Targets See New Push as Effort To Discredit Legitimate Criticism
By Nathan Guttman
Published March 31, 2010,
Organizer: CODEPINK’s Nancy Kricorian says she does not aim to delegitimize Israel.
The term, used to describe a broad spectrum of anti-Israel protests, has become a major rallying point for the American Jewish community and is the up-and-coming cause for Jewish organizations.
In particular, supporters of this emerging advocacy effort point to the campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction — BDS — Israel as a primary marker distinguishing “delegitimizers” from genuine critics. It’s a campaign that has gained traction on the left in recent years. And in the past few months, pro-Israel advocates have begun to mobilize against what they perceive to be efforts to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state, whether via BDS or other means.
“The delegitimization and BDS movement is nationally coordinated, and it requires a national response,” said William Daroff, the Jewish Federations of North America’s vice president for public policy. “We need to move forward as a community to counter this cancerous growth.”
But while supporters of Israel see the fight against delegitimization of the Jewish state as a new frontier in the pro-Israel battle, critics believe that the term is used mostly to discredit opposition to Israeli policies.
“To be frank, the ‘de-legitimization’ issue is a fraud,” historian Tony Judt, director of New York University’s Remarque Institute, wrote in an e-mail to the Forward. Judt, a harsh critic of Israel, said: “I know no one in the professional world of political commentary, however angry about Israel’s behavior, who thinks that the country has no right to exist…. ‘De-legitimization’ is just another way to invoke antisemitism as a silencer, but sounds better because [it’s] less exploitative of emotional pain.”
Judt has written that he believes Israel’s settlement policies have made a binational one-state outcome to the Israel-Palestinian conflict all but inevitable — a stand that has led Israel advocates to label Judt himself a delegitimizer.
In the past year, JFNA and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs adopted resolutions calling for communitywide action against delegitimization. And the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s executive director, Howard Kohr, outlined a plan to fight Israel’s delegitimization by demanding the state’s admission into international bodies, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
A March 10 meeting in New York marked the most significant attempt yet to formulate a communitywide response to this perception of delegitimization. Israeli officials and participants from major Jewish organizations and federations discussed the possibility of creating and funding a mechanism to track and respond to what they see as delegitimization efforts.
As a first order of business, participants raised the need to educate the Jewish community about the issue.
“Members of our community need to be knowledgeable and need to be able to answer to these allegations,” said Martin Raffel, JCPA’s senior vice president. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution. We will have to have tailored responses for each constituency.”
But seeking a response to delegitimization requires a clear definition of the problem. An in-depth study released in March by the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv-based think tank, identifies delegitimization as an organized movement and goes to great lengths to define the elusive term in a way that draws a line between what authors of the 92-page report see as legitimate criticism of Israel and forms of protest that fall under the delegitimization category.
“We are asking people to go into the nuances. We need to keep in mind that not everyone is an Israel hater, but not everything is Israel’s fault,” said Gidi Grinstein, Reut’s founder and president.
The think tank’s paper defines delegitimization as criticism that “exhibits blatant double standards, singles out Israel, denies its right to exist as the embodiment of the self-determination right of the Jewish people, or demonizes the state.”
But, as Grinstein pointed out, identifying Israel’s delegitimizers can be tricky, since most do not see themselves as denying Israel’s right to exist.
“The effectiveness of Israel’s de-legitimizers, who represent a relatively marginal political and societal force in Europe and North America, stems from their ability to engage and mobilize others by blurring the lines with Israel’s critics,” the Reut paper states.
Would the students who disrupted the February 9 speech of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at University of California, Irvine be delegitimizers? For most activists in the Jewish community, the answer is clear.
“They definitely are,” said Michael Kotzin, executive vice president of Chicago’s Jewish federation. “Instead of asking [Oren] about Israel’s policy, they are denying him the right to speak.”
Kotzin said that many of those pursuing the delegitimization agenda are naive and are exploited by activists who deny Israel’s right to exist.
According to Israel supporters dealing with the issue, the key is focusing not on the protesters’ actions but on their intentions, even if they do not acknowledge these intentions publicly.
“You need to dig under the surface and see what drives them,” Grinstein said. “Most of the students who protested Oren’s speech don’t understand the subtleties and believe they are not engaged in delegitimization, but those organizing them are.”
Nancy Kricorian of CODEPINK, a women’s anti-war group, might be seen as such an organizer. Kricorian coordinates CODEPINK’s boycott campaign against Ahava cosmetic products because the products are manufactured on a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. But she rejected the thought that she was seeking to delegitimize the state. “This is only a way of changing the subject,” said Kricorian. “All we want is [for] Israel to respect human rights and international law. I don’t see how that delegitimizes Israel.”
At the same time, the broad-based coalition of Palestinian civil society groups that launched the BDS movement in 2005 declares that one of its goals is to promote the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they lost — sometimes through mass expulsion — during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. A 1948 United Nations Security Council Resolution endorsed this right, but Israel rejects it on the grounds that the flood of returnees would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
Reut and advocates for Israel argue that singling out Israel and demanding that it adhere to higher human rights standards than its adversaries is another form of delegitimization.
Yet, a higher standard for Israel is something that Judt, for one, unapologetically upholds. “People will say, ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya, Yemen? Burma? China?’” he writes in the March 25 issue of the London Review of Books. “Fine. [But] Israel describes itself as a democracy, and so it should be compared with democracies, not with dictatorships.”
As a country in “a difficult relationship” with its neighbors, Israel should be allowed a “certain margin of behavior,” Judt acknowledged in his email. But Israel’s relative strength compared to other regional nations gives it “even less excuse for criminality, law-breaking or violence than they do,” he said.
Amos Guiora, a law professor and former Israeli army senior military counsel, objected that Israel is judged by double standards even when compared with other Western democracies. Guiora, noted that attacks by German and American forces in Afghanistan that caused heavy civilian deaths received less censure from the international community.
“By what standard does Israel want to be judged?” Guiora asked. His reply was, “By a standard in which you judge countries that are in a very, very special situation.”
Those seeking to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from delegitimization cite another criterion: the labeling of Israeli policies as “apartheid.”
Yet, in recent years mainstream Israeli leaders have used the word to describe the danger the country faces if it does not resolve its conflict with Palestinians.
Recently, Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister and Labor Party leader, said bluntly, “If millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
Grinstein warned that fighting delegitimization must not devolve into hasbara, or public relations. The struggle, he said, is both about confronting those who question Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and making sure Israel pursues a path of seeking peace and an end to the occupation.
The Reut document states, “Clearly, an Israeli and Palestinian comprehensive Permanent Status Agreement that establishes a Palestinian state and brings about an ‘end of conflict’… would weaken the grounds of Israel’s de-legitimization.”
EDITOR: No More Rockets? Oy Vey…
Terrible news, this! If indeed there will be no rockets, it will be even more difficult to justify the next attack… but, not to worry, they will find seven different ways to do so. They always do.
Islamic Jihad on Sunday announced that it would cease firing rockets into Israel, Channel 10 news reported.
An Islamic Jihad spokesman, Daoud Shihab, made the announcement in an interview on Islamic Jihad radio, during which he reportedly said the militant group, “stopped the rocket fire into Israel for internal Palestinian purposes – first and foremost to help end the siege on the Gaza Strip.”
According to the Channel 10 report, Shihab went on to say that Islamic Jihad does not intend to reverse this decision, but clarified that “if Israel once again attacks Gaza, no one will be able to prevent the resistance operatives from responding to the attacks.”
An anonymous Islamic Jihad official later denied the attacks would stop, according to Israel Radio.
A senior Egyptian official involved in brokering past truces between Gaza militant groups and Israel said in a statement that the Egyptians had on Sunday stepped up diplomatic pressure on both parties to reduce tensions in the coastal strip.
“Egypt has conducted extensive calls at the highest level with both Israel and the Palestinian factions to contain the escalating tension in the Gaza Strip in order to prevent a deterioration of the situation,” the official said.
Meanwhile, Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha on Friday told the BBC that Hamas is working to curb rocket attacks against Israel by Gaza militants.
“The government in Gaza is in charge of the situation, and it does know clearly who launches rockets,” Taha told the BBC. “It is working hard to deter any faction from acting individually.”
Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal to stop militants in the Gaza Strip from firing rockets against Israel.
Lavrov made his request in a telephone conversation, which, according to Russian news agencies, covered a variety of issues regarding the Middle East.
The Russian foreign minister told Meshal that the recent increase in rocket fire was unacceptable.
Meshal responded by reiterating Hamas’ declared stance that it was not interested in an escalation of tensions with Israel and would continue to try to maintain calm in the area.
However, days later, on Saturday, Meshal said that all options against Israel remain open, including war, according to Channel 10 news.
“We will do everything to obtain the rights stolen from us, including confrontation with the enemy,” said.
EDITOR: The great apologists rides again
Jacobson, a hopeless case of apologism for Israel, is again speaking of the terrible antisemitism, which he has been hoping and pining for for some time now, and at last he seems to capture it in his gun-sight… When calling Israel arrogant and speaking of war crimes is supposedly antisemitic, then surely we should all sop speaking and writing altogether, and if possible, stop thinking. For some people, no amount of Israeli brutalities will ever make the slightest difference.
Anti-Zionism of the sort that peppers letters pages has much to answer for
Taking the long view, it’s been a good few weeks for Israel. It won’t look that way, of course, to those who view the country from an extreme position – whether zealots unwilling to believe Israel can ever do a thing wrong, or zealots unwilling to believe it can ever do a thing right.
Nothing will assuage the passions of these fevered men, or deflect them from their mutual fascination; they are locked in a lewd embrace, each needing the heat of the other’s body to keep his own alive. But to the rational and the fair, it’s been a few weeks full of promise.
Call nothing certain, but Obama’s strict line with Netanyahu over the resumption of building in Ramat Shlomo appears to have woken the latter to an awareness, if not yet the practice, of realpolitik – realpolitik, paradoxically, being an acceptance that a concessionary spirit as often as not trumps principle.
The argument has been advanced that the houses in Ramat Shlomo are not to be confused with settlements on disputed land, that they are the completion of a project that has been going on for years without complaint, and in a part of Jerusalem not covered by the settlement freeze – a municipal not an international matter, in other words, a bit like the holes in the roads of Boris Johnson’s rubbish-dump London. To which the answer, since this is a family newspaper in which we ought not to resort to swearing, is “Tough!”
Where peace is the prize – and it can’t be a good few weeks for any party in which peace is not brought a little closer – such topographical niceties are not only brutally irrelevant, they are counterproductive. Never mind the rights and wrongs of it, in politics you must sometimes swallow your conviction of rectitude, just as in human relations you must sometimes accept that what looks right to you looks wrong to someone else.
Fanatical and uninformed anti-Zionism of the sort that peppers the letters pages of serious newspapers has much to answer for morally and intellectually, but the most serious charge against it is that while it satisfies the self-righteousness of its propounders, it does little to help those it calls victims, and still less to persuade those it calls oppressors.
Weary of the one-sidedness of international condemnation, successive Israeli administrations have turned away and pursued their own course, confident at least that America will go on winking at the obduracy into which it has been backed. With every misattribution of motive, with every lazy libel, that obduracy has grown stronger. As an observer one can feel it hardening one’s own heart. Malign misrepresentation leaves no room for subtle dialogue. Thus, many who would have been critical of the occupation in their own terms – which does not mean seeing it as Hamas or Ahmadinejad see it – are deflected from the real conversation and must expend their energies confuting the prejudices of scoundrels.
The recent Biden/Netanyahu spat has broken the enchantment. Never mind that the poorly taught and easily led will go on twittering about apartheid and genocide even if Israel pulls down every house it has ever built and moves its population on to Dizengoff Beach tomorrow – the argument now is between grown-ups. This is how you talk to friends. This is how you treat enemies. To gain A you must forfeit B, no matter that you think you have the paperwork to prove it’s yours. He who would win a bit in the long run must lose a bit in the long run too.
It’s far better for Israel to be in an argument with a specific country over a specific issue than to have its actual, never mind its spiritual existence, forever undermined by ideologues hunting in packs with misquotations in their pockets. So I see the expulsion of an Israeli diplomat by our Foreign Secretary as more good news.
This, too, has been couched in the language of sanctimony, the inviolability of British passports blah blah, the crime of targeted assassinations, but that’s an allowable hypocrisy. A state must say one thing while its citizens believe another. We all love targeted assassinations in our hearts, so long as it’s the right target and it isn’t our passport that’s been purloined to do it – a sophisticated parley with our consciences which we don’t require our government to reflect. From a newspaper, though, we expect a tone which at least acknowledges that we face both ways in matters such as these. So I was surprised to see a Guardian editorial reading like a 19th-century Foreign Office reprimand to a recalcitrant colony that had forgotten it was of the wrong caste and colour to be getting uppity.
“Both events in London and Washington,” the editorial said, “are the marks of an arrogant nation that has overreached itself.”
Let’s leave aside what’s arrogant and what’s not. What we call arrogance is almost always a cover for fear. And Netanyahu struts like a man whose fears run deep. But how can the rift with the American and British administrations reflect in any way on Israel as a “nation”? Did Mrs Thatcher’s taking back the Falklands make us an arrogant “nation”? Does our being in Afghanistan say anything about us as a “nation” at all? Some of us are pleased we’re there, some aren’t, and some don’t give a damn either way. We are not, as a nation, of one mind or heart in very much, if anything, we do. To imply otherwise would be to charge us with a collective flaw, and we all know what the word is for doing that.
It’s precisely because they are free of slurs of this sort, without unsavoury ethnic or socio-religious overtones, that Washington and London’s arguments with Israel are to be welcomed. They address political differences. Obama and Miliband have squared up to a country not a “nation”, they have taken issue with decisions made by the government of Israel, and not that unvariegated figment of disordered imaginations, “the Israeli people”, and thus they have liberated the entire debate from the question of what Balfour intended, whether the Holocaust has been exploited, who is and who is not a Zionist, etc, etc. And give or take the odd misguided editorial, letters from the usual suspects, and the on-line vituperation that clings like a spider web to the coat-tails of other people’s articles, such has been the liberated spirit of public commentary ever since Biden kept Netanyahu waiting for dinner.
Allowing that tomorrow is a terrifying place, we can take some hope from this. An Israel treated like other countries, held accountable for its political, not its supposed aetiological or genetic failings, is a country from which much might be expected, including peace.
Israel and the Palestinians must show restraint in the wake of a recent bout of violence, a U.K. official said Friday, just hours after Israel war planes struck the Gaza Strip in retaliation of recent rocket fire.
A spokesman for the U.K. Foreign Office said that London was “concerned by today’s strikes and the escalation of violence in Gaza and southern Israel over the past week.”
Talking to the U.K. newspaper The Telegraph, the official called “on all parties to show restraint,” adding that Britain encouraged “Israelis and Palestinians to focus efforts on negotiation and to engage urgently in US-backed proximity talks.”
Earlier Friday, a Qassam rocket was reported to have been fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, a report which the IDF Spokesman’s Office said was the result of a false alarm.
At least 35 rockets were fired at Israel over the course of March.
Also Friday, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh called on the international community must intervene in the latest cycle of violence between Gaza and Israel in order to avoid a possible escalation.
Haniyeh urged the world must stop “the escalation and aggression,” according to a Channel 10 report. He was likely referring to the Israel Air Force strikes, which destroyed what an Israel Defense Forces spokesman described as Palestinian munitions sites.
“We are contacting the other factions in order to reach an internal consensus as to the measures we may take in order to protect our people and strengthen our unity,” Haniyeh told reporters in Gaza.
Friday’s IAF air strikes were Israel’s response to a Palestinian short-range rocket that was fired across the border into Israel on Thursday, an IDF spokesman said. The attack, which went unclaimed by any Palestinian faction, caused no damage.
Four air strikes blew up two caravans near the town of Khan Younis, witnesses and Hamas officials said. There were no casualties.
A fifth missile hit a cheese factory in Gaza City, setting it on fire, witnesses and Hamas officials said. Hospital officials said two children were slightly wounded by flying debris.
Helicopters struck twice in the central refugee camp of Nusseirat, destroying a metal foundry. There were no casualties.
An IDF spokesman confirmed the attacks, saying they had targeted two weapons-manufacturing plants and two arms caches.
Last Friday, Major Eliraz Peretz and Staff Sergeant Ilan Sviatkovsky were killed while pursuing a group of Palestinian militants trying to lay mines near the border fence. Two other soldiers were wounded in the incident, and two militants were killed.
