Suez port employees reveal 21-ton US tear gas order for interior ministry
Port workers in Suez refuse to receive initial seven ton shipment as the interior ministry looks to restock after firing tear gas at protesters in Egypt for six days last week
Ahram Online | November 29, 2011
A group of customs employees at the Suez seaport have revealed that the Egyptian Ministry of Interior is in the process of receiving 21 tons of tear gas from the US.
The claim was supported by Medhat Eissa, an activist in the coastal city of Suez, who provided documents he says he obtained from a group of employees at the Suez Canal customs. The employees have been subjected to questioning for their refusal to allow an initial seven ton shipment of the US-made tear gas canisters enter the port.
A group of employees at the Adabiya Seaport in Suez have confirmed, with the documents to prove it, that a three-stage shipment of in total 21 tons of tear gas canisters is on course for the port from the American port of Wilmington.
Employees say the container ship Danica, carrying seven tons of tear-gas canisters made by the American company Combined Systems, has already arrived at the port, with two similar shipments from the same company expected to arrive within the week.
Anonymously Explaining Pakistan Deaths
By Peter Hart – FAIR – 11/29/2011
A New York Times piece today about the U.S. airstrikes that apparently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers opens with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani speaking publicly about the incident, as does Pakistani military spokesperson Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.
Readers are then treated to a lesson in how U.S. officials speak to important news outlets about an emerging, controversial story. They don’t use their names. Instead, we hear from:
- “A United States official” who comments on the “growing frustration in Washington about the increasingly harsh language coming out of Islamabad.” He “spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the need not to personally alienate Pakistani officials.”That same official then is allowed to mischaracterize the Pakistani complaint: “You hear what they’re saying, and they’re making it sound like we’re just bombing Pakistani military positions for the hell of it.”
- “Another American official,” who “disputed the Pakistani assertions that the border posts were in areas that had been largely cleared of insurgents.”
- “Yet another American official… who asked not to be identified in discussing a case that is under investigation.”
- And, finally, a “third American official briefed on the raid.”
Elsewhere in the paper, a Times editorial explained its regrets over this incident and others:
It’s not clear what led to NATO strikes on two Pakistani border posts this weekend, but there can be no dispute that the loss of lives is tragic. At least 24 Pakistani troops were killed. We regret those deaths, as we do those of all American, NATO and Afghan troops and Pakistani and Afghan civilians killed by extremists.
So any deaths in the wars in Afghanistan or Pakistan are regrettable–except for civilians killed by U.S./NATO forces.
Citizens Sue Minnesota State Board of Investment for Illegal Investments in Israel Bonds
By Doris Norrito | International Middle East Media Center | November 29, 2011
The Minneapolis Minnesota Break the Bonds Campaign (MN BBC), a statewide campaign aimed at stopping Minnesota investment in Israel’s human rights and international law violations, has joined with several individuals and organizations in serving a lawsuit on the Minnesota State Board of Investment (SBI) to demand that the Board divest from its purchase of sovereign Israel Bonds.
The lawsuit asserts that investment in Israel Bonds by the SBI is both unlawful and imprudent, and further contends that such investment violates the Minnesota statutes that control the types of foreign investments that the SBI is permitted to make. Foreign government bonds, which include Israeli bonds, are not included in the SBI’s list of authorized investments. The only exception is for Canadian Bonds.
Justification for the lawsuit is the further claim that investment in Israel Bonds by the SBI is unlawful because the SBI knowingly aided and abetted Israel’s blatant defiance of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. By financing Israel’s illegal settlement activities, including the prohibited transfer of Israeli’s civilian population to the occupied Palestinian territories in full recognition of the internationally recognized violation, makes SBI liable under International Law by affirming complicity with agencies that financially provide aid to those engaged in violation of International Law.
Finally, the lawsuit argues that the SBI is in breach of its fiduciary obligations by exposing Minnesota taxpayers to liability imposed by victims of Israel’s human rights abuses and the international law violations because of its material support of unlawful activities practiced by Israel.
