On May 17, 2012, the Washington based Woodrow Wilson Center featured Amihai Ayalon in a book presentation: Peace Without Partners: Can Israeli Unilateralism Lead to a Two-State Solution?. The controversial topic provoked questions − did the book contain a genuine proposal for achieving peace or, was it only another distraction for those who desire a just solution to the Israeli/Palestinian crisis? Because hope is eternal, are Ami Ayalon’s words designed to keep it that way?
Ami Ayalon arrived with credentials; a former Labor Party member in the Israeli Knesset, he gains attention by having previously been commander-in-chief of the navy and head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret service. The former intelligence agent also arrived with publicity. His Blue White Future organization “that seeks to help achieve a two-state solution, and has developed a radical new unilateral approach to achieve this goal,” so as to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel and keep its blue/white Star of David flag, received space in a New York Times article: Peace Without Partners, By Ami Ayalon, Orni Petruschka and Gilead Sher, April 23, 2012
Add suspicion to the agenda. Note that other Labor party figures, identified with the “peace process,” fired up many and disillusioned all. Recall President Shimon Peres, “father” of the settlements, General and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, originator of “:break the bones of Palestinians” during the 1990 Intifada, and former Knesset member Yosef Beilin’s Geneva Initiative, “a permanent status agreement based on previous official negotiations, international resolutions, the Quartet Roadmap, the Clinton Parameters, and the Arab Peace Initiative,” whose program had no accomplishments. All were members of a Labor Party that, despite its calls for “peace initiatives,” promoted the settlements, the major obstacle to negotiations.
Ayalon’s Peace Without Partners approach maintains that the “greatest threat to the nation is disappearance of the Zionist entity. Israel needs to be a Jewish democracy with a majority of Jews. The children who have been raised with a narrative of 5000 years of Jewish history cannot be betrayed.” From these propositions, Blue White Future concludes that “peace requires two states.” Continuing the thoughts, he suggests that Palestinian leader “Abu Mazen cannot deliver what he promises because he lacks support from Arab heads of state. Nor can Israel promise what former Prime Minister Olmert proposed. Negotiations no longer exist. Only coordinated unilateralism, based on former United States President Clinton’s peace proposals, can resolve the crisis.”
The details of a six point plan
(1) Israel must take constructive steps to advance the two states based on the 1967 borders, with land swaps − regardless of whether Palestinian leaders agree to accept it.
(2) Israel should declare willingness to return to negotiations anytime and state that it has no claims to sovereignty on areas east of the existing security barrier. It should end all settlement construction east of the security barrier and in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
(3) Israel should also enact a voluntary evacuation, compensation and absorption law for settlers east of the fence, so that those who wish can begin relocating before there is an agreement with the Palestinians.
(4) Israel should develop a strategic plan to help 100,000 settlers who live east of the barrier to relocate within Israel’s recognized border.
(5) The IDF will remain in the West Bank until the conflict is officially resolved by a final-status agreement
(6) A Law of National referendum will decide the Israeli population acceptance of the plan.
Coordinated Palestinian acceptance will complete the process – two nations for two peoples and all disputes mutually resolved.
Another benefit − from this approach “the international community will see Israel as an honest player.”
A disingenuous plan, with built in obstacles
The “show stoppers” are so definitive that success with the plan is dubious.
Will any Israeli leader want to have his/her name recorded in history as acquiescing to the halt of the Israeli initiative to control all of Biblical Israel and having relinquished land to the Palestinians?
Ami Ayalon calmly states that “right of return” of any Palestinian refugee to Israel will not be permitted; refugees will return to the new Palestine nation. Will any Palestinian leader agree to that proposal? To them, the Palestinians outside of borderless Israel are not refugees; they are displaced persons who have been forced to live outside of their lands. The present West Bank cannot absorb new populations ─ insufficient agriculture, water, and employment prevent immigration of a large number of new people, and the authority will fear that the in-gathered Palestinians will be those who are most poor, most angry, most restless and most rebellious. In addition, the Palestinians in West Bank, Gaza, Lebanese and Syrian camps want to return to ancestral homes in Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, and hundreds of other ethnically cleansed villages in Israel. No more than someone removed from Philadelphia would consider returning to Akron, Ohio, will displaced Palestinians consider returning to a territory that is alien to them.
Will Israel cede claims of sovereignty on areas east of the existing security barrier? Prime Minister Netanyahu has declared, “Israel will never cede the Jordan Valley.” On March 2, 2010, the PM told a Knesset committee that the Jordan Valley’s “strategic location makes pullout impossible, even in a peace deal.”
An immediate question; why is Amihai Ayalon telling us this? His proposal has an air of uncertainty and a dreamlike quality. The proposal rests on convincing the Israeli government to proceed with the recommendations − a difficult, if not impossible task. What can Americans do about that, except hope and postpone other endeavors until the Israelis, if ever, proceed? Why is the Labor leader, who must have many associates in Israeli politics, not devoting all of his time and effort to convince his associates and government to start moving the proposition − at least halting new settlements and settler expansions − some small initiative to convince others that this concept has legs. Would not Israel, if it had any interest in the plan, want to show some good faith?
The thrust is singular − a Zionist perspective on only what is good for Israel and not what is good for reconciliation. It essentially legalizes the illegal land seizures and legitimizes the illegitimate actions. No consideration to “right” the “wrongs,” or to allow Palestinians to reclaim water rights, land rights, and human rights.
Most disturbing is the appearance that the Israeli children have been raised with a narrative of 5000 (?) years of Jewish history, rather than the actual sixty years of Israeli history. Archaeology and historical research have disproved the biblical myths of a united Jewish nation that commanded vast territory for centuries in the Levant. Academics lack historical evidence that supports the existence of the Torah’s Hebrew prophets or a common and connected history of Jews through millennia. Other than religious beliefs and some common customs, Falasha, Yemenites, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, German-American and other Jews have tenuous relations between each other. Relating modern day Israel to ancient tribes, as if the small tribe of a 5000 year-old Abraham walked the land only a few years ago, denies reality.