Three children injured in Israeli air strikes after Palestinian militants step up rocket attack
Palestinians walk past what Hamas officials say is a cheese factory destroyed in an Israeli air strike. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/REUTERS
Israeli jets and helicopters have attacked Gaza, injuring three children and hitting what the Israeli military said were weapons manufacturing and storage sites.
The attacks continue the escalation in violence around Gaza in recent weeks. A day earlier Israeli had dropped leaflets in southern Gaza warning of an attack.
The number of rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian militants has begun to increase and a week ago two soldiers and two Palestinian gunmen were killed in the most serious clashes on the border for more than a year.
There were at least seven Israeli missile strikes overnight. Two caravans near the southern town of Khan Younis were hit as well as a cheese factory in Gaza City and a metal foundry in the Nuseirat refugee camp, according to reports. Hamas said a complex it built for making movies was damaged, the Associated Press reported.
The Israel defence forces (IDF) said a rocket was fired into southern Israel on Thursday and there were nearly 20 rocket and mortar attacks in March. Two weeks ago a rocket killed a Thai worker in Israel.
“The IDF will not tolerate any attempt to harm the citizens of the state of Israel and will continue to operate firmly against anyone who uses terror against it. The IDF holds Hamas as solely responsible for maintaining peace and quiet in the Gaza Strip,” the military said.
Britain today called for restraint and urged Israel and the Palestinians to renew talks. A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: “We are concerned by today’s strikes and the escalation of violence in Gaza and southern Israel over the past week. We encourage Israelis and Palestinians to focus efforts on negotiation and to engage urgently in US-backed proximity talks.”
Hamas, the Islamist movement that won Palestinian elections four years ago and controls Gaza, has tried in recent months to curb rocket fire. But it also said its fighters were involved in a gun battle a week ago in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and released video footage apparently taken during the fight.
Today Hamas said it had contacted armed groups in Gaza in an apparent attempt to rein in their attacks.
A statement by the Hamas government accused Israel of an escalation against the territory. But it also said the Hamas government was “making contact with the factions to safeguard internal agreement”.
Israel led a devastating war into Gaza in January last year that killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians. Thirteen Israelis died. For months afterwards the area was quiet, with both sides apparently keen to prevent further fighting.
Israel is continuing a tight economic blockade on Gaza, preventing exports and limiting imports to a small number of aid and food items.
EDITOR: Democracy of Silence
For over three months Israel has silenced this bizarre affair, in which the army and the judges operate illegally, in order to silence two journalist who have found the evidence that the IOF murders Palestinians despite a High Court order to the contrary. In this democracy, you are allowed to say what you want, until you find yourself in jail, at which point even the papers are not allowed to writye about it – the Israeli papers have not yet reported this latest news…
‘Haaretz’ writer fled to London fearing charges over exposé on Palestinian’s killing
By Kim Sengupta, Diplomatic Correspondent
Friday, 2 April 2010
An Israeli journalist is in hiding in Britain, The Independent can reveal, over fears that he may face charges in the Jewish state in connection with his investigation into the killing of a Palestinian in the West Bank.
Uri Blau, a reporter at Israel’s liberal newspaper, Haaretz, left town three months ago for Asia and is now in London. Haaretz is understood to be negotiating the terms of his return to Israel with prosecutors, according to an Israeli source, who declined to be identified, because of the sensitivity of the situation.
The news of Mr Blau’s extended absence comes just days after it emerged that another Israeli journalist, Anat Kam, has been held under house arrest for the last three months on charges that she leaked classified documents to the press while completing her military service.
Although no media outlet or journalist has been specifically named as the recipient of the classified information, there is speculation on Israeli blogs that Ms Kam gave documents to Mr Blau that formed the basis of a story he wrote in November 2008.
In his article for Haaretz, Mr Blau reported that one of two Islamic Jihad militants killed in Jenin in June 2007 had been targeted for assassination in apparent violation of a ruling issued six months earlier by Israel’s supreme court. While not outlawing assassinations in the West Bank altogether, the ruling heavily restricted the circumstances in which they were permissible, effectively saying that they should not take place if arrest was possible.
In an unusual move, Israel has placed a gagging order on national media, preventing them from reporting any aspect of the Kam case. Israel’s Channel Ten and Haaretz are expected to challenge this order on 12 April.
According to the court order, Ms Kam, 23, is being held on “espionage” charges. It alleges that she passed classified documents to a male journalist while working as a clerk in the Israel Defence Forces Central Command during her military service.
She was arrested more than a year after Mr Blau’s report, which was cleared by military censors at the time of publication, when she was working for the news service Walla, until recently owned by Haaretz.
Ms Kam denies all the charges. Her trial has reportedly been set for 14 April and she could face a lengthy prison sentence if convicted. Mr Blau did not respond to requests for comment; his friends and colleagues refused to discuss the case in detail.
Dov Alfon, Haaretz’s editor-in-chief, said in an emailed statement: “Haaretz has a 90-year-long tradition of protecting its reporters from government pressures, and Uri Blau is getting all the help we can provide him with.”
The move to gag Israel-based media has sparked fevered debate on Jewish blogs, which have freely reported the story. Bloggers have railed against the blackout, saying it represents a critical challenge to the freedom of the press.
“I do not believe that a citizen can be arrested and tried for suspected security offences right under our noses without anyone knowing anything about it,” wrote former Haaretz editor Hanoch Marmari in an eloquent cri de coeur on the Seventh Eye website.
“Trials do not take place here in darkened dungeons, nor do we have show trials behind glass or chicken wire. I have no doubt that such a strange, terrible and baseless scenario cannot take place in such a sophisticated democracy as our own.”
Woman faces treason trial after allegedly leaking documents that suggest military breached court order on West Bank assassinations
Anat Kam is accused of copying documents while she was a soldier on her national service and passing them on to Ha’aretz.
An Israeli journalist has been under secret house arrest since December on charges that she leaked highly sensitive, classified military documents that suggest the Israeli military breached a court order on assassinations in the occupied West Bank.
Anat Kam, 23, goes on trial in two weeks on treason and espionage charges and could face up to 14 years in jail. A court-imposed gagging order, proposed by the state and more recently by the defence, is preventing media coverage of the arrest and charges in Israel.
Kam is reportedly accused of copying military documents while she was a soldier on national service and then passing them to an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. Kam denies the charges. Her lawyers declined to respond to repeated requests for comment.
A Haaretz journalist, Uri Blau, who has written several stories critical of the Israeli military and who has been linked in internet reports to the case, has left Israel and is now in London, apparently for fear he will be targeted for his reporting. Haaretz and Channel 10, an Israeli television station, will challenge the media gagging order at a hearing on 12 April, two days before Kam’s trial is due to start at the Tel Aviv district court.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which reported the story from New York this week, said the investigation into Kam was jointly conducted by Israeli military intelligence, the police and the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service. The Israeli military declined to comment on the case.
During her military service, Kam reportedly worked in the office of a senior Israeli general and is accused of copying classified documents from the office. After her time in the army she became a journalist, working for the Israeli news website Walla, which was previously partly owned by Haaretz but entirely editorially independent. Reports suggest she is accused of leaking the documents to Haaretz.
Attention has focused on an investigation Haaretz published on the Israeli military’s assassination policy in November 2008, written by Uri Blau and headlined “Licence to Kill”. He reported that the military, the Israel Defence Force, had been carrying out assassinations of Palestinian militants in the West Bank in contravention of an Israeli high court ruling, which said efforts should be made first to arrest suspected militants rather than assassinating them.
The story described meetings in the spring of 2007 in which senior Israeli generals discussed a mission to assassinate Ziad Subahi Mahmad Malaisha, a senior leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The army chief, General Gabi Ashkenazi, allegedly approved the operation but said Malaisha’s car was not to be attacked if there was “more than one unidentified passenger” in it.
Malaisha and another Islamic Jihad leader were killed by the military in June that year, and the military claimed at the time that the militants had first opened fire at the soldiers.
One of the generals involved in the meetings, Major-General Yair Naveh, was quoted in the story as defending the killings as legal. The AP reported that Kam served in Naveh’s office during her military service.
The Haaretz piece was accompanied by copies of military documents but it was approved by the military censor before publication, the Guardian understands. The story was published more than a year before Kam was arrested and was followed by several other articles by Blau that were similarly critical of the military.
Dov Alfon, editor of Haaretz, said: “Uri Blau is in London. He will be there until his editors decide otherwise. We are ready to continue to keep him in London as long as needed. Uri Blau published a lot of articles in Haaretz. All of them are dynamite stuff and it is clear of course that the authorities are not satisfied with these kind of revelations in a major newspaper.
“We understand this but we also understand that Israel is still a democracy and therefore we intend to continue to publish whatever public interest demands and our reporters can reveal.”
Palestinian detainees in Israel’s Ketziot prison in the Negev have decided to unite in order to secure better conditions, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported on Wednesday.
The protest, which will start on April 7, marks the first time since 2006 that prisoners from all factions would unite in a demonstration.
The prisoners have been unhappy with the restrictions placed on some of their families so they decided to protest and halt all family visits for one month. They have also decided to mark the protest by a hunger strike.
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A detainee in Ketziot prison, Mahmud Da’is, told Ma’an that “the prisoners were united in their determination to secure fair treatment for Palestinians.
While in Washington the U.S. administration is trying to reduce tensions with Israel, in Jerusalem they go out of their way to depict in war paint the demands President Barack Obama put to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Political sources in Jerusalem told Haaretz’s Ari Shavit this week that hiding behind the American demands is an intention to impose a permanent settlement on the two sides in less than two years. This is being presented as a troubling change in U.S. policy toward Israel, while the Americans issue veiled yet serious threats about the risks that allegedly loom for them if their credibility in the Middle East is lost.
The top U.S. political officials and that country’s defense establishment recently made it clear that the continued Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the perpetuation of the occupation in the territories undermine the strategic interests of the United States (and Israel as well). The stern demands made of the Israeli government reflect Obama’s willingness to invest a significant effort in defense of these interests. It seems he concluded that the endless dialogue with the Israeli government does not push forward anything unless an American peace plan is formulated.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. The possibility that the United States will propose a plan of its own and seek to convince the sides to accept it, or even impose it, is not the worst of all possibilities.
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However, it is obvious that a settlement reached through negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is preferable to an imposed settlement, where not accepting it would involve an especially intense confrontation with the international community and deepen Israel’s isolation. The only way to prevent an imposed settlement must be through a realistic Israeli peace plan that is similar to that of the United States and based on agreements and understandings reached by previous governments. It must be based on principles that, obvious to everyone, are imperative for a settlement.
A government that seeks to prevent an imposed settlement must not only bring to the fore serious propositions and demands of its own, it must avoid at all costs unilateral steps that signal an intention to foil all chances for an agreed settlement. An imposed settlement may prove to be the least worst alternative when compared with no settlement and a continuation of the situation. Those who fear an imposed solution must immediately present an Israeli peace plan.
A four-month halt to building in East Jerusalem may be brokered by encouraging Palestinians to enter direct peace talks
The US administration is pressing Israel for a four-month freeze on settlement construction in East Jerusalem and in return will encourage Palestinians to enter direct peace talks, the Ha’aretz newspaper reported today.
The report, which cited an unnamed Israeli official in Jerusalem, said Washington believed this would be enough to restart peace talks for the first time since Israel’s war in Gaza more than a year ago. A number of senior Israeli ministers have said publicly they will not halt settlement construction in the city, but Ha’aretz said a “tacit agreement” with the US might be possible.
“According to this idea, Israel would make it clear to the United States that during the coming four months no massive construction in East Jerusalem neighbourhoods would be planned or carried out, enabling Israel to be seen as meeting the American and Palestinian demands,” the report said.
Palestinians have refused to return to direct talks with Israel without a full freeze on construction in Israeli settlements, in line with the road map of 2003. Washington too made an identical demand of Israel for most of last year, but in the end Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu put instead a partial, temporary freeze on construction in West Bank settlements. Netanyahu insists in public that he will continue to allow building in East Jerusalem, which Israel regards as sovereign territory. The international community does not recognise Israeli sovereignty in the east of the city and all settlement on occupied land is illegal under international law.
Israel and the Palestinians had been due to start a new programme of “indirect” proximity talks earlier this month, but they were scuppered when Israeli authorities gave approval for 1,600 new homes in an ultra-Orthodox settlement in East Jerusalem.
Ha’aretz reported earlier this week that Barack Obama had presented Netanyahu with several other demands during their meeting in Washington last week including the opening of a Palestinian commercial interests office in East Jerusalem, an end to demolitions of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, and a commitment to discuss all the core issues of the conflict during the next round of talks.
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, said the demand for a freeze of settlement construction in East Jerusalem was “completely unreasonable”. He said none of the top seven ministers – known as the forum of seven – agreed to it. “I have not seen anyone in the forum of seven who has consented to this,” Lieberman told the Ma’ariv newspaper in an interview published on Monday. “The past few days have taught me that there is no point to further concessions … I am certain that we can convince the US that this demand is unreasonable … There will be no choice but to insist. To pay the price, even if it is high.”
Benny Begin, another of the forum of seven ministers, said on Monday that US demands were “bothersome and certainly worrying”. “This change will definitely bring about the opposite to the declared objective. It will bring about a hardening in the policy of the Arabs and of the Palestinian Authority,” he told Israel Radio.
EDITOR: The trend is now setting, and gaining pace!
A number of international moves to limit dealing with Israel is signaling the growing disenchantment with Israel, and a more robust attitude towards its illegal occupation and its iniquities. More action is taken daily against it, not just by political organisations on the left, but now also on behalf of governments which are on the whole supportive of Israel. This is likely to continue and deepen, as Israeli atrocities worsen.
A group of British lawmakers are expected to call Tuesday for the reevaluation of arms deals with Israel after a recently published report claimed that British weapons were “almost certainly” used in Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, The Guardian reported.
“It is regrettable that arms exports to Israel were almost certainly used in Operation Cast Lead,” the U.K. daily The Guardian quoted the Commons committee on strategic export controls report.
“This is in direct contravention to the U.K. government’s policy that U.K. arms exports to Israel should not be used in the occupied territories,” the report said.
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In April 2009 Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband said that the U.K. would review all its weapons exports to Israel, in the wake of the Israel Defense Forces’ recent offensive on the Gaza Strip.
According to the report, U.K. arms deals with Israel in 2008 totaled at over £27.5 million, and over £4 million worth of government exporting licenses, the Guardian reported.
The equipment the U.K. sold to Israel which probably included components in cockpit displays in United States F-16 combat aircrafts and other parts installed in the U.S. Apache helicopters purchased by Israel and used during the Gaza offensive, the report concluded.
Miliband told the British Parliament shortly after the war in Gaza that all export licenses would be reviewed in light of the war in Gaza, which ended in mid-January.
A cross-party group of MPs will call today for a review of the way arms sales are approved after the government admitted British equipment was “almost certainly” used in the assault on Gaza last year.
“It is regrettable that arms exports to Israel were almost certainly used in Operation Cast Lead [the attack on Gaza],” the Commons committee on strategic export controls says in a report published. “This is in direct contravention to the UK government’s policy that UK arms exports to Israel should not be used in the occupied territories.”
The MPs say they welcome the government’s subsequent decision to revoke five export licences for equipment destined for the Israeli navy but “broader lessons” must be learned from a review to ensure British arms exports to Israel are not used in the occupied territories in future.
After the attack on Gaza, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, told the Commons that all future applications for arms-related exports to Israel “will be assessed taking into account the recent conflict”. He said Israeli equipment used in the attack on Gaza “almost certainly” contained British-supplied components included in cockpit displays in US F-16 combat aircraft sold to Israel, and components for the fire control and radar systems, navigation equipment and engine assemblies for US Apache helicopters.
The equipment also included armoured personnel carriers adapted from Centurion tanks sold to Israel in the late 1950s and components for the guns and radar in Israeli Sa’ar-class corvettes which took part in the operation.
Miliband said the government was looking into all existing licences to see whether any of them needed to be reconsidered. He added that he believed British export controls were amongst the strongest and most effective in the world.
Government-approved arms exports to Israel were worth more than £27.5m in 2008, according to the the report. Government departments approved nearly £4m worth of export licences for weapons and equipment with dual military and civil uses in the nine months after the Gaza attack, according to official statistics.
Though this suggests a significant drop, the figures show Britain was continuing to sell Israel a wide range of military equipment, including small-arms ammunition and parts for sniper rifles.
