal compared to the military one. “The Foreign Ministry is built for the challenges of the ’60s, not the 2000s,” the report says. “There are no budgets, not enough diplomats and no appropriate diplomatic doctrine.” Reut recommends setting up a counter-network, in which Israel’s embassies in centers of delegitimization activity would serve as “front positions.”

The report says the intelligence service should monitor the organizations’ activities and study their methods. The cabinet should also confront groups trying to delegitimize Israel but embrace those engaged in legitimate criticism. The report adds that Israel should not boycott these groups, as Israel’s embassy in Washington does with the left-wing lobby J Street. Boycotting critics merely pushes them toward joining the delegitimizers, Reut says.

EDITOR: Destroying Gaza – fishing and agriculture made impossible

The Gaza Strip used to export large amount of fish, vegetables, fruit and other food products, and this has played a crucial role in feeding the almost two million people living within its boundaries, in what is the densest human habitation on earth. Fishermen and farmers were proudly contributing to the economy, and to the sense of community so prevalent in Gaza, despite all the privations and carnage Israeli has inflicted ever since 1947. Israel has been fighting to limit the Gazan food production for decades, and quite successfully; the fishermen have been stopped from fishing by a blockade, thousands of fruit trees were uprooted under the pretence of ‘security’, and the very limited amount of bitter, salty water was further hurt by the destruction of wells. It suits Israel to have the Gazan population totally dependent on food and other imports, and makes the illegal blockade since 2006 more painful and ‘effective’. Israel is thus moving the costs, as well as the responsibility of supporting Gaza directly onto the international community. This illagal aspects of the continued occpation are not less damaging than the mass killing by force of arms. In the long run they are even more frightening, as they will maker a total starvation possible in the near future. The report below uncovers some of the aspects of this continuing war crime.

Israel bombs Gaza’s agricultural sector to the brink: The Electronic Intifada

Eva Bartlett, 15 February 2010

“If we didn’t get the wheat planted today, we would not have had crops this year,” says Abu Saleh Abu Taima, eyeing the two Israeli military jeeps parked along the border fence east of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip. Although his land is more than 300 meters away, technically outside of the Israeli-imposed “buffer zone,” Abu Taima has reason to be wary.
“They shot at us yesterday. I was here with my wife and nephews.”
Like many farmers along Gaza’s eastern and northern borders, Abu Taima has been delayed planting by the absence of water and the threat from Israeli soldiers along the border.
With most of Gaza’s border region wells, cisterns and water lines destroyed by Israeli forces during last winter’s attacks, farmers have been largely left with no option but to wait for heavier rains.

“Israeli soldiers started intensively bulldozing the land in 2003. But they finished the job in the last war on Gaza,” says Hamdan Abu Taima, owner of 30 dunams (1 dunam is approximate to 1,000 square meters) dangerously close to the buffer zone.
Nasser Abu Taima has 15 dunams of land nearby. Another 15 dunams lie inaccessibly close to the border, rendered off-limits by the Israeli military. “My well was destroyed in the last Israeli war on Gaza. Five years ago I had hothouses for tomatoes, a house here, many trees. It’s all gone. Now I just plant wheat if I can. It’s the simplest.”
Nasser points out the rubble of his home, harvests some ripe cactus fruit and shakes his head. “Such a shame. Such a waste. I knew every inch of this area. Now, I feel sick much of the time because I cannot access my land. And I’ve got 23 in my family to provide for.”

Israel imposed the “buffer zone” along Gaza’s side of the internationally-recognized “Green Line” boundary nearly ten years ago. Israeli bulldozers continue to raze decades-old olive and fruit trees, farmland and irrigation piping, and demolish homes, greenhouses, water wells and cisterns, farm machinery and animal shelters.
Extending from Gaza’s most northwestern to southeastern points, the unclearly-marked buffer zone annexes more land than the 300 meters flanking the border. Israeli authorities say anyone found within risks being shot at by Israeli soldiers. At least 13 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 39 injured in border regions in and outside of the buffer zone since the 18 January end of Israel’s attacks last year, among them children and women.

A sector destroyed
Farmers in southeastern Gaza take shelter from bullets fired by Israeli soldiers at the border nearly one kilometer away. The United Nations agency OCHA reports that roughly one-third of Gaza’s agricultural land lies within the buffer zone, its width varying from half a kilometer to two kilometers.

Ahmed Sourani, of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC), told the Guardian newspaper: “It is indirect confiscation by fear. My fear is that, if it remains, it will become de facto.”
According to PARC, the fertile farmland in and next to the buffer zone was not long ago Gaza’s food basket and half of Gaza’s food needs were produced within the territory.
In 2008, the agricultural sector employed approximately 70,000 farmers, says PARC, including 30,000 farm laborers earning approximately five dollars per day.
One of the most productive industries some years ago, farming now yields the least and has become one of the most dangerous sectors in Gaza, due to Israeli firing, shelling and aggression against people in the border regions.

Of the 175,000 dunams of cultivable land, PARC reports 60 to 75,000 dunams have been destroyed during Israeli invasions and operations. The level of destruction from the last Israeli war on Gaza alone is vast, with 35 to 60 percent of the agricultural industry destroyed, according to the UN and World Health Organization. Gaza’s sole agricultural college, in Beit Hanoun, was also destroyed.
Oxfam notes that the combination of the Israeli war on Gaza and the buffer zone renders around 46 percent of agricultural land useless or unreachable.
More than 35,000 cattle, sheep and goats were killed during the last Israeli attacks, as well as 1 million birds and chickens, according to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) September 2009 report.
Even before Israel’s last assault, PARC reported on the grave shortage of agricultural needs due to the Israeli siege on Gaza: “saplings, pesticides and fertilizers, plastic sheets for greenhouses and hoses for irrigation are no longer available,” reads its 2008 report.

A March 2009 OCHA report lists nylon, seeds, olive and fruit tree seedlings, plastic piping and valves, fertilizers, animal feed, livestock and many other items as scarce, many of which are “urgently” needed.
The dearth of agricultural goods, combined with Israel’s policies of destruction and aggression in the buffer zone, has meant that farmers have changed practice completely, planting low-maintenance wheat and rye where vegetables and orchards once flourished, or not planting at all.
Water sources were particularly hard hit during Israel’s attack on Gaza last winter.
A UNDP survey following the attacks found that nearly 14,000 dunums of irrigation networks and pipelines have been destroyed, along with 250 wells and 327 water pumps completely damaged, and another 53 wells partially damaged by Israeli bombing and bulldozing. This is excluding the many destroyed cisterns and irrigation ponds.
Farmers now either hand deliver water via plastic jugs or wait for the heavy rains in order to salvage some of their crops. Many others have given up working their land.

Farming under fire
Mohammed al-Ibrim, 20, of Benesuhela village near Khan Younis was injured by Israeli shooting in the border region.
“On 18 February 2009, I was working with other farm laborers on land about 500 meters from the border. We’d been working for a couple of hours without problems, and the Israelis had been watching us. Israeli soldiers began shooting from the border as we pushed our pickup truck which had broken down. I was shot in the ankle.”
His injury came just weeks after cousin Anwar al-Ibrim was martyred by an Israeli soldier’s bullet to the neck. Anwar al-Ibrim leaves behind a wife and two infants.

Meanwhile, in Gaza’s north, Ali Hamad, 52, has 18 dunams of land roughly 500 meters from the border east of Beit Hanoun.
“The Israelis bulldozed my citrus trees, water pump, well and irrigation piping in the last war. No one can come here to move the rubble of my well — everyone is afraid of the Israeli soldiers at the border. So now we are just waiting for the winter rains.
All but one well and pump have been destroyed in this region.
“I haven’t watered my few remaining trees since the war. I used to water them once a week, three to four hours per session. Now, they are dehydrated, the lemons and oranges are miniature.”
Mohammed Musleh, 70, lives east of Beit Hanoun, roughly 1.5 kilometers from the border, and owns the only working well and pump in his region.
“There used to be many birds in this area, because it was so fertile, until the Israelis started bulldozing all of the trees, including mine. When people replanted them, the Israelis began destroying the water sources instead.”

Ahmed al-Basiouni, 53, owned the first well established in the east Beit Hanoun area, built in 1961.
“My brothers and I have 60 dunams of land. Many people took water from our well. It was destroyed in 2003, and again in the last Israeli war. Now when I water my remaining trees, I do it by hand, tree by tree.”
In its September 2009 report, the UNEP warned that Gaza’s aquifer is in “serious danger of collapse,” noting that the problem has roots in the “rise in salt water intrusion from the sea caused by over-extraction of ground water.” According to the report, the salinity and nitrate levels of water are far above WHO-accepted levels. Between 90 and 95 percent of the water available to Palestinians in Gaza is contaminated and hence “unfit for human consumption,” according to WHO standards.
Water has been further contaminated by chemical agents used by the Israeli army during its war on Gaza. More contamination from destroyed asbestos roofing, the toxins produced by the bodies of thousands of animal carcasses, and waste sites which were inaccessible and damaged during and after the attacks on Gaza exacerbates the situation.
Further up the lane, Hassan al-Basiouni, 54, says he has lost a quarter of a million dollars to the Israeli land and well destruction.
“My brothers and I have 41 dunams. Our well was destroyed once before this last war. The materials to make a new well aren’t available in Gaza. The 180 people who earned a living off this land are out of work.”
According to Bassiouni, it costs $200 to raise just one fruit tree to fruit bearing maturity.
“We had 1,500 citrus trees, some destroyed in random Israeli shelling and the rest destroyed during the last Israeli war on Gaza. The few remaining trees are only one year old and produce nothing.”
“This water we’re using,” says Basiouni, referring to the contamination, “actually dehydrates the trees.”

Weathering the storm
In eastern Gaza’s Shejaiye area, Sena, 74, and Amar Mhayssy, 78, are devastated. “Our land has been bulldozed four times. We have nine dunams of land in the buffer zone which we can’t access because the Israelis will shoot at us. We have 10 dunams of land over 500 meters from the border fence. Our olive trees, over 60 years old, were all bulldozed by the Israeli army.”
They persevere in the face of danger and futility.
“Now we’re growing okra and have replanted 40 olive trees. But they will take years before they produce many olives. We need to water the new trees every three days, but our water source was destroyed. So we bring containers to water them. There are 13 people in our family, with four in university. Aside from farming, we have no work.”

In al-Faraheen village, east of Khan Younis, Jaber Abu Rjila now can only work his land on a small scale.
“My chicken farm — over 500 meters from the border — as well as 500 fruit and olive trees and 100 dunams of wheat and peas of my and my neighbors’ land were destroyed in May 2008 by Israeli bulldozers. My cistern, the pump and motor and one of my tractors were destroyed. The side of our house facing the border is filled with bullet holes from the Israeli soldiers. Now, because of the danger we rent a home half a kilometer away. I’ve lost my income, how can I pay for rent?”
Since the first constraints of the siege on Gaza were imposed nearly four years ago, the destruction of Gaza’s agricultural sector and potential to provide produce and economy to a severely undernourished Strip has dramatically worsened.
With Palestinians in Gaza now largely dependent on the expensive Israeli produce that is inconsistently allowed into Gaza, the plight of the farmers reverberates throughout the population.

All images by Eva Bartlett.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who arrived in Gaza in November 2008 on the third Free Gaza Movement boat. She has been volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement and documenting Israel’s ongoing attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. During Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, she and other ISM volunteers accompanied ambulances and documenting the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.

Continue reading February 13, 2010

EDITOR: Preparations for War: A whole series of local wars planned by Israel

It seems that Israel is preparing four wars at the same time: in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran! They plan to pick and chose the one to start at any point in time, and Israeli commentators are pointing out the links between those military adventures: a war against Iran will, by necessity, also mean attacking Hizbullah in Lebanon, for example… so at last, the US has the Sheriff it always wanted in the Middle East, spewing fire and destruction in all directions, and at the same time claiming to be the underdog, and under attack from all sides. The amazing fact is that this seems to be an efficient policy, working well on otherwise seemingly intelligent politicians, like the western leaders, without whom it could never succeed. This is hardly an accident: at a time that the west has become ever more aggressive towards the Arab and Islamic world, Israel’s value as a local terrorising agent has never been clearer, in subduing parts of the Middle East at will, assisting the greater plan. Below one can easily detect the ominous strands coming together:

Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri warns of Israel ‘threat’: BBC

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri says he is concerned about “escalating” threats posed to the Middle East by Israel.
Mr Hariri told the BBC that Israeli planes were entering Lebanese airspace every day, and he feared the prospect of another war with Israel.
He accused Israel of making a huge mistake by allegedly threatening both Lebanon and neighbouring Syria.
His comments come days after Syria and Israel exchanged hostile accusations.
The BBC’s Natalia Antelava in Beirut says that while such rhetoric is hardly new, there is concern it could lead to more serious confrontation.
In an interview with the BBC, Mr Hariri said: “We hear a lot of Israeli threats day in and day out, and not only threats.
“We see what’s happening on the ground and in our airspace and what’s happening all the time during the past two months – every day we have Israeli war planes entering Lebanese airspace.
“This is something that is escalating, and this is something that is really dangerous.”
Mr Hariri also said that Lebanon was united, and that the government would stand by Hezbollah – the Lebanese militant group which fought Israel in 2006.
“I think they’re betting that there might be some division in Lebanon, if there is a war against us.
“Well, there won’t be a division in Lebanon. We will stand against Israel. We will stand with our own people.”
His comments come just days after the foreign ministers of Syria and Israel exchanged aggressive accusations, which fuelled both media speculation and public fear about what many in the region describe as the “imminent next war”.
Such hostile rhetoric is hardly new to the Middle East, and yet, because calm in this is region is so fragile, many are concerned that it could lead to a more serious confrontation.

Lebanese PM: We will stand united against Israeli threat: BBC

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Wednesday said that he was concerned over Israel’s “escalating” threats to Lebanon and Syria, and that if Israel were to attack, he would stand united with his own people.
“I think they’re betting that there might be some division in Lebanon, if there is a war against us,” Hariri said in an interview with BBC News.
“Well, there won’t be a division in Lebanon. We will stand against Israel. We will stand with our own people,” he said, referring to Hezbollah’s role in the divided country.
The Lebanese premier also said that Israeli planes enter Lebanese and Syrian air space on a regular basis.
“We see what’s happening on the ground and in our airspace and what’s happening all the time during the past two months – every day we have Israeli planes entering Lebanese airspace,” Hariri said. “This is something that is escalating, and this is something that is really dangerous.”
Hariri’s remarks follow a week of increased tensions between Israel and Syria.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman responded to Hariri’s remarks Wednesday, saying, “Hezbollah murdered his father and he is in the position of being a hostage,” Channel 10 reported, quoting Army Radio.
Addressing a business conference at Bar-Ilan University last week, Lieberman warned Syrian President Bashar Assad that if his country entered a conflict with Israel, it would not only lose, but his regime would also disintegrate.
“Assad should know that if he attacks, he will not only lose the war. Neither he nor his family will remain in power,” Lieberman told the audience.
The foreign minister’s remarks come after Assad on Wednesday told Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos that Israel was pushing the Middle East toward a new war.
“Our message should be that if Assad’s father lost a war but remained in power, the son should know that an attack would cost him his regime,” Lieberman continued. “This is the message that must be conveyed to the Syrian leader by Israel.”

Israeli PM plays down minister’s Lebanon war claim: BBC

Israel’s prime minister has distanced himself from comments by a member of his cabinet who suggested Israel was heading for a new war with Lebanon.
Israel was “not seeking any conflict” with Lebanon, Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Earlier, Yossi Peled, minister without portfolio and a reserve army general, had said that a repeat of the 2006 war with Lebanon was only a matter of time.
More than 1,000 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and about 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers, died in the conflict.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clarifies that Israel is not seeking any conflict with Lebanon,” the Israeli leader said in a statement on Saturday.
“Israel seeks peace with its neighbours.”
The statement came shortly after comments by Mr Peled were broadcast in which the minister said Israel was “heading towards a new confrontation”.
“In my estimation, understanding and knowledge it is almost clear to me that it is a matter of time before there is a military clash in the north,” he said.
In 2006 the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah launched a raid into Israel in which it captured two Israeli soldiers. Hezbollah also sent thousands of rockets into northern Israel.
Israel launched huge air and sea attacks on targets all over Lebanon, and then a land invasion.

Obama vows ‘significant’ sanctions against Iran: BBC

US President Barack Obama has said the US and its allies are developing a “significant regime of sanctions” against Iran for its nuclear programme.
He said the international community was unified over Iran’s “misbehaviour”.
Speaking in Washington, he said despite Tehran’s denials, it was clear Iran was working to build nuclear weapons.
His remarks came after Iranian state media reported that Iran had started the process of enriching uranium to 20% for use in a medical research reactor.
Russian disapproval
In an unexpected appearance in the White House briefing room, Mr Obama said the US was confident the international community was “unified around Iran’s misbehaviour in this area”.
He said the new push for sanctions on Iran was “moving along fairly quickly” and should be completed in the next few weeks.
Mr Obama also said he was pleased at Russia’s quick disapproval of Iran’s latest move.
But he said it was unclear how China would respond to a new push at the UN Security Council for another round of sanctions against Iran.
China, a UN Security Council member, has called for further talks over the issue.
China and Russia have been reluctant in the past to support international sanctions against Iran.
“How China operates at the Security Council as we pursue sanctions is something we’re going to have to see,” Mr Obama said.
The five permanent members of the Security Council – the US, Russia, China, France and Britain – have a veto over resolutions, including sanctions.
Iran currently enriches uranium to a level of 3.5% but requires 20% enriched uranium for its research reactor, which is meant to produce medical isotopes. A bomb would require uranium enriched to at least 90%.
The US and its Western allies say Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon – a charge Iran denies.
In October, a deal brokered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was thought to have been struck for Iran to send its uranium to Russia and France for enrichment.
But last month, diplomats said Iran had told the IAEA that it did not accept the terms of the deal – though there have since been other, conflicting messages.
Also on Tuesday, US state department spokesman PJ Crowley said the international community was willing to help Iran secure medical isotopes from abroad.
The offer would help to “build some confidence” and show Iran that enriching uranium to 20% purity was “unnecessary”, Reuters news agency quoted him saying.

Continue reading February 10, 2010

David Bellamy urged: ‘Pull out of Zionist talk’: The Jewish Chronicle

The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (Bricup) has urged botanist David Bellamy to pull out of a Zionist Federation event at which he is expected to speak about Israel’s environmental achievements.
Mr Bellamy is due to appear at the ZF’s Israel Blue White and Green seminar alongside leading Israeli scientists on Tuesday.
The event, which is primarily aimed at non-Jewish schoolchildren, is a follow-up to last year’s Israel Science Day which Bricup also attempted to disrupt.
But the group’s protests fell flat after a small group of demonstrators turned up at the venue and left after an hour.

Bricup wrote to Mr Bellamy this week saying: “We are outraged, and think you ought to be too, at the prospect of Israel presenting itself (especially to relatively unformed minds) as a champion of environmentalist virtues.
“Their university scientists, as elsewhere, have made some useful contributions. These events, however, will try to use these to ‘greenwash’ the whole state of Israel.”
The letter was signed by 97 supporters including Lord Ahmed, Baroness Tonge, Clare Short MP and Tom Hickey of the University and College Union.
Among their allegations is the claim that untreated sewage from Israeli settlements in the West Bank is being dumped into valleys, polluting Palestinian agriculture and water sources.
Bricup’s Jonathan Rosenhead said: “For Israel to be held up as the environmental ‘good guy’ while it is destroying the environment of the West Bank and Gaza is like Machiavelli posing as a supporter of open government.”
The ZF declined to comment on the letter, but said it expected the event to go ahead as planned.
Mr Bellamy was unavailable for comment.

Gideon Levy / If Israel lets ex-pats vote, what’s to stop enfranchising all Jews?: Haaretz

What rejoicing in America! How delighted they will be – Abe (formerly Avraham), Joe (formerly Yossi) and Sam (formerly Shmulik). From now on, they will be able to vote from afar.
We’ll have elections by text messages, governments chosen by remote control. We are legitimizing what used to be regarded as Israel’s great sin – emigration.
The most right-wing government in Israel’s history, which hunts down anyone who hasn’t done military service and declares war on anyone who questions its whims, is now opening its legs to those whom until recently it regarded as traitors.
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From now on, those who left Israel will be able to vote on its leadership. Tomorrow, maybe all the Jews in the world will do so. Anything to increase the support for the right-wing parties, anything to neutralize the “demographic threat.”
If worst comes to worst, maybe we’ll even let the Christian Evangelists – those friends of Israel – vote. Why make do with 5 million Israeli Jews? Let’s add another million.
Much water has flown through the Hudson River since Yitzhak Rabin called the migrants “dropouts.” Today we follow their success stories – whether real or imaginary – with envy. We read the stories about those who “made it” there, and every used car salesman on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio seems to have achieved the ultimate Israeli dream.

They come here once a year or two, stay at the Hilton and lecture us from the lobby to strike harder, to kill more, to deepen the occupation, to strengthen the settlements. It’s easy to be nationalist in Manhattan.
Now they will be our partners. War and peace, territories and settlements, subsidized medicine and Avigdor Lieberman. All these issues will be in the hands of about 1 million old-new Israelis who left shamefacedly. They will vote for racism and war, while we will eat the rotten fruit.
Israel won’t hear about a Palestinian right of return, and deprives all rights to every Palestinian who goes abroad, after his or her family lived here for generations. But it is opening its gates to people who haven’t lived here for decades. Now they will vote with their acquired American accent.

Benjamin Netanyahu knows a thing or two about them personally. Most of his uncles and cousins on his father’s side left Israel or were born to Israeli expatriates. Exemplary patriots.
Not all is clear yet. What about the ex-Israelis’ children? Will they be able to vote, too? How about their grandchildren? Are Arab Israelis included?
All this does not matter. Netanyahu and Lieberman have broken a new record for cynicism. A singer who did not serve in the Israel Defense Forces isn’t allowed to perform, left-wingers are seen as a traitors. But an Israeli who hasn’t stood in a traffic jam here for 50 years will be able to vote. Lo how the Zionism of once has become today’s cynicism.

An excellent expose of the nefarious context of the Anthony Julius publication about anti-semitism:

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Still no hope of common sense in the war against anti-Semitism: The Independent

These defenders to the end of all Israeli actions knowingly mix politics and race

One would not choose to roll around naked in a field of nettles. One learns that choosing to write on anti-Semitism is just as rash, possibly more so. Protesters and malicious maligners stalk anyone who ventures on to the subject. And for the only Muslim weekly columnist in the country (who knows for how long) to tread into that field is extreme recklessness. Or reveals a worrying proclivity for masochism. Stinging rebukes will arrive before I am awake and all manner of outrageous allegations will roam the streets of the internet, rogue rumours against which there is no defence. Every word typed can be distorted or has the potential to offend. The column will madden both hyper-Zionists and insufferable Islamicists. So divisive is the issue today that many who see themselves as “reasonable” Muslims and Jews may not be too happy either. Ah well so be it. No more procrastination. Unto the breach dear friends.

The lofty, intellectual lawyer Anthony Julius, whose most famous client was Diana, Princess of Wales, has written Trials Of The Diaspora, an erudite history of anti-Semitism in Britain. He convincingly exposes the “polite”, almost naturalised anti-Jewish attitudes still rife among genteel folk of this country. When Diana chose him as her divorce lawyer, to The Daily Telegraph Julius was a clever Jew who was unlikely to understand the “English” idea of fair play. The paper was obliged to publish a grovelling apology.
George Orwell wrote a stirring essay in 1945 on this English prejudice. Julius describes a train journey when he was a young boy. An Englishman who did business with his father praised the excellent manners of a young Jewish girl who knew his daughter, as if such good manners were remarkable and unexpected. Orwell describes such moments too and asks: “Was it a conscious effort to behave decently by people whose subjective feelings in many cases must have been very different?”

This week we had a report published by the Community Security Trust, a Jewish organisation that monitors hate crimes against British Jews. In 2009, there were 598 incidents and attacks, 56 per cent more than in 2006, another bad year. I believe both Julius and the CST. Wagner said: “I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it.”
In a coffee shop before Christmas, I overheard a group of yummy mummies of all races going on about Bernie Madoff and how “these people” got the world into the mess it is in. It really is all around us. Just look up the Jew-haters on the internet, the neo-Nazis and Islamicists and the bloggers who say anti-Semitism is exaggerated. Across Europe, even in Sweden, Jewish citizens say hatred against them is in the air once more.

More wounding than racism itself is the denial of it, the invalidation of lived and felt experience. Racist statements and judgements are today defended with unprecedented ardour and conviction. Black and Asian people are instructed to learn toleration, to understand banter and brave free expression, to stop inventing pain and to end their wretched PC whinges. Muslims too are suspected of making up stories, imagining humiliation and “using” discrimination for unholy purposes. Ironically, Julius rejects the claim that Muslims are facing increasing hostility in Britain. I know Muslim activists who say exactly the same about the rise in anti-Semitism.
We should trust witness and victim testimonies of bigotry. But we can’t and shouldn’t become credulous. Unquestioning accommodation would be naïve. Accusations of racism are used by all vulnerable groups to deflect legitimate concerns about, say, female genital mutilation, or forced marriages, or the too many young black men sunk into drug addiction and violence, or the lack of real democracy in the Muslim world.
Julius plays that game, dextrously extending the accusation of anti-Semitism to implicate principled critics of the Israeli state. Jewish objectors, like the esteemed American Tony Judt, are also cut down with a poisoned blade. Richard Goldstone, the South African Zionist, has found himself similarly discredited by Zionists for writing a scathing UN assessment of the Israeli assault on Gaza. Similar treatment is meted out to others who try to remain scrupulously fair yet tough when scrutinising the government of Israel.

These defenders to the end of all Israeli actions knowingly mix politics and race. Their enemies do the same: when Lebanon was attacked, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: “This is a war that is fought by all the Jews.” It wasn’t. To say so is iniquitous, just as bad as the Jihadis who claim all of us Muslims are on their side or must be. The much admired writer Anne Karpf points this out in a beautifully articulated column: “If the Israeli government (wrongly) elides Israel with all Jews it is hardly surprising if anti-Semites do so too.”
By reproducing this conflation in his book, the eloquent Anthony Julius undercuts his powerful case that anti-Semitism, a very light sleeper, is up again. Doubters have been given a reason to repudiate him. Oh, the pity of it all.

Continue reading February 8, 2010

As international hysteria is driving the capitalist west into another islamophobic illegal, immoral and illogical military conflict with Iran, based on an Israeli campaign and perceived interests, the voices against this crminal madness are increasing, even within Israel itself. As we know, in the western democracies public opinion makes no difference, as last shown during the buildup towards the war in Iraq. Democracy is a fine things for other people to have, of course, people who are underdeveloped… we in the west are so above such primary needs… Our leaders are in touch both with God and the Truth, so fortunately do not need our views and advice.

Peace with Syria as vital as stopping Iran’s bomb: Haaretz

By Zvi Bar’el,
Ehud Barak said what he had to say, Bashar Assad did not understand or maybe he did, Avigdor Lieberman uttered his usual concoction, Benjamin Netanyahu explained that “we want peace,” and life is good. Everything is all right. This week’s ruckus is over. All that remains is the media circus. Because war, we should recall, is not something Israel does in winter.

The chatter, on the other hand, works all year round and Lieberman is its strategic asset. Lieberman can babble on about the collapse of the Assad family’s rule, swear at Hosni Mubarak and ridicule Jordan. His importance at the Foreign Ministry compares only to that of the Strategic Affairs Ministry under Moshe Ya’alon or the Regional Development Ministry under Silvan Shalom. These three frustrated ministries fall under the category “we want peace” and have transformed chatter into policy.

But Lieberman is not really the problem. The root of evil is the hoax of “we want peace,” because Israel is not really interested in peace with Syria – not at the cost of withdrawing from the Golan Heights. Israel’s working assumption is that there is no rush for negotiations with Syria; our northern neighbor does not constitute a military threat and its regional position does not allow it to rally the support of other Arab countries to carry out a full-blown war. Syria can be threatened without risking damage.

Syria itself “contributed” to this Israeli approach by keeping the border calm for decades, and there is no way to convince Israelis, who understand only Katyushas and Qassam rockets, that Syria is a threat for which a single bed-and-breakfast needs to be removed from the Golan. The Syrian promise for the “fruits of peace” is also shoddy. Compared to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, Syria is not offering any real economic incentives to make peace.

But Syria holds an asset that Israel does not recognize. Peace at this time means the possibility that Israel’s strategic position in the Middle East and the world will change. Syria is a key country along a new axis being formed in the Middle East, which includes Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The backbone of this axis is economic, security and diplomatic cooperation that would replace the old axis of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Iran’s burgeoning political influence in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, the huge amounts of oil still available in Iraq, Turkey’s influence on Central Asia and its control over a gas pipeline to stretch from Iran to Europe, as well as the new link between Saudi Arabia and Syria and Syria’s great influence on Palestinian politics and Lebanon’s Hezbollah – all these may make this axis much more wealthy and influential in the next decade. So a very important arena of interests is forming, not only for Israel.

The United States of Barack Obama has already realized that Syria, with or without peace with Israel, is a country Washington needs to preserve its position in the region and beyond. A U.S. ambassador is expected to be sent to Damascus in the near future, and Europe is negotiating with Syria, not only on economics, but also on an entry point to the entire Middle East. Our friend Silvio Berlusconi should be asked about his view on Syria when his country’s trade with Damascus stands at about $2 billion, some 20 percent of overall trade between Syria and Europe.

Israel, which is used to examining the region through a lens that counts Hezbollah’s missiles and Hamas’ explosive barrels sent to sea, and which considers the prisoner numbers in the Gilad Shalit deal the crux of the security threat, is blind to the region’s strategic developments. The expression “we want peace,” which is void of substance, cannot even begin to express the folly and shortsightedness of Israel, which is shrugging its shoulders at a chance to reach peace with Syria, if for no other reason than to prevent a damaging blow from this new axis.

To this end, we need a statesman, not a comedian. The leader who can make Israelis understand that peace with Syria does not mean eating humus in Damascus but is an existential interest, no less important than blocking Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But this is the kind of statesman we’re lacking. For the time being we have to make do with a thug who cries out – “hold me back!”

Continue reading February 7, 2010

So, why is Israeli economy so strong? It is no miracle, it is based on pillage, theft, brutality and illegality:

Israeli report claims $2bn stolen from Palestinians: IOA

Jerusalem –  Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than US$2 billion (Dh7.4bn) by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists revealed this week.
A new report, “State Robbery”, says the “theft” continued even after the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 and part of the money was supposed to be transferred to a special fund on behalf of the workers.
According to information supplied by Israeli officials, most of the deductions from the workers’ pay were invested in infrastructure projects in the Palestinian territories – a presumed reference to the massive state subsidies accorded to the settlements.
Nearly 50,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are working in Israel – following the easing of restrictions on entering Israel under the “economic peace” promised by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister – and continue to have such contributions docked from their pay.
Complicit in the deception, the report adds, is the Histadrut, the Israeli labour federation, which levies a monthly fee on Palestinian workers, even though they are not entitled to membership and are not represented in labour disputes.
“This is a clear-cut case of theft from Palestinian workers on a grand scale,” said Shir Hever, a Jerusalem-based economist and one of the authors of the report. “There are no reasons for Israel to delay in returning this money either to the workers or their beneficiaries.”
The deductions started being made in 1970, three years after the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories began, when Palestinian workers started to enter Israel in significant numbers, most of them employed as manual labourers in the agriculture and construction industries.
Typically, the workers lose a fifth of their salary in deductions that are supposed to cover old age payments, unemployment allowance, disability insurance, child benefits, trade union fees, pension fund, holiday and sick pay, and health insurance. In practice, however, the workers are entitled only to disability payments in case of work accidents and are insured against loss of work if their employer goes bankrupt.
According to the report, compiled by two human rights groups, the Alternative Information Centre and Kav La’Oved, only a fraction of the total contributions – less than eight per cent – was used to award benefits to Palestinian workers. The rest was secretly transferred to the finance ministry.
The Israeli organisations assess that the workers were defrauded of at least $2.25bn in today’s prices, in what they describe as a minimum and “very conservative” estimate of the misappropriation of the funds. Such a sum represents about 10 per cent of the PA’s annual budget.
The authors also note that they excluded from their calculations two substantial groups of Palestinian workers – those employed in the Jewish settlements and those working in Israel’s black economy – because figures were too hard to obtain.
Mr Hever said the question of whether the bulk of the deductions – those for national insurance – had been illegally taken from the workers was settled by the Israeli High Court back in 1991. The judges accepted a petition from the flower growers’ union that the government should return about $1.5 million in contributions from Palestinian workers in the industry.
“The legal precedent was set then and could be used to reclaim the rest of these excessive deductions,” he said.
At the height of Palestinian participation in the Israeli labour force, in the early 1990s, as many as one in three Palestinian workers was dependent on Israeli employers.
Israel continued requiring contributions from Palestinian workers after the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, arguing that it needed to make the deductions to ensure Israeli workers remained competitive.
However, the report notes that such practices were supposed to have been curbed by the Oslo process. Israel agreed to levy an “equalisation tax” – equivalent to the excessive contributions paid by Palestinians – a third of which would be invested in a fund that would later be available to the workers.
In fact, however, the Israeli State Comptroller, a government watchdog official, reported in 2003 that only about a tenth of the money levied on the workers had actually been invested in the fund.
The finance ministry has admitted that most of the money taken from the workers was passed to Israeli military authorities in the Palestinian territories to pay for “infrastructure programmes”. Hannah Zohar, the director of Kav La’Oved who co-authored the report, said she believed that the ministry was actually referring to the construction of illegal settlements.
The report is also highly critical of the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation, which it accuses of grabbing “a piece of the pie” by forcing Palestinian workers to pay a monthly “organising fee” to the union since 1970, even though Palestinians are not entitled to membership.
Despite the Histadrut’s agreement with its Palestinian counterpart in 2008 to repay the fees, only 20 per cent was returned, leaving $30m unaccounted for.
The Histadrut was also implicated in another “rip-off”, said Mr Hever. It agreed in 1990 to the Israeli construction industry’s demand that Palestinian workers pay an extra two per cent tax to promote the training of recent Jewish immigrants, most of them from the former Soviet Union.
Mr Hever said that in effect the Palestinian labourers were required to “subsidise the training of workers meant to replace them”. The funds were never used for the stated purpose but were mainly issued as grants to the families of Israeli workers.
In one especially cynical use of the funds, the report notes, the money was spent on portable stoves for soldiers involved in Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza last year.
In response, the finance ministry called the report “incorrect and misleading”, and the Histadrut claimed it was “full of lies”. However, neither provided rebuttals of the report’s allegations or its calculations.
Mr Hever said the government body responsible for making the deductions, the department of payments, had initially refused to divulge any of its figures, but had partly relented after some statistics were made available through leaks from its staff.
Assef Saeed, a senior official in the Palestinian Authority’s labour ministry, said the PA was keen to discuss the issue of the deductions, but that talks were difficult because of the lack of contacts between the two sides

Rights groups under fire for scrutiny of Israel’s conduct of Gaza war: IOA

A parliamentary investigation could lead to the dismantling of some rights groups accused of undermining the legitimacy of Israel’s government by documenting alleged misconduct by Israeli forces during last year’s Gaza war.
Tel Aviv — As the United Nations prepares to decide what action to take on the Goldstone report, which alleges Israeli misconduct in last year’s Gaza war, local human rights groups and their backers are facing a rising tide of domestic criticism for fomenting international scrutiny of Israel and its military.
A center-right group, “Im Tirtzu,” issued a report last week charging that the Goldstone report relies on documentation from 16 local rights organizations that were vocal critics of Israeli conduct during the war. The report singled out a common financial thread, the multimillion-dollar New Israel Fund, which raises money among American Jews and foundations for progressive causes.
That sparked a drive in the Israeli parliament to approve an investigation to determine whether the work of those nonprofits undermines Israel’s legitimacy. The investigation could lead to the outlawing of some groups.
The sponsor of the inquiry proposal, Knesset Member Otniel Schneller from the centrist Kadima party, accused the groups of “the worst incitement possible” against Israel. “Most of the quotes in the [Goldstone] report against Israel come from Israeli organizations,” he said. “They are accusing Israel of terrorizing [Palestinian] civilians.”
The Goldstone report assigns blame to both Israel and Hamas for committing possible war crimes during the war, but accuses Israel of intentionally killing Palestinian civilians and of destroying civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.
Israel says the report reflects political bias, anti-Semitism, and an effort to rob the Jewish state of the right to self-defense against attacks on its citizens. In the coming weeks and months, the United Nations Security Council will decide whether to refer the findings to the International Criminal Court.
How much can you criticize government?
The campaign against the rights groups is sparking a debate over the limits of legitimate criticism of the government.
“We believe there are valid concerns with regard to Israel’s conduct during [the war]. We believe the Israeli public has the right to know what was done in our name in Gaza,” says Haggai Elad, the director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a beneficiary of the New Israel Fund. “If the [parliament] is intent on holding hearings in the 21st century that are reminiscent of the anti-Communist hysteria in the United States of the 1950s, then that is a sad moment for Israeli democracy.”
Im Tirtzu, which is funded by Christians United for Israel, a group founded by US evangelical John Haggee, said the New Israel Fund affiliates had a “significant influence” on the crafting of the Goldstone report, and that most of its accusations against Israel were sourced to the rights groups.
“These organizations are trying to help Hamas in [its] fight against Israel,” argues Im Tirtzu chairman Ronen Shoval. “They are slandering the State of Israel and the Israeli soldiers around the world.”

Police would issue arrest warrant for Israeli PM if Mossad is behind Dubai killing: IOA

DUBAI — The Israeli prime minister would be at the top of the wanted list if the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad, is behind the killing of a senior Hamas official who was found dead in a hotel in the city last month, the chief of Dubai Police said today.
Lt Gen, Dahi Khalfan Tamim told The National: “Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to assassinate [Mahmoud] al Mabhouh in Dubai. We will issue an arrest warrant against him.”
He did not, however, assert that Mossad was definitively responsible for the killing.
Lt Gen Tamim had said the method used to kill Mr al Mabhouh, was a “Mossad method” but did not elaborate.
He added that Mossad “has carried out operations” in the past using similar procedures. Dubai Police had also earlier said only that the involvement of Mossad could not be ruled out.

Israel slaps six-month travel ban on Palestinian map expert: The Electronic Intifada

Marian Houk,  5 February 2010

Citing “security reasons” — the ubiquitous and unanswerable catch-all phrase against which it is almost impossible to mount any defense — Israel’s Ministry of the Interior has just issued a six-month travel ban on map expert Khalil Tafakji.

Tafakji, like almost all other Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, is a “permanent resident,” but not a citizen of Israel.

He is frequently interviewed as an expert on Al-Jazeera satellite channel, as well as on Palestinian television and other media. He said in a phone interview on 4 February that he had just returned 20 days previously from a tour of a number of countries, from Tunisia to Turkey to India, during which he spoke about the problems facing Palestinians because of Israeli policies in East Jerusalem. “You know I am not a political man,” Tafakji said today. But, this is a place where even ordinary, everyday life becomes political.

However, Tafakji has been called the Palestinian Authority’s chief geographer and said he did not know of any other person who has been handed such a travel ban.

Tafakji, surprised at the development, said that “Yesterday they [Israeli authorities] called me and said come to Moskobiyya [the “Russian Compound” security complex in West Jerusalem] — Room 4. They said ‘This is an order, sign it, you have 14 days to make an objection. It is forbidden for you to travel from today for six months.'”

[[When asked if he will contest the travel ban,]] Tafakji said that he has been in constant consultation with lawyers, who have all said that since the explanation he was given was only the generic — but all-encompassing — “security reasons,” it is almost hopeless to contest.

Tafakji was not given any other restriction, he said.

“We are trying, through relations with Jordan and Egypt, America, Britain and France, to see if we can do anything” to remove the restriction, Tafakji said. He told the privately-owned and operated Maan News Agency in Bethlehem that “I am a peace man,” and noted that he worked as a cartographic expert with Palestinian delegations to peace talks since they began in the early 1990s.

He also worked with the late PLO leader in Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, who had set up the Arab Studies Society in 1983 and established an important center for services in the Orient House, the Palestinian headquarters in East Jerusalem forcibly closed by Israel in 2001. Tafakji heads the Arab Studies Society’s Mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Department, which has relocated to Dahiet al-Bariid, just beside Israel’s wall, but with full access to Jerusalem.
Marian Houk is a journalist currently working in Jerusalem with experience at the United Nations and in the region. Her blog is www.un-truth.com.

The return of Goldstone: Al Ahram Weekly

Israel’s vicious counter-campaign against the UN fact-based report on its war on Gaza continues as the time approaches when further action will be considered, writes Amira Howeidy

On Monday, 1 February, the Israeli media reported that the commander of the Israeli army’s Gaza division, Brigadier General Eyal Eizenberg, and the commander of the Givati Brigade, Colonel Ilan Malka, were “disciplined” for authorising the shelling of a United Nations facility with white phosphorous during Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip that started in December 2008 and lasted for 22 days.

During that onslaught the Israeli military killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, and wounded or maimed approximately 5,000. Israel destroyed at least 2,000 buildings in addition to significant sectors of Gaza’s infrastructure. Besieged by the Israeli occupation since June 2007, the Strip’s 1.5 million population is denied construction material — in addition to adequate food, medical and energy supplies — and has not been able to repair the damage since.
Known as Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza assault was Israel’s seventh and latest war in the region. It stands out for its shocking brutality. The Israeli army’s liberal use of white phosphorous munitions in densely populated areas meant that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were subject to the lethal chemical that burns flesh to the bone once in contact with oxygen.

Doctors operating in Gaza at the time also pointed to mounting evidence that Israel used DIME, an experimental explosive biological weapon created by the US air force and that is packed with tungsten dust that forms a micro-shrapnel cloud upon detonation. Gaza hospitals spoke of the “clean tearing of limbs” that DIME can cause, according to the Christian Science Monitor on 14 January 2009. Unfortunately for Israel much of the gruesome scene was captured on camera, drawing international outrage.
A year later, Israel has decided that only two military officers should be “disciplined” for the offensive, which was described by a UN fact-finding mission last September as amounting to “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”. In fact, had it not been for the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that formed a team of pioneering legal figures to investigate war crimes in Gaza and Israel during the 22-day military operation, it is unlikely that Israel — an occupying power with a record of brutality and impunity — would have probed its own war.

Ever since the UNHRC passed in February 2009 a resolution to dispatch an independent mission to investigate the war, Israel has continued to attack the council. The UN Goldstone Mission, named after its head, South African judge Richard Goldstone, formed in April 2009 by the UN high commissioner for human rights, was lambasted by Israel as “political”, despite Goldstone being a former member of the South African Constitutional Court, a former chief prosecutor of the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and also Jewish and a self-proclaimed “Zionist”.
When it came to the work of investigation, the Goldstone Mission was repeatedly denied entry to Israel, the latter having declared officially that it would “not cooperate” with the fact-finding effort, forcing Goldstone to work via public hearings that included Israeli and Palestinian victims alike. The outcome was a damning report submitted to the UNHRC on 29 September 2009. Although it accused both Israel and the Islamic resistance movement Hamas of “possibly” committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, the report contained an analysis of 36 specific incidents in Gaza compared to only a few in the West Bank and in Israel. In other words, the 575- page long report was mainly and primarily about Israeli, not Palestinian war crimes.

Upon release, Israel immediately mounted a vigorous campaign to defame the report’s conclusions. But an emergency meeting by the UN General Assembly in November endorsed the report’s recommendations nonetheless. It recommended that if Israel and Hamas fail to investigate the alleged violations and undertake follow-up actions that meet international standards of objectivity within six months, then the Security Council should consider referring the whole issue of Israeli and Hamas violations to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
International human rights organisations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch both issued reports on the Gaza war, equally condemning Israel and to a much lesser degree Hamas. Now that the Goldstone deadline is approaching, the Israeli government — which refused to recognise the Goldstone Report and described it as politically motivated — has sent a 46-page report to the UN secretary-general, submitted on 29 January, explaining the Israeli judicial system. The Israeli communiqué included information on an internal Israeli inquiry into some of the accusations in the Goldstone Report, and defended the Israeli army’s performance during the war.
Parallel to this, an active pro-Israel (Western) media campaign surfaced during the past week that accused Goldstone of anti- Semitism, bringing Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January) into the affair. Reuters quoted Yuli Edelstein, a minister in the Israeli cabinet, as saying he was going to meet UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on the day of remembrance to suggest that the Goldstone Report had triggered recent attacks on Jews worldwide. Recent narratives alluding to the report, such as that of Israeli political commentator Alan Dershowitz in the popular US Huffington Post newszine, claimed that Israel went to “extreme lengths to avoid civilian causalities… in a manner that put Israeli soldiers at considerable risk.”
The Palestinian Authority submitted its response to the Goldstone Report on 29 January. According to the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, Hamas will submit its 52-page long response before the deadline for doing so of 5 February.

Abbas at a loss: Al Ahram Weekly

His political credibility wagered on the peace process, Palestinian President Abbas is not coping well with Israel’s perpetual intransigence, writes Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah

With the Obama administration effectively reneging on pledges to get Israel to freeze settlement expansion in the West Bank, or even abide by the outdated “roadmap” peace plan, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas is finding himself in an increasingly unenviable position.

Abbas had been insisting all along that he wouldn’t agree to resume talks with Israel unless the latter agreed to halt settlement expansion in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem. However, in recent weeks, the Palestinian leader has been signalling that he may return to the negotiating table virtually without conditions.
In an interview that appeared on Sunday 31 January on The Guardian website, Abbas was quoted as saying that he would be prepared to resume face-to- face talks with Israel if the latter froze all settlement construction for three months and accepted the borders of 4 June 1967. “These are not preconditions; they are requirements in the roadmap. If they are not prepared to do that, it means they don’t want a political solution.”
The Israeli government rejected the Palestinian proposal, calling it “unrealistic” and “unacceptable”. Responding to the proposal, Mark Regev, advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, resorted to red herring tactics, arguing that the Palestinians were still short of their roadmap obligations. Regev cited the issue of “incitement”, as if Palestinians were expected to sing hymns of praise whenever Israel killed their brethren and demolished their homes.

Earlier, it was reported that Abbas was considering proposals presented by US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell for “proximity” or “indirect” talks. Mitchell proposed that he travel between Ramallah and occupied Jerusalem, relaying messages between the two sides on various core issues, including borders, East Jerusalem, settlements and the refugees. The proposal was part of a “package of inducements” that would also include the release of an unspecified number of non-Islamist prisoners from Israeli detention camps.
However, the reported package contained no undertaking to freeze settlement expansion or even halt the growing pace of Arab home demolitions in occupied Jerusalem and the so-called “Area C” of the West Bank where the Israeli occupation army maintains full security and civilian authority. This area, which covers the bulk of the Palestinian countryside, constitutes more than 65 per cent of the occupied territories.

PA spokesmen are denying that Abbas is retreating from his earlier stand with regards to settlements. Ghassan Al-Khatib, a former cabinet minister and now head of the PA Government Press Office, said he didn’t think Abbas was no longer demanding a settlement freeze. Al-Khatib told Al-Ahram Weekly that Abbas was consulting with Arab leaders on the expediency of resuming the peace process with Israel in a manner that would bring maximum benefit for the Palestinian cause.
Al-Khatib defended the idea of “proximity” talks whereby the Americans would shuttle between Israel and Arab capitals to relay respective positions to the sides. “This is not necessarily a bad idea. The Americans would be witnesses and Israel wouldn’t be able to fabricate lies as to who is to blame for the failure of talks, as was the case in past failed talks.”

Some voices at the Palestinian arena have lately accused Abbas of seeking Arab cover to resume the “futile” peace process without preconditions, with one Hamas official calling these efforts “a reproduction of past failures”. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been consulting Arab leaders on the best way to resume stalled talks between Israel and the Palestinians. While these leaders have been urging Washington to actively intervene to bring about a speedy resumption of the peace process, the US has been pressing, even pressuring, Arab capitals to cajole the increasingly vulnerable PA leadership to drop settlement related demands ahead of reviving talks.
One of the Arab states most concerned about the continued paralysis of the peace process is Jordan. King Abdullah has been warning that time is running out for peace and that extraordinary efforts must be made now in order to resolve the Israeli- Palestinian impasse. Jordan is particularly worried that the continued stalemate in the West Bank could generate tension in Jordan itself, and might even precipitate attacks on Israeli and Western targets on Jordanian soil.

The fear is not unfounded. Last week, the motorcade of the Israeli ambassador to Jordan was attacked outside Amman with a roadside bomb. While causing no injuries or serious damage, the incident rang alarm bells in the corridors of Jordan’s intelligence services, which are likely to be more nervous regarding the ramifications of the situation in the West Bank on security and stability at home.
However, notwithstanding Jordanian concerns, it seems that the Obama administration is not in a position — or doesn’t want — to force the intransigent Israeli government to allow for the creation of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state on the West Bank. Abbas himself has echoed this view, saying that continued Israeli stonewalling would lead to the creation of a unitary state in all of Mandate Palestine (Israel proper plus the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem). In this case, the Palestinians would form a numerical majority, which implies that Israel would lose its Jewish identity.

But Israel, especially under the extreme rightwing Zionist leadership, is unlikely to allow such a scenario to evolve, even if Palestinians gave it their backing. In the meantime, there are growing fears that Israel might launch a fresh wave of aggression against Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, with or without the acquiescence of the Obama administration, in order to further enhance its hegemonic standing vis-à-vis the PA and Syria, and also as warning to Iran.
Israeli officials calculate that the neutralisation of Hamas would allow the PA leadership (Abbas) to give significant concessions to Israel with regards to final-status issues. Other Israeli policy planners, however, argue that destroying or even weakening Hamas — assuming this is possible — would lead to Israel losing a valuable propaganda card, and that might eventually lead to increasing international pressure on Israel to return to the 1967 borders. Israel has been seriously provoking Hamas, including via the assassination of a prominent Hamas operative in Dubai, as well as the attempted assassination of a Hamas official in Khan Younis on 1 February.

Beware the coming war: Al Ahram Weekly

Tel Aviv’s recent rhetoric is further proof that Israel cannot exist outside the cycle of perpetual war, writes Ramzy Baroud*
The Israeli military may be much less effective in winning wars than it was in the past, thanks to the stiffness of Arab resistance, but its military strategists are as shrewd and unpredictable as ever. The recent rhetoric that escalated in Israel suggests that a future war in Lebanon will most likely target Syria as well. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that Israel intends on targeting either of these countries in the near future, it is certainly the type of language that often precedes Israeli military manoeuvres.

Deciphering the available clues regarding the nature of Israel’s immediate military objectives is not always easy, but it is possible. One indicator that could serve as a foundation for any serious prediction of Israel’s actions is Israel’s historical tendency to be in a perpetual state of war. Peace — real peace — has never been a long-term policy.
“Unlike many others, I consider that peace is not a goal in itself but only a means to guarantee our existence,” claimed Yossi Peled, a former army general and current cabinet minister in Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government. Israeli official policy — military or otherwise — is governed by the same Zionist diktats that long preceded the establishment of the state of Israel. If anything has changed since early Zionists outlined their vision, it was the interpretation of those directives. The substance has remained intact.

For example, Zionist visionary Vladimir Jabotinsky stated in 1923 that Zionist “colonisation can… continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population — an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.” He was not then referring to an actual wall. While his vision took on various manifestations throughout the years, in 2002 it was translated into a real wall aimed at prejudicing any just solution with the Palestinians. Now, most unfortunately, Egypt has also started building its own steel wall along its border with the war- devastated and impoverished Gaza Strip.
One thing we all know by now is that Israel is a highly militarised country. Its definition of “existence” can only be ensured by its uncontested military dominance on all fronts. Thus the devastating link between Palestine and Lebanon. This link makes any analysis of Israel’s military intents in Gaza that excludes Lebanon — and in fact, Syria — seriously lacking.

Consider, for example, the unprecedented Israeli crackdown on the second Palestinian Intifada that started in September 2000. How is that linked to Lebanon? Israel had been freshly defeated by the Lebanese resistance, led by Hizbullah, and was forced to end its occupation of most of South Lebanon in May 2000. Israel wanted to send an unmistakable message to Palestinians that this defeat was in fact not a defeat at all and that any attempt at duplicating the Lebanese resistance model in Palestine would be ruthlessly suppressed. Israel’s exaggeration in the use of its highly sophisticated military to stifle a largely popular revolution was extremely costly to Palestinians in terms of human toll.

Israel’s 34-day war on Lebanon in July 2006 was an Israeli attempt at destroying Arab resistance, and restoring its metaphorical iron wall. It backfired, resulting in a real — not figurative — Israeli defeat. Israel then did what it does best. It used its superior air force, destroyed much of Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure, and killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The resistance, with humble means, killed more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers during combat.
Not only did Hizbullah penetrate the Israeli iron wall, it had also filled it with holes. It challenged, like never before, the Israeli army’s notion of invincibility and illusion of security. Something went horribly wrong in Lebanon. Since then the Israeli army, intelligence apparatus, propagandists and politicians have been in constant preparation for another showdown. But before such a pending battle, the nation needed to renew its faith in its army and government intelligence; thus the war in Gaza late December 2008.

As appalling as it was for Israeli families to gather en masse near the Israeli Gaza border, and watch giddily as Gaza and Gazans were blown to smithereens, the act was most rational. The victims of the war may have been Palestinians in Gaza, but the target audience was Israelis. The brutal and largely one-sided war united Israelis, including their self- proclaimed leftist parties, in one rare moment of solidarity. Here was proof that the Israeli army still had enough strength to report military achievements.
Of course, Israel’s military strategists knew well that their war crimes in Gaza were a clumsy attempt at regaining national confidence. The tightly lipped politicians and army generals wanted to give the impression that all was working according to plan. But the total media blackout and the orchestrated footage of Israeli soldiers flashing military signs and waving flags on their way back to Israel were clear indications of an attempt to improve a problematic image.

Thus Yossi Peled’s calculated comments on 23 January: “In my estimation, understanding and knowledge, it is almost clear to me that it is a matter of time before there is a military clash in the north.” Further, he claimed: “We are heading towards a new confrontation, but I don’t know when it will happen, just as we did not know when the second Lebanon war would erupt.”
Peled is of course right. There will be a new confrontation. New strategies will be employed. Israel will raise the stakes and will try to draw Syria in and push for a regional war. A Lebanon that defines itself based on the terms of resistance — following the failure to politically co-opt Hizbullah — is utterly unacceptable from the Israeli viewpoint. That said; Peled might be creating a measured distraction from efforts aimed at igniting yet another war — against the besieged resistance in Gaza, or something entirely different. (Hamas’s recent announcement that its senior military leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh was killed late January in Dubai at the hands of Israeli intelligence is also an indication that the efforts of Israel go much further than immediate boundaries).

Will it be Gaza or Lebanon first? Israel is sending mixed messages, and deliberately so. Hamas, Hizbullah and their supporters understand well the Israeli tactic and must be preparing for various possibilities. They know Israel cannot live without its iron walls, and are determined to prevent any more from being built at their expense.

Gaza war saw anti-Semitic attacks rise to record high: The Independent

Britain’s Jews faced surge of abuse after Israel’s invasion in January 2009

The number of anti-Semitic attacks in the UK reached record highs last year as anger over Israel’s assault on Gaza led to an explosion of race hatred targeted at Britain’s Jewish community.
The Community Security Trust (CST), a charity which monitors attacks against Jews, said 924 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded last year – a 69 per cent increase on 2008 and the highest number since the charity began keeping records of anti-Semitism in 1984.
The charity said Israel’s three-week invasion of Gaza in January last year led to an unprecedented outpouring of anger directed at Britain’s Jews, with more anti-Semitism recorded in the first six months of 2009 than in any entire previous year.

Israeli commander: ‘We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza’: The Independent

Civilians ‘put at greater risk to save military lives’ in winter attack – revelations that will pile pressure on Netanyahu to set up full inquiry

A high-ranking officer has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimise military casualties during last year’s Gaza war, The Independent can reveal.
The officer, who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, made it clear that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as “means and intentions” – whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter. A more junior officer who served at a brigade headquarters during the operation described the new policy – devised in part to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war – as one of “literally zero risk to the soldiers”.
The officers’ revelations will pile more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up an independent inquiry into the war, as demanded in the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which harshly criticised the conduct of both Israel and Hamas. One of Israel’s most prominent human rights lawyers, Michael Sfard, said last night that the senior commander’s acknowledgement – if accurate – was “a smoking gun”.

Until now, the testimony has been kept out of the public domain. The senior commander told a journalist compiling a lengthy report for Yedhiot Ahronot, Israel’s biggest daily newspaper, about the rules of engagement in the three-week military offensive in Gaza. But although the article was completed and ready for publication five months ago, it has still not appeared. The senior commander told Yedhiot: “Means and intentions is a definition that suits an arrest operation in the Judaea and Samaria [West Bank] area… We need to be very careful because the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] was already burnt in the second Lebanon war from the wrong terminology. The concept of means and intentions is taken from different circumstances. Here [in Cast Lead] we were not talking about another regular counter-terrorist operation. There is a clear difference.”
His remarks reinforce testimonies from soldiers who served in the Gaza operation, made to the veterans’ group Breaking the Silence and reported exclusively by this newspaper last July. They also appear to cut across the military doctrine – enunciated most recently in public by one of the authors of the IDF’s own code of ethics – that it is the duty of soldiers to run risks to themselves in order to preserve civilian lives.

Explaining what he saw as the dilemma for forces operating in areas that were supposedly cleared of civilians, the senior commander said: “Whoever is left in the neighbourhood and wants to action an IED [improvised explosive device] against the soldiers doesn’t have to walk with a Kalashnikov or a weapon. A person like that can walk around like any other civilian; he sees the IDF forces, calls someone who would operate the terrible death explosive and five of our soldiers explode in the air. We could not wait until this IED is activated against us.”
Another soldier who worked in one of the brigade’s war-room headquarters told The Independent that conduct in Gaza – particularly by aerial forces and in areas where civilians had been urged to leave by leaflets – had “taken the targeted killing idea and turned it on its head”. Instead of using intelligence to identify a terrorist, he said, “here you do the opposite: first you take him down, then you look into it.”
The Yedhiot newspaper also spoke to a series of soldiers who had served in Operation Cast Lead in sensitive positions. While the soldiers rejected the main finding of the Goldstone Report – that the Israeli military had deliberately “targeted” the civilian population – most asserted that the rules were flexible enough to allow a policy under which, in the words of one soldier “any movement must entail gunfire. No one’s supposed to be there.” He added that at a meeting with his brigade commander and others it was made clear that “if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot. This is essentially the rules of engagement.”
The other soldier in the war-room explained: “This doesn’t mean that you need to disrespect the lives of Palestinians but our first priority is the lives of our soldiers. That’s not something you’re going to compromise on. In all my years in the military, I never heard that.”
He added that the majority of casualties were caused in his brigade area by aerial firing, including from unmanned drones. “Most of the guys taken down were taken down by order of headquarters. The number of enemy killed by HQ-operated remote … compared to enemy killed by soldiers on the ground had absolutely inverted,” he said.
Rules of engagement issued to soldiers serving in the West Bank as recently as July 2006 make it clear that shooting towards even an armed person will take place only if there is intelligence that he intends to act against Israeli forces or if he poses an immediate threat to soldiers or others.

In a recent article in New Republic, Moshe Halbertal, a philosophy professor at Hebrew and New York Universities, who was involved in drawing up the IDF’s ethical code in 2000 and who is critical of the Goldstone Report, said that efforts to spare civilian life “must include the expectation that soldiers assume some risk to their own lives in order to avoid causing the deaths of civilians”. While the choices for commanders were often extremely difficult and while he did not think the expectation was demanded by international law, “it is demanded in Israel’s military code and this has always been its tradition”.
The Israeli military declined to comment on the latest revelations, and directed all enquiries to already-published material, including a July 2009 foreign ministry document The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects.
That document, which repeats that Israel acted in conformity with international law despite the “acute dilemmas” posed by Hamas’s operations within civilian areas, sets out the principles of Operation Cast Lead as follows: “Only military targets shall be attacked; Any attack against civilian objectives shall be prohibited. A ‘civilian objective’ is any objective which is not a military target.” It adds: “In case of doubt, the forces are obliged to regard an object as civilian.”
Yedhiot has not commented on why its article has not been published.

Israel in Gaza: The soldier’s tale
This experienced soldier, who cannot be named, served in the war room of a brigade during Operation Cast Lead. Here, he recalls an incident he witnessed during last winter’s three-week offensive:
“Two [Palestinian] guys are walking down the street. They pass a mosque and you see a gathering of women and children.
“You saw them exiting the house and [they] are not walking together but one behind the other. So you begin to fantasise they are actually ducking close to the wall.
“One [man] began to run at some point, must have heard the chopper. The GSS [secret service] argued that the mere fact that he heard it implicated him, because a normal civilian would not have realised that he was now being hunted.
“Finally he was shot. He was not shot next to the mosque. It’s obvious that shots are not taken at a gathering.”

Holes are shot in army’s denial of Gaza attack: The Independent

Israel claimed it did not bomb flour mill, but 500lb explosives find proves otherwise
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

Doubts have been cast on the Israeli rebuttal of the Goldstone Report, after it emerged last night that a bomb was defused last year at a Gaza flour mill that Israel had officially said did not come under air attack in the war.
The presence of a large part of the fractured Mark 82 bomb was reported to a demining team in late January 2009, and technicians were dispatched to defuse the 500lb device on 11 February.

The flour mill is the only one in Gaza, and the Goldstone Report, commissioned by the United Nations, said its destruction “was carried out for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population”.
The discrepancy came to light on a day in which domestic and international debate over the Goldstone Report and Israel’s response was fuelled by a reprimand issued to two high-ranking officers.
Israel said a brigadier-general and a colonel had “exceeded their authority in a manner that jeopardised the lives of others” by authorising the firing of artillery shells into the area of the main UN compound in Gaza. The Israeli military denied a Haaretz report that the two had been reprimanded over the use of white phosphorus.

UN officials had described how the attack – which destroyed the UN warehouse – scattered burning white phosphorus through the compound.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to decide whether to order an independent investigation into the Gaza offensive or face the possible fresh moves, threatened in the Goldstone Report, for an external war crimes inquiry to be launched.
The case of the El Badr flour mill in northern Gaza was examined in detail in the 575-page report by the Jewish South African judge, Richard Goldstone. It said the mill had come under air as well as ground attack during Operation Cast Lead, which lasted for three weeks last winter.

The official update of Israel’s own investigations – sent to the UN on Friday – says that inquiries by the military’s Advocate General had found that the mill did come under ground attack, but that he “did not find any evidence to support the assertion that the mill was attacked from the air using precise munitions”.
It said that the military’s Advocate General had “determined that the allegation was not supported in the [Goldstone] report itself, nor in the testimony to the Fact-Finding Mission by [the joint owner] Rashad Hamada, who had left the area prior to the incident in response to the IDF’s early warnings.”
But an international mines action team went to the flour mill on 11 February 2009 to take the fuse out of the unexploded front half of the bomb – the sort commonly carried by Israeli Air Force F16 aircraft – both a UN technical source and Mahmoud Hamada, brother of Rashad, confirmed to The Independent last night.

The Israeli report to the UN says that from the beginning of the Gaza operation the immediate area of the flour mill was used as a defensive zone because of its “proximity to Hamas’s stronghold in the Shati refugee camp”. It said that Hamas had fortified the area with tunnels, booby-trapped houses, and had deployed its forces to attack troops operating there. One IDF squad had been ambushed by five Hamas operatives in a booby-trapped house.
But while saying that the mill had come under fire during the engagements, Israel rejected the suggestion in the Goldstone Report that it had come under deliberate attack, and said that photographic evidence of the building was not consistent with an air attack.
Mahmoud Hamada said last night that the 110cm-long front of the bomb had mercifully not exploded but had destroyed a 4-tonne milling machine. He did not know what had happened to the other half but thought it might have exploded in the air.

Deadly and cheap: The Mark 82 bomb
Developed in the 1950s, the Mark 82 is aerodynamic, deadly and cheap. One of the most common bombs dropped in the world – Israel’s air force drops them from F-16 jets – and costing less than $300 (£190) to produce, each general-purpose 500lb bomb has a blast radius of about 40ft. In the Gaza conflict, Israel is said to have used a fin-guided version with parts made by US arms manufacturer Raytheon.

The following piece is by a serious political analyst, yet he does not shirk from repeating idiotic soundbites: “Israeli believe in peace”, that he obviously does not himself believe in… While he sees clearly the problem with attitudes of the leadership, his own chip blinds him:

Israel’s dual reality: The Guardian CiF

Israelis believe in peace, yet the Palestinian issue is met with apathy – except by our leaders, who see it just as a PR problem

Israel’s image problem abroad is down to one issue: the stark and growing difference between how Israelis view their country, and how it is seen from outside. This explains the anger and insult that Israelis feel when they watch themselves on the BBC or CNN. It can’t possibly be us, they protest, the networks must be biased and pro-Arab.
From the outside, Israel is defined by its everlasting conflict with its Arab neighbours, the Palestinians in particular. The vast majority of international news stories reflect this perception, depicting Israel as one-half of either war or peace talks. Occupation stories like Gaza under siege, new construction in West Bank settlements, or demolition of Palestinians’ homes in East Jerusalem, are prime-time stuff.
Israel per se attracts little interest abroad, with its relatively small population of seven million. Think Denmark or Paraguay. Who bothers to cover its internal politics? Who would recognise its leaders’ names and faces? Thanks to the Middle East conflict, Israeli leaders have always been internationally recognised figures, and our political system is closely watched.

Israelis define their country as a western democracy with an advanced high-tech economy, a bastion of innovation, modernity, and technological development in a backwards region. We see the conflict as a fact of life, like the weather to Englishmen. Most people are more excited about money, sex, real estate, and travel abroad. The media makes comparisons with America, Britain, or the OECD average, and not with our immediate neighbours Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or the Palestinian Authority.
It wasn’t always like that. When I was a little kid, the conflict was all around. Children’s books described brave, good-looking Israeli heroes defeating ugly, ridiculous Arab villains. On Lag Ba’omer, a holiday celebrated with bonfires, we used to burn effigies of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s then-leader and our arch-enemy. Yasser Arafat’s figure followed. Today, few kids would bother to express similar public hatred towards Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, or the Hezbollah leader, Hasan Nasrallah.

The separation policy of the former prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who strove to isolate Israelis from the conflict through the Gaza pullout and the construction of the West Bank security barrier, paid off handsomely. The vast majority of Israelis, who live in and around Tel Aviv, don’t interact with Palestinians, or even with Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Only a small number of conscripts and reservists, deployed across the barrier as part of their military service, would go there.
To most Israelis, New York, London and even Thailand are closer to home than Palestinians towns like Nablus or Ramallah and their adjacent settlements, a mere 40-minute drive from downtown Tel Aviv. Occupation stories are barely reported in the Israeli media, which prefers to praise Israeli scientific, business, and cultural achievements or to chew on the latest political scandal.

The “demographic problem” – namely, the Palestinian threat to demand “one man, one vote” and overwhelm Israel with an Arab majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – is widely discussed in op-ed articles, but fails to scare Israelis. After all, how can you be defeated by invisible people?
On Tuesday, defence minister Ehud Barak gave a dire public warning: “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic,” he said. “If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.” Clear as they were, his words failed to stir public debate.

First-time foreign visitors are often struck. They have heard of “Israeli apartheid” and expect to see separate toilets and buses for Jews and Palestinians. Instead, when exposed to Tel Aviv’s beaches and lively night spots, they are shocked. “I thought it would be far more religious and conservative” is a common visitor’s perception. And they never see any Palestinians around, unless they bother to drive up the hills to find them.
The government’s PR machine tries to build on this sentiment, leading an effort to “rebrand” Israel away from the image of an unpleasant fortress. Bikini-clad models and high-tech entrepreneurs demonstrate the new, post-conflict, western-lookalike Israeli society. The underlying message to North American and European audiences is “We are just like you”. The Palestinians have no Bar Refaeli or Shai Agassi (the electric car innovator), both of whom spend most of their time outside Israel.

A similar process happened in India. While Indians are still preoccupied with Pakistan, and despite the ongoing fighting in Kashmir and in India’s cities, they define their country outside the sub-continental conflict. India today is an economic powerhouse and aspiring global power, not only a belligerent in an endless postcolonial conflict. If they can do it, why couldn’t we?
In Israel, the appearance of calm – especially in the past year, which has been the quietest security-wise in a decade – has important political ramifications. Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, with its ensuing allegations of Israeli war crimes, is seen here as a PR problem rather than as a moral or legal issue. The settlement debate is seen through the prism of Israeli-American relations, which most Israelis cherish.

As a result, most Israelis are indifferent to the establishment of a Palestinian state. For several years, a stable two-thirds majority of Israelis have supported the idea in opinion surveys – while a similar majority doubted its possibility. They simply don’t care, since they fail to see how an independent Palestine would make any change in Israelis’ lives. At best, it might reduce some of the international criticism of Israel; and even that is doubtful. Israelis believe that security will be achieved by force, rather than diplomacy.
This attitude explains why the American effort to resume Israeli-Palestinian talks, despite ostensible majority support, fails to interest Israelis. It also explains why from the outside, Israel appears to be divorced from the reality of its occupation, and apathetic to peace.

Canadian organization attacking Palestinian rights groups: The Electronic Intifada

The following statement was issued on 1 February 2010:

The Board of Directors of Rights & Democracy, a not-for-profit organization created by Canada’s parliament in 1988 to encourage and support human rights around the world, recently voted, with substantial objection, to repudiate grants given to Al-Haq and Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights, two well-known Palestinian human rights organizations located respectively in the West Bank and in Gaza.

The Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Rights & Democracy, Mr. Aurel Braun, was quoted (in The Globe & Mail) as criticizing both organizations for being two “of the most vitriolic anti-Israeli organizations” and for “their accusations against Israel’s human rights violations.” Further, the article reports that Braun had said that “there is no way to ensure that some of the money given to groups in Gaza does not go to the banned terrorist organization Hamas.” He also led a personal attack against Al-Haq’s general director — the well-known human rights defender Mr. Shawan Jabarin — for allegedly being an activist in a PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] faction (ibid). These remarks made by the chairperson of Rights and Democracy are extremely grave as they seem to support the Israeli government’s policy of silencing human rights defenders.

In recent years, Israel’s attempts to silence any voice of opposition regarding its human rights violations have reached alarming levels. In addition to arrests of activists and the closing down of organizations, Israel has also denied many human rights defenders the possibility of effectively advocating for human rights by the imposition of travel bans. A new tactic used by Israel, supported by right-wing groups, is to go after the funders of human rights organizations. In this context, it came as a shock to us — Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations — that instead of advocating for and defending human rights defenders, who work to counter Israeli violations of human rights and ensure respect for international human rights and humanitarian law, the board of Rights & Democracy has instead chosen to join the side of the violator.

The undersigned organizations contend that labeling esteemed human rights organizations such as Al-Haq and Al-Mezan as “questionable” under the aforementioned circumstances is to take sides with the violator. It seems that the board’s decision to repudiate grants to Al-Haq and Al-Mezan might well be because they have been doing their job too well, in particular their investigations of Israel’s human rights violations during last winter’s attack on Gaza. Or perhaps, it could be due to Al-Haq’s exposure of and litigation against the involvement of Canadian businesses in such human rights violations in the West Bank. Maybe it was this unexpected and apparently unwelcomed exposure that prompted Right and Democracy’s recent misguided conduct.

The contention that Al-Haq and Al-Mezan are some “of the most vitriolic anti-Israeli organizations,” because they “accuse” Israel of human rights violations on their websites is a distorted and misleading representation of the facts. Al-Mezan and Al-Haq carry out professional documentation of the human rights violations committed by all of the involved actors in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). Their documentation has been deemed reliable and precise by international bodies that apply the strictest relevant standards. Without this proper documentation by them and other human rights nongovernmental organizations, defending human rights is a mission impossible.

The two organizations receive support from a wide array of donors including governments and nongovernmental contributors who are satisfied with their work and their management due to the transparency that each organization exhibits.

The public smear campaign initiated by the Board of Directors of Rights & Democracy is intended to stop nongovernmental organizations from doing their vital work of human rights monitoring and reporting. It is equal to a call to cease altogether any meaningful promotion of respect and protection of human rights in the OPT, in clear contradiction to Canada’s declared interest in furtherance of universal values of human rights and the promotion of democracy.

In November 2009, the UN General Assembly reiterated its commitment to defend human rights defenders recognizing “the substantial role that human rights defenders can play in supporting efforts to strengthen peace and development, through dialogue, openness, participation and justice, including by monitoring, reporting on and contributing to the promotion and protection of human rights.”

Israel, recognizing that same strong role, carries out deliberate policies and practices that directly or indirectly seek to suppress, obstruct and delegitimize human rights organizations in Israel and the OPT. We denounce these policies and practices, and call on fellow human rights defenders around the world to also denounce them. We also denounce Israeli travel bans on human rights activists operating in the OPT and Israel, and especially the blanket travel ban on Gaza human rights defenders. While Israel is violating their rights, Rights and Democracy Board is trying to delegitimize them, using the same rhetoric.

We demand that we be allowed to meet, to advocate, and to struggle for what we all hold dear: human rights and social justice.

Signatories:
Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Right in Israel
Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association – Ramallah
Al Dameer Association for Human Rights – Gaza
AL-JANA – The Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts – Beirut, Lebanon
Al-Quds Human Rights Clinic
American Jews for A Just Peace
Arab Association for Human Rights – HRA
Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine
The Association Swiss-Palestine ASP
Association for the Support of Needy, Palestinian Children – Switzerland
Association France-Palestine Solidarite (AFPS)
BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights
Boston Coalition For Palestinians Rights (BCPR)
Coalition of Women for Peace (Israel)
Defence for Children International – Palestine Section
Ensan Center for Democracy & Human Rights
Flemish Palestine Solidarity Committee
Gaza Community Mental Health Programme
Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement
Group for Justice and Peace in Palestine (JPP) – Switzerland
Habitat International Coalition – Housing and Land Rights Network
The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)
International Committee of the National Lawyers Guild, USA
Institute for Policy Studies – Washington DC USA
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) – France
The Israeli Association for the Palestinian Prisoners
Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC)
Jewish Voice for Peace, USA
Labor for Palestine
Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate
Medico International
Medico Swiss
Mopat – Movement Palestine for All – Brazil
The Netherlands Palestine Committee
New York City Labor against the War
Olive Oil Campaign Switzerland
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) – UK
Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between People
Palestine Think Tank
STW (Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign)
Palestinian Workers Union – Greece
The Peace People in Belfast
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PCATI)
Right to Education Campaign – Birzeit
Tlaxcala Translations Collective
US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling (WCLAC)
Women in Black Union Square in New York City
Women in Black (Vienna)
Women in Black, Maastricht, Netherlands

Interview: “We need a new, united strategy as one people”: The Electronic Intifada

Adri Nieuwhof, 3 February 2010
Mohammad Zeidan (Arab Association for Human Rights) The Arab Association for Human Rights (HRA), based in Nazareth, is one of the first human rights organizations in Israel. HRA was founded during the first Palestinian intifada by lawyers and community activists to monitor human rights violations. HRA is a member of Ittijah, the Union of Arab Community Based Associations, and is involved in human rights education, research and international advocacy. The Electronic Intifada contributor Adri Nieuwhof recently interviewed Mohammad Zeidan, the general director of HRA.

Adri Nieuwhof: Can you discuss HRA’s work and what drives you?
Mohammad Zeidan: HRA is active in three fields: human rights education linked to community outreach; research and reporting on violations of human rights of Palestinians living in Israel; and international advocacy to bring the needs of our community to international attention. Without international attention Israel will not change its policies toward its Palestinian minority. I am driven by the feeling that there is a need for community action against racial discrimination in all aspects of Palestinian life in Israel. With human rights education we help our communities to know their rights and the protection of their rights.

AN: What are the major challenges concerning the rights of Palestinians in Israel ?
MZ: For the Palestinian minority, [chief concerns include] the rise of the culture of racism among the majority of Israeli society, the public support for racist ideas — for instance the transfer of the Palestinian population from Israel. [Also of concern are] proposals for new laws that restrict basic minority rights, like organizing politically and the use of our land. And it is a challenge, how can we link our issues to the broader problems of Palestinians fighting the occupation [in the West Bank and Gaza Strip]. I think in our community we are faced with the challenge to mobilize the young generation for political action. They are the future leaders. It is important they become aware of their identity, linked with the Palestinian Arab international community.

AN: Do you think the situation of Palestinians in Israel has improved over the past ten years?
MZ: There is no sign of improvement. All the change is backwards. The situation is deteriorating. We are winning small victories, but the challenges are becoming bigger. [Israeli] racism is growing. Since 1977 you can see Israeli support for the right wing is growing. Take for example the support for [Avigdor] Lieberman. The left wing is disappearing.

AN: Does HRA have allies in Israel and abroad?
MZ: The Palestinian minority in Israel is our ally. And we have allies among [Jewish] Israelis, people who are concerned about human rights issues. We challenge the Jewish character of the State of Israel, and this makes it hard for Israelis to support our work. They can support specific action. Internationally we have much better allies. We saw a rise in support abroad, especially after the war in Gaza, even in the United States. The international support is not reflected as the political level. There is a gap between the popular support and the government.

AN: Palestinian human rights defenders in the occupied West Bank are confronted with a wave of repression. How is the situation in Israel?
MZ: There is also oppression in Israel. Nongovernmental organizations have been shut down by administrative order, but not at the scale as in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Israel is not interested to put [itself] on the agenda [by bringing attention to human rights violations within its borders]. They don’t want to open another front. Getting international support gives us a kind of protection. It makes it harder for Israel to deal with us the way they deal with Palestinians in the OPT.

AN: Have the closure of Gaza and Israel’s attack on the territory last winter had an impact on the Palestinian community in Israel?
MZ: In principle the Palestinians in Israel, like most Palestinians, reacted to Gaza. The biggest demonstration in Israel ever was organized in Sakhnin in the Galilee [region in northern Israel] in December 2008. Over 100,000 people participated in a demonstration against the military attacks on Gaza. It was the first time we came out in such big numbers. In general the war made the issue of the oppression much stronger. This is strengthening our identity. We feel more and more that we are part of the Palestinian people, a process that already began before the war.

AN: What is your advice to Palestine solidarity activists and citizens abroad?
MZ: I would say that for Palestinian activists the main issue is the unity of all the Palestinians. We should work together, and mobilize all powers. And we have to rethink our strategy. Sixty years of promoting the two-state solution did not get us anywhere. The facts on the ground have made this impossible. We need a new, united strategy as one people, that takes all of us into consideration — regardless of our political affiliation or geographic distribution.
On the role of Europe and the international community I would like to say that the public support needs to be translated to political action. This is not happening right now. On the contrary, Israel is receiving more support from the European Union (EU) with talks about the upgrading of the relationship between the EU and Israel, and with Europe’s refusal to hold Israel to account by withholding support to the Goldstone report. It has an impact on the credibility of the EU and its member states as democratic states.

Adri Nieuwhof is an independent consultant based in Switzerland. Continue reading February 4, 2010