Careful examination of the proposal, as in most mighty dramas, reveals sub-text. The former Shin Bet leader has knowingly or carelessly framed a document of surrender. This plan serves as a floater, to gauge opinion of a treaty of surrender for the Palestinians, in which Israel unilaterally dictates the surrender terms. The terms may not be exactly as Ami Ayalon has specified, but then the Palestinians, who have sacrificed everything, must make some sacrifices. Expect the terms to be exactly as Israel wants them, with Jerusalem entirely Israeli, all major settlements incorporated into Israel, some unusable Israeli land given to the Palestinians for any loss in West Bank land, all Israeli roads and water provisions remaining as is for Israelis in the West Bank, and the Jordan Valley incorporated into Israel. There will be a new nation with defined borders, the nation of Israel; the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza can declare themselves one or two nations, as they want. Checkpoints will disappear and be replaced by border guards. A visa will be required to enter Israel, even if it is only for passing through new Israeli territory to re-enter Palestinian territory. This will include traversing the Jordan valley to reach Jordan. West Bank Palestinians will be more landlocked and less able to move than brethren in Gaza.
The drama of Peace Without Partners is not much different than that of Partners Without Peace. The characters and their actors are the same. The backdrop and scenery are the same. The plot is identical. The script has been modified, but still controlled by the same director. Without a change in action, the ending will be the same − and there is no discernible change in action.
There is a lot of talk about Israel as the State for Jews being bad for Jews worldwide, engendering increasing anti-Israel as well as anti-Jewish sentiment, but I submit that it is primarily bad for Jewish Power, the so-called Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), insofar as it throws an unwelcome spotlight on it. There have always been subscribers to the Protocols but until relatively recently they have been easily dismissed if not ostracized as anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, and Jews have managed to restrict the gentile book-keeping of influential Jews to counting the Jews on the Nobel Prize winners list.
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians whose land they took over has been beyond despicable from the very beginnings of the state yet a well-organized hasbara has managed to inculcate into the minds of the Western Goyim the dichotomy: Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims = terrorists vs Israeli Jews = peace-loving, long-suffering victims. Not so anymore. Israel is no longer seen as even a “legitimate” state but a rogue nuclear power, a racist, expansionist war criminal and war monger. Of more concern, in attracting scrutiny of its successful flouting of international laws, it has led to an examination of what exactly allows it to act with complete impunity. It has exposed the lines of power that move the governments of the major world powers, like puppets on a string, to act as its enablers, indeed as its agents. The lines are now seen by more people than ever before to lead to the Jewish lobbies, to the ZPC, which does not reside in Israel, but permeates the power centers of the US and the UK, and not only.
The ZPC needs Israel, the flag under which the sayanim can be rallied to march in lockstep (notwithstanding the minor kvetchings that serve to depict “plurality” and “diversity” of Jewish opinion) and to do its work in the “diaspora.” Without Israel the very useful concept of “diaspora” could not exist and the Jews might take it into their heads that they are nationals and citizens of their own countries first, foremost and last. Israel is a boon for the ZPC.
But what kind of Israel would serve the ZPC best? Definitely not the one in existence. The Palestinian “problem” has not only refused to go away in more than six decades, it has in fact grown due to Israel’s egregious actions (and its lack of action) into an impossible to hide or paper over hideous contradiction of Israel’s hasbara posters of itself. More and more people, organizations and governments worldwide are reacting to the reality staring them in the face, and concerted Jewish blackmail or cajoling is not making them back down any more. Israel is a bane to the ZPC.
These facts are recognized by the likes of big ZPC movers and shakers like Soros and by new Jewish organizations like J Street, who seek to address them, while the old guard — AIPAC, ADL and its dershes refuse to do so, not only because they think it can still be all made to go away with the old “anti-Semitism!” cudgel, but also because, on a personal level, they fear the new gang would eventually make them unclasp their paws from the high branch on which they have been perched for so long.
The ZPC needs an Israel it can both wave to the Sayanim as the heart-touching symbol, the call to arms, the reproach, the unity symbol, the house that Yad Vashem built, as well as a world-wide salable story of the success of Jews–a nation like any other (just a little bit more so…), peace-loving (say Shalom loudly and say it often), long-suffering, democratic, moral and just.
If that is what the ZPC needs then they must think that Israel is run by complete idiots. Their idiots but catastrophic idiots nonetheless. Their inability to solve the Palestine problem in the simplest and most advantageous way is proof of it.
What would happen if Israel became one state legally, not just militarily and, where it really counts, de facto, as it is now, and if the Palestinian refugees who wished to return would be allowed to do so? The Jews may become a minority in Israel. So? Is it a problem for the ZPC and indeed for Jews in the US and the UK that they are a tiny minority there? Why would it be a problem in Israel? The “demographic bomb” nonsense ignores the reality of Jewish Power. Were Jews to become a minority in a putative Palestine-Israel state, their status might well emerge elevated for all practical and political purposes. They would become the minority to watch for and protect like nobody’s business. What’s not to like in this?
Attractions for the Israeli Jews in the new Formerly Known as Israel (FKI) state: they can have a Jewish Lobby there, and an ADL too! Jewish historians will be busy writing a Revised Revisionist history, recounting their ethnic cleansing in the FKI state during which, say, 600,000 Jews disappeared. They can have it all, the same, yet new and cleaned up.
Most of all, the highly inconvenient spotlight on the Jewish Power worldwide could be turned off and everything would be business as usual again quietly. Critics of the ZPC, of any and all its aspects, from the international banking to the media ownership and the political levers of power in the governments of the major powers will more easily be made into crass “anti-Semites” again.
Israel could stop being a bane for the ZPC if only the ZPC “deciders” were really as smart as they are supposed to be, according to the ethnic hype. This is just a Goyische opinion but it is offered freely to Zionist plagiarists.