Most of the equipment was components for large items, including parts for ground-based radar, military aircraft engines, military aircraft navigation equipment, military communications and unmanned drones.
Among approved exports were remote ground-sensor systems, electronic warfare equipment “components for sniper rifles”, “small arms ammunition” and “test equipment for recognition/identification equipment”.
The report also reveals that the government decided to revoke a number of licences for arms sales to Sri Lanka. It says it regrets British arms were sold to Sri Lanka during ceasefire periods in the conflict with Tamil Tiger rebels.
Amnesty International called on the government to act swiftly to close loopholes allowing “brass-plate” companies registered in the UK to trade arms to countries where human rights violations were committed.
It backed the committee’s call for a robust international arms trade treaty. Amnesty International’s arms programme director, Oliver Sprague, said: “World leaders and campaigners have worked far too hard on the treaty for it to become a worthless piece of paper that will do little to protect people from armed violence.”
The biggest Swedish pension fund has barred Israeli defense electronics company Elbit Systems from its investment portfolios on ethical grounds, Israel Radio reported Monday.
Following the lead of Norway’s state oil fund, the Första AP-Fonden pension fund said it had banned investment in Elbit because the Israeli company had built and is operating a surveillance system for the much debated West Bank separation barrier.
Critics of the controversial barrier argue that it is an illegal attempt to annex Palestinian land under the guise of security and that it severely restricts Palestinians who live nearby, particularly their ability to travel freely within the West Bank and to access work in Israel. Proponents, however, argue that the barrier has greatly reduced the incidence of suicide bombers coming from the West Bank and carrying out terror attacks within Israel.
According to the Swedish website the Swedish Wire, the pension fund said in a statement that “the Ethical Council recommended that Elbit Systems Ltd. should be excluded from each portfolio because it deems that the company can be linked to violations of fundamental conventions and norms.”
In its annual report, the ethical council wrote that “the Council has noted that both the European Union and the Swedish government consider the part of the separation barrier being built on West Bank to be illegal under international law. This position is also supported by the advisory opinion from 2004 by the International Court of Justice regarding the separation barrier.”
Israel has so far completed 413 kilometers (256 miles) of the planned 709-kilometer (435-mile) barrier, according to UN figures.
The Swedish fund, which only had small investments in Elbit according to its ethics council chairwoman Annika Andersson, said that Grupo Ferrovial, PetroChina, Thales and Yahoo had successfully addressed its concerns about ethics violations.
Last September, Norway’s state pension fund, one of the world’s biggest investors, also banned Elbit from its portfolio, prompting the Israeli Foreign Ministry to summon Norway’s ambassador in protest at the move.
Well, we all know Passover id supposed to be about freedom. Or so were are told. Now many Jews will sit tonight and sing lovely songs about freedom, end to slavery and suffering, and what not. Most of them will not for a moment think that it is not the Jews today who are in slavery, but the Palestinians; It is not the Jews who will go short on food, medicines, water, housing, gas, electricity, but again, the people of Gaza. It is not the Jews whose children will be taken by the soldiers to the many prisons, but again, the Palestinian children.
So, if there was some humane message in the Passover myth, it is lost on the very people who should know better, who should know that any nations which occupies, brutalizes and oppresses another nation, is not itself free. There no freedom to the occupied, or the occupier.
By Akiva Eldar
One of the harshest of the 10 plagues has smitten the children of Israel this Passover, and they are stumbling about in pitch darkness, bumping blindly into anyone in their way as they head toward the edge of the precipice. Warm friends, cool friends, icy enemies: Jordan and Turkey, Brazil and Britain, Germany and Australia – it’s all the same.
And if that’s not enough, the myopic Jewish state also has gone and collided head-on with the ally that offers existential support. Israel has become an environmental hazard and its own greatest threat. For 43 years, Israel has been ruled by people who have refused to see reality. They speak of “united Jerusalem,” knowing that no other country has recognized the annexation of the eastern part of the city. They sent 300,000 people to settle land they know does not belong to them. As early as September 1967, Theodor Meron, then the legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, said there was a categorical prohibition against civilian settlement in occupied territories, under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Meron – who would become the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and is now a member of the Appeals Chamber for both that court and a similar one for Rwanda – wrote to prime minister Levi Eshkol in a top-secret memorandum: “I fear there is great sensitivity in the world today about the whole question of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, and any legal arguments that we try to find will not remove the heavy international pressure, from friendly states as well.”
It is true that for many years, we have managed to grope our way through the dark and keep the pressure at bay. We did so with the assistance of our neighbors, who were afflicted with the same shortsightedness.
On Sunday, however, the Arab League marked the eighth anniversary of its peace proposals, which offer Israel normalization in exchange for an end to the occupation and an agreed solution to the refugee problem, in accordance with UN Resolution 194. But Israel behaves as if it had never heard of this historic initiative. For the last year, it was too busy realizing its dubious right to establish an illegal settlement in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, turning a blind eye to reality, has tried to persuade the world that what applies to Tel Aviv also applies to Sheikh Jarrah. He simply refuses to see that the world is sick of us. It’s easier for him to focus on his similarly nearsighted followers in AIPAC. Tonight they’ll all swear “Next year in rebuilt Jerusalem” – including the construction in Ramat Shlomo, of course.
Hillary Clinton is not Jewish, but it was she who had to remind the AIPAC Jews what demography will do to their favorite Jewish democracy in the Middle East. A few days earlier, she had come back from Moscow, where she took part in one of the Quartet’s most important meetings. Israeli politicians and media were too busy with the cold reception awaiting Netanyahu at the White House. They never gave any thought to the decision by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations to turn Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s state-building plan from a unilateral initiative into an international project.
The Quartet declared that it was backing the plan, proposed in August 2009, to establish a Palestinian state within 24 months. This was an expression of the Palestinians’ serious commitment that the state have a just and proper government and be a responsible neighbor. This means Israel has less than a year and a half to come to an agreement with the Palestinians on the permanent borders, Jerusalem and the refugees. If the Palestinians stick to Fayyad’s path, in August 2011, the international community, led by the United States, can be expected to recognize the West Bank and East Jerusalem as an independent country occupied by a foreign power. Will Netanyahu still be trying to explain that Jerusalem isn’t a settlement?
For 43 years, the Israeli public – schoolchildren, TV viewers, Knesset members and Supreme Court judges – have been living in the darkness of the occupation, which some call liberation. The school system and its textbooks, the army and its maps, the language and the “heritage” have all been mobilized to help keep Israelis blind to the truth. Luckily, the Gentiles clearly see the connection between the menace of Iranian control spreading across the Middle East and the curse of Israeli control over Islamic holy places.
Monday night, when we read the Passover Haggadah, we should note the plague that follows darkness. That may open our eyes.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Monday warned that Hamas that Israel would react harshly to any escalation along its border with the Gaza Strip.
“The enemy in the Gaza Strip has paid and will continue to pay a heavy price if it tries to shake the equilibrium along the border,” Barak said.
His comments as he visited troops from the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani Brigade who took part in an exchange of fire that killed two of their comrades at the border this weekend.
Likud minister Gilad Erdan Also called for Israel to react strongly to the incident.
“There must be a clear and decisive response, although at this stage there is not a need for a wide-ranging operation on the scale of Cast Lead,” Erdan told Israel radio on Monday, refering to Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza last year, in which some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued his own warning on Sunday, saying Israel would retaliate against any attack on its citizens or soldiers and that Hamas would be made to be held accountable for actions.
The two deaths in Gaza clashes on Friday have increased concern in the IDF that Hamas is trying to alter the situation along the Gaza Strip border fence, possibly by targeting of Israeli patrols.
“Israel’s policy of retaliation is forceful and decisive,” Netanyahu said during the weekly government meeting in Jerusalem, asserting that Israel would “retaliate decisively against any attack on our citizens and soldiers.”
“This policy is well-known and will continue. Hamas and the other terror organizations need to know that they are the ones that are responsible for their own actions,” Netanyahu said.
MI6 suspects that airline staff working for Mossad may have copied passports of Britons flying to Israel, News of the World reports, adding authorities also concerned about security searches carried out on British officials attending terrorism conference in country last September
The British secret intelligence service (MI6) suspects that airline staff working for the Israeli secret service Mossad may have copied thousands of British passports, some of which were used in the assassination of senior Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, the News of the World tabloid reported Sunday.
According to the report, British authorities are also concerned about security searches carried out on British officials attending a terrorism conference in Israel last September.
MI6 believe that Britons flying to Israel have been targeted for months and their documents have been cloned, the newspaper said, adding that the Foreign Office held top level talks last week on whether to issue a warning against travelling with certain airlines.
The forging method was already revealed last week in a statement made by the British government to the parliament after the use of British citizens’ identities in the Dubai assassination was revealed. According to the statement, 12 passports used by the assassins were cloned in different airports while the British nationals were on their way to Israel. They were taken away for “examinations” which lasted 20 minutes each.
In addition to the investigation into the falsification of British passports, the United Kingdom authorities are also checking whether Israeli intelligence elements took advantage of a visit to Israel by British security officials in order to clone their passports.
British police sources said the officials had undergone strict security checks upon arriving in Israel.
“It was said to be routine but the searches did not apply to all nations,” a source told the newspaper. “There is now a real concern that some of these high-ranking officers and officials have also had documents cloned.”
The UK expressed its discontent after Dubai authorities revealed that British identities were used in the assassination and launched an investigation into the matter. One of the moves taken against Israel was the decision to expel an Israeli diplomat serving in the kingdom, which was said to be the Mossad representative in London.
It was also reported that Israel would not be allowed to replace its Mossad representative in London should it not provide Britain with a public assurance that UK citizens’ passports will never be used again for secret operations.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told lawmakers last week that Israel’s actions had put British nationals at risk and showed a “profound disregard” for Britain’s sovereignty. He said the fact that Israel is a longtime ally with close business, personal and political ties to Britain “adds insult to injury” in this case.
Miliband noted that a thorough British investigation concluded that Israel was behind the forging of British passports used by the alleged assassins in Dubai.
There was talk in the Israeli media on an attack planned for the spring for along time now, at least since the summer of 2009. The pundits seem to differ about its location, arguing the toss between Gaza and Lebanon, with some speaking of both. The events of the weekend in which the IOF lost two of its soldiers to Hamas, seem to be confirming such rumours; it was the IOF which moved across into Gaza on this occasion, seeking a conflict actively, and following it with tanks, artillery air-force and navy bombardments. Even the US in Vietnam has not used such force to crack a nut, and in pure military terms the whole episode is bizarre, and bears the signs of a trap set by Hamas into which the IOF was lured. While it is difficult to see what more can be achieved by another full scale attack on Gaza, this is not something which might hold Israel back from executing such a folly, with its cost to the Palestinian population being even more devastation than the 22 Day invasion last year. While Steinitz is on the extreme right of the Israeli Knesset, Like Lieberman, he is at the heart of Netanyahu’s government, and used as his speaker on many occasions.
Israel will retaliate against any attack on its citizens or soldiers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, adding that Hamas would be made to be held accountable for actions.
The PM’s comments come following the death of two soldiers in Gaza clashes on Friday, which increased concern in the Israel Defense Forces that Hamas is trying to alter the situation along the Gaza Strip border fence, which will result in their targeting of Israeli patrols.
“Israel’s policy of retaliation is forceful and decisive,” the PM said during the weekly government meeting in Jerusalem, asserting that Israel would “retaliate decisively against any attack on our citizens and soldiers.”
“This policy is well-known and will continue. Hamas and the other terror organizations need to know that they are the ones that are responsible for their own actions,” Netanyahu said.
A statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office on Sunday also referred to recent anonymous quotes reportedly originating from Netanyahu aides attacking U.S. President Barack Obama’s policy in the Middle East.
“The prime minister emphatically rejects the anonymous quotes about President Obama that a newspaper attributed to one of his confidants, and he condemns them,” the statement said.
Netanyahu was at pains to hammer home the message, telling reporters at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting: “I have heard over recent days anonymous and improper remarks in the media about the U.S. administration and American president.”
“I want to say clearly, these comments are unacceptable to me. They do not come from anyone representing me. The relations between Israel and the United States are those of allies and friends, and are based on tradition spanning many years.”
On the stalled peace talks with the Palestinian Authority the PM said that Israel continued to see a “Palestinian lack of flexibility. There are no signs of them becoming more moderate.”
“I don’t expect the discussions and declarations in the Arab League will make the process any easier,” Netanyahu added, saying that nonetheless Israel would “maintain a restrained framework for negotiations and continue our dealings with the American administration in an attempt to renew talks.”
Netanyahu’s statement came after Likud Minister Yuval Steinitz told Israel Radio earlier Sunday that Israel would reoccupy Gaza if it felt it had no other choice.
Finance Minister Steinitz said that Israel must deal with Hamas, and may have to reenter Gaza to destroy the regime.
“Israel won’t allow Hamas to arm with long-range missiles,” Steinitz said.
Major Eliraz Peretz and Staff Sergeant Ilan Sviatkovsky were killed Friday while pursuing a group of Palestinian militants trying to lay mines near the border fence. Two other soldiers were wounded in the incident, and two militants were killed.
Any change along the fence may present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government with the first military challenge of its tenure. For the past year the situation has been calm, in great part as a result of the two wars conducted by the Olmert government: the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead.
Intelligence sources in Israel have recently raised the question whether Hamas was turning a blind eye to the rocket attacks, a possible change of tactics. Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Channel 2 on Saturday that Hamas is trying to change the “rules of the game” in Gaza, and will have to pay the price for this.
Spokesmen on behalf of Hamas claimed Friday evening that their gunmen acted defensively after an IDF force entered their area. In this they hinted that there was no change in policy from the point of view of Hamas. Responsibility for the incident was also claimed by three smaller factions in the Gaza Strip, including Islamic Jihad.
It is possible that Hamas was involved in the incident, in the mortar fire that was used to support the Palestinian gunmen during the exchanges of fire.
The incident comes at a convenient time for Hamas, on the eve of the Arab League summit, but for Netanyahu the timing is terrible, with pressure from the Americans and the international community on the need to alleviate the Israeli siege on the Strip.
In the interivew with Israel Radio, Steinitz also slammed the U.S. administration, saying the pressure it is putting on Israel is just worsening the situation.
“American pressure isn’t conductive and isn’t fair, because the Netanyahu government made two enormous gestures toward the Palestinians: The opportunity to improve the Palestinian economy, and the settlement freeze,” he said.
“The United States needs to understand that the atmosphere it created in the Middle East, that Washington is now less friendly to Israel, isn’t making the Palestinians more willing to compromise, it further adds to their rejection of the peace process.”
Stenitiz also stressed that it is necessary to make it clear to the Americans that they must focus on solutions to the Iranian nuclear threat.
The future of Jerusalem is one of the most emotive issues in the Middle East
By Jeremy Bowen
The Middle East is full of talk of war. Not today, tomorrow or perhaps even next year but the horizon is dark, and people who have to live with the Middle East’s grim collection of smouldering problems are finding it hard to look ahead with anything other than foreboding.
By the end of this year, if sanctions have not persuaded Iran to stop what many countries insist is a nuclear weapons programme, the war party in Israel will be pushing for military action.
South Lebanon is once again looking like a tinderbox.
Insults and threats have been bandied back and forth between Syria, Israel and Hezbollah.
In Washington DC, where I have been this week, analysts say Syria has been shipping bigger and better weapons to Hezbollah, its Lebanese ally. ‘Disastrous visit’
Israel assumes that there will be another war in Lebanon, and has been training its army to win it, which it could not do last time in 2006.
TIMELINE: ISRAEL-US ROW
9 Mar: Israel announces the building of 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem during visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden.
Mr Biden condemns the move
11 Mar: Mr Biden says there must be no delay in resuming Mid-East peace talks, despite the row
12 Mar: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the Israeli move is “deeply negative” for relations
15 Mar: The US says it is waiting for a “formal response” from Israel to its proposals to show it is committed to Mid-East peace
16 Mar: The US envoy to the Mid-East postpones a visit to Israel
17 Mar: President Obama denies there is a crisis with Israel
22 Mar: Hillary Clinton tells pro-Israel lobby group Aipac Israel has to make “difficult but necessary choices” if it wants peace with Palestinians.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu tells Aipac Israel has a “right to build” in Jerusalem
23 Mar: Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu meet behind closed doors with no media access
23 Mar: Jerusalem municipal government approves building of 20 new homes in East Jerusalem
24 Mar: Mr Netanyahu ends Washington trip talking of a “golden” solution amid US silence
And then there is the crisis between the United States, Israel and the Palestinians.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s disastrous visit to Washington DC has exposed just how bad this crisis and current US-Israeli relations are.