MN BBC is a group comprised of Palestinians, Jews, Christians, Muslims, students, professionals, parents, community members and supporters who are working to educate Minnesota communities about injustices and the ongoing suffering of Palestinians. Their aim is to promote justice and human rights. The principle of MN BBC members contends that the people of Minnesota have the moral obligation to make sound investments that do not aid the oppression of anyone because of race, faith or ethnicity.
Members of MN BBC will serve the lawsuit on November 29, 2011 at the Attorney General’s office at 1400 Bremer Tower, 445 Minnesota Street, St. Paul. Media are welcome to interview MN BBC members and co-plaintiffs following issuing of the complaint. Copies of the lawsuit will be available to the press.
November 29, 1947: War, Ethnic Cleaning Unleashed

‘One thing is certain: Israel is not the victim.’ (Nakba archive/file)
By William James Martin | Palestine Chronicle | November 29, 2011
November 29, 1947 was the date the UN passed the Partition Resolution partitioning Palestine, more or less equally, into a Jewish and an Arab state.
In fact, the ethnic cleansing commenced the very next morning when the 75,000 Arab citizens of Haifa were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly by the terrorist group, the Irgun, under Manachem Begin, and the Haganah, the regular militia under David Ben Gurion. The Jewish settlers who had arrived during the previous decade had built their homes higher up the mountain and thus occupied a higher topographical space. From the superior height, they could snipe at the villagers at will. They began doing this while the Jewish troops rolled barrels of burning oil down their roads and then ignited them. When the terrified residents came out to try to extinguish the rivers of fire, they were sprayed with machine gun fire. Another techniques was to deliver cars filled with explosives to Arab garages to be repaired, and then to detonate the cars in the garages.
On its website, the official historian of the Palmach (a special unit of the Haganah) states, “The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation.”
This was the beginning of the ethnic cleansing and occurred six months before the first regular soldier from a surrounding Arab state entered Palestine, which was on May 15, 1948.
I remind you that the Deir Yassin massacre occurred on April 9, 1948, and also that by May 15, all of the major cities of Palestine had been cleansed of Arabs and about one half of the 750,000 to 800,000 Palestinian refugees has been ethnically cleansed.
This was the beginning of the expulsion of the Palestinians Arabs from Haifa and from Palestine. The ending for Haifa’s Arabs came on Passover evening of April 21, when the British commander, Stockwell, called four Arab community leaders in to this office to inform them that the British army would be evacuating the city and advised the Arabs that they could not be protected. As Ilan Pappe puts it:
“Previous correspondence between them and Stockwell shows that that they trusted him as the keeper of law and order in the city. The British officer now advised them that it would be better for their people to leave the city, where they and most of their families had lived and worked ever since the mid-eighteenth century, when Haifa came to prominence as a modern town. “ – (Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, p 94)
Pappe continues:
“[I]t was Mordechai Maklef, the operation officer of the Carmel Brigade … who called the shots. Maklef orchestrated the cleansing campaign, and the orders he issued to his troops were plain and simple: ‘Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.’
“When these orders were executed promptly within the 1.5 square kilometers where thousands of Haifa’s defenseless Palestinians were still residing , the shock and terror were such that, without packing any of their belongings or even knowing what they were doing, people began leaving en masse. In panic they headed towards the port where they hoped to find a ship or boat to take them away from the city. As soon as they had fled, Jewish troops broke into and looted their houses. …
“In the early hours of dawn on 22 April, the people began streaming to the harbor. As the streets in that part of the city were already overcrowded with people seeking escape, the Arab community’s self-appointed leadership tried to instill some order in the chaotic scene. Loudspeakers could be heard, urging the people to gather in the old marketplace next to the port, and seek shelter there until an orderly evacuation by sea could be organized. ‘the Jews had occupied Stanton road and are on their way’, the loudspeakers blared.
“The Carmeli Brigade’s war book, chronicling its action in the war, shows little compunction about what followed thereafter. The brigade’s officers, aware that people had been advised to gather near the port’s gate, ordered their men to station three-inch mortars on the mountain slopes overlooking the market and the port – where the Rothchild Hospital stands today – and to bombard the gathering crowds below. The plan was to make sure the people would have no second thoughts, and to guarantee that the flight would be in one direction only. Once the Palestinians were gathered in the marketplace – an architectural gem dating back to the Ottoman period, covered with white arched canopies, but destroyed beyond recognition after the creation of the State of Israel – they were an easy target for the Jewish marksmen.
“Haifa’s market was less than one hundred yards from what was then the main gate to the port. When the shelling began, this was the natural destination for the panic-stricken Palestinians. The crowd now broke into the port, pushing aside the policemen who guarded the gate. Scores of people stormed the boats that were moored there, and began to flee the city. We can learn what happened next from the horrifying recollections of some of the survivors, published recently. Here is one of them:
‘Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers.’” (Pappe p 96)
Thus it was the Jews who pushed the Palestinians into the sea, and not vice versa.
In March of 1948, a month earlier than the events described above, the so-called ‘Plan D’ or ‘Plan Dalet’, as a further crystallization of Plans A, B and C, was finalized by David Ben Gurion, and those who were continually in consultation with him, and distributed to the Haganah commanders. This document was a blueprint for the destruction of Arab villages and expulsion of their residents, within the 78% of Palestine coveted by Ben Gurion, not the 55% apportioned to the Jewish state by the UN General Assembly. By this time 30 Arab villages had been either destroyed or depopulated. By the year’s end, 531 Arab villages would be destroyed, and 11 Arab neighborhoods in urban areas.
One revealing paragraph of this document states:
“These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those populations centers that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”
Between the time that Israel declared itself a state in May of 1948 and the summer of 2005, Israel killed 50,000 Palestinians, according to Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe, writing in Foreign Policy, in the summer of 2005. And since October of 2000, Israel has killed 6430 Palestinians, according to the web site, If American Knew. The latter figure averages to about 2 Palestinians killed per day by Israel (1.932, by my calculation.)
According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, Israel has destroyed 34,000 Palestinian homes in the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967, and, in the same period, about 800,000 olive and citrus trees in the west Bank and Gaza resulting in a loss to the Palestinian economy of $55 million, according to a recent estimate by the international humanitarian relief agency Oxfam. And in Israel’s winter assault on Gaza in 2009, Israel destroyed between 4 and 5,000 homes and either damaged destroyed as many as 50,000. Many Gaza families spent the winter of 2010 living in caves dug out of the rubble of their destroyed homes because the area is under siege with building material not allow to enter.
Because of the siege of Gaza, babies are frequently born with anemia because their mothers are not getting enough nutrition and because of the lack of food allowed into Gaza and because of the destruction of agricultural areas inside Gaza. The stunting of growth because of the lack of nutrition of Gaza’s children is prevalent, and I have seen this figure put at 14%.
Israel, a state which had never clearly defined its boundaries, invites Jews from all over the world to immigrate to Israel and expand it ranks, along with its boundaries into Arab lands.
One thing is certain: Israel is not the victim, as it is constantly screaming, but the victimizer.
~
– William James Martin taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He may be contacted at: wjm20@caa.columbia.edu
PCHR Strongly Condemns WHO’s Decision to Conduct a Conference in Jerusalem
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights | 28 November 2011
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemns in the strongest possible terms the decision of WHO Europe to conduct an official conference in Jerusalem, hosted by Israel. The first World Health Organisation (WHO) European Conference on the New European Policy for Health is to take place on the 28–29 November 2011.
By conducting a Conference hosted by Israel in the city of Jerusalem the UN Agency WHO sends an implicit recognition of Israel’s annexation of the city and gives implied legitimization to Israel’s illegal actions in Jerusalem over the past decades.
The Israeli Knesset’s decision on 28 June 1967 to annex East Jerusalem to the Israeli territories, the Knesset’s declaration on 30 July 1980 that “the whole united Jerusalem is the capital of Israel” and policy of expanding Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries constitute grave violations of international law and United Nations Resolutions which explicitly recognise East Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state.
The city of Jerusalem is a central issue in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. It touches upon Palestinian right to self-determination as well as civil and political rights. The Palestinian people have made clear their desire for East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. The WHO’s decision to conduct the Israeli hosted upcoming conference in Jerusalem does not respect Palestinian’s legitimate aspirations for East Jerusalem as their capital.