The problem facing the Palestinian leadership, as they strive to bring the millions living in the occupied territories some small relief from their collective suffering, amounts to a matter of a few words. A bit like a naughty child who has only to say “Sorry” to be released from his room, the Hamas government need only say “We recognise Israel” and supposedly aid and international goodwill will wash over the West Bank and Gaza.
That, at least, was the gist of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s recent speech during a visit to the Negev, when he suggested that his country’s hand was outstretched across the sands towards the starving masses of Gaza — if only Hamas would repent. “Recognise us and we are ready to talk about peace” was the implication.
Certainly the Palestinian people have been viciously punished for making their democratic choice early this year to elect a Hamas government that Israel and the Western powers disapprove of. An economic blockade has been imposed, starving the Palestinian Authority (PA) of income to pay for services and remunerate its large workforce. Millions of dollars in tax monies owed to the Palestinians have been illegally withheld by Israel, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. A physical blockade of Gaza enforced by Israel has prevented the Palestinians from exporting their produce, mostly perishable crops, and from importing essentials like food and medicine. Israeli military strikes have damaged Gaza’s vital infrastructure, including the supply of electricity and water, as well as randomly killing its inhabitants. And thousands of families are being torn apart as Israel uses the pretext of its row with Hamas to freeze the visas of Palestinian foreign passport holders.
The magic words “We recognise you” could end all this suffering, so why not utter them? Is Hamas so filled with hatred and loathing for Israel as a Jewish state that it cannot make such a simple statement of good intent? Is the Palestinians’ recalcitrance not proof that they still want to drive the Jews into the sea?
It is easy to forget that, though conditions have dramatically deteriorated of late, the Palestinians’ problems did not start with the election of Hamas. Israel’s occupation is four decades old, and no Palestinian leader has ever been able to extract from Israel a promise of real statehood in all of the occupied territories: not the mukhtars, the largely compliant local leaders, who for decades were the only representatives allowed to speak on behalf of the Palestinians after the national leadership was expelled; not the PA under the secular leadership of Yasser Arafat, who returned to the occupied territories in the mid-1990s after the Palestine Liberation Organisation had recognised Israel; not the leadership of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” who first called for an end to the armed Intifada; and now not the leaders of Hamas, even though they have repeatedly called for a long-term truce ( hudna ) as the first step in building confidence.
Similarly, few Palestinians doubt that Israel will continue to entrench the occupation — just as it did during the supposed peacemaking years of Oslo, when the number of Jewish settlers doubled in the occupied territories — even if Hamas is ousted and a government of national unity, of technocrats or even of Fatah, takes its place.
There is far more at stake for Israel in winning this little concession from Hamas than most observers appreciate. A statement saying that Hamas recognised Israel would do much more than meet Israel’s precondition for talks; it would mean that Hamas had walked into the same trap that was set earlier for Arafat and Fatah. That trap is designed to ensure that any peaceful solution to the conflict is impossible.
It achieves this end in two ways.
First, as has already been understood, at least by those paying attention, Hamas’s recognition of Israel’s “right to exist” would effectively signify that the Palestinian government was publicly abandoning its own goal of struggling to create a viable Palestinian state.
That is because Israel refuses to demarcate its own future borders, leaving it an open question what it considers to be the extent of its “existence” it is demanding Hamas recognise. We do know that no one in the Israeli leadership is talking about a return to Israel’s borders that existed before the 1967 war, or probably anything close to it.
Without a return to those pre-1967 borders (plus a substantial injection of goodwill from Israel in ensuring unhindered passage between Gaza and the West Bank) no possibility exists of a viable Palestinian state ever emerging.
And no goodwill, of course, will be forthcoming. Every Israeli leader has refused to recognise the Palestinians, first as a people and now as a nation. And in the West’s typically hypocritical fashion when dealing with the Palestinians, no one has ever suggested that Israel commit to such recognition.
In fact, Israeli governments have glorified in their refusal to extend the same recognition to the Palestinians that they demand from them. Famously Golda Meir, a Labour prime minister, said that the Palestinians did not exist, adding in 1971 that Israel’s “borders are determined by where Jews live, not where there is a line on a map.” At the same time she ordered that the Green Line, Israel’s border until the 1967 war, be erased from all official maps.
That legacy hit the headlines last week when the dovish education minister, Yuli Tamir, caused a storm by issuing a directive that the Green Line should be reintroduced in Israeli schoolbooks. There were widespread protests against her “extreme leftist ideology” from politicians and rabbis, and many schools said they would refuse to comply.
According to Israeli educators, the chances of textbooks showing the Green Line again — or dropping references to “Judea and Samaria”, the Biblical names for the West Bank, or including Arab towns on maps of Israel — are close to nil. The private publishers who print the textbooks would refuse to incur the extra costs of reprinting the maps, said Professor Yoram Bar-Gal, head of geography at Haifa University.
Sensitive to the damage that the row might do to Israel’s international image, and aware that Tamir’s directive is never likely to be implemented, Olmert agreed in principle to the change. “There is nothing wrong with marking the Green Line,” he said. But in a statement that made his agreement entirely hollow, he added: “But there is an obligation to emphasise that the government’s position and public consensus rule out returning to the 1967 lines.”
The second element to the trap is far less well understood. It explains the strange formulation of words Israel uses in making its demand of Hamas. Israel does not ask it simply to “recognise Israel”, but to “recognise Israel’s right to exist”. The difference is not a just matter of semantics.
The concept of a state having any rights is not only strange but also alien to international law. People have rights, not states. And that is precisely the point: when Israel demands that its “right to exist” be recognised, the subtext is that we are not speaking of recognition of Israel as a normal nation state but as the state of a specific people, the Jews.
In demanding recognition of its right to exist, Israel is ensuring that the Palestinians agree to Israel’s character being set in stone as an exclusivist Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of Jews over all other ethnic, religious and national groups inside the same territory. The question of what such a state entails is largely glossed over both by Israel and the West.
For most observers, it means simply that Israel must refuse to allow the return of the millions of Palestinians languishing in refugee camps throughout the region, whose former homes in Israel have now been appropriated for the benefit of Jews. Were they allowed to come back, Israel’s Jewish majority would be eroded overnight and it could no longer claim to be a Jewish state, except in the same sense that apartheid South Africa was a white state.
This conclusion is apparently accepted by Romano Prodi, Italy’s prime minister, after a round of lobbying in European capitals by Israel’s telegenic foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. According to The Jerusalem Post last week, Prodi is saying in private that Israel should receive guarantees from the Palestinians that its Jewish character will never be in doubt.
Israeli officials are cheering what they believe is the first crack in Europe’s support for international law and the rights of Palestinian refugees. “It’s important to get everyone on the same page on this one,” an official told the Post.
But in truth the consequences of the Palestinian leadership recognising Israel as a Jewish state run far deeper than the question of the future of Palestinian refugees. In my book Blood and Religion, I set out these harsh consequences both for the Palestinians in the occupied territories and for the million or so Palestinians who live inside Israel as citizens, supposedly with the same rights as Jewish citizens.
My argument is that this need to maintain Israel’s Jewish character at all costs is actually the cause of its conflict with the Palestinians. No solution is possible as long as Israel insists on privileging citizenship for Jews above other groups, and on distorting the region’s territorial and demographic realities to ensure that the numbers continue to weigh in the Jews’ favour.
Although ultimately the return of Palestinian refugees poses the biggest threat to Israel’s “existence”, Israel has a far more pressing demographic concern: the refusal by the Palestinians living in the West Bank to leave the parts of that territory Israel covets (and which it knows by the Biblical names of Judea and Samaria).
Within a decade, the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the million Palestinian citizens living inside Israel will outnumber Jews, both those living in Israel and the settlers in the West Bank.
That was one of the chief reasons for the “disengagement” from Gaza: Israel could claim that, even though it is still occupying the small piece of land militarily, it was no longer responsible for the population there. By withdrawing a few thousand settlers from the Strip, 1.4 million Gazans were instantly wiped from the demographic score sheet.
But though the loss of Gaza has postponed for a few years the threat of a Palestinian majority in the expanded state Israel desires, it has not magically guaranteed Israel’s continuing existence as a Jewish state. That is because Israel’s Palestinian citizens, though a minority comprising no more than a fifth of Israel’s population, can potentially bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.
For the past decade they have been demanding that Israel be reformed from a Jewish state, which systematically discriminates against them and denies their Palestinian identity, into a “state of all its citizens”, a liberal democracy that would give all citizens, Jews and Palestinians, equal rights.
Israel has characterised the demand for a state of all its citizens as subversion and treason, realising that, were the Jewish state to become a liberal democracy, Palestinian citizens could justifiably demand: the right to marry Palestinians from the occupied territories and from the Diaspora, winning them Israeli citizenship — “a right of return through the backdoor” as officials call it; the right to bring Palestinian relatives in exile back to their former homes in Israel under a Right of Return programme that would be a pale shadow of the existing Law of Return that guarantees any Jew anywhere in the world the automatic right to Israeli citizenship.
To prevent the first threat, Israel passed a flagrantly racist law in 2003 that makes it all but impossible for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to bring a Palestinian spouse to Israel. For the time being, such couples have little choice but to seek asylum abroad, if other countries will give them refuge.
But like the Gaza disengagement, this piece of legislation is a delaying tactic rather than a solution to the problem of Israel’s “existence”. So behind the scenes Israel has been formulating ideas that taken together would remove large segments of Israel’s Palestinian population from its borders and strip any remaining “citizens” of their political rights unless they swear loyalty to a “Jewish and democratic state” and thereby renounce their demand that Israel reform itself into a liberal democracy.
This is the bottom line for a Jewish state, just as it was for a white apartheid South Africa: if we are to survive, then we must be able to do whatever it takes to keep ourselves in power, even if it means systematically violating the human rights of all those we rule over and who do not belong to our group.
Ultimately, the consequences of Israel being allowed to remain a Jewish state will be felt by all of us, wherever we live, and not only because of the fallout from continuing and growing anger in the Arab and Muslim worlds at the double standards applied by the West to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Given Israel’s view that its most pressing interest is not peace or regional accommodation with its neighbours but the need to ensure a Jewish majority at all costs to protect its “existence”, Israel is likely to act in ways that endanger regional and global stability.
A small taste of that was offered in Israel’s cheerleading of the invasion of Iraq, during the build-up in 2002 and 2003, and its assault on Lebanon this summer. But it is most evident in its drumbeat of war against Iran.
Israel has been leading attempts to characterise the Iranian regime as profoundly anti-Semitic, and its presumed nuclear ambitions as directed by the sole goal of wanting to “wipe Israel off the map” — a calculatedly mischievous mistranslation of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech.
Most observers have assumed that Israel is genuinely concerned for its safety from nuclear attack, however implausible the idea that even the most fanatical Muslim regime would, unprovoked, launch nuclear missiles against a small area of land that contains some of Islam’s holiest sites, in Jerusalem.
But in truth there is another reason why Israel is concerned about a nuclear-armed Iran that has nothing to do with conventional ideas about safety.
Last month, Ephraim Sneh, one of Israel’s most distinguished generals, a senior member of the Labour party and now Olmert’s deputy defence minister, revealed that the government’s primary concern was not the threat posed by Ahmadinejad firing nuclear missiles at Israel but the effect of Iran’s possession of such weapons on Jews who expect Israel to have a monopoly on the nuclear threat.
If Iran got such weapons, “Most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad will … I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That’s why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs.”
In other words, the Israeli government is considering either its own pre-emptive strike on Iran or encouraging the United States to undertake such an attack — despite the terrible consequences for global security — simply because a nuclear- armed Iran might make Israel a less attractive place for Jews to live, lead to increased emigration and tip the demographic balance in the Palestinians’ favour.
Regional and possibly global war may be triggered simply to ensure that Israel’s “existence” as a state that offers exclusive privileges to Jews continues.
For all our sakes, we must hope that the Palestinians and their Hamas government continue refusing to “recognise Israel’s right to exist”.
* Jonathon Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth. His book Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State is published by Pluto Press.
‘Get some new lawyers.’ — 1999: Then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook on his assertion that the bombing of Balkan States was illegal under international law.
In this sixteenth anniversary year of Madeleine Albright stating her endorsement of half a million child sacrifices at the altar of the UN Embargo on Iraq as a “price worth it”, this silent holocaust is to be commemorated annually.
In New Haven, Ct., On 12th May, marking the day of Albright’s infamous broadcast, a banner was unfurled and a minute’s silence held as the Middle East Crisis Committee, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CT), the Tree of Life Education Fund and We Refuse to be Enemies, inaugurated the first Iraq Genocide Memorial Day.
Stanley Heller, Chair of the Middle East Crisis Committee commented: “This horrific loss of life was ignored for six years until the US Ambassador to the UN appeared on ’60 Minutes’ and admitted the deaths of half a million children … We in the Middle East Crisis Committee call for May 12th to be marked as Iraq Genocide Memorial Day.”
Iraq’s children of course, continued to die at an average of six thousand a month until the illegal 2003 invasion wrought further apocalyptic disaster. Currently many hospitals are assessed as even more woeful than under the embargo, thus they continue to die in a near forgotten tragedy of UN-US-UK making. Soaring cancers and birth deformities linked to weapons used in the 1991 bombings, twelve years of subsequent bombings, 2003 and the following years have exacerbated and compounded a tragedy of enormity.
As others accused of crimes against humanity and the peace end up at the International Criminal Court (but so far, only if black or Eastern European, it seems) Albright gathers a bizarre collection of “humanitarian” awards.
One of the strangest is surely the Freedom Award from the International Rescue Committee, initiated by Albert Einstein which: “responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people survive and rebuild their lives (offering) lifesaving care and life-changing assistance …” Endorsing infanticide hardly falls within the IRC’s lofty stated aspirations.
Two years after her statement on disposable children, Albright, now having abandoned further tarnishing the United Nations fine founding aspirations, to become US Secretary of State, declared (February 1998) : “Iraq is a long way from (here), but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.”
A year later, the 1999 razing of much of the Balkans became known as “Madeleine’s war.” The largely unrecognized nation of Kosova, carved from that decimation is now rated one of the most corrupt and lawless countries in the region and high in world ranking, according to December 2011 findings by Transparency International.
Talking after the virtual destruction of Iraq as a nation state, it’s records, government institutions bombed, looted, stolen, she told Jim Lehrer in September 2003: “ … I think we actually … kept him (Saddam Hussein) in a strategic box. We bombed very much if you remember all the maps, always in terms of North and South — covers a great portion of Iraq. I think we had him in the box.” No mention that both the bombing and the “box” were comprehensively illegal.
As ever, the majority of “bombed” victims were Iraq’s children for whom her contempt was seemingly boundless: small rural shepherds and goat herders tending the family flocks on the vast flat tundra, with no place to hide.
One politician with whom she had sparred did take a stand in vast contrast. Robin Cook, Britain’s Foreign Secretary resigned in protest two days before the invasion. His resignation speech in Parliament on 18th March 2003 was a searing indictment of stark double standards on dealing with Iraq. Deliberate selective perception which could now equally apply to threats to Iran:
“I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but twelve years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted”, he began.
“Yet it is more than thirty years since (UN) Resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
“We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.”
He talked of: “ … the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.”
Britain’s credibility was not: “helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.
“That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.
And as Iran now, he pleaded that: “Inspections be given a chance (that the UK was) “being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own.
He asked for the halt of: “commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support” and ended: “I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action. It is for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.”
On the first anniversary of the invasion he stated in Parliament: “It seems only too likely that the judgment of history may be that the invasion of Iraq has been the biggest blunder in British foreign and security policy in the half century since Suez. “In truth we would have made more progress in rolling back support for terrorism if we had brought peace to Palestine rather than war to Iraq.”
Robin Cook died of a heart complication whilst hill walking on remote Ben Stack in Scotland, coincidentally within a swathe of land owned by the Duke of Westminster, a Major General and at the time Assistant Chief of Defence Staff, who visited British held Basra a number of times after the invasion.
His death was on the 6th August, 2005, Hiroshima Day and the fifteenth anniversary of the imposition of the all denying embargo on Iraq. A price Robin Cook had clearly not thought “worth it.”
It has to be hoped that Iraq Genocide Memorial Day spreads worldwide both in memory of those abandoned by the inspiring words committed to in the UN Charter, the numerous hidden casualties, dead and alive – and as a reminder that for a great swathe of the world, mortifyingly, it is the West which appears to be increasingly despotic.
– Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist with special knowledge of Iraq. Author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of Baghdad in the Great City series for World Almanac books, she has also been Senior Researcher for two Award winning documentaries on Iraq, John Pilger’s Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq and Denis Halliday Returns for RTE (Ireland.)
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recently issued its weekly report on Israeli violations in the occupied territory for the period between 9- 15 of May, revealing that Israeli soldiers shot at least 370 Palestinians during the Nakba commemoration, and continued their violations in the West bank and the Gaza Strip.
The report indicated that the number of Palestinians injured by Israeli fire since the beginning of this year has reached 1,339, adding that the rate of injuries is 69 a week, comparing to 28 a week last year.
Most of the injuries took place when the soldiers attacked Nakba protests on May 15, especially the protests that were held near the Qalandia terminal, north of Jerusalem, and the Ofer prison terminal near Ramallah.
OCHA further stated that Israel demolished seven Palestinian buildings under the claim that they were built without construction permits.
It said that 27 Palestinians were also injured during a weekly protest against Israeli restrictions preventing Palestinian farmers from reaching their lands near the Qadumim settlement, built on lands that belong to residents of Qalqilia, in the northern part of the West Bank.
OCHA also said that Israeli settlers carried out several attacks against the residents and their lands, leading to several injuries while Israeli settlers cut more than 430 trees, including at least 280 olive trees near Nablus, Salfit and Bethlehem.
The Office said that Israeli settlers cut at least 3,070 trees since the beginning of 2012 (most of them are olive trees), and injured 50 residents.
As for the destruction of property, OCHA stated that, during the reported period, Israel demolished seven Palestinian-owned livelihood structures affecting 40 Palestinians. The buildings are in Burqa in the Nablus district, Al-Jalama near Jenin, and Husan near Bethlehem, in addition to the destruction of a water cistern and the foundations of a house under construction in Beit Hanina neighborhood in East Jerusalem; Israel also issued demolition orders against Palestinian houses in Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem.
According to OCHA, Israel demolished 285 Palestinian buildings displacing 477 Palestinians, which is a %25 increase comparing structures demolished in 2011.
Israeli soldiers also shot and wounded more than eight Palestinians near the border with Israel, in the Gaza Strip during the reported week. The residents were treated for the effects to teargas inhalation when the soldiers targeted them for “approaching the security fence”; the residents were working in their own lands.
OCHA said that 29 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip and 155 were injured since the beginning of this year.
The Israeli Navy also continued its restrictions and attacks against Palestinian fishermen, as Israel continued to limit the fishing area allotted to Gaza fishermen for only three nautical miles. During the period of this weekly report, the Navy detained fishermen and confiscated their boats; the fishermen were released but the fishing boats remained with Israel.
Fuel shortages and power outages in Gaza continued to hinder the lives of 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza, while the Gaza Power Plant is only producing 25 megawatts of the needed 80 megawatts.
Fuel smuggling into Gaza via siege-busting tunnels this week was less that %15 of the 800,000 – one million liters of diesel and benzene that used to enter Gaza regularly each day prior the onset of fuel crisis in 2011.
The Palestinian Fishermen Syndicate said that the number of fishing trips conducted in recent months witnessed a sharp decrease (less than four trips a month for each fishing boat) compared to 15 trips a month.
It is worth mentioning that more than 65,000 Palestinians depend on fishing as their only source of livelihood in the Gaza Strip but are suffering due to increased Israeli restrictions. In April, Gaza fishermen fished 99.6 Tons.
Please follow the link for the comprehensive report issued by OCHA in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are likely to visit a West Bank tomb in the coming year, after a Jerusalem court awarded two rabbis legal and administrative control over it in contravention of international law.
Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus is in the part of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords assigned to full Palestinian control.
Consequently, the Israel Defense Forces officially have no jurisdiction in the area and any Israeli involvement there is illegal.
However Israeli court judge Rabbi Haim Rosenthal ruled that rabbis Shlomo Ben-Shimon and Mordechai Gross, who head the settler organization Shechem Ehad (One Nablus), are the “representatives entitled to appear, legally and publicly, before any court or institution on matters connected to” the tomb, according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The court granted the two rabbis sole control over the area for the next 18 months, after which it will review the decision.
Currently over 20,000 Jews visit the tomb a year, as it is open from midnight to 4am once a month, but the decision could see that number increase to hundreds of thousands.
In their application, the two rabbis argued that the 20,000 limit “doesn’t at all satisfy the enormous demand.”
The court had previously refused the request, and the decision will be seen as yet another abuse of Palestinian autonomy.
The decision is likely to enrage Palestinians who already suffer an ongoing occupation of the West Bank.
Netanel Shnir, another key figure in Shechem Ehad, was quoted in November 2010 as saying that the ultimate goal of the group was to get Jews to return to Nablus “to settle there and inherit the land.”
Israel continues to encourage the development of illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank, despite condemnation from the United Nations, the European Union, and rights groups.
The Jewish state refuses to accept Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank, maintaining an illegal occupation in the area while upholding a siege on Gaza.
GAZA — Seven Palestinian citizens were wounded to the east of Gaza city on Thursday in Israeli artillery shelling of the area, medical sources reported.
Adham Abu Salmiya, the spokesman for emergency and ambulance services in Gaza, told the PIC reporter that two of the casualties were in serious condition.
He added that three of the wounded were old men, adding that the casualties were taken to Shifa hospital in moderate condition except the abovementioned two.
The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) fired a number of artillery shells at civilian neighborhoods and farmlands east of Shujaia suburb in Gaza city.
IOF soldiers earlier on Thursday raided southern and northern Gaza Strip areas, firing at random and bulldozing land.
Local sources in Khan Younis, south of the Strip, said that eight IOF armored vehicles infiltrated 800 meters into Fakhari area and bulldozed land amidst indiscriminate shooting.
Other IOF units raided northern Beit Lahia town to the north of the Strip while firing at farmers tending to their land.
Abu Salmiya said that no casualties were reported in the northern area despite earlier news of one casualty among the farmers.
On May 10, the BBC released the results of its annual Global survey of world nations and how their influence is viewed by 24,090 participants from 27 nations. The participants were asked to rate the influence of each of 16 nations and the EU as “mostly positive” or “mostly negative”.
According to the survey – Germany received top positive views followed by Britain, Japan and Canada – while Iran received the highest negative views (55%, improved from last years’ 59%), followed by Pakistan (51%), North Korea (50%) and Israel (50%, up from 40% in 2010).
Among EU nations, Spain topped the negative opinion of Israel (74%), followed by Germany (69%), Britain (68%) and France (65%).
The United States, Nigeria and Kenya gave Israel more positive views than the rest of nations surveyed. In Canada, the negative ratings increased from 52% to 59% – while in Australia it went up from 58% to 65%. Israel received the highest negative opinion in Egypt (95%)and Turkey (73%).
The BBC survey paints a darker picture about Israel than the results of a survey conducted by the pro-Israel group, ADL, in March 2012. It revealed that a significant majority of Europeans believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than the countries they live in.
Israel’s rise in unpopularity confirms Israel’s Reut Institute 2010 report – which warned the Netanyahu government of the ‘delegitimization’ of the Zionist entity.
“There are two main generators of attacks on Israel’s legitimacy. The Resistance Network – which operates on the basis of Islamist ideology and includes Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas; and the Delegitimization Network – which operates in the international arena in order to negate Israel’s right to exist and includes individuals and organizations in the West, which are catalyzed by the radical left,” noted the report.
Members of the Palestinian media today demonstrated in Gaza City to draw attention to violence against journalists, particularly the case of Mohammad Othman, shot by Israeli soldiers while covering the Al Nakba commemoration at the Erez crossing a year ago.
The protestors gathered outside the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, where they held a press conference, then marched to the UNESCO Offices.
Mohammad Othman was targeted by Israeli soldiers at the Erez checkpoint while he was carrying out his professional duties as a journalist. He received severe wounds to his back, and required medical treatment in Turkey. He still suffers the effects of his injuries.
Despite attempts by the journalists union to have the person/s responsible for his injuries held to account, the Israeli authorities have not investigated the matter, or held anyone responsible.
The protestors called on the Palestinian Human Rights Centre and the United Nations to take up the matter, as the deliberate shooting by Israeli forces of a journalist carrying out his professional duties is a crime that must be investigated, and punished.
“Israeli impunity for such crimes against journalists must end,” they said. “Othman was only taking pictures in his professional capacity when he was brutally and deliberately shot.”
The week leading up to the 64th commemoration of Nakba Day, the city of Ramallah witnessed a blitz of protests which were echoed in other Palestinian cities such as Gaza, Nablus, and Jerusalem. The deal to end the hunger strike on the eve of Nakba led to a more subdued commemoration then was expected.
The mass hunger strike that began on April 17, with an estimated 2,500 Palestinian prisoners participating, was the largest of its kind and had entered its fourth week. Eight of the hunger strikers had entered their third consecutive month without food.
Small protests at the Israeli prison of Ofer in west Ramallah took place daily, with the Israeli army typically responding with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Every day, the city center witnessed multiple marches, with marchers calling on shopkeepers to close their stores and join them as they headed back to the point they started from: the prisoners’ solidarity tent at Clock Square.
On some occasions, huge traffic jams were caused by the protesters who blocked the main streets as they sat on the ground, chanting and holding up posters and pictures of prisoners.
Other creative ways of demonstrating to raise awareness about the prisoners’ struggle included offering water and salt to people, as a reminder that these two elements were all that the prisoners were surviving on during their hunger strike.
Frustration was vented at the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership as well. Protesters almost managed to enter the PA compound of al-Muqata, calling out against the leadership’s compliant silence.
During a Europe Day celebration, a small of group of protesters and mothers of prisoners expressed their wishes to have their sons back home and their disappointment in the PA’s lack of action to Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who responded in the well-rehearsed manner of any politician paying lip service to a cause.
During PA president Mahmoud Abbas’ brief visit to the prisoners’ solidarity tent in al-Bireh last Thursday, protesters who had unfurled posters exposing Abbas’ silence on the hunger strikes were attacked by undercover policemen both physically and verbally. Despite an array of media cameras in the tent, only one outlet covered the incident.Last Wednesday, the UN building in Ramallah was effectively shut down by protesters for the whole day. Protesters, who were barred from entering the building, called on secretary general Ban Ki Moon to take a more assertive stance regarding the Palestinian prisoners, in accordance with the third and fourth Geneva Conventions that Israel regularly violates.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) buildings in Gaza and Ramallah were both shut down, and a protest took place in front of the office of the Quartet on the Middle East in Jerusalem.
For the first time in a long time, Palestinians were united on the street, regardless of their political factions, and perhaps disregarding them. The prisoners proved they had the potential to unite the people and overstep the PA regime’s political normalization with Israel. Chants of “Why the security coordination while your people are getting shot at by the Israeli army” and “Oslo is long gone! We have returned to the struggle!” referring to the signing of the disastrous Oslo Accords in 1993, reverberated through the streets.
Nakba Eve
On the eve of Nakba Day, the mood was electric in anticipation of the commemoration events. It seemed like it wasn’t clear who most feared the potential explosive zenith the hunger strikers had managed to bring out – the PA (with Abbas begging Israel to allow the PA to have more weapons to maintain ‘security’) or Israel, who had taken extreme measures in preparation for suppressing the Nakba protests.
In the early morning hours of May 15, confirmation of a deal between the hunger strikers and the Israeli Prison Authorities (IPA) was heard. The mass hunger strikers, who had gone 28 days without food, succeeded in achieving almost all of their demands, which included three main calls: an end to administrative detention, an end to solitary confinement (19 prisoners have spent years living in a tiny cell by themselves), and the right to family visits.
All administrative detainees, held without charge or trial, are to be released once their detention expires without having their detention renewed. Family visits will be reinstated within a month, a great relief for families from Gaza, who haven’t seen their sons, brothers, and fathers since 2007.
The longest hunger strikers in the history of Palestine, Bilal Thiab and Thaer Halahleh (77 days), as well as Hasan Safadi (71 days) and Omar Abu Shalal (69 days) all agreed to end their strike on the basis of the same agreement the administrative detainees agreed to.
Diffusing Hunger
The hunger strikers had triumphed. Yet the role of the PA and its frantic collusion with Israel to reach a deal ahead of Nakba Day is certainly questionable. The charged atmosphere was effectively diffused.
As a result, Nakba Day in the West Bank lost its unique potential to spark an uprising and instead panned out like any other commemoration. In Nablus, a branch of the International Solidarity Movement for Palestinians (ISM) went to the Huwarra checkpoint to demonstrate, catching the Israeli soldiers there off-guard. The demonstration wasn’t announced because when they did that last year, the PA was quick to suppress them.One protester, identified only as Beesan, told Al-Akhbar that “the group of around 30 protesters was forced to retreat by the army. Huwarra checkpoint was sealed shut, meaning no one could go in or out of Nablus. As the protesters made their way back to Nablus, PA security forces followed them in their cars, and kept calling the director of the ISM branch Wael al-Faqih to disband the protest.”
One of the villages in the Ramallah governate, Ni’lin, tasted a small victory before being suppressed by the Israeli army. Protesters went to the village early in the morning and managed to cross through the checkpoint to the other side where the town of Ramleh, ethnically cleansed in 1948, lies. Ramleh, which used to be home to thousands of Palestinians, now has a Jewish majority and is part of Israel. Israeli occupation forces dispersed the protesters with tear gas and arrested Naji Tamimi from Nabi Saleh, who has only just been released after a year in Israeli jail on March 1st.
In Ramallah, thousands of people marched from Yasser Arafat’s grave in Muqata to Clock Square, where singers sang nationalistic songs and politicians congratulated the hunger strikers on their victory.
Another Day of Protests
Hundreds made their way to Ofer prison, in the largest demonstration there yet. The Israeli army surrounded the protesters from three sides and fired large amounts of tear gas canisters, which forced the majority of protesters to remain at a distance from the jail.
Persistent protesters managed to get close to the soldiers and were chanting against the occupation, but had to scatter on more than one occasion when the soldiers brought out the skunk truck and began firing plastic covered steel bullets.
At Qalandiya checkpoint, a smaller protest was quickly quelled by the Israeli army, and one man was taken immediately to hospital after being shot at with live ammunition.
In essence, it was just another protest at Ofer or Qalandiya, disconnected from the heavy inference that May 15 holds for Palestinians. The right of return assertions and chants were eclipsed by the general chants against the occupation, and occasionally for the prisoners whose cause is still not over yet.
The prospective spark for an uprising on Nakba Day did not happen, but the struggle remains. 4,600 prisoners still languish in Israeli jails, the right of return has not yet been achieved, and that the stage is still set for an uprising against the occupation.
Two apparent US drone attacks killed at least 10 people in Yemen on Saturday, while Yemeni government forces killed 15 others in a new offensive against insurgents, local and military officials said.
Two air strikes destroyed three vehicles and killed 10 people in the eastern oil-producing Maarib province and near the border of the southeastern Shabwa province, the Defence Ministry website said, without elaborating.
Yemen and Washington do not acknowledge US drone attacks as they undermine the idea of Yemeni sovereignty.
The government claimed those killed were militants but provided no evidence for this.
Local officials told Reuters the strikes were believed to have been carried out by US drones and up to 12 people were killed, including an Egyptian and two Saudis.
It was the latest in a series of reported drone attacks on militants in the south of the impoverished Arab country who exploited mass protests last year against then-President Ali Abdallah Saleh to seize large swathes of territory, including Zinjibar, the capital of restive Abyan province.
Last week, the US Defense Department said Washington had resumed training Yemeni armed forces, after a suspension during the political upheaval that ousted Saleh.
In a sign of growing lawlessness after more than a year of unrest, Bulgaria’s ambassador to Yemen escaped with minor injuries on Saturday after masked gunmen opened fire on his car in the capital and tried to kidnap him, a Western diplomat said.
US officials said this week they had thwarted a plot by the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to arm a suicide bomber with a non-metallic device, an upgraded version of the “underwear bomb” carried onto an airliner on Christmas Day 2009.
BETHLEHEM – Ten years after Israel exiled 39 Palestinians taking refuge in Bethlehem’s Nativity Church, deportees say they have been forgotten by Palestinian leaders.
On May 10, 2002, Israeli forces ended a 39-day siege on the church after striking a deal with Palestinian leaders to send 39 people given sanctuary in the church to Gaza and Europe.
When Israeli tanks surrounded Bethlehem on April 2, 2002, around 220 locals — including around 40 priests and nuns — took shelter in the church. Over the next 39 days, eight Palestinians were killed inside the church and 27 others injured.
The siege on the site believed to be Jesus’ birthplace sparked outrage in the Vatican as monks sheltering inside pleaded for international assistance.
Former Bethlehem Governor Salah Tamari headed the negotiations team to end the siege, and told Ma’an TV the deportation deal was reached without his knowledge.
He recalled his shock when Israeli officials told him Palestinians would be exiled, and said he called the office of President Yasser Arafat to resign as chief negotiator.
Israeli officials had demanded a list of names of everyone in the church, Tamari said.
“Since the first moment, we refused to give any names. We told [the Israelis] if you have anyone who’s wanted, give us their names and we’ll see if their charges affect the Palestinian law, we’ll hold them accountable.”
Rafat Obayyat was one of 27 Palestinians injured by Israeli attacks on the church. He is in a wheelchair due to his injuries.
He told Ma’an the grotto was the safest place in the church during the siege. Food was scarce and small amounts of pasta would be rationed between everyone, he added.
After a decade in exile, deportees say they have been abandoned by the Palestinian Authority and all political factions. They have not been allowed to return to their families in the West Bank.
Deportees had planned to demonstrate on Thursday but canceled the protest to stand beside prisoners on hunger strike, spokesman for the group Fahmi Kanan said at a press conference on Monday.
Instead, deportees will go on a 3-day hunger strike on Thursday in solidarity with detainees in Israeli jails, Kanan said.
‘A dangerous precedent’
Former detainee and researcher Abdul Nasser Farwaneh said the deportation deal was a clear violation of international law and human rights.
The Palestinian leadership’s acceptance of the deal to send Palestinians into exile set a dangerous precedent and over the last decade Israel has deported hundreds more Palestinians, Farwaneh said in a statement.
He urged the international community to send a commission of inquiry into Israel’s siege on one of the world’s holiest sites.
He also called for greater efforts to bring the deportees home and said the ongoing failure to bring them back from exile reflected Palestinian indifference to the issue.
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
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Members of the Palestinian media today demonstrated in Gaza City to draw attention to violