‘I have a vision that suddenly all the Jewish people will come to live here… And if there were 10 million Jews here, we wouldn’t have to give up on anything.’
Reuven Rivlin was elected yesterday the tenth president of Israel. He has previously served as Speaker of the Knesset (2003-’06, 2009-’13), and has been a Member of Knesset since 1988. Hailing from PM Netanyahu’s Likud party, Rivlin also served as a minister in Ariel Sharon’s government (2001-’03). He will replace Shimon Peres when the latter’s term ends in July.
“I whole-heartedly believe that the land of Israel is ours in its entirety.”
“The communities in Judea and Samaria [Ed. referring to West Bank settlements] do not threaten our existence, they guarantee our existence.”
“Today, almost 20 years after Oslo, we can see clearly that the idea of separating the [Israeli and Palestinian] nations failed.”
“For some reason the settlement enterprise is being accused of being an obstacle to peace. Personally, I explain at each possible forum that the obstacle to peace is the objection by the Arabs to it and the fact that they do not want us here”.
Israeli citizens who marry Palestinians need to move to “the other side“.
“Dividing Jerusalem will bring disaster for the city. It cannot be that every time something is built in Jerusalem, the international community censures it. This constant criticism is a mark of disgrace for the international community.”
“We will not apologize – not for conquering Katamon or Jaffa or Tzfat, nor for liberating Hebron, and not for building Jerusalem our capital.”
“The residents here [in Migron settlement] are not thieves and are not trying to banish people from their land. They came here innocently, with the encouragement of the State of Israel.”
“There is no consensus in Israel regarding the two state formula. We will not, under any circumstances, allow the establishment of a neighbouring state that will be a genuine threat on our existence.”
“Zionism from its outset was a settlement movement. If we stop going on this path, how can we justify the faith that all of Zion belongs to us?”
“There are red lines that I as a democrat, say you cannot cross. I see it as defiance against Israel and Jerusalem as its capital as well as another protest against the historical narrative, a matter already pending before the High Court.” (Responding to a MK Tibi-proposed bill recognising Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state)
“I have a vision that suddenly all the Jewish people [from around the world] will come to live here… And if there were 10 million Jews here, we wouldn’t have to give up on anything.”
“If the Nakba is a tragedy, then the establishment of the State of Israel is a tragedy. The Palestinians experienced a catastrophe that was brought on by their leaders, but the establishment of the State of Israel is not the reason for it.”
“Terrorism is trying to paralyze and silence democracies fighting against it, exactly as was manifest in the world’s reaction to Israel’s counter-terrorist offensive Cast Lead in light of the Goldstone Report.”
“We miss [Rehavam Ze’evi’s] clear, ideological voice, his leadership, his larger than life presence.”
June 11, 2014
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Hebron, Human rights, Israel, Jerusalem, Palestine, Zionism |
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Yesterday morning on the 8th June, Israeli police forces raided the village of Iqrit (located on the northern tip of Israel, within eyesight of Lebanon). The police uprooted trees, destroyed and confiscated all the personal belongings of Palestinian activists present in the village. Furthermore they beat and violently arrested 3 Palestinian men who were present in the village at the time. The 3 arrested are: Walla Sbait, Nidal Khoury and Jeries Khiatt. They were taken to the police station in Nahariyya, where they were kept in detention over night.
Today at 8:30 AM the three detainees were brought before the Kiryat Gat Magistrates’ Court, following a police request for an extension of their detention. The police have charged the detainees with trespassing the land owned by the ILA, obstructing the work of public officials, assaulting a public employee and endangering public order.
The court ruled that Nidal Khoury is kept in detention until Wednesday 11th of June. Walaa Sbeit and Jeries Khiatt was sentenced house arrest until Sunday 15th of June and they are not allowed to go back to Iqrit for 60 days.
As the season of Advent approached in November 1948, the Israeli military forced residents of Iqrit and the neighboring village of Kufr Bir’im —all citizens of the newly created state of Israel— to leave their homes near the northern border with Lebanon because of military operations in the area. The Israeli forces made a promise to the inhabitants, that they could return to their homes after 15 days. The people of Iqrit are still waiting. In July 1951, the Israeli High Court ruled that the people of Iqrit and Kufr Bir’im had the right to return to their homes. The military refused to comply, and on Christmas Eve 1951 blew up all houses in both villages.
Shortly thereafter, all village lands were confiscated by the state and has been rented out to the nearby Kibbutz for their cows to graze until this day. Since then, decades of demonstrations and legal appeals for the villagers’ right to return have seen a string of favorable decisions by courts and commissions that have resulted only in more broken promises and unenforced rulings.In the 1970s, the government had granted use of the cemetery —allowing only the dead to return to Iqrit after they lived and died in exile at Kufr Yasif, Rameh, Haifa or other places. The original villagers and their descendants —now around 1,500 people scattered across northern Israel— are allowed only to hold services in the church and bury their dead in the cemetery. Every first Saturday of the month there has been a mass held at the village church and every year a summer camp has been organised on the hillside. In August 2012 the third generation reclaimed their village.
Around 20 descendants from Iqrit took the initiative to begin resurrecting the village despite the village’s legal limbo. The activists make sure that the village is constantly inhabited, sleeping in tents, under the stars or in rooms attached to the church. The group consists of university students, factory and restaurant workers, and teachers.
Their attempts to construct or plant anything in the village have been met with immediate demolition by the Israeli authorities. But over time, they’ve been able to add a few amenities, including solar panels on the church roof, determined to bring back life to Iqrit.
Iqrit’s 80 homes are long gone, but the activists goal is to rebuild Iqrit for the villagers-in-exile, refusing only to return to their home in coffins, but alive. The activists have returned to the area and are discussing on how to proceed with their campaign, determined not to be intimidated by Israeli forces and their harassment.
June 9, 2014
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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An Israeli committee tasked with putting forward a law on the “Jewish State” is scheduled to be formed today, Sunday, 8 June.
The committee will be chaired by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and is expected to have among its members MK Ruth Calderon (Yesh Atid) and the initiators of the proposal MKs Oielit Shaked (Jewish Home) and Yariv Levin (Likud).
Livni and Yair Lapid had previously stated that they would oppose the bill.
The formation of the committee has been approved by the Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Haaretz said, adding that Netanyahu will adopt any agreement reached by the committee and will help adopt a legislation as proposed by the committee.
According to Haaretz, bills on the “Jewishness of Israel” proposed in recent years aimed at obliging courts to favor “Jewish identity” over “the Decmocratic nature” of decisions, since the Jewishness of the state contradicts with its being democratic.
The text of the bill describes Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people,” and that “the right to determine the destiny of the nation in Israel is owned by the Jewish people alone.” The bill also states that “The land of Israel is the historic home of the Jewish people.”
June 9, 2014
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Slavyansk residents take shelter in the basement of their house during a heavy artillery shelling on June 8, 2014. (RIA Novosti / Andrey Stenin)
Death and destruction is reported in eastern Ukraine as Kiev’s artillery has resumed shelling the rebellious city of Slavyansk. Locals tell RT they have been without running water and power for days, and that hope is fading.
“The shells broke just near the central square. They hit residential houses, a furniture factory, a cafe and communications post,” an unnamed representative of the local city council told Itar-Tass. “There are victims among the civilians and some people received shrapnel wounds.”
“At this time there were many people in the center because of the Pentecost Mass in the nearby church has just ended,” the source added.
Four people were killed in the result of the shelling, a small girl among them. Seven people were taken to hospital with injuries, RT’s correspondent Andrey Krasnoschyokov reports from the scene.
Kiev’s artillery also has hit a gas pipe in the city, but there was no explosion threat, the city council told RIA Novosti. Another shell struck a petrol station outside Slavyansk, and a blast and fire followed.
Slavyansk residents say their spirits are getting lower, as the city is completely surrounded by Kiev’s armed forces and there is constant shooting and shelling while evacuation is hindered.
“Slavyansk has been attacked by massive shelling overnight,” a local resident told RT, adding that the shelling never stops.
As the man was speaking to RT in the morning, he saw massive columns of smoke coming from the city outskirts. The sounds of shelling were heard distinctly over the phone.
The city is preparing to survive without drinking water and electricity.
“Residents are living a third day without water, some people even the fifth… Half [of the city population] doesn’t have electricity,” the man said.
As shops ran out of drinking water supplies too, Twitter images showed that residents had started scooping the remaining water out of fountains.
According to RT’s witness, those water and electricity lines that have been broken are located in the “war zones,” where most of the fighting takes place, that’s why it is almost impossible to repair them.
“There is an impression that [Kiev forces] are striking in the vicinity of high-voltage lines to disrupt them and leave the city without water and electricity,” he added.
‘Slavyansk is a total nightmare’
Slavyansk residents are leaving the besieged city with shells whistling above their heads, local driver Vladimir, who evacuates at least 10 residents a day, told RT.
“This is a total nightmare what is happening in Slavyansk. They [Kiev troops] only let women and children leave the city – they are forced to walk through the checkpoints,” Vladimir says. “Men are not allowed to leave or enter the city.”
Vladimir, who literally drives through never-ending gunfire, says Slavyansk residents are mostly seeking refuge in Crimea or in nearby regions.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s National Guard has begun artillery fire in the outskirts of Slavyansk, according to a video released on YouTube. The footage shows a huge amount of smoke coming from the hill on the outskirts.
Kiev authorities have recently intensified what Kiev calls an “anti-terrorist” operation with a massive artillery attack on Slavyansk. The plan was to conduct a “clean-up” of Donetsk and Lugansk regions ahead of the presidential inauguration held on June 7.
June 8, 2014
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Illegal Occupation, Militarism, War Crimes | Ukraine |
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Potential 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says the United States made a tactical mistake to put pressure on Israel to freeze its settlement activities on the Palestinian territories.
The former US secretary of state made the remarks in her new book ‘Hard Choices,’ scheduled to be released on June 10.
“I was concerned that we not be seen as pushing a longtime partner out the door, leaving Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the region to an uncertain, dangerous future,” she wrote.
“In retrospect, our early, hard line on settlements didn’t work.”
Clinton said Washington’s demand only hardened the stance of the now President of the Palestinian National Unity Government Mahmoud Abbas.
Abbas himself ultimately rejected the freeze because it failed to include the East Jerusalem (al-Quds).
She noted that when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to resume settlement construction, it strained relations between Tel Aviv and Washington, leaving US President Barack Obama infuriated with Netanyahu.
Clinton is preparing for a presidential run in 2016 and in her new memoir she does not shy away from criticizing President Obama.
June 8, 2014
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Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Hillary Clinton, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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GAZA CITY – A Palestinian fisherman shot by the Israeli navy two weeks ago succumbed to his wounds Sunday morning, Gaza medical authorities said.
Spokesman for the Gaza Ministry of Health Ashraf al-Qidra told Ma’an that 52-year-old Imad Shukri Salim was announced dead Sunday morning.
Salim was shot in the chest by the Israeli navy two weeks ago while he was fishing off the coast in the area of al-Sudaniya in the northern Gaza Strip, al-Qidra said.
Israeli forces shot two Palestinian fishermen off the al-Sudaniya area coast in the month of May alone.
Palestinian fishermen are only being allowed to go three nautical miles from Gaza’s shore, even though an agreement previously settled on 20 nautical miles.
Israeli naval forces frequently harass Palestinian fishermen who near the three-mile limit, as well as those inside the zone.
There are 4,000 fishermen in Gaza. According to a 2011 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross 90 percent are poor, an increase of 40 percent from 2008 and a direct result of Israeli limits on the fishing industry.
June 8, 2014
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Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Pope Francis’ “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land last week proved to be an unbalanced impossible mission. The pontiff failed to strike a balance of neutrality between contradictory and irreconcilable binaries like divinity and earth, religion and politics, justice and injustice and military occupation and peace.
Such neutrality is viewed by the laity of Christian believers, let alone Muslim ones, in the Holy Land as religiously, morally and politically unacceptable.
The 77-year old head of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics “is stepping into a religious and political minefield,” Naim Ateek, the Anglican priest who founded the Palestinian liberation theology movement and runs the Sabeel Ecumenical Center in Jerusalem and Nazareth, was quoted as saying by Time on last May 24, the first day of the pope’s “pilgrimage.”
Ironically, the symbolic moral and spiritual power of the Holy See was down to earth in Pope Francis’ subservient adaptation to the current realpolitik of the Holy Land in what the Catholic Online on May 26 described as “faith diplomacy.”
The pontiff’s message to the Palestinian people during his three-day “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land boils down to an endorsement of the Israeli and U.S. message to them, i.e.: “The only route to peace” is to negotiate with the Israeli occupying power, refrain from unilateral actions and “violent” resistance and recognize Israel as a fait accompli.
The UK-based Jordanian-Palestinian journalist Lamis Andoni, a Christian herself, wrote on May 27: “We don’t need the Vatican blessing of negotiations … Whoever sees occupation and remains neutral has no justice in his vision.”
The Vatican and the pope himself had insisted that his visit to the birthplace of the three monotheistic “Abrahamic faiths” of Islam, Christianity and Judaism was “purely spiritual,” “strictly religious,” a “pilgrimage for prayer” and “absolutely not political.”
But the Vatican expert John Allen, writing in the Boston Globe a week ahead of the pope’s visit, had expected it to be a “political high-wire act,” and that’s what it truly was, because “religion and politics cannot be separated in the Holy Land,” according to Yolande Knell on BBC online on May 25.
Pope Francis would have performed much better had he adhered “strictly,” “purely” and “absolutely” to making his trip a “pilgrimage for prayer” and one that is committed to Christian unity and to helping indigenous Christians survive the highly volatile and violent regional environment.
Instead he had drowned his spiritual role in a minefield of symbolic political semantics and semiotics.
The pope finished his “pilgrimage,” which was announced as a religious one but turned instead into a political pilgrimage, with a call for peace.
However, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hussein, while welcoming the pontiff inside Islam’s third holiest site of Al-Aqsa Mosque on May 26, said: “Peace in this land will not happen until the end of the [Israeli military] occupation.”
Palestinian-American Daoud Kuttab on May 25 wrote in a controversial column that the pope “exceeded expectations for Palestinians.”
He flew directly from Jordan to Bethlehem in Palestine without passing through any Israeli entry procedures, implicitly and symbolically recognizing Palestinian sovereignty.
He addressed the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as the head of the “State of Palestine,” announced that there must be “recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to a sovereign homeland and their right to live with dignity and with freedom of movement” and met with Palestinian children whose parents were refugees whom Israelis displaced from their homes in 1948.
And in an undeniable expression of solidarity with the Palestinians, he made an unplanned stop to pray at Israel’s apartheid wall of segregation in Bethlehem, because, as he said, “the time has come to put an end to this situation which has become increasingly unacceptable.”
However, the word “occupation” was missing in more than thirteen of his speeches during his “pilgrimage” as was any reference to the world’s “largest open-air prison” in Gaza Strip or to Dahiyat a-Salam (literally: Neighborhood of Peace) and five other neighbourhoods in eastern Jerusalem, including the Shu’fat Refugee Camp, where some eighty thousand Palestinians have been cut off from the city services, including water, since March 2014 and isolated from Jerusalem by Israel’s segregation wall. His itinerary did not include the Galilee and Nazareth where most Palestinian Christians are located.
Eight papal messages
However, within less than twenty four hours the pontiff was to offset his positive overtures to Palestinians and his call for a “just solution” and a “stable peace based on justice” for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with eight messages to them.
The pontiff’s arrival in the Palestinian Holy Land came three days before Israel’s celebration of its 47th anniversary of its military occupation and annexation of the Christian and Muslim holy sites in the Arab east Jerusalem and ten days after the Palestinian commemoration of the 66th anniversary of their Nakba on the creation of Israel in 1948 on the ruins of more than 500 towns and villages from which the Zionist paratroops ethnically cleansed forcefully more than 800,000 Arab Muslim and Christian native Palestinians.
The pope had nothing to say or do on both occasions to alleviate the ensuing plight of the Palestinians except prayers, because “the concrete measures for peace must come from negotiations … It is the only route to peace,” according to the pope aboard his flight back to Rome.
That was exactly the same futile message the Israeli occupying power and its U.S. strategic ally have been sending to Palestinians for sixty six years, but especially since 1967: Palestinians should be held hostages to exclusively bilateral negotiations with their occupying power. This was the pope’s first message to Palestinians.
For this purpose, the pope invited Palestinian and Israeli presidents, Abbas and Shimon Peres, to pray for peace at “my home in the Vatican as a place for this encounter of prayer” on June 8. The pope’s spokesman, Federico Lombardi, told the BBC it was “a papal peace initiative.” This was his second message.
His third message to Palestinians was to “refrain from initiatives and actions which contradict the stated desire to reach a true agreement” with Israel, i.e. to refrain from unilateral actions, which is again another Israeli and U.S. precondition which both allies do not deem as deserving Israeli reciprocity.
By laying a wreath at the grave of Theodor Herzl, the atheist founder of Zionism who nonetheless believed in God’s promise of the land to His Jewish “chosen people,” the pope legitimized Herzl’s colonial settlement project in Palestine. This was his fourth message: Israel is a fait accompli recognized by the Vatican and blessed by the papacy and Palestinians have to adapt accordingly. The Washington Post on May 23 went further. “Some are interpreting” the pope’s act “as the pontiff’s tacit recognition of the country’s Jewish character.”
The pope sent his fifth message to Palestinians when he addressed young Palestinian refugees from the Dehiyshe Refugee Camp in Bethlehem: “Don’t ever allow the past to determine your life, always look forward.” He was repeating the Israeli and U.S. call on Palestinian refugees to forget their Nakba and look forward from their refugee camps for an unknown future in exile and diaspora.
On the same occasion he sent his sixth message: “Violence cannot be defeated by violence; violence can only be defeated with peace,” the pope advised the young Palestinian refugees. This is again the Israeli and U.S. message to them, which after more than two decades of Palestinian commitment produced neither peace nor justice for them.
The pope prayed at the Holocaust memorial, the western al-Buraq Wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which Israelis call “The Wailing Wall,” the memorial of the Israeli victims of Palestinian resistance, laid a wreath at Herzel’s grave, visited Israeli president at his residence where he “vowed to pray for the institutions of the State of Israel,” which are responsible for the Palestinian Nakba, and received Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Notre Dame complex. The pontiff was in fact blessing and granting the Vatican legitimacy to all the Israeli symbolic casus belli claims to the land, which justify the Palestinian Nakba. This was his seventh message.
All those events took place in Jerusalem, which Israel annexed as the “eternal” capital of the Hebrew state and the “Jewish people.” Reuven Berko, writing in Yisrael Hayom, said that the Pope’s meetings with Peres and Netanyahu were “de facto expressions of the Vatican’s recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel.”
The pope’s eighth message to Palestinians was on the future of Jerusalem: “From the negotiations perhaps it will emerge that it will be the capital of one State or another … I do not consider myself competent to say that we should do one thing or another.”
Normalization with Israel
The “greatest importance” of Pope Francis’ visit “may lie in the fact that it reflects the normalization of relations between the Vatican and the State of Israel,” head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, wrote on May 23.
The Second Vatican Council early in the sixties of the last century rejected the collective Jewish guilt for Jesus Christ’s death. Since then the Vatican’s “normalization” of relations with the Jews and Israel has been accumulating.
Rabbi David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs at the American Jewish Committee, was quoted as saying by the USA Today on May 26: There “has been a revolution in the Christian world.”
At Ben-Gurion airport on May 25, Pope Francis reiterated his predecessor Benedict’s call for “the right of existence for the [still borderless] State of Israel to be recognized universally,” but was wise enough not to reiterate his “thanks to God” because “the Jews returned to the lands of their ancestors.”
To emphasise interfaith coexistence he broke the precedent of including a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim sheikh in his official delegation. “It’s highly symbolic,” said Rev. Thomas Rosica, a consultant to the Vatican press office.
By laying a wreath of white and yellow flowers, the colours of the Vatican, on the Herzl’s grave, the pope broke another historic precedent. It was an unbalanced act, 110 years after Pope Pius X met Herzl and rejected the idea of a Jewish state.
The pontiff’s “pilgrimage” could not dispel the historical fact that lies deep in the regional Arab memory that papacy is “still linked to the Crusades of the 11th through 13th centuries” when the successive popes’ only link to the Holy Land was a military one, according to the international editor of NPR.org, Greg Myre, on this May 24.
Of course this does not apply to Christianity. The indigenous oriental churches’ link to the land has never been interrupted while the Catholic Church was cut off from the region since the end of the Crusades until it came back with the European colonial domination since the nineteenth century.
No pope ever travelled to Jerusalem until Paul VI spent one day in the city, on January 4, 1964, when the holy sites were under the rule of the Arab Jordanians. John Paul visited thirty six years later and established a new papal tradition that has been followed by Pope Benedict, who visited in 2009, and now Pope Francis.
It doesn’t bode well with the Arabs and the Palestinians in particular that the new papal tradition is building on the background of recognizing Israel, which is an occupying power and still without constitutional demarcated borders, as a fait accompli that the Palestinian people should recognize as well.
~
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. An edited version of this article was first published by the Middle East Eye. nassernicola@ymail.com
June 5, 2014
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Ethnic Cleansing, Illegal Occupation | Israel, Palestine, Pope Francis, Vatican, Zionism |
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The “fog of war” is a reference to the moral chaos on the battlefield as well as the rampant confusion. Individuals kill others for no other reason than that they are ordered to. Things deemed unambiguously bad in civilian life are authorized and even lauded in war. The killing and maiming of acknowledged innocents — in particular children and the elderly — is excused as “collateral damage.”
No wonder that some individuals thrust into this morass sometimes act differently from how soldiers behave in romantic war movies. The hell of war is internal as well as external.
We might remember this as the story of Sgt. Bowe Robert Bergdahl unfolds.
Bergdahl volunteered for the U.S. military and was apparently a gung-ho soldier. Americans have not been conscripted since 1973, but young Americans are propagandized from childhood with the message that time in the military is service to their country. Few question this narrative; fewer seek rebuttals to it. You have to want to face the facts that governments lie and that the service is to an empire having nothing to do with Americans’ security.
This, however, doesn’t relieve military personnel of responsibility for their own conduct. In 1951 — while Americans were fighting in Korea — Leonard E. Read, one of the founders of the modern libertarian movement, published “Conscience on the Battlefield,” in which a dying American soldier hears his conscience say that he — not the army or government — bears responsibility for his deadly conduct: “Does not the fault inhere in your not recognizing that the consequences of your actions are irrevocably yours…?”
Bergdahl seems to have been plagued by this question. (See Michael Hastings’s revealing 2012 article.)
In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a regime that used war to keep its population too frightened to ask questions and in which the enemy could change without notice. Orwell may have exaggerated, but not by much. The United States sided with one Afghan faction against the Soviets and their Afghan allies in the 1980s, then switched when it replaced the Soviets as invaders in 2001.
On the surface, the war in Afghanistan seems easy to understand. The Taliban government gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, which attacked American targets in the 1990s and on September 11, 2001.
But things are not so simple. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the U.S. government sided with the future Taliban and al-Qaeda. President Reagan called the Afghan mujahideen“freedom fighters,” subsidized their war, and hosted them at the White House.
After the Soviet exit and years of civil war, the Taliban became the brutal theocratic government of Afghanistan, but not an anti-American terrorist organization. Indeed, as late as May 2001, President George W. Bush was helping the Taliban suppress opium production. After 9/11, the Taliban made various offers to surrender or expel bin Laden, but the Bush administration was uninterested. (This lack of interest predated 9/11.) Taliban attacks on American military targets since the U.S. invasion should not be construed as terrorism, but rather as combat between former government officials and the foreign force that overthrew them.
Anand Gopal, author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, points out that soon after American forces invaded Afghanistan, “there was no enemy to fight”:
By mid-2002 there was no insurgency in Afghanistan: al-Qaeda had fled the country and the Taliban had ceased to exist as a military movement. Jalaluddin Haqqani [whose “network” held Bergdahl captive] and other top Taliban figures were reaching out to the other side in an attempt to cut a deal and lay down their arms.
But, Gopal writes, “driven by the idée fixe that the world was rigidly divided into terrorist and non-terrorist camps, Washington allied with Afghan warlords and strongmen. Their enemies became ours, and through faulty intelligence, their feuds became repackaged as ‘counterterrorism.’”
When Haqqani, a celebrated freedom fighter during the Soviet war, turned down a deal from the Americans because it included detention, the U.S. military attacked his home province and other areas, killing his brother-in-law and innocent children.
If he wasn’t with the Americans, he was against them, and therefore it was open season.
In this whirlwind of cynicism and relativism, can anyone be blamed for wondering what the point of the war was?
June 5, 2014
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Illegal Occupation, Militarism, War Crimes | Afghanistan, United States |
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By Robert Fantina | CounterPunch | June 4, 2014
As Detroit, Michigan grapples with bankruptcy, requiring at least $1 billion in aid, it is probably not alone. “More U.S. cities could be heading towards bankruptcy”, said Richard Ravitch, a former Lieutenant-Governor of New York, who was instrumental in helping New York City navigate through its financial woes in the 1970s.
So with Detroit, once the world leader in automobile manufacturing, now on its deathbed, and other major U.S. cities selling off their buildings to pay current expenses, it may be informative to look at how the Federal government is spending U.S tax dollars.
Half a planet away is the glittering city of Tel Aviv. One wonders why that city can be so successful, while U.S. cities are dying. Could it be the $9 million dollars the U.S. gives to Israel, every single day of the year, more in foreign aid than the United States give to all other countries combined?
One might reasonably ask what Detroit could do with $9 million dollars a day. That city is trying to cobble together $1 billion to stay afloat this year; Israel is getting more three times that much from U.S. taxpayers, every year.
‘But’, the august, so-called representatives of the U.S. citizenry will proclaim, ‘Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, a major ally of the U.S., and therefore must be supported’. Really? One wonders why this ally not only refuses to cooperate with the U.S.’s hapless and insincere efforts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, but actually spits in the face of the U.S., as it accepts $9 million a day. When the joke of peace talks is announced, with the U.S. saying neither side should do anything to jeopardize them, Israel announces more illegal settlements. When the United Nations proposes condemning increased settlement-building, which the U.S. has stated it believes to be in violation of international law, Israel knows it can rely on the U.S. to veto any such resolution. When the U.S. hypocritically decries the human rights abuses so prevalent around the world, Israel knows that it is exempt from any such condemnation, if it only brutally abuses Palestinians.
Sadly, this is not a new phenomenon. Looking at one incident from the administration of President Ronald Reagan indicates Israel’s sure knowledge that it can do as it pleases, with no repercussions from the U.S.
In 1988, Mr. Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz, crafted a plan that he hoped would resolve some ongoing, underlying issues between Palestine and Israel. His three point plan was as follows:
1) The convening of an international conference;
2) A six-month negotiating period that would bring about an interim phase for Palestinian self-determination for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and
3) A date of December, 1988 for the start of talks between Israel and Palestine for the final resolution of the conflict.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir immediately rejected this plan, claiming, incredibly, that it did nothing to forward the cause of peace. In response, the U.S. issued a new memorandum, emphasizing economic and security agreements with Israel, and accelerating the delivery of seventy-five F-16 fighter jets. This, ostensibly, was to encourage Israel to accept the peace plan proposals. Yet Israel did not yield. An Israeli journalist commented that the message received was: “One may say no to America and still get a bonus.” And thus it has been for generations.
The reason for this is hardly a mystery. The Israeli lobby, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), funnels millions of dollars into the election and re-election campaigns of candidates and elected officials who are willing to jump as high as AIPAC demands. And it seems there is no height to which these worthies will not jump for the almighty dollar. In return, they send a fortune to Israel every year, defend its horrific human rights abuses, and ignore international laws, laws the U.S. has signed on to. And when Palestinians are occasionally able to gather supplies sufficient to send an ineffective rocket into Israel, the U.S. condones and finances the carpet-bombing of the beleaguered Gaza Strip.
Never mind that much of Detroit looks like it has annoyed Israel, and been victim of its bombs. Ignore the spiraling, out-of-control crime rate, the poverty, poor educational standards, failing infrastructure and despair that are so much a part of that once great city. Rather, fawn over Israel, send it vast amounts of money that could be going to assist the taxpayers who provide it, and accept those checks into campaign coffers from grateful Zionists.
The Palestinians have just sworn in a new unity government (why the media insists on saying that Hamas ‘seized control’ of the Gaza Strip in 2006, when it was democratically elected, is a mystery to this writer), and Israel is in panic mode. There now exists the possibility that Palestine will petition the International Criminal Court for redress from Israel’s many horrific crimes. Israel, with complete U.S. support, has successfully resisted every effort by the international community to investigate allegations of human rights abuses. The time may be approaching when it can hide no longer.
And what of that? As Israel becomes increasingly isolated in the world community, due at least partly to the success of the ‘Boycott, Divest and Sanction’ (BDS) campaign, including commercial, academic and entertainment boycotts, will not the U.S. always be there to come to the financial rescue? As more and more U.S. cities decay, as the educational level of U.S. schools falls further and further behind other industrialized nations, leaving a citizenry ill-prepared to work in the global economy, as the number of those living in poverty grows, what is all that, when AIPAC pulls the puppets’ strings?
A generation ago, when the U.S. first began moon exploration, with the goal of landing a person on the moon, some critics said that the vast amounts of money that that would cost could be better used on this planet. Today, as the U.S. bows and scrapes at the unholy altar of AIPAC, mightn’t the same argument be used? When U.S. citizens are in deep poverty, living in unsafe, decaying cities, is it a stretch of the imagination to think that U.S. tax dollars should go first to assisting them?
There remain, in isolated pockets of the U.S., people who believe that the United States is a democracy, with voters electing people to represent them, who will act in their best interests. When the tax burden falls mainly on the dwindling middle class, and the taxes they pay go not to assist the communities in which they live, but to support and uphold a barbaric apartheid regime, the time for the putting to bed of that myth has long since passed.
Detroit and countless other U.S. cities will continue to struggle to survive, as tax revenues are sent to a nation that holds the U.S. in complete contempt. But politicians will continue to have unlimited funds for their election campaigns, so business will remain as usual.
Robert Fantina’s latest book is Empire, Racism and Genocide: a History of US Foreign Policy (Red Dill Press).
June 4, 2014
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | AIPAC, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Kiev’s military operation in eastern Ukraine has left 181 people killed, including 59 of ruling regime troops, and 293 injured, according to the country’s Prosecutor General.
Oleg Makhnitsky announced the recent figures at a press conference. However, it was not clear whether the death toll included casualties among self-defense forces.
The Prosecutor General has also added that over 220 people have been abducted, including 12 foreign citizens, since the uprising started in Lugansk and Donetsk Regions.
“Six hundred and seventy-five criminal enterprises connected with subversive activities, terrorist acts, and violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine are currently being investigated,” Makhnitsky told the media.
Kiev has been conducting its “anti-terrorist operation” in eastern Ukraine since April, following a mass uprising against the coup-appointed government, demanding broader independence from the capital.
Following the May 11 referendums, in which the Lugansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic voted for the two regions’ independence and proclaimed themselves sovereign states, the military operation by Kiev troops has intensified.
The day after the presidential elections on May 25, the likely winner, billionaire Petro Poroshenko, announced that the military operation in the southeast of the country would continue, demanding “it must be more effective, and military units must be better equipped.”
Just a few hours after the early results of the elections were announced, Ukrainian troops stepped up their military activity and deployed fighter jets and helicopters at Donetsk International Airport in an attempt to win it back from self-defense forces.
More than 50 civilians and as many self-defense troops were killed in the subsequent clashes, local militia estimated.
On Wednesday, May 28, Kiev troops targeted civilian quarters of Slavyansk, for the first time shelling one of the city’s schools and a kindergarten.
All the pupils and teachers were quickly evacuated from the school as the shell hit the roof and exploded right above the hall where children played.
The shelling also damaged a block of flats and a dormitory in the city’s teachers’ college, shattering glass in the windows of the college.
Shortly afterwards, the Ukrainian military shelled a children’s hospital, also in Slavyansk.
This past weekend, over a thousand people rallied in Donetsk demanding that children be protected from Kiev’s assault.
The Kiev forces quickly blamed the violence on self-defense units, which they refer to as “terrorists.”
June 3, 2014
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism | Human rights, Ukraine |
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Russian envoy to NATO Alexander Grushko
Russia’s envoy to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) says the western military alliance is “encouraging” the Kiev authorities to use force against pro-Moscow activists in eastern Ukraine.
Alexander Grushko made the remarks in a meeting with ambassadors of NATO member states in the Belgian capital of Brussels on Monday, Russia’s Ria Novosti news agency reported.
“NATO is providing Kiev … with technical support, thus encouraging the continuation of forceful actions,” Grushko said.
The Russian official also accused NATO of adding to tensions in the eastern Ukrainian provinces by conducting “unprecedented” activities near Russia’s borders.
He further noted that the military alliance is hampering efforts to find a peaceful solution to the current turmoil in the former Soviet state.
On May 6, NATO launched military drills in Estonia with a record-breaking number of 6,000 troops from a number of allied countries, including the US, the UK, Latvia and Lithuania. The alliance has also deployed fighter jets and naval vessels to Lithuania and Poland as well as to Romania.
Tensions between Russia and the West heightened after Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea integrated into the Russian Federation following a referendum on March 16.
The United States and its European allies accuse Moscow of destabilizing Ukraine and have slapped a number of sanctions against Russian and pro-Russia figures.
Russia, however, rejects the accusation, saying the pro-Moscow protests in Ukraine began spontaneously against the new interim government in Kiev.
June 2, 2014
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | NATO, Press TV, Russia, Ukraine |
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Hebron, Occupied Palestine – With only a sliver of their land left to protect, having their entire lot of land encircled by Israeli settlements, Faryel and Arwa Abu Haikal climbed over a pile of rubble and boulders and stopped the Israeli bulldozer from shearing further into their property, dumping their dignity into the back of a dump truck, and hauling away their rights. There they stood under the unrelenting sun, staring into the teeth of the approaching bucket excavator, protecting their land from the ever encroaching Israeli settlement enterprise, facing arrest and physical assault – a reality they have faced for decades. Their resilience and steadfastness held off the Israeli Antiquity Authority (I.A.A.) for at least a few hours.
The I.A.A. continues to deploy a variety of tactics to annex privately owned Palestinian land on the hill top of Hebron, including ignoring previous orders issued by the Israeli police to halt work. Under the directive of Emmanuel Eisenberg, the I.A.A. project coordinator, the excavator bucket began carving deeper into Faryel Abu Haikal’s land, breaking both Israeli and international law in the process.
“They don’t know where the land is,” said Eisenberg about the Abu Haikal’s resistance to the archeological dig. “We will keep working. We are like the wagon that goes by the barking dog: The wagon keeps going and the dog keeps barking.”
In many ways, it’s hard to disagree with Eisenberg on the trajectory of the illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank and the recent illegal activity in Hebron. More than 1,500 hundred shops or homesteads have either been squatted or blocked off, creating a Hebronite Diaspora of several tens of thousands of Palestinians. The Hebronite refugee population didn’t happen all at once, but rather has occurred and continues to occur in a system of apartheid which operates with immunity.
Since Rabbi Moshe Levinger first led his caravan to the Park Hotel in the heart of Hebron to establish the Kiryat Arba settlement in 1967, the Jewish settlers have slowly, inch by inch, piece by piece, constructed an elaborate security apparatus that only Israelis have the keys to. In Hebron, there are over 130 road blocks, dead end streets, check points, and military patrols that restrict Palestinian access to their city.
The Abu Haikal’s land and life is a microcosm of the principles of ethnic cleansing at work across Palestine today.
For the sake of expediency, this is just a short history of the aggression and assault that the Abu Haikal family has endured at the hands of the Jewish settlers and the Israeli security forces while trying to maintain a home to raise their family.
In 1984, Jewish settlers first arrived on Tel Rumeida, the historical hilltop neighborhood of Hebron, which, according to some religious texts, is where Abraham first laid claim to land. It is this historical interpretation that provides impetus for archeological digs to establish exclusive Jewish claims to the hilltop. The Tel Rumeida settlement stands today on concrete pylons built directly on a previous archeological dig. This marked the genesis of the heightened tensions that would continually boil over and spill onto the Abu Haikal’s land year after year.
The next year, the Abu Haikal family’s land was trespassed by settlers looking to establish religious significance on the land by praying on it, a tactical first step that often leads to the construction of a synagogue.
A few years later in 1991, the Israeli Army sent a formal letter to the family informing them that they were confiscating parts of their land (plot 54) for military purposes, which then was reconstructed into an army barracks. To this day, the Abu Haikal family has a military base in their backyard, a backyard that for generations has been cultivated by their family. Their field of family memories is now the staging grounds for night raids into Palestinian homes.
The following year, settlers brought a caravan to another corner of the Abu Haikal land (plot 53). Fortunately, they were able to halt the annexation of that plot – temporarily.
February 25, 1994, is a day that will live in infamy. The American-born, Jewish religious extremist Baruch Goldstein entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, killing 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounding another 125. The following day, the Israeli military responded by taking over the Mosque of the 40 Companions which had been on the land of the Abu Haikals for centuries. Their place of religious sanctuary was stripped out from underneath of them, even though it had little connection to the incident.
As the construction continued on the illegal settlement near their house and the Jewish extremist population of Hebron started to swell, the attacks on their land and family continued in frequency and heightened in intensity.
On July 2, 1998, Jewish settlers cut down three trees on their property and brought a bulldozer to uproot more, but the family was able to utilize the law and nonviolently halt the destruction of their property.
A year later, in July, the internet icon of settler violence in Hebron, Anat Cohen along with her children and eight settlers, trespassed on their property (plot 54) using a footpath between the Abu Haikal houses to the settlement. The Abu Haikal family objected and the settlers, as they had so many times before, resorted to violence. Escalations involving 40 settlers erupted, and a settler with a wooden stick bludgeoned Arwa Abu Haikal, seriously injuring her. Despite the trespassing settlers and the initial aggressions, it was the Abu Haikal family that was issued fines, having to pay 1,500 shekels.
The settlement expansion continued under the guidance of a familiar face: Emmanuel Eisenberg. Eisenberg was responsible for the oversight of the archeological dig that led to the illegal settlement of Ramat Yishai in Tel Rumeida.
Despite the years of attacks and threats of land confiscation, on Jan 22, 2000, the Abu Haikals renewed the rental agreement with the Israeli Authorities and paid a year in advance, keeping the hope that justice would be realized. Signing the protection tenancy wasn’t about the land for them, it was a commitment to resist the illegal settlement expansion, knowing that years of harassment and violence awaited them.
Within three months, 70 settlers had occupied their land inside a structure. The Abu Haikals again called the police to evict the settlers from their land. The rule of law prevailed in that moment, but the leniency, which borders on absolute impunity, led to almost 100 settlers again attacking the Abu Haikal family on their land. Again, it was the Abu Haikals who had to pay 3,000 shekels in the aftermath.
When the Second Intifada broke out in September 2002, the pressure cooker which is Tel Rumeida, was quickly turned into a strategic Israeli military asset, and homes overlooking the city had their rooftops transformed into lookout towers and sniper positions. The Call to Prayer, the spiritual serenade from the mosques on the hill top, was replaced by the sounds of bullets cutting through the air and rocketing through their neighbors’ houses. For the next three years, curfews would further restrict the ability of the Abu Haikal family and others to even leave their house and provide for their family.
Shortly after the Second Intifada erupted, Wadea Abu Haikal (age 16) was attacked on the street in front of the house, and the stones hurled by the settlers broke his nose. The soldiers explained they could not protect the family, and prevented them from accessing their front path to the road in front of the settlement.
The Israeli authority then approached the Abu Haikals about putting a fence around their plots of land (53, 52) to help keep out the settlers. The key to the gate was never handed over the family.
One month later, the Israeli authorities refused to accept their rent, and plots 53 and 52 were declared a closed military zone. The fruit orchards would soon bear their last harvest.
The same year in September, despite being a closed military zone, Israeli settlers celebrated Sukkot on plot 52, building a wooden structure associated with the holiday on their land. A few weeks later, the booth was dismantled by the Israeli authorities. The settlers responded to Faryel Abu Haikal’s petition to remove the illegal booth by attacking her on the way home from school where she worked.
During the 2002-03 military campaign, it was normal for the military to show up during the month of Ramadan, a holy time for Muslims who fast during the day and then at sunset, break their fast in communion with their family. Routinely the military showed up and pulled the family out of the house to disrupt their religious practices. The Abu Haikals creatively resisted, preparing tea and taking nuts and seeds with them as the guards sat them on the ground. They refused give up their tradition, their religious rights.
October 22, 2003 was a day that changed Arwa Abu Haikal’s life. A Palestinian was shot. Knowing that soldiers would quickly mobilize to shut down roads and lock down access paths to her home and that her younger siblings would need to be attended to, she left her work at Bab Al Zaweyah, a 20-minute walk up hill to her house. As she walked down the road, a soldier stopped her and held a gun to her head, threatening her life if she continued her walk to her home. Frightened, but undeterred, she continued, forcing the soldier to make the decision between murder and humanity. Shortly after, the IDF brigade besieged the house, dragging the family out onto the street. Her parents were unable to preempt the lockdown and had to wait until 1:30 am before the streets were reopened. As the parents waited anxiously, not knowing if their children were safe, the children sat by themselves outside the home in the cold and the dark. The Israeli military proceeded to unload round after round from their machine guns into the walls, furniture, closets, and cherished belongings while the family sat helplessly outside. Some of the holes remain today.
Two days later, the soldiers returned and took the mother of the household, Faryel, into a separate room and questioned her for four hours as the rest of the family sat helplessly.
The following year, the settlement expansion continued and Jewish extremists took control of the elderly Al Bakri couple’s home nearby. They later build structures on the Al Bakri garden. The close proximity to the Abu Haikal’s house led an increase in frequency of attacks on their home, forcing them to put metal cages around their windows.
“Our windows have been broken several times over the years, until finally we were forced to put metal grates around them,” said Faryel Abu Haikal. The Abu Haikal had to replace the windows with their home money, a situation unique to the occupation: the oppressed have to pay for the aggression of the oppressor.
The settlers found other ways to cause damage to the family’s home in the hopes of driving them off the land.
Settlers systematically razed the olive trees and stole their harvest. When their grape vines had matured, those too were consumed by the indifference of extreme Jewish ideology. Fires to their dried up field continued over the next several years. By 2006, half of the trees on plot 52 had been cut down and destroyed by settlers, and what was left had been burnt by almost continuous arson.
Two years later in December of 2009, the military entered the Abu Haikal house, pointing their guns in the face of the males in the room. The women of the house stood between the guns and their men. The soldiers responded with extreme force and attacked the family, many of whom were badly beaten. The four who had resisted the assault were arrested and had to pay a 1,000-shekel fine a piece.
Over the next four years, settlers held women’s Torah groups on plot 52, right outside the family’s salon, singing, discussing the Jewish heritage of the land, and praying in the hopes of establishing a synagogue.
The repeated attempts by Jewish settlers to establish claims to the land continued, as they planted 200 vine plants and an irrigation system on plot 52, forcing the Abu Haikal family to seek legal remedy. Again, they had to take time off from work, renegotiate responsibilities away from the home, and convince the Israeli police to intervene. After six long weeks the army removed the vines.
A short time later, Israeli soldiers helped settler children build a tree house in the big ancient olive tree on the Abu Haikal land, next to the soldiers look-out structure. It took the police three hours to remove the children.
In April of 2012, the settlers cut more trees on plot 52, again with the protection of soldiers. The Abu Haikals continued to advocate and speak up in the hopes that one day the international community would respond.
On January 5th, 2014, Emmanuel Eisenberg returned to attend to unfinished business. Settler “archaeologists” from the Israel Antiquities Authority and Ariel University moved onto plot 52 with a bulldozer and two containers. The Abu Haikal family protested, and Sami Abu Haikal was detained. The settlers uprooted all the almond trees immediately and began with the illegal excavations.
There was a small victory in the small Palestinian neighborhood in Tel Rumeida. In 2014, Israeli High Court granted possession and the return of Al Bakri family land . . . but ordered the family to pay the police the costs for 50 police officers to remove the settlers. The court would attempt to recover the cost of eviction from the Jewish settlers. That has yet to happen.
One month later, plot 53 was consumed by the archeological dig that was never about archeology, but rather the establishment of a biblical museum. On February 5th, 2014, the I.A.A. moved onto plot 53 with a bulldozer and uprooted all the cherry trees. It also blocked a well-used right-of-way and replaced it with a longer, narrow footpath around the edge of the property that descends a steep, precarious slope.
Despite their land being confiscated, a week and a half later the Abu Haikals paid their rent up to 2015 in order to confirm their continued legal ownership of the land. The money was accepted by the Israeli institution, but excavations continued.
On February 19th, 2014, settler archaeologists uncovered a Muslim grave built of stone slabs directly on the bedrock and oriented to Mecca. Contrary to best archaeological practices and religious principles, they removed the grave.
Despite a police injunction to stop working, on March 26th, Emmanuel Eisenberg and David Ben Shlomo supervised the destruction of another section of the retaining wall, representing the border between plots 54 and 53. The Mayor of Hebron, Dr. Dawood Al Zatari, visited the area and stated that he was going to pursue legal remedy to the confiscation of land. His words have yet to lead to action.
Even after 20 years of extreme, systematic and planned abuse built by detailed policy after policy, the Abu Haikals continue to resist, even though so many times the expansion around their land has continued.
This week they were able to risk their lives in order reinforce a police order to stop working. The police orders should have stopped work, but as Eisenberg has said so many times, he doesn’t “give a shit,” and reminded everyone that at the end of the day, “We will keep working. We are like the wagon that goes by the barking dog: The wagon keeps going and the dog keeps barking.”
May 31, 2014
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | Hebron, Israeli settlement, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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