– The continued displacement of the native Palestinian population through forced population transfer;
– Illegal house demolitions;
– Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza being withheld access to Jerusalem holy sites:
– The building of illegal Israel settlements as a means of irreversibly changing the demographic balance of the city in favour of Jewish Israeli’s;
– The Judaization of the city through public works such as the “The City of David”, to be constructed in the Palestinian district of Silwan, as well as the destruction of Palestinian heritage sites within the city;
– The discriminatory targeting and mistreatment of Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces;
The unequal access of Palestinians in Jerusalem to public services;
– Such discrimination against Palestinians in Jerusalem is part of a broader regime of apartheid imposed by Israel on all Palestinians living in Israel/Palestine historic 1948 borders as outlined recently by The Russell Tribunal in South Africa.
PCHR call on the conference organisers to adhere to UN resolutions respecting East Jerusalem as Palestinian territory and the rightful capital of a Palestinian state by cancelling plans to hold the upcoming WHO meeting in Jerusalem.
Israel Apologizes To Pregnant U.S. Reporter Strip-Searched By Soldiers
By Saed Bannoura | IMEMC & Agencies | November 29, 2011
Israeli sources reported that the Israeli Defense Ministry issued an apology for a pregnant American reporter who was forced to be strip searched, humiliated, and forced into a X-Ray search machine, at a military roadblock while heading to Israel from Gaza.
Israel,s Ynet News reported that the reporter, identified as Lynsey Addario, who works for the New York Times, asked the soldiers not to force her to go through the X-Ray search machine because she is pregnant.
In a letter sent to the Israeli Defense Ministry, the reporter said that, despite her pleads, the soldiers forced her through the X-ray machine three times while laughing at her.
After the search, female soldiers took her to another room, and forced her to strip down to her underwear, Ynet News added.
The reporter, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, wrote her letter on October 25, and stated in it that she was never humiliated like this when she worked in more than 60 countries around the globe.
Ynet said that the Defense Ministry investigated the incident and found out that Addario made an official request not to go through the X-ray machine due to her pregnancy before she arrived at the terminal, “but the request was not properly relayed”.
The Israeli Defense Ministry issued an official apology to the reporter for what it described as “the mishap in coordination and the trouble it may have caused”.
The Ministry tried to excuse the behavior of the soldiers by stating that security measures are very tight on the border with Gaza in order “to prevent terrorist attacks from taking place in Israel”, but never explained the motive behind humiliating her.
Ethan Bronner, New York Times Bureau Chief in Israel, said that he is shocked by the way Addario was treated, and how long it took Israel to investigate the incident.
It is worth mentioning that Bronner, known for his support to Israel, has a son who joined the Israeli Army.
Single truckload of strawberries leaves Gaza
Ma’an – 29/11/2011
GAZA CITY – One truckload of strawberries left the Gaza Strip on Tuesday for export to Europe, crossings officials said.
Farmers in Gaza started to export limited amounts of produce to Europe via the Kerem Shalom crossing on Sunday, said crossings liaison officer Raed Fattouh.
The strawberries and carnations were the first produce to leave the coastal enclave in six months due to an Israeli ban on exports which has crippled the Gaza economy.
The agricultural goods are exported under an agreement between Israel and the Dutch government to allow five trucks of farm produce to leave Gaza each day.
The Israeli legal rights organization Gisha notes that if Israel fully implements the agreement, the exports represent just 1 percent of the exports Israel agreed to in 2005.
Under the 2005 agreement, Israel pledged to allow 400 trucks of Gaza produce to be exported every day.
“This exception to the ban is helpful for select growers, but it fails to address the manufacturing shut-down and massive unemployment caused by the export ban,” Gisha said in a statement released Monday.
Before 2007, 85 percent of Gazan produce was sold to Israel or the West Bank, Gisha said, adding that exporting to Europe was expensive due to high shipping costs and low demand.
Gaza farmer Monthar al-Boudi told Gisha he exported 1,500 tons of strawberries annually before Israel banned exports from Gaza to Israel and the West Bank in 2007.
In 2010, al-Boudi was only allowed to sell seven tons of strawberries to Europe.
Gisha director Sari Bashi said: “It is not clear how preventing producers in Gaza from selling eggplants, school desks, and oranges to the West Bank enhances Israeli security, but the ban is clearly harming Palestinians trying to engage in productive, dignified work.”