What is even more serious is that it is centred on the future of Jerusalem, which is about the single most emotive issue in the entire Middle East.
Mr Netanyahu returns home weakened, though his ministers are declaring their support. US President Barack Obama seems to see him as part of the problem.
The precise details of what happened in Washington between Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu are emerging only slowly.
But it is clear that the Americans want Israel to freeze building for Jews in those parts of the holy city that Israel occupied and annexed in 1967.
The Obama administration has concluded that it will be impossible to negotiate peace while Israel continues to settle its people on occupied land.
Mr Netanyahu insists, long and loud, that he wants a peace deal if it guarantees Israeli security.
The Americans agree with that, but not with his insistence that Israel has the right to build whatever and wherever it wants in Jerusalem.
Israel’s claim that that the city is its sovereign capital is not accepted by its allies. Political vacuum
The Americans want to start peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Their plan was to wring concessions out of Mr Netanyahu while he was in Washington that they could take to the Palestinians to persuade them to take part.
The president of the Palestinian authority, Mahmoud Abbas, pulled out after the Israelis announced a big building project at the Ramat Shlomo settlement in occupied East Jerusalem.
The US Vice-President Joe Biden was in Jerusalem at the time to get the talks going. Embarrassed and angry, he condemned Israel’s plans.
Mr Netanyahu’s visit to Washington – far from ending the crisis between Israel and its most important ally – seems to have made things worse.
What is now forming around the row over Jerusalem is an old-fashioned Middle Eastern political vacuum.
When there is no political process to absorb some heat and give people even a glint of hope for the future, the result tends to be violent.
King Abdullah of Jordan, whose father made peace with Israel in 1994, has told newspapers in Amman that Israel needs to decide between war and peace. American pressure
If it wants peace, he says it has to stop settling Jews on occupied land.
The US State Department and the White House employ many Middle East experts who know that even if they manage to start negotiations the chances of success are low.
They are trying anyway, because the alternatives seem much worse.
But the reality is that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are in good shape to negotiate, even assuming that they want to try (in fact they have only dabbled with the idea because of American pressure).
Mr Netanyahu’s coalition government depends on the votes of nationalists who want no compromise with the Palestinians.
Mr Abbas is isolated and weak. It is hard to see how he could deliver any agreement he made when the Palestinian national movement is split down the middle between Fatah, his faction, and Hamas, which controls Gaza.
Mr Obama has declared that Middle East peace is a strategic priority for the United States.
But just glance across the region, from Jerusalem to Beirut, then on to Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran and further east to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Never mind making peace, just avoiding war in the places that are not already fighting is going to be hard enough, and perhaps impossible.
Israel prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu ran into a storm of criticism over his dispute with the White House.
Israeli PM under fire from press at home after dispute with US over new settlements in East Jerusalem Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP
The last week must rank as the worst of Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s second term as Israeli prime minister. It produced headlines no leader would want to read, even allowing for the sometimes excitable tone of the Israeli press: “Ambush in the White House”, “A hazing in stages” and “With his back to the wall.”
Netanyahu flew to Washington a week ago hoping to mend fences after an extraordinary rupture in relations but found only a frosty reception. Then Britain expelled an Israeli diplomat from London in anger at the “intolerable” forging of British passports for the hit squad who assassinated a Hamas man in Dubai. Hours later Netanyahu had a low-key meeting with Barack Obama that ended in serious disagreement and without the usual courtesy of a photographed handshake.
Perhaps it was inevitable that an American president who gave such a firm commitment to tackling the Middle East conflict so early in his term would eventually run up against one of the most rightwing coalition governments in Israel’s history.
Some in Israel are encouraged by the Obama administration’s strong words and its continued pressure for a halt to Jewish settlement-building in East Jerusalem. In its weekly newspaper advert on Friday, the peace group Gush Shalom pleaded with Obama: “Now heal us please from the malignant occupation. Many in Israel will be grateful.”
But this is not a majority view. More common is the sense that the world does not understand or sympathise with Israel, a feeling summed up by one Israeli newspaper columnist who wrote: “The US is abandoning us and effectively turning into Europe. From now on, we are completely alone.” Two opinion polls suggest many Israelis want their government to continue building settlements in East Jerusalem, even if it brings a rift with the Americans.
For years US governments have called on Israel to stop expanding its Jewish settlements in occupied territory – a settlement freeze is even a key plank of the roadmap introduced during the Bush presidency. But it is the Obama administration that has pushed hardest on it, so far without success. Netanyahu has introduced a partial, temporary curb on building in the West Bank, but insists building will continue in Jerusalem. “Jerusalem is not a settlement. It’s our capital,” he said. It is not the view of the international community, which does not recognise Israel’s occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem in the wake of the 1967 war.
Netanyahu’s position, together with his heavily circumscribed vision of a future Palestine, has meant no return to peace talks. But the more settlements are built and serious negotiations avoided, the less possible any conflict-ending, two-state peace deal becomes. And the fate of Jerusalem in particular is crucial to a broader agreement.
For now Netanyahu’s coalition is in robust form, unusually so for an Israeli government, and is backing its prime minister. But soon, like others before him, he may find himself forced to choose between maintaining the relationship with Israel’s greatest ally, the Americans, or maintaining the loyalty of his coalition, without whom he would be lost.
Opposition chairwoman tours Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, uses opportunity to slam PM on various issues. ‘We have a prime minister who succumbs to every political whim,’ she says
Kadima Chairwoman Tzipi Livni toured the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon Sunday along with other faction members, following the decision to relocate the hospital’s emergency room due to the discovery of ancient tombs in the site.
“My visit here is part of a battle for Judaism and not against it, as well as for the values of Israel as a Jewish and democratic country.”
Livni further added, “The story is not about the bones found here, but the decision-making process. We have a prime minister who succumbs to every whim of every political partner, and the entire public is paying the price for it.”
Livni also used the opportunity to slam Netanyahu for mounting tensions between Israel and the US and the government’s conduct in the international arena. “This Passover eve, every person should ask himself what has changed: The status of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, the status of women pushed to the back of the bus and the rights of patients, which have been pushed aside.
“We need different leadership and different policy as well as an organized point of view with which to go to the US – instead of pushing Israel into a corner and say that the whole world is against us.”
In the backdrop of calls to add Kadima to the government in order to help solve the crisis with Washington Livni said, “The prime minister has chosen his natural partners for survival. He has no vision and for this reason his government is not trusted by the public and by the world.” The Kadima chairwoman also stressed she has no intention of joining the government in order to stabilize it. “For that to happen one needs different leadership and different policy.”
State responds to petition
Following attempts to change the government’s decision regarding the Barzilai hospital, the State Prosecutor’s Office filed its response with the High Court of Justice Sunday to a petition by the Movement for Quality Government in Israel.
The State rejected the claim suggesting biased conduct on the part of the examination team tasked with addressing the tombs affair.
“The factual infrastructure at the base of the petition is inaccurate. The movement did not exhaust all procedures before filing the motion and was quick in doing so before being given a response from the Prime Minister’s Office to a letter issued a day earlier,” the State’s response noted.
March 27th, 2010, by Carol Sanders
In the West Bank, there is a two-tiered system of justice, including for minors. For settler children, justice is administered according to Israeli domestic law, with all the due process protections that affords. They cannot be charged as adults until they reach 18, in accordance with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a signatory. For Palestinian children, military law applies, and that pretty much means due process, and the tenderness of their years, is irrelevant. Their childhood itself is cut short, both by the circumstances of the Occupation and the letter of military law. Until recently, they could be charged as adults as young as 12 years of age. A recent military order “reformed” that anomaly by setting their age of majority at 16 –still two years earlier than their settler counterparts, and two years younger than required by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. But the reality is that children as young as 12 continue to be arrested and imprisoned in adult military jails. In the majority of cases the soldiers who arrest them say that the children were throwing stones, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
Defence of Children International-Palestine reports that arrests of children have been increasing . Presently approximately 350 West Bank children under 17 are being held in Israeli prisons. Defence of Children provides testimonies of the children, detailing the brutal circumstances of their detention and interrogation, and their confinement with adult prisoners. Urgent appeals on behalf of the children are issued by Defence of Children, including in the case of masse arrests (17 children taken in a night raid from Al Jalazun Refugee Camp near Ramallah), and the transfer of children to prisons within Israel, where family members cannot visit because of restrictions on movement of people under Israel’s military Occupation.
If there’s a photo the White House should issue after Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit, it’s a group portrait of the prime minister, his Iraqi counterpart and the president of Afghanistan embracing Barack Obama together.
They are all heads of governments attached to the U.S.’s umbilical cord. They all experience insecurity in the region, and the world is concerned about each of the three’s security. Washington manages domestic policy for each of them, since each poses a danger to American foreign policy. In Iraq, Washington is involved in disagreements among Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds. In Afghanistan, Washington dictates conditions to the president to help advance its war against Al-Qaida. And when it comes to Israel, the United States showed clearly last week that it will not allow domestic Israeli politics to interfere with American foreign policy.
The group photo is a fitting picture of how Israel’s situation has deteriorated during Netanyahu’s short term in office. We’re not talking about yet another clumsy Israeli foreign minister whom no one wants to meet, or irksome building permits. Netanyahu poses a threat to Israeli security because he tips the balance of U.S.-Israeli relations, which are essential for our survival. And not only these relations. If Washington gives Israel the cold shoulder, it will be showing the way for other important countries, from Britain to Egypt and Brazil to Turkey, to do the same. Israel is no longer an exotic citron, but has been exposed as just another lemon.
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We may mock Netanyahu for the impolite reception he received in Washington; we can snipe about the late hour of his meeting with Obama, past Israeli television’s prime time, and ask why Obama abandoned the talk for dinner with his children. But then we remember that this isn’t some other country’s prime minister who is being kicked around; this danger on wheels is our own.
In a properly-run country, concerned about its own survival, thousands would have met the prime minister on his return, calling for his resignation. In such a country, gangs of squatters who steal land and buildings in Jerusalem would be considered organizations opposed to the nation’s security interests. They would be taken to court, at least. In Israel, they are a symbol of national pride.
This arrogant government is sure that ever since it annexed the occupied territory in Jerusalem, it granted Israel control for all eternity. Jordan’s King Abdullah can tell the lovers of eternity what happened to the so-called legal annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Jordan. This is the same Jordanian East Jerusalem that Washington will recognize as the capital of Palestine.
For generations the settlers have been blamed for posing an obstacle to peace, for acting against the policy of the government, which, poor soul, can’t stand up to these bullies. And so, while Washington believed that the Israeli government wanted to take action against such subversive organizations but had problems, it showed restraint, gave in a little about the construction freeze, patted Netanyahu on the shoulder and granted extensions to the government so it could manage its own affairs.
There is no longer any basis for this approach. The Israeli government, and the seven wonders in charge of it, are inseparable from the bullies. And so Washington had to conclude that the government and prime minister were simply lying.
Washington’s main interest is no longer whether the peace process will advance, because there are no guarantees that even direct talks with the Palestinians will end in an agreement. Washington’s interest is to preserve its standing in the world against a small state and its crafty government, which made it a laughing stock. This will be a true test of the United States’ ability to apply foreign policy. What is good for Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington figures, will also suit Israel now, because if Israel rebuffs Washington, Iraq and Afghanistan will, too.
And so the American formula is the same for all three. The United States will take care of the security of Israel/Iraq/Afghanistan, but security will not be measured only in the number of weapons sold to them, but also in the creation of conditions that will avoid the need to use them. To a certain extent, it will also be measured by these countries’ willingness to agree to U.S. policy. In this way, a new condition has been created that should have been applied a long time ago. According to it, any country that is willing to harm the international standing of the United States is gambling on its own security. This is not a threat, but a clarification.
Israel denies that the new homes are being built illegally
Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu has moved to ease tensions with the US, describing the two countries’ relations as those of “allies and friends”.
Mr Netanyahu also dismissed reports one of his confidants called US President Barack Obama a “disaster” for Israel.
The US has criticised the building of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, which prompted the Palestinians to pull out of US-brokered indirect peace talks.
The row has caused one of the worst crises in US-Israeli ties for decades.
In the wake of a controversial visit to the US, Mr Netanyahu said on Friday that his policy on East Jerusalem would not change, despite US pressure on Israel to announce a freeze on building Jewish homes there.
A best-selling Israeli newspaper then quoted an unidentified aide as saying: “You could say that Obama is the greatest disaster for Israel – a strategic disaster.”
But the prime minister, speaking before he briefed the cabinet on his US trip, condemned these comments as “unacceptable”.
“They do not come from anyone representing me. The relations between Israel and the United States are those of allies and friends, and are based on tradition spanning many years.”
Re-occupy Gaza?
Tension has also been mounting in Gaza in recent days, with two Israeli soldiers and two Palestinian militants reportedly killed in the worst clashes for more than a year.
At the cabinet meeting, Mr Netanyahu stressed that Israel would provide a “firm and decisive” response to any attack from the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Israel pulled out in 2009 after a which left hundreds of people dead.
Israel insists that Jerusalem will remain its undivided capital.
Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
They are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
The Middle East quartet – the US, EU, UN and Russia – has called for final status negotiations to reach a comprehensive peace deal within two years.
Editor: Wishful thinking?
While Gideon Levy is, as usual, totally accurate about the Israeli lie-machinery and obfuscation tactics, he is rather wishful about Obama, I feel. He writes as if he wished Obama to take his advice, but how likely is that? To see the Obama move in the the terms describd here, is to give him credit he has not earned, and is unikely to justify.
By Gideon Levy
If Israel had a real peace camp, if the silent majority had broken its sickly silence, if more Israelis approached the situation as a collective rather than individuals yearning for the next holiday or car, if more Israelis refused to accept blindly the deceptions of Israeli diplomacy and propaganda, Rabin Square would have been filled with demonstrators yesterday. Among the banners and flags, one sign would have stood out in this hour of risks and fateful decisions: “Thank you, friend.” Thank you, Barack Obama, friend of Israel.
The tidal wave of slurs and slanders, the unitary portrayal of Obama as someone trying to subjugate and humiliate Israel should have been answered with a dissenting voice saying that Obama was doing exactly what a true friend would do. Yes, it’s unpleasant, but after 43 years there’s just no other way. After a regrettable one-year delay and despite constant doubts and question marks, there now seems to be a chance that the 44th president of the United States will prevail where all his predecessors failed. There’s a chance Obama will pull Israel out of the crisis it created and work to achieve a better future, a future where it will claim what’s its own, but only what’s really its own.
The first step is encouraging and hope-inspiring. Among Obama’s modest demands – a construction freeze in Jerusalem and extending the freeze in the settlements, two basic conditions for “negotiations without preconditions” and for anyone who really wants a two-state solution – there’s a demand that the Israelis themselves should have made long ago.
Obama is asking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and through him every Israeli, to finally speak the truth. He’s asking Netanyahu and the rest of us: What on earth do you actually want? Enough with the misleading answers; the moment of truth is here. Enough with the tricks – a neighborhood here, a settlement expansion there. Just tell us: Where are you heading? Do you want to go on receiving unprecedented aid from the United States, do you want to become part of the Middle East, do you want to achieve peace?
If you do, please start behaving accordingly, including halting all construction in all settlements, everywhere, for all time, and begin evacuating them instead. Any action by Israel would be reminiscent of the three no’s of Khartoum: No to ending the occupation, no to peace, no to friendship with America.
Obama’s demands are minimal. Not just continuing the construction freeze, but dealing with the core issues, a two-year deadline to reach a solution and the demand that Israel speak the truth to others and itself. All these things should have been obvious if Israel were really aiming for a solution. Earlier presidents let Israel off and did not press for answers. Obama, faithful for the time being to the great promise he made when he was elected, is no longer willing to put up with the deceit. We now need to see if he’ll withstand the pressure and keep up his pressure on Israel.
The Israelis should be thankful to Obama for holding a mirror in front of them and saying that this is how your continuous deception looks. The Israelis should be just as thankful to Obama for being the first president ready to make Israel pay for its responsibility in maintaining the status quo. This is an American innovation supported by a shifting mood in world politics.
Take heed: The world is beginning to demand that Israel take responsibility for its actions in Dubai and Sheikh Jarrah, in Operation Cast Lead and Ramat Shlomo. From America and Europe, the time of responsibility and payback has arrived.
After 43 years of a vicious occupation, these, too, are minimal demands. Obama didn’t humiliate Israel. Israel humiliated itself for a generation, thinking it could do whatever it wanted – talk peace and build settlements, entrench an occupation and still be considered a democracy, while living on American support and rejecting its requests. Since all of Obama’s demands should have come from Israel itself, Obama is merely acting the way a friend should act. And for that he deserves those three words, from the bottom of our hearts: Thank you, friend.
International agencies, inspectors and western intelligence officials believe Tehran is planning to build more nuclear enrichment sites in defiance of international demands, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
Quoting anonymous sources from several governments and international agencies, the Times reported that United Nations inspectors were looking for evidence of two such sites.
The Times reported that inspectors were tipped off by an interview given by Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, who told the Iranian Student News Agency in recent weeks that construction could start on two new enrichment sites after Iranian New Year on March 21.
“God willing,” Mr. Salehi was quoted as saying, “we may start the construction of two new enrichment sites” in the Iranian new year, the Times reported.
U.S. President Barack Obama in September revealed evidence of a hidden enrichment site at Qum.
The Times went on to report that American officials had disclosed that Israel has pressed the case in talks with the U.S., saying that evidence points to what one senior official called “Qum look-alikes.”
The U.S., France and Britain are pushing Russia and China to back a new round of United Nations sanctions against Iran, which they suspect is developing nuclear weapons. The issue will be at the top of the agenda of foreign ministers from the G8 countries – U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Germany and Russia – in Ottawa Monday and Tuesday.
Published: March 26, 2010
After taking office last year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel privately told many Americans and Europeans that he was committed to and capable of peacemaking, despite the hard-line positions that he had used to get elected for a second time. Trust me, he told them. We were skeptical when we first heard that, and we’re even more skeptical now.
All this week, the Obama administration had hoped Mr. Netanyahu would give it something to work with, a way to resolve the poisonous contretemps over Jerusalem and to finally restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. It would have been a relief if they had succeeded. Serious negotiations on a two-state solution are in all their interests. And the challenges the United States and Israel face — especially Iran’s nuclear program — are too great for the leaders not to have a close working relationship.
But after a cabinet meeting on Friday, Mr. Netanyahu and his right-wing government still insisted that they would not change their policy of building homes in the city, including East Jerusalem, which Palestinians hope to make the capital of an independent state.
President Obama made pursuing a peace deal a priority and has been understandably furious at Israel’s response. He correctly sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a factor in wider regional instability.
Mr. Netanyahu’s government provoked the controversy two weeks ago when it disclosed plans for 1,600 new housing units in an ultra-orthodox neighborhood in East Jerusalem just as Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. was on a fence-mending visit and Israeli-Palestinian “proximity talks” were to begin.
Last year, Mr. Netanyahu rejected Mr. Obama’s call for a freeze on all settlement building. On Tuesday — just before Mr. Obama hosted Mr. Netanyahu at the White House — Israeli officials revealed plans to build 20 units in the Shepherd Hotel compound of East Jerusalem.
Palestinians are justifiably worried that these projects nibble away at the land available for their future state. The disputes with Israel have made Mr. Obama look weak and have given Palestinians and Arab leaders an excuse to walk away from the proximity talks (in which Mr. Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, would shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah) that Washington nurtured.
Mr. Obama was right to demand that Mr. Netanyahu repair the damage. Details of their deliberately low-key White House meeting (no photos, no press, not even a joint statement afterward) have not been revealed. We hope Israel is being pressed to at least temporarily halt building in East Jerusalem as a sign of good faith. Jerusalem’s future must be decided in negotiations.
The administration should also insist that proximity talks, once begun, grapple immediately with core issues like borders and security, not incidentals. And it must ensure that the talks evolve quickly to direct negotiations — the only realistic format for an enduring agreement.
Many Israelis find Mr. Obama’s willingness to challenge Israel unsettling. We find it refreshing that he has forced public debate on issues that must be debated publicly for a peace deal to happen. He must also press Palestinians and Arab leaders just as forcefully.
Questions from Israeli hard-liners and others about his commitment to Israel’s security are misplaced. The question is whether Mr. Netanyahu is able or willing to lead his country to a peace deal. He grudgingly endorsed the two-state solution. Does he intend to get there?
For Israel’s hawkish premier, the issue is not halting illegal settlement expansion, but increasing it less conspicuously, writes Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah
Netanyahu addressed the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in Washington this week
While claiming to have a genuine desire for the resumption of “peace talks” with the Palestinian Authority (PA), Israel has been murdering Palestinian civilians in the streets of the West Bank in a clear overreaction to recent Palestinian protests against Israeli transgressions against Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem.
Eyewitnesses reported that trigger-happy Israeli troops shot had killed two young Palestinians who were trying to access their land near the northern West Bank town of Nablus. Initially, the Israeli army claimed the two tried to attack heavily armed soldiers with pitchforks, a claim rejected by the Ramallah- based Palestinian government that described the killings as “cold-blooded murder”. An Israeli army spokesman later said the circumstances surrounding the two deaths were vague and that an investigation into “the incident” would be carried out.
Ghassan Al-Khatib, head of the Palestinian Government Press Office, accused the Israeli occupation army of murdering Palestinians in order to provoke a new uprising — or Intifada — that would divert the world’s attention from the belligerent discourse adopted by the Netanyahu government. “We look at this as part of the Israeli escalation. It could have been treated in a completely different way. But the Israelis have been escalating, and this is something the prime minister [Netanyahu] has been warning.”
More ominous remarks came from Mahmoud Al-Alul, a senior Fatah leader based in Nablus. He told some 2,000 mourners that, “nobody can imagine that we can stand with our hands tied vis-à-vis what is happening.” A day earlier, two more Palestinians were killed and others injured when Israeli troops opened fired on Palestinian youths protesting against Israeli provocations at Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest shrines. The Israeli army claimed it used rubber bullets, though they can also prove fatal.
The latest killings in the West Bank coincided with visits to the region by EU Foreign Policy Director Catherine Ashton and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki- Moon. Both visited Israel and the occupied territories, including the blockaded Gaza Strip, voicing their solidarity and sympathy with tormented Gazans, many of whom are homeless having had their houses destroyed during Israel’s brutal onslaught against the coastal enclave last year.
Hoping that the two important visitors would not submit a “negative” report when they return to their respective bases in Brussels and New York, the Israeli government decided to allow them to travel to Gaza via the Beit Hanoun border terminal, also known as the Erez Crossing. Israel previously blocked repeatedly foreign officials from travelling to Gaza via Erez.
In the West Bank, Ban, escorted by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, saw firsthand how the proliferation of Jewish colonies is seriously inhibiting prospects for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. He called for a total freeze on Jewish settlement expansion, a call ignored by the Israeli government notorious for its disregard of and contempt for the UN.
In Gaza, Ban inspected destruction caused by massive Israeli bombing. He called on Israel to allow building materials to get through to Gaza, acknowledging the fallacy of the Israeli argument that Hamas could use building materials for illegitimate purposes. Ban had earlier met with the family of an Israeli prisoner, captured by Palestinian fighters near Gaza. The UN secretary-general made no mention of the thousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons and detention camps.
Both Ban and Ashton left Israel-Palestine with a negative impression about the extent to which the Netanyahu government is willing to engage in a genuine peace process that would end the military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Prior to his departure for the US in order to address a major conference of the Jewish lobby and to attempt to mend fences with the Obama administration, Netanyahu told his cabinet and party caucus that settlement expansion would continue unabated. He added that Israel would have to carry out its settlement schemes “quietly, stealthily, and without making a big noise”.
As to recently declared plans to build 1,600 additional settler units in Arab East Jerusalem, Netanyahu vowed to keep building, regardless of what Washington says or does. “Our policy on Jerusalem is the same policy followed by all Israeli governments for the past 42 years. Building in Jerusalem is the same as building in Tel Aviv.”
Netanyahu’s remarks on Jerusalem were rejected by European foreign ministers meeting in Brussels this week. Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn was quoted as saying that the EU was very disappointed by the position of the Israeli government. “I think I can say very clearly that Jerusalem is not Tel Aviv,” he said.
Faced with an uncharacteristically determined American stance on the issue of settlement building, and dismayed by a growing negative impression in Europe — including with close allies such as Germany — about his government’s true intentions, Netanyahu is expected to undertake a number of “goodwill gestures” towards the PA in order to enhance his government’s image in Washington and Europe.
According to Israeli media, Netanyahu might agree to “discuss” all outstanding issues with the Palestinians, release a few hundred Fatah-affiliated prisoners, and allow the entry into Gaza of a limited shipment of building materials as demanded by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Nonetheless, the Israeli premier has refused to revoke plans to build 1,600 settler units in the Ramat Sholomo colony in East Jerusalem. To avoid the kind of embarrassment accompanying the recent visit to Israel by US Vice- President Joe Biden, when Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yeshai announced the new settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian town, Netanyahu promised a better “oversight system” for the future.
Netanyahu’s tactics suggest he is convinced that the recent tension with Washington is over the timing, not the content, of the settlement expansion announcement. In addition, Netanyahu is trying to achieve two tactical goals. First, return the proverbial ball to the Palestinian court; second, replacing the “Iranian subject” on the top of US agenda while relegating the “Palestinian subject” to a secondary status. Netanyahu may even be harbouring further ambitions, including the acquisition of laser-guided bunker-busters from the US, which Israel could use in an attack on Iranian nuclear installations.
As Netanyahu headed for Washington, US Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell — who returned to the region this week — urged “both sides to show restraint”. Mitchell was evasive and noncommittal about the issue of settlements, stressing that the important thing was to resume peace talks, even without clear guidelines. Recently, General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command in the Middle East, was quoted as criticising Mitchell’s mission in the region, suggesting that the American diplomat was “too old, two slow and too late”.
Obama Still Doesn’t Have the Stomach to Confront Israel
By JONATHAN COOK, Counterpunch, March 25, 2010
Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in the United States this week armed with a mandate from the Israeli parliament. A large majority of legislators from all of Israel’s main parties had supported a petition urging him to stand firm on the building of Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem — the very issue that got him into hot water days earlier with the White House.
Given the Israeli consensus on Jerusalem, there was no way Mr Netanyahu could have avoided rubbing that wound again in his speech on Monday to the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobby group.
He told the thousands of delegates: “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.”
Citing his own policy as inseparable from all previous Israeli governments, he added: “Everyone knows that these neighbourhoods will be part of Israel in any peace settlement. Therefore, building them in no way precludes the possibility of a two-state solution.”
Mr Netanyahu’s speech appeared consistent with the new approach agreed byboth sides to end this particular debacle. According to the US media, a policy of “Don’t ask and don’t tell” has been adopted to avoid making East Jerusalem an insurmountable obstacle to negotiations.
It will be telling how the US administration responds to the latest approval by Israeli planning authorities of a housing project at the Shepherd’s Hotel in East Jerusalem – this time in the even more controversial area of Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian community slowly being taken over by Jewish settlers backed by the Israeli courts.
The White House has eased its stance chiefly because Mr Netanyahu has climbed down on two issues of even greater importance to the administration.
First, he has agreed to make a “significant gesture” to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, probably in the form of a prisoner release. That is the carrot needed to bring Mr Abbas to the peace talks overseen by George Mitchell, the US special peace envoy.
And second, Mr Netanyahu has conceded that Israel will discuss the “core issues” of the conflict – borders, Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees – ensuring that the negotiations are substantive rather than formal, as he had intended.
Those concessions – if Mr Netanyahu delivers on them – should be enough to break up his far-right coalition, a prospect the White House craves. The US administration wants Tzipi Livni, the leader of the centrist opposition, to join Mr Netanyahu in a new, “peacemaking coalition”.
If Mr Netanyahu could wriggle out of this bind, he would do so. But his ace in the hole – harnessing the might of AIPAC and its legions in Congress to back him against the White House – looks to have been disarmed.
Comments last week by Gen David Petraeus, the head of the US Central Command, linked Israel’s intransigence towards the Palestinians to the spread of a hatred that endangers US troops in the Middle East. That left the AIPAC hordes with little option but to swallow their and Mr Netanyahu’s pride, lest they be accused of dual loyalties.
In the words of Uri Avnery, a former Israeli legislator: “This is only a shot across the bow, a warning shot fired by a warship in order to induce another vessel to follow its instructions. The warning is clear.”
And the warning is that Mr Netanyahu must come to the negotiating table to help to establish a Palestinian state whatever the consequences for his coalition.
But it would be unwise to assume that the crisis over settlement building in East Jerusalem indicates that the Obama administration plans to get any tougher with Israel on the form of such statehood than its predecessors.
Ms Livni, unlike Mr Netanyahu, may wish to find a solution to the conflict – or impose one – but her terms would be far from generous. The White House knows that she, too, is an ardent advocate of settlements in East Jerusalem. When she broke her silence on the crisis last week, it was to emphasise that, by “acting stupidly” in stoking a row with the US, Mr Netanyahu had risked “weakening” Israel’s hold on Jerusalem
Instead, the signs are that Barack Obama could be just as ready to accommodate the Israeli consensus on East Jerusalem as the previous Bush administration was in backing Israel’s position on keeping the overwhelming majority of West Bank settlers in their homes on occupied Palestinian land.
Shimon Peres, the Israeli president who is much favoured in Washington, has outlined a “compromise” to placate the Americans. It would involve a peace deal in which Israel keeps the large swaths of East Jerusalem already settled by Jews, while the Palestinians would be entitled to the ghettos left behind after four decades of illegal Israeli building.
In her own AIPAC speech, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, hinted that such a solution might yet be acceptable to the administration. The recent US condemnation of settlement building, she said, was not “a judgment on the final status of Jerusalem, which is an issue to be settled at the negotiating table. This is about getting to the table, creating and protecting an atmosphere of trust around it — and staying there until the job is finally done.”
Having lost patience with Mr Netanyahu’s lip service to Palestinian statehood, the White House appears finally to have decided its credibility in the Middle East depends on dragging Israel — kicking and screaming, if needs be — to the negotiating table.
Mr Obama may hope that the outcome of such a process will make US troops safer in Iraq and strengthen his hand in the stand-off with Iran. But it remains doubtful that the US actually has the stomach to extract from Israel the concessions needed to create that elusive entity referred to as a viable Palestinian state.
Regional leaders meeting in Libya have been united in their condemnation of Israel’s settlement activity in occupied Palestinian land.
The Arab League summit began on Saturday in the Libyan city of Sirte, with Amr Moussa, the Arab League chief, warning that continued Israeli settlement building would end efforts to revive the Middle East peace process.
“We have to study the possibility that the peace process will be a complete failure,” Moussa said in his opening speech to the two-day annual summit.
“It’s time to face Israel … We have accepted an open-ended peace process but that resulted in a loss of time and we did not achieve anything and allowed Israel to practise its policy for 20 years.”
Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as a joint capital for a future state, has been a particular point of focus for delegates.
Jerusalem’s significance
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, reiterated that Israel’s settlements were illegal under international law, and called for Jerusalem to be part of peace negotiations.
“Jerusalem’s significance to all must be respected, and it should emerge from negotiations as the capital of two states,” he said at the meeting’s opening session.
Ban also called for Arab leaders to support US-led efforts to facilitate indirect “proximity” talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
The Palestinians pulled out of the talks in reaction to Israel’s announcement it would build 1,600 settlements on occupied land.
The Israeli move has also caused a rift between Israel and Washington as it came during a visit to Israel by Joe Biden, the US vice-president.
“I urge you to support efforts to start proximity talks and direct negotiations. Our common goal should be to resolve all final status issues within 24 months,” Ban said.
But Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, ruled out taking part in the talks unless Israel stops building settlements.
“We cannot resume indirect negotiations as long as Israel maintains its settlement policy and the status quo,” he said in his speech.
The warnings over Jerusalem were echoed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, who called Israel’s policy of considering Jerusalem as its united capital “madness”.
“Jerusalem is the apple of the eye of each and every Muslim … and we cannot at all accept any Israeli violation in Jerusalem or in Muslim sites,” he said.
Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, called the declarations coming out of the summit “aggressive”, saying that the arguments put forward were based on “very selective opinions”.
“We say strongly and firmly that we have a legal right to build in Jerusalem and those that seek to enshrine the 1949 Armistice Lines, the so-called ‘Green Line’ as a border have not understood history nor legal precedence,” he said.
“We call on the Palestinian Authority to cease living in delusions of forcing Israel to the pre-1967 lines and to come and join us at the negotiation table without preconditions.”
‘Playing with fire’
Many Arab leaders have been angered by the opening of a restored 17th century synagogue near the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, home to Islam’s third holiest site.
They see such acts as a clear intention by Israel to “Judaise” Jerusalem and undermine chances for a peace agreement with the Palestinians who consider East Jerusalem the capital of their future state.
Holy Land Grab
Jordan’s King Abdullah warned that Israel was “playing with fire” and trying to alter the identity of Jerusalem.
Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, described tensions with Israel as a “state of no-war, no-peace”, and said his country was ready if “war is imposed” by Israel.
Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, opened the summit with an unusually short speech in which he said that Arabs were “waiting for actions, not words and speeches”.
The Libyan leader, whose country is hosting this year’s summit, has said he wants the meeting to be one of unity and the issue of Jerusalem has proved a unifying factor.
“The whole issue of Israeli actions has been under intense discussions, particularly in light of what has happened in that region in recent days,” Mike Hanna, Al Jazeera’s correspondent reporting from Sirte, said.
“Very clearly the issue of Jerusalem has been brought up and focused on because it is the one issue that would be very difficult for the international community as a whole to ignore.
“If, for example, resolutions would go to the UN General Assembly or the Security Council … on the question of East Jerusalem and Israeli occupation, it is very difficult for international bodies – or countries such as the US – to veto or abstain over something they’ve already condemned.”
Arab leaders are expected to ratify an agreement drafted by their foreign ministers to raise $500m in aid to improve the living conditions for Palestinians in Jerusalem as part of a “rescue” plan for the city.
A senior Palestinian official said the money would go towards improving infrastructure, building hospitals, schools, water wells and providing financial support to those whose houses have been demolished by Israeli authorities.
The leaders are also due to discuss a number of strategies, including keeping a record of what they consider to be Israeli “violations” in Jerusalem to refer them to higher bodies such as the International Criminal Court, based in the Hague in the Netherlands.
The last Arab League summit, held two years ago, was hosted by Qatar.
Tim Franks
As relations between Britain and Israel continue to unravel, in Jerusalem many Israelis feel that the outside world still fails to understand the problems – and threats – their country is facing.
Uzi Arad is a very important man. He’s now the director of Israel’s National Security Council, and National Security Adviser to the prime minister – a position he’s held since Benjamin Netanyahu took office.
Uzi Arad has a reputation for fighting fiercely and territorially among the sharp edges that exist at the height of the Israeli power pyramid.
He was always hospitable whenever I, on occasion, used to visit him at home – before he took up his current job.
He’d spent more than 20 years in Mossad – Israel’s secret intelligence service, and before he was appointed one of its directors, he was stationed for a time in London.
Once, at his house, he took me into his expansive library. He reached onto a shelf and extracted a book called Mandarin – the memoirs of the British diplomat Sir Nicholas Henderson.
Uzi Arad opened the inside front cover. There, in green ink, was an inscription: “To Uzi, with the thanks and appreciation of your British friends for your co-operation and help and best wishes for the future.”
The message was signed C – the initial that has always denoted the head of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service.
‘Doesn’t look good’
Such cordiality evaporated this week with the expulsion of a senior Israeli London-based diplomat who, by common consent, appears to have been the Mossad London station chief.
The Government’s anger was stoked by the apparent use of fake British passports in the assassination of the top Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January.
In the careful language of the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, the Serious Organised Crime Agency “was drawn to the conclusion that the passports used were copied from genuine British passports when handed over for inspection to individuals linked to Israel, either in Israel or in other countries”.
It doesn’t take much for the gales of public opinion to blow in Israel – and barely had David Miliband finished his statement in Westminster than the gusts a continent away began whipping.
A right-wing Israeli Member of Parliament reached into strangely Maoist terminology, and called the British “dogs”.
A commentator in a right-of-centre newspaper argued that “millions of Muslims live in Britain, and Gordon Brown needs their votes in the upcoming elections”.
At the other end of Israel’s brightly coloured political spectrum, a resident of one of the country’s most stalwartly socialist kibbutzim, or rural collectives, e-mailed me to say that “if Israel was directly or indirectly involved in the Dubai incident then there’s no limit, apparently, to the arrogance and stupidity of this regime/administration”.
But between the howls and harrumphs there were quieter noises. Some dwindled quickly into silence, and I found the voices I normally turn to in the Israeli intelligence community politely declining to speak or hanging up after the briefest of “it doesn’t look good” comments.
One diplomat with a close connection to London did allow himself to be slightly more phlegmatic. “This is a standard dance the British have to go through,” he told me.
“Of course, they won’t admit it. They’ll sell it hard. But I see no reason for them or for us to shift gears over bilateral co-operation.” Fundamental point
What is clear is that few Israelis are shedding tears for Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
On a street-corner in Jerusalem, half-way between the prime minister’s residence and the official home of the president, Eitan was drawing heavily on a cigarette, outside his shop.
“Personally, I don’t like violence,” Eitan told me. “But the thing is, Hamas doesn’t want to talk. And if someone is going to hit you, then sometimes you have to hit them first.”
Behind Eitan’s shrug is a wide belief in Israel that the rest of the world doesn’t quite get it – that Israel is the only homeland the Jews have, that it’s small and that it’s trying to survive in a hostile neighbourhood.
It’s that feeling which fuels the declamation “Jerusalem is not a settlement”, repeated this week in Washington by Benjamin Netanyahu – and that the Israeli government will carry on building in the city wherever it chooses, even if that means the occupied territory of East Jerusalem, amid growing American displeasure.
And that is the much more fundamental point here.
There may be a moment of iciness between Britain and Israel over the forged passports.
Mossad London station chiefs may not, in the near future, receive cosy book inscriptions from the boss of MI6.
But Israel’s belief in its exceptionalism, and the impatience currently shown by two of its closest allies, may point to a deeper rupture.
Editor: Achitofel’s advice – The voice of unreason
Somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, stands proud Alan Dersowitz, untouchable by events, rising among the hard liners of AIPAC, forever ready to have a fight with anyone around, supporting Israel to the bitter end of Palestine. His advice is sure to get the whole world intoa quagmire which only he knows how to get out of… this is the true voice of Israeli politics of confrontation, and he is a better Amabassador than the official one.It is interesting that even Dersowitz is against the settlements, according to himself… so who in his right mind supports the ocupation and settlements in the US, you wonder?
The American administration has been paying for this colonial effort, indirectly, giving Israel over 3 Billion dollars in ‘civilian aid’ every year. That’s who.
By Akiva Eldar
Law professor Alan Dershowitz, a well-known attorney in the American legal world, has made a name for himself representing celebrity clients such as O.J. Simpson, Jonathan Pollard and Mike Tyson. His lectures are seen as some of the most fervent speeches made in Israel’s defense, while his books, including “The Case for Israel,” have become bestsellers – particularly among Israel’s supporters. He also played a pivotal role in attacking Justice Richard Goldstone’s report on last year’s Israeli offensive into Gaza.
Dershowitz traveled last week from Harvard University to Washington to participate in the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He also followed the clash unfolding between Barack Obama, his president, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of his favorite client, with concern.
How do you interpret the cool to frosty reception Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received at the White House?
It’s clearly part of the Obama administration’s strategy to increase pressure on Israel. After all, they praised Netanyahu’s offer to end building in the West Bank, without him committing to ending building in parts of Jerusalem certain to remain an integral part of Israel under any agreement. In the White House they think they can have more influence on Israel than on the Palestinians. But this seems to be backfiring, because the Palestinians now believe they can demand more and more pre-conditions for starting talks. What Obama has to realize is that he is dealing with Israel, a democracy to which you can not always dictate specific terms. Israel can’t make peace without the clear support of the United States. The Israeli voters supported Ehud Barak’s very generous offers in 2000/2001 largely because they trusted Bill Clinton. Mistrust of Barack Obama will make it more difficult to persuade Israelis to take risks for peace.
Obama is surrounded by Jewish advisors who understand how Israel works, and even has a senior advisor with an Israeli background.
The fact that Obama has advisors who are Jewish simply gives him a better cover to be tough on Israel. On the other hand, he doesn’t have close Palestinian advisors who are familiar with the other side. I’m afraid this is bringing the parties further apart rather than closer together.
Could the rift between the administration in Washington and the Israeli government cause a split in the Jewish community, between Obama’s supporters and supporters of Israel?
No – the Jewish community is solidly behind Israel on security issues and largely behind Israel on building in Jewish neighborhoods in North Jerusalem that will remain part of Israel in any agreement. On the other hand, the issue is lessening support for Obama among Jewish supporters of Israel.
If you were Netanyahu’s attorney, how would you advise him to end this crisis?
I would suggest that he make the following announcement: “We do not believe that new building in Jewish sections of Jerusalem is a barrier to peace. We believe that the Palestinian’s unwillingness to engage in unconditional direct talks, coupled with their unwillingness to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, is the primary barrier to peace. To prove our point, and without waving any rights in Jerusalem, we will announce a three-month suspension of all building permits in all disputed areas of Jerusalem in order to see whether that brings the Palestinians to the peace table and whether they are prepared to engage in good faith direct negotiations. If the Palestinians will then be prepared to engage in good faith direct negotiations, the suspensions will continue until the negotiations are complete. If not, we will return to the status quo.”
That would be a test of the Palestinians’ good will – a test I hope they will pass, but believe they will fail.
How would you advise Obama?
I would tell him that the process cannot be unilateral and that there must be mutual concessions. For example, the Obama administration has falsely blamed the naming of a Ramallah square after a terrorist who murdered Jews on Hamas, rather than on the Palestinian Authority. The Obama administration has to make as substantial demands of the Palestinians as it does of the Israelis. If you think this crisis is severe, you should know it is nothing compared to what could happen with regard to the Iranian issue at some future date. I’m afraid [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is one of the happiest men these days thanks to the many incidents between the United States and Israel. [PA Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas, by the way, is also pretty happy.
Would you disagree that this crisis – along with earlier ones and ones that will likely follow – stems from the Israeli settlement policy?
I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy. Accordingly, the settlements should not be a major cause of disagreement between Israel and the United States, despite their differences over this issue. Nonetheless, I hope Israel will stop building in the West Bank and in those sections of Jerusalem which are likely to become part of a Palestinian state.
I am deeply concerned that, without peace and a two-state solution, the Jewish and democratic nature of Israel is in danger. That’s why I have opposed Israel’s settlement policy since 1973, and that’s why I have favored a two-state solution since 1967.
Do you believe that Obama is a friend of Israel and is truly committed to his promise not to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons?
I believe Barack Obama is committed to Israel’s security. He is also committed to the two-state solution and the peace process.
I hope he understands that unless Israelis – and the rest of the world – believe that he will do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, many Israelis will be unwilling to take significant risks for peace. I will remain committed to Obama so long as he continues to support Israeli security unequivocally. Obama’s historic legacy will be based on whether he succeeds in preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. If such weapons are obtained on his watch, history will remember him as it remembers Neville Chamberlain, despite anything else he might achieve in terms of domestic American policy.
You’ve made no secret about your criticism of the left-wing Jewish organization J Street. Why are you so disturbed by Jews who support peace?
I am a peace supporting Jew. I think J Street performs an important function, as it represents many left-leaning young Jews. My criticism is that it would be better if they work within the context of AIPAC. The pro-Israel lobby could then speak with one voice, especially during a time of conflict between the United States and Israel, and especially on undisputed issues – like Iran, responding to rocket attacks, anti-terrorism measures, etc. I myself have had significant disagreements with the Israeli government on a number of issues, such as the settlements. At the same time, I emphasize the 80 percent of Israeli policies that have widespread support across the political spectrum. When I wrote “The Case For Peace,” my book received endorsements from prime minister Ariel Sharon and [writer] Amos Oz, because I dealt with the agreed 80 percent. J Street, on other hand, tends to focus on the 20 percent, where there is significant disagreement. That is perfectly okay for an Israeli newspaper, like Haaretz, or for Israeli domestic organizations. But it weakens pro-Israel advocacy considerably, particularly at a time when the pro-Israel community in the United States must continue to pressure the Obama administration to de-escalate this conflict.
Can you describe what happened when you debated the representative from J Street at the AIPAC conference?
Here is what happened: I was standing with professor Irwin Cotler, the former attorney general of Canada, having a conversation. A gentleman asked me if I would like to be interviewed by the correspondent from Haaretz. I said yes. He then went over to the correspondent and asked her whether she wanted to interview professor Dershowitz. She said yes, asked me several questions, and wrote down the answers on her notepad. She then turned to the J Street representative and asked him whether he had any response, which he then provided. Following that, a polite debate ensued, I did not break into a conversation. The entire episode was videotaped and witnessed by over 100 people.
Israeli analysts are adamant that Israel is safe – no third Intifada is on the way. Their argument is that Palestine is more divided than ever, that the West Bank is well-policed and controlled by the Abbas US-trained force, and that the PNA is acting on behalf of Israel, and will not allow it.Looking at the events, and at pace of hostilities picking up, one may think otherwise; Abbas is, at best, a collaborating politician rather than a leader of the Palestinians, and his grip on the West Bank, or rather, the little parts of it which he controls, is very tenuous. The Palestinian population both in Gaza and the West Bank now fully realises that neither Israel, nor the US, are prepared to allow them to live, not even to ‘live like dogs’, as Moshe Dayan’s famous phrase defined the intentions of the military occupation. They now understand that Israel is playing the ethnic cleaning game, and that leaves them little choice. It is also clear that the hand on the tiller in Jerusalem is that of a ‘drunken driver’ to use Thomas Friedman’s definition of Netanyahu behaviour. It all adds up to an incredible powder keg, and the mad plans hatched about the temple in Jerusalem, the clearing up of the space in front of the Western Wall, and the rest of the building projects in every bit of East Jerusalem, are all bringing about a situation of great explosive potential. Netanyahu plays poker on the whole lot, and plays it badly.
By Akiva Eldar
The strife between Israel and the United States concerns something far bigger than the proximity talks with the Palestinians. As far as President Barack Obama and his senior advisers are concerned, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to blame for nothing less than damaging the standing of the U.S.in the Middle East and the Muslim world.
Just as Netanyahu received his standing ovation at the AIPAC conference, Obama and his advisers were ruminating over an altogether different convention – the Arab League begins a meeting Tripoli on Saturday. For the Americans, Netanyahu’s Likudnik speech and the Shpeherd Hotel project matched in embarrassment the scandalous announcement of construction in East Jerusalem during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit here.
This year’s Arab League summit will be the scene of struggle between the allies of Iran and the allies of American, and the violation of the status quo in Al Quds – Jerusalem – has direct implications for the balance of power between the sides. Over the last few weeks, Americans have been giving life support to the Arab Peace Initiative, born at the League’s summit in Beirut 2002 and set to be on the agenda this week.
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The absence of Egyptian President Mubarak, who is recovering from an operation in Berlin, doesn’t make it any easier for the U.S. to resist the efforts of Syria and Libya to suspend or possibly even terminate the peace initiative. The al-Mabhouh assassination, insulting as it was to the rulers of the Gulf, doesn’t do much for the other proponents of the initiative, King Abdullah of Saudia and King Abdullah II of Jordan. The Saudi king had asked the Quartet for clarifications about Israel’s latest moves in Jerusalem and specifically about Netanyahu’s statement of intent for the Arab part of the city.
The messages coming to the White House from Riyadh and Amman, then, were starkly clear: If you don’t rein in your Israeli friends, Tehran won’t be the only Middle East capital where American flags will burn.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decisively supported General David Petraeus, the first American military man in years to describe Israel as a strategic burden on the U.S. Gates said America’s rivals in the Middle East are abusing the standstill of the political process between Israel and the Arabs. He stressed that he had no doubt a lack of peace in the region was influencing American interests there.
Netanyahu had been hoping to buy time until November’s Congressional elections, which coincide with the deadline he set for the settlement freeze. But with America’s strategic interest on the line, Bibi’s favorite political game (playing the Jewish community and Congress against the White House and the State Department) isn’t working anymore. Obama decided his moderate Middle East coalition is more important than Netanyahu’s extremist one. This is a point of no return.
25 Mar 2010
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the increasing American war front across the world: from Afghanistan to Africa and Latin America. This is the Third World War in all but name, waged by the only aggressive “ism” that denies it is an ideology and threatened not by introverted tribesmen in faraway places but by the anti-war instincts of its own citizens.
Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.
According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of perception”. Thus, the recent “liberation of the city of Marja” from the Taliban’s “command and control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.
“War is fun”, the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one “who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to values” (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with today’s public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.
Western war-states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested Israel’s assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police “kettled” (corralled) thousands, first-offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry custodial sentences. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.
Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of famous writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the “market” or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq’s clean water system and lead to “increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease”. So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, noted Unicef, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.
Norman Mailer once said he believed the United States, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a “pre-fascist era”. Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. “Fascism” is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is “more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent.”
This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state with the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced perhaps, but the results are both unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials in Iraq during the American and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.
In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud “our boys”. The candidates are almost identical political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite loves America because America allows it to barrack and bomb the natives and call itself a “partner”. We should interrupt their fun.
Miliband demands assurances that identity cloning will never happen again
By Kim Sengupta, Defence Correspondent
The Israeli government will not be allowed to replace the senior Mossad station chief expelled from London over the cloning of British passports used in the assassination of a Hamas commander unless it offers a public assurance that UK citizens’ documents will never be used again for clandestine operations. The Foreign Secretary David Miliband wants his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, to make the pledge. British diplomatic officials are insisting the situation is not negotiable.
Israeli media outlets have claimed that another operative would be sent soon to take the place of the Mossad official working at the Israeli embassy in London, who was asked to leave after a UK investigation concluded that there was evidence that British passports used by an assassination squad were cloned by Israel.
An Israeli hit team used the British and other countries’ passports to travel to Dubai to murder the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, it has been claimed. A British inquiry established that the documents were cloned at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport and Israeli officials made surreptitious calls to check the travel plans of those whose identities had been stolen.
The Israeli government has shown no signs so far that it will acquiesce in Mr Miliband’s demand that it pledge that “the state of Israel would never be party to the misuse of British passports in such a way”. Such a declaration would be tantamount to an admission of Israel’s guilt in the killing of Mr Mabhouh, something it denies. Mr Lieberman said: “There is no proof of Israeli involvement in this affair.”
However, the Israeli government has also indicated that it will not retaliate by expelling a British diplomat. Officials privately acknowledge that the removal of the Mossad official, although damaging for relations between the two countries, will not impact too severely on the Israeli intelligence agency’s work in the UK.
During a previous confrontation in 1988 when another Mossad agent, Arie Regev, was expelled from the UK, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered a temporary ban on the exchange of intelligence. Mr Miliband’s statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday, announcing the expulsion of the Israeli diplomat, made no mention of a halt in information sharing.
Israel’s mass-circulation newspaper Yediot Aharonot said that the Israeli government has got off lightly in the affair: “Whoever forged the British passports knew that he might have to pay the price. And the price set by the British was a clearance-sale price.”
However, Israeli government officials say they are reconciled to other countries following Britain’s lead. Australia, France, Germany and Ireland are all investigating the use of their citizens’ passports in the assassination and, it is expected, will announce sanctions. In the Australian capital, Canberra, the Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, said the Australian Federal Police would receive the report compiled by the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency. “We take the misuse of Australian passports very seriously,” he said.
LONDON — In a rare move by a friendly government, Britain expelled an Israeli diplomat on Tuesday to rebuke the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for what it says was the fraudulent use of a dozen fake British passports in the assassination of a Hamas official in a Dubai hotel earlier this year.
David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said there were “compelling reasons” suggesting that Israel was behind the misuse of the British passports and called Israel’s actions “intolerable.”
“The fact that this was done by a friendly country only adds insult to injury,” he said in remarks to the House of Commons. “The actions in this case are completely unacceptable and they must stop.”
A host of other lawmakers used even harsher language to excoriate Israel on the floor of Parliament, calling for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, urging criminal prosecution of those involved and going so far as to say that Israel was becoming a “rogue state.”
The British decision to expel the diplomat is a new turn in Israel’s recent frictions with its closest Western allies. Earlier this month, the Netanyahu government announced 1,600 new Jewish housing units in East Jerusalem, embarrassing Vice President Joseph R. Biden as he visited Israel and eliciting a furious American reaction.
The Israeli government was shaken by the expulsion but chose to issue only a curt official expression of regret and to take no countermeasures against Britain, top officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were unauthorized to talk publicly.
“The relationship between Israel and Britain is mutually important,” Yigal Palmor, the foreign ministry spokesman, said by way of official reaction. “We therefore regret the British decision.”
Other officials suggested, however, that Britain should have let the issue of the forged passports die quietly out of friendship and the shared goal of fighting radical Islam. The fact that it chose to pursue the case and to take the very public step of expelling a member of the Israeli diplomatic mission in London showed ill will, they said.
In his remarks, Mr. Miliband refused calls from British lawmakers to identify the expelled Israeli official by name or title, or to say how he was connected with the faked passports. But he said that “a state intelligence service” was most likely behind the forgeries, an apparent reference to the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.
British news reports speculated that the diplomat being ordered to leave was the London station chief of Mossad, Israel’s overseas spy agency.
Officials in Dubai have accused Mossad of being behind the Jan 20 slaying of the Hamas operative, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in a luxury hotel room there.
The Dubai officials say they have identified at least 26 suspects of a suspected Israeli hit squad that traveled to Dubai on fake identities and forged British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports. Interpol has issued a wanted list of 27 people in connection with the slaying.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in Mr. Mabhouh’s killing, but Israeli officials have described the slain Palestinian as an important figure in Hamas terrorist operations against Israel, and said that he was deeply involved in smuggling arms for the Hamas government in Gaza.
On Tuesday, the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, told reporters in Brussels that Israel had been presented with no concrete proof regarding its connection to the forged passports, but he did not go so far as to deny Israel’s role.
A former senior Mossad agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his ties to the agency, said he found the British expulsion “a reasonable way to react,” and a sign that “the British are as interested as we are in trying to finish this thing as quickly as possible.”
He added that this was “not the same as 20 years ago,” a reference to the last time Britain expelled an Israeli diplomat over a Mossad operation. “Then there was a stronger feeling that we were playing around with their sovereignty. There was a buildup of things. This time, something happened and they wanted to nip it in the bud.”
On that occasion, the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered the expulsion of a Mossad agent, Arie Regev, in 1988 after he was linked to a double-agent operation run by the spy agency in Britain that involved a Jerusalem-born Palestinian conducting covert surveillance on behalf of Mossad. That case, too, involved a Mossad undercover operation that was suspected of planning the assassination of a suspected Palestinian hit man who had been active in Britain.
Mr. Miliband, himself the son of Jewish immigrants, emphasized the importance of relations between Israel and Britain on Tuesday and said the uproar over the forged passports should not be used to weaken ties between the two countries.
Officials at 10 Downing Street said that Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, met Monday with Peter Ricketts, the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office and Britain’s senior diplomat, to discuss the case. Israel’s Foreign Ministry declined to provide details of the talks.
News reports quoting British officials since the Dubai killing have said that at least 15 of the names used by those involved in Mr. Mabhouh’s killing matched those of Israeli citizens who are dual nationals of Western countries — including eight Israeli-British dual nationals. All have denied involvement, saying their identities were apparently stolen. On Tuesday, three of the victims reached by telephone refused to comment.
Mr. Miliband said the owners of the 12 passports were “wholly innocent victims” and that they would be issued new ones.
Other aspects of the Dubai operation have been exposed by the Dubai authorities’ action in releasing video sequences that the Dubai officials said were taken from the hotel’s surveillance cameras. One sequence showed two men identified by Dubai as members of the assassination team dressed in sports clothes, one of them carrying a tennis rackuet, as they followed Mr. Mabhouh and a female hotel concierge holding his plastic room key emerging from an elevator.
Officials in South Africa have said that several members of the Israeli hit team left Dubai for Johannesburg on a direct flight by Emirates Airline, the Dubai flag carrier, then flew back to various destinations in Europe before catching connecting flights back to Israel.
South African news reports have quoted South African officials as saying that they were unable to comply with Dubai’s request for closed-circuit video recordings taken as the men transited through Oliver Tambo International airport in Johannesburg because the recordings had been mysteriously wiped before the Dubai request was made.
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
The Israeli media has responded to the announcement that the UK Government is to expel an Israeli diplomat over the cloned British passports used in January’s assassination of Hamas leader Mabhoub al-Mabhouh in Dubai.
In the English Language press Amir Oren, writing in Haaretz, says the UK has dealt a blow to what he calls “Israel’s arrogance”:
“A British agent using an Israeli passport to track down an IRA cell would not meet with much Israeli sympathy. The massive use of borrowed identities of citizens of a foreign country is no different, in principle, than a plane entering that country’s air space without permission.”
At Ynet News, the website of Israel’s centrist newspaper Yedioth Ahraronot, Gerald Steinberg writes:
“The British action at this time constitutes a response to an act that caused it some embarrassment. Hence, the Mossad representative’s expulsion marks a predictable diplomatic protest, in a bid to close the case without prompting an earthquake.”
But in the right-leaning Jerusalem Post, an editorial pours scorn on the UK reaction and says Britain has “lost its moral compass”:
“But even if it had ‘compelling evidence’ from an investigation by the Serious Organized Crime Agency into the cloning of up to 15 British passports, why has the UK government now decided to publicly humiliate Israel over the affair with so drastic a response?”
A news story in the Jerusalem Post reports how a National Union party member of the Kenesset Aryeh Eldad called Britain “dogs” for expelling the diplomat.
“Eldad’s party colleague, MK Michael Ben-Ari, responded: ‘The British may be dogs, but they are not loyal to us, but rather to an anti-Semitic system, and Israeli diplomacy partially plays into their hands. This is anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism’.
In the Hebrew language daily newspaper Yedioth Ahraronot Simon Schiffer says Israel should not get too worked up about the affair:
“The affair that embarrassed the kingdom so much ended with a reasonable price: the result was that the representative of the Mossad extension in London was asked to leave … He who used forged British passports knew that it was possible he would have to pay a price. And the price the British set yesterday is a sale price.”
Elsewhere in the same paper, investigative journalist and Israeli security expert Ronen Bergman questioned why Israel would want to alienate Britain, given their support over Iran’s development of a nuclear programme:
“Between Jerusalem and London there is today a unity of interests that stems from the identical way in which the British view at least some of the central threats to the State of Israel when at the centre stands the Iranian nuke. He who listens to the way the British speak at closed forums about Iran will be very surprised by their intensity and sharpness. Was it worth it to lose all this for the liquidation of Mahmud al-Mabhouh?”
In the centrist Maariv newsapaper Maya Bengal writes that Israel was “stunned” into inaction by the decision:
“In similar situations, the country whose representative was expelled responds with the same coin, to expel a British diplomat… But this time it was decided in Jerusalem not to respond in accordance with the rules of the diplomatic game and to ‘swallow the frog’.”
24 March 2010
The forging of British passports is the work of a country which believes it can act with impunity when planning the murder of its enemies
Expulsions of Israeli diplomats from Britain are few and far between. The last one took place in 1988 and only after serial provocations – when a Mossad agent left an envelope containing eight forged passports in a German telephone box, and when, a year later, a Palestinian working as a Mossad double agent was found with six suitcases of arms and explosives in Hull. The affair was swiftly hushed up. This time, the expulsion yesterday of an Israeli diplomat over the use of cloned British passports used by a Mossad murder squad, was accompanied by an unprecedented statement by the foreign secretary, David Miliband.
He all but accused the Israeli government of participation in a criminal, terrorist conspiracy. He said that given that high-quality forgeries were made of British passports, it was “highly likely” the forgeries were made by a state intelligence service and that, taken with other inquiries from the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), there were compelling reasons to believe that Israel was responsible for the misuse of British passports. The inference was clear. If Israel as a government was responsible for the forgery of passports, it was responsible too for the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the founder of Hamas’s military wing, in Dubai.
As Mr Miliband was speaking, the gap that had opened up between the United States and Israel over its refusal to stop building in East Jerusalem, widened still further. This is land which Israel has annexed but which the rest of the world regards as occupied Palestinian territory. Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, warned that the peace talks could be delayed for another year unless Palestinians dropped their “illogical and unreasonable” demand for a full settlement freeze. The day before he said that if the Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago they could build there today, and the nearly 250,000 Jews living in neighbourhoods beyond the green line today were an “integral and inextricable” part of modern Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was not a settlement, he said, it was the capital of Israel. These are not the words of a government prepared to negotiate what all Israelis know is a central demand of final status negotiations – Jerusalem becomes the capital of a Palestinian state. King Abdullah of Jordan, one of only two Arab states that has signed a peace treaty with Israel, called the sovereignty of the holy city a red line. Israel’s statements on East Jerusalem condemn the talks before they have even begun.
Both events in London and Washington are the marks of an arrogant nation that has overreached itself. The forging of British passports is the work of a country which believes it can act with impunity when planning the murder of its enemies, while simultaneously claiming to share the values of a law-based state. Mr Netanyahu’s statements in Washington, made as he was preparing to meet Barack Obama, are the mark of a leader who thinks he can openly defy the will of Israel’s closest military ally. As Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said, continued construction in East Jerusalem undermines America’s ability to play any effective role in the peace process. She could not have been more explicit in her warning that the chances of America being able to persuade the Arab world to recognise Israel were diminishing by the month. In neither case does Mr Netanyahu see that he is eroding the very ground on which he stands.
Mr Netanyahu has to face the consequences of an ideological stand over East Jerusalem which precludes any other. Here, as in the rest of the West Bank, where the number of Jewish settlers has more than doubled since the Oslo peace accords were signed in 1993, Israel is pre-empting the shape of the final agreement by creating facts on the ground. No deal with the Palestinians can be made in these conditions.
The council urged Israel to compensate Palestinians who suffered losses during Gaza war [File: EPA]
The United Nations Human Rights Council has passed three resolutions condemning Israel over its policies in occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories.
However, the United States voted against them all.
Another resolution, calling for a fund to compensate Palestinians who suffered losses during Israel’s offensive in Gaza 14 months ago, is expected to be passed on Thursday.
One resolution on “grave human rights violations” by Israeli forces in the Palestinian territories – which was passed by 31 votes to nine, with seven abstentions in the 47-member Council – demanded that Israel end its occupation of Palestinian land, occupied since 1967.
US opposition
It also demanded that Israel stop what it called targeting of Palestinian civilians and systematic destruction of their cultural heritage, halt all military operations across Palestinian land and lift its blockade of Gaza.
The US and the European Union, whose seven members on the Council vote separately but generally in unison, opposed the resolution, with both saying it was unbalanced.
Another resolution called on Israel to stop building all settlements in the occupied territories.
The third condemned Israel for what it called systematic violation of the rights of the people of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The US voted no, while 15 countries, including EU members, abstained.
The US, which itself is in a diplomatic row with Israel over settlements which the government of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is vowing to pursue, told the Council that the three resolutions would do nothing to help peace.
It said the UN body was too often being used as a platform to single out Israel for condemnation while rights violations by other countries were ignored.
The Council is effectively dominated by a developing country bloc in which the Organisation of the Islamic Conference has a strong influence and which is routinely supported by China, Russia and Cuba.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during Washington crisis, advised PM not to capitulate in face of American pressure, Ynet learns
Did the prime minister decide not to provide a written pledge to the US during his Washington visit based on political and coalitional considerations? Ynet learned Thursday that amid the deepening rift between Jerusalem and Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Foreign Minster Avigdor Leiberman, who advised him not to agree to US demands and urged him to return to Israel for further consultations.
According to US reports, Netanyahu conveyed a sense of “panic” during the trip.
“Apparently Bibi is very nervous, frantically calling his ‘seven (top ministers),’ trying to figure out what to do,” one Washington Middle East hand said Wednesday according to the Politico website. “The word I heard most today was ‘panic.’”
Netanyahu’s visit to Washington was held against the backdrop of a serious diplomatic row between Israel and the United State, including the latest incident involving building permits in east Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
Future of Coalition
Many believe diplomatic crisis with US will force Netanyahu to invite Kadima to join coalition
After receiving a cool reception in the White House, Netanyahu met with US President Barack Obama and the two engaged in intense deliberations in an effort to reach mutual understandings before the Israeli PM left Washington. During the discussions, Netanyahu made some time for a conversation with his senior coalition partner Avigdor Leiberman.
According to information received by Ynet, the foreign minister advised the prime minister not to sign any document of understandings with the Americans, urging Netanyahu not to act under pressure, but rather ,to return to Israel and draft such a document along with his senior cabinet members.
Thursday night, several hours after returning from the United States, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak will convene with the seven senior ministers’ forum.
The prime minister seemed to have taken Lieberman’s advice and left Washington without consenting to the US Administration’s demands, saying he must first consult with his senior ministers. However, Netanyahu did not speak with Shas Chairman Eli Yishai – another senior coalition partner.
Much speculation regarding the stability of the current coalition with its existing make-up had been circulating within Israel’s political establishment. Despite the growing speculation, Lieberman did not express any concerns over the future of the coalition, saying in closed-door talks that he does not foresee any changes in its composition.
Unlike the foreign minister, a Labor party minister noted that “the government with its current composition is in danger. The question is not who will leave, but who will join.”
Another senior Likud minister said that “the picture is still not clear enough, and it is too early to engage in any speculations.”
Satisfaction – that’s what Israeli faces radiate, at least as observed by people who just came out of Ramallah or Gaza and watch Jerusalem’s busy Ben-Yehuda Street, the Ramat Aviv Mall or Ben-Gurion International Airport.
To the Israelis, nothing exists beyond the moment. It’s just like the smugness exhibited by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his private playing field, the AIPAC conference. Have our diplomats been expelled? Is the American administration angry? We’ll bow our heads for a moment, the storm will pass, and we’ll be accepted into the honorable club of the OECD. The main thing is that Israel’s obstinate policy of separation has succeeded and that two adversarial Palestinian entities has been created.
One is building its Islamic principality in an isolated enclave, bouncing around promises that the second step toward the liberation of Jerusalem and Haifa has already been taken. The other proudly hosts representatives of donor nations in its small and crowded enclaves, and tries to persuade everybody that this is the way to build a state that includes Area C, no-man’s land, Latrun, Gaza, Al-Aqsa and the approximately 70 square kilometers that Israel has annexed and calls Jerusalem.
But we Israelis know that everything is equally imaginary. We are the wizards of the status quo. We establish it as we like, moving an acre here and a military base there, until the world says it agrees. When God wants, Ramallah will also be called a holy city and Gaza will be crowned an Egyptian district capital.
That is not the way the future looks in the two separate entities. Their mutually contradictory rhetoric is based on a similar assumption: Both Gaza and Ramallah believe that change will eventually come from the outside, and that is the popular expectation as well.
The Ramallah government expects that the United States, Europe and the pro-Western Arab states will come to their senses and force Israel to do that which it has avoided since 1968: withdraw (“with slight border adjustments”) and bring the settlers back home. The Ramallah government expects that external factors will cause Israel to understand that which it does not understand on its own. There is nothing boastful about this stance; rather, it is one of compassion for the Israeli people, which has encased itself in a bubble of smugness that ignores historical processes.
More than a decade ago, during one of the futile rounds of talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Saeb Erekat allowed himself to wonder: “Aren’t the Israelis thinking about their grandchildren?” A similar question is heard from inhabitants of Gaza whose homes were destroyed and whose children were killed, as well as from Palestinian farmers in the West Bank who have had their fill of harassment from settlers. Everyone wants to know: Don’t the Israelis understand that they cannot depend forever on their economic and military superiority? That it is impossible to maintain forever an aggressive regime based on extreme inequality and privilege for Jews?
In other words, it is a request to the West: “If Israel is so important to you, save it from itself.”
That approach sees the Jewish Israeli community as an accepted part of the region, whether in one state, in two or in a federation of states. It does not matter. It proposes foreseeable time frames for implementation: two years, five years, 10. This is an approach that still preserves faith in Western common sense.
The Gaza government, meanwhile, is expecting a Muslim intifada to break out in countries near and far, which will turn the regional and the global balance of power upside down: Peoples will rise up, pro-Western governments will fall, and the new governments will not show tolerance for Western aid to Israel or the foreign element that the West has planted in the East. That scenario, too, sees Israel as the one responsible for everything that happens and might happen, but has no compassion for an entity that views 1 billion of its neighbors as unimportant. Its time frame is much longer than the compassionate scenario. Those who patiently anticipate a widespread Muslim intifada are convinced that their scenario, and not the one that expects the West to take action, is the one that will happen; after all, they are convinced, the West will not change its spots.
By Ali Abunimah, CNN – 23 March 2010
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Monday speech to America’s leading pro-Israel lobby took on added significance in light of the spat between the U.S. and Israel over the expansion of Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem.
It indicated the Obama administration blinked in the face of continued Israeli defiance, but that Israel likely faces more trouble down the road.
The row began when Israel announced 1,600 new Jewish-only homes on occupied Palestinian land on March 9, the very day Vice President Joe Biden was in the country to launch indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
In an angry phone call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Clinton reportedly demanded that Israel rescind the decision, among other “confidence-building measures,” to get the U.S.-brokered talks back on track.
At AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Clinton stood by the administration’s criticism but could not point to any substantive Israeli concessions.
Netanyahu, she said, had responded to her demand for concrete steps with specific actions Israel is prepared to take. But halting settlement expansion was not one of them. Indeed, before leaving Israel for Washington where he was scheduled to meet President Obama on Tuesday, Netanyahu stressed that construction anywhere in Jerusalem was the same as construction in Tel Aviv and would continue as normal.
This is a replay of the administration’s earlier cave-in. Almost a year ago, Obama sought to correct America’s long-standing, pro-Israel tilt by demanding Israel stop building West Bank settlements, which have consumed much of the land on which a Palestinian state was supposed to be established.
But bowing to pressure from Israel’s powerful U.S. lobby, the administration dropped the demand. Israel announced a fictional 10-month settlement freeze, excluding Jerusalem. Then Obama pressured Palestinians to return to the same merry-go-round of endless talks — and still, Israel pursues settlements unrestrained.
In unusually stark language, Clinton warned that Israel needed a peace deal because “the status quo is unsustainable for all sides.”
She pointed to the “inexorable mathematics of demography,” a reference to projections that Palestinians will soon be the majority population in the area controlled by Israel. Only a two-state solution, Clinton asserted, could preserve Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.”
The problem is that the administration’s plan to get to its objective of “two states for two peoples living side by side in peace” looks less credible today than ever.
On the Palestinian side, the U.S. refuses to engage with Hamas, without which no credible deal can be struck, and the anemic U.S. vision of a Palestinian mini-state cannot hope to meet the aspirations or restore the rights of millions of Palestinian refugees.
And, after two embarrassing defeats at the Israel lobby’s hands, chances that Obama will use America’s massive financial aid to Israel as leverage are close to nil, especially as midterm elections approach.
The administration’s dependence on the goodwill of the lobby was highlighted by the fact that AIPAC’s new president, Lee Rosenberg, was a key member of the national finance committee for Obama’s presidential campaign, and another AIPAC national board member, J.B. Pritzker — who got a shout-out in Clinton’s speech — was national finance chair of Citizens for Hillary.
In the closely watched race for Obama’s former Illinois Senate seat, the National Republican Senatorial Committee accused Republican Mark Kirk’s Democratic opponent Alexi Giannoulias — and by extension Obama, who is a close Giannoulias friend — of being “anti-Israel.” This may foreshadow a national GOP strategy to make unconditional support for Israeli policies more than ever a litmus test in American elections.
In this poisonous atmosphere, real progress is unlikely — the best the Obama administration can hope for is to avoid a serious blowup until it can pass the problem to the next administration.
But the situation on the ground will not wait for the United States to come to its senses; in Jerusalem and the West Bank, popular resistance is growing, in the form of nonviolent protests, to Israel’s land confiscations.
Israel’s violent response, including the arrests of civil society leaders, may cause some Palestinians to react in kind.
Globally, Israel faces a growing campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions just like apartheid South Africa did in the 1980s. A leading Israeli think tank, the Reut Institute, warned the government recently that this campaign “possesses strategic significance, and may develop into a comprehensive existential threat within a few years.”
It also stated that a “harbinger of such a threat would be the collapse of the two-state solution as an agreed framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the coalescence behind a ‘one-state solution’ as a new alternative framework.” With its aggressive settlement expansion plans, Israel has in effect chosen a one-state instead of a two-state solution — but it is indeed an apartheid state.
While the United States looks on impassively, or continues to tout a charade of a peace process, Palestinians, pro-democracy Israelis and their allies will intensify what is rapidly turning into a struggle for equal rights and citizenship for everyone who inhabits the narrow land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington this week absorbing the full wrath of the Obama administration, the Pentagon and Israel’s defense establishment were in the process of sealing a large arms deal. According to the deal, Israel will purchase three new Hercules C-130J airplanes… designed by Lockheed Martin… [and] worth roughly a quarter billion dollars.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington this week absorbing the full wrath of the Obama administration, the Pentagon and Israel’s defense establishment were in the process of sealing a large arms deal.
According to the deal, Israel will purchase three new Hercules C-130J airplanes. The deal for the three aircrafts, designed by Lockheed Martin, are worth roughly a quarter billion dollars. Each aircraft costs $70 million.
The aircrafts were manufactured specifically for Israeli needs, and include a large number of systems produced by Israel’s defense industry.
The deal will be covered by American foreign assistance funds. The Pentagon will issue a formal announcement on the matter on Thursday evening.
America and Israel have still not reached an agreement regarding the purchase of another Lockheed war plane, the F-35. It is still not clear when that deal, which is estimated to be worth more than $3 billion, will finally be sealed and carried out.
If that deal is signed in the near future, Israel will likely receive its first F-35 in 2014.
Membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes 30 of the world’s most developed countries, does not provide money or any special economic benefits. Yet it is easy to see why the Israeli government attributes great importance to Israel becoming one of its members. For Israel, membership in the OECD would mean a victory of legitimacy, and a major setback for the worldwide movement calling on Israel to be held accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people. Only democratic countries are allowed to join the OECD. With 35 percent of the population under Israel’s control and sovereignty disenfranchised, denied their basic human and civil rights and repeatedly attacked by the Israeli army, Israel is finding it increasingly difficult to portray itself as a democracy.
What appears less obvious is why the member countries would want to include Israel in the OECD. Israel’s membership would be a confirmation of Israeli policies, thus eroding the organization’s prestige while undermining the efforts of these very same countries to achieve peace in the Middle East. The OECD would be inviting the world to see how it prefers to ignore the crimes committed by Israel, and reward it instead. This would do no less than feed into the argument of extremists who claim that only violence can safeguard the rights of occupied Palestinians.
Ironically, however, the OECD seems to be working harder than Israel to facilitate the latter’s acceptance, which is expected to occur in May. Israel has refused to comply with the OECD demand to provide statistical data which applies only to the internationally-recognized parts of Israel, excluding the illegal settlements in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Yet despite Israel’s refusal, the OECD’s Committee on Statistics is acting to find ways to accept Israel anyway.
According to a leaked report, “Ascension of Israel to the Organization: Draft Formal Opinions of the Committee on Statistics” (download the PDF), the committee proposes to accept Israel based on the statistics currently available, which includes Israeli citizens in the OPT. However, it requests that Israel provide more detailed statistical data which will allow the OECD to conduct its own calculation in order to separate the OPT data from that of Israel. However, Israel will only commit to provide this data after it becomes a member of the organization. Yet as soon as Israel becomes a member, it will have the right to veto this decision, rendering the commitment an empty statement.
It should be noted that in this way the OECD is adopting the Israeli approach — an approach that eliminates the Palestinians and Israel’s effective sovereignty over the OPT, and focuses solely on Israeli citizens. This approach is tantamount to recognizing Israel’s illegal occupation, which stands in direct contradiction to international law and the foreign policies of virtually all OECD countries.
It should also be noted that the OECD takes decisions by consensus. It only takes one OECD country to oppose the integration of Israel into the organization in order to block the process. So far, not a single OECD country has voiced its intention to vote against including Israel in the organization.
The reason for that is twofold. First, there is the usual fear that any country (especially a European country), that voices its objection to Israel’s joining the OECD will be accused of anti-Semitism. Israel enjoys the unflinching support of the United States, and few European politicians have the courage to take a moral stand against either Washington or Israel.
Second, right-wing parties around the world see Israel as the Mecca of anti-immigration policies, Islamophobia and the “war on terror.” With every new line that Israel crosses in abusing the human and national rights of Palestinians, right-wing parties are emboldened to deepen their own politics of hatred toward immigrants. If Israel conducts extra-judicial assassinations, why won’t other countries be allowed to do the same? If Israel installs surveillance mechanisms that invade the privacy of its citizens, what would stop other countries from doing so also? Legitimizing Israel by inviting and facilitating its ascension to the OECD is thus a tool to legitimize the extreme measures promoted by far-right parties in Europe, which are eager to do away with democratic mechanisms and human rights of minorities in the name of nationalism and “security.”
European law clearly forbids European countries from recognizing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, as has been affirmed by the Russell Tribunal. Yet by granting Israel membership in the OECD, they will be doing exactly that. OECD members will knowingly accept Israel to the organization based on deceptive statistics provided by the latter, statistics which conceal the occupation while simultaneously treating it as a permanent fact.
Israel’s acceptance into the OECD would be a grave mistake. It will reward violations of international law, feed the extreme right wing which is growing in developed countries and render all OECD countries as accomplices in Israel’s illegal occupation.
Between March 1 and March 5, 2010, the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt was open, and 4427 people passed through the crossing, including 461 students. Of these students, 100 were returned to Gaza by the Egyptians either because Egypt believed that they would seek to remain in Egypt, or because they were missing the requisite exit documents.
According to the latest information, 502 students are presently seeking to leave the Gaza Strip in order to realize their dreams and study in universities abroad. Yet why do students in Gaza aspire to study outside the Strip? Among the reasons is the fact that in Gaza it is not possible to study certain fields, such as dentistry, occupational therapy, veterinary studies, environment preservation and democracy and human rights. In contrast, degrees in all these areas are available in the West Bank.
Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, the number of students that have received permission from Israel to study in the West Bank since 2000 stands at zero. This is due to the imposition by Israel of a sweeping prohibition on students from Gaza traveling to the West Bank in order to study there. Therefore, students from Gaza (who are able) focus on studying at universities abroad.
Since June 2007, Israel has imposed tight restrictions on the exit of students through the Erez border crossing, establishing strict criteria for the passage of students through Israel on their way to the Allenby border crossing (in Jordan) and from there to their studies overseas. As a result, students are forced to try and exit Gaza through the Rafah crossing.
Since June 2006 and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, the Rafah crossing has been officially closed and has been opened on an ad hoc and irregular basis. This is contrary to the Agreement on Movement and Access concluded in November 2005, according to which the Rafah crossing must be open to the movement of people between Gaza and Egypt.
In total approximately 1600 people, including 502 students who are eager to start their studies abroad, were not able to exit Gaza via the Rafah crossing when it opened at the start of March. They are forced instead to wait until the next time the crossing is opened.
Yet they have no way of knowing when the next time will arrive.
AMMAN, Jordan — Jordan’s king warned Israel in a rare public rebuke that it is “playing with fire” with its settlement policy, and said in comments published Thursday the Jewish state must decide whether it wants peace or war.
The comments from King Abdullah II, whose country signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, underscore the Jordanian leader’s frustration with recent Israeli announcements of new housing for Jews in disputed east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as the capital of a future state.
The Israeli plans came just as long-stalled indirect peace talks were to begin under U.S. mediation. The housing announcement enraged Arabs, and triggered sharp condemnation from Washington and the international community.
“We have warned repeatedly that Israel is playing with fire,” Abdullah said in an interview published with local newspapers.
He said Israel “must decide if it wants conflict or peace,” adding that if it is indeed peace, then Israel must take “tangible actions” toward ending settlements and returning to negotiations with Palestinians.
“People are fed up with an open-ended process that does not lead to results,” he said.
Abdullah said that a two-state solution was the “only solution” to the crisis, and warned that if no progress is made toward peace soon, then a new cycle violence will erupt for which “the whole world will pay the price.”
Despite intense pressure from the U.S. and the international community, Israel has refused to budge on the plans for 1,600 new Jewish homes in east Jerusalem, insisting the holy city is Israel’s capital and not a settlement.
During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip this week to Washington for talks with senior U.S. officials, Israel announced plans to further expand Jewish housing in the disputed part of Jerusalem.
Abdullah firmly rejected the plans, saying Jordan “condemns all Israeli measures to change the identity of Jerusalem and empty it of its Arab Christian and Muslim residents.”
Abdullah spoke ahead of this weekend’s Arab summit conference in Libya, where Arab leaders are expected to decide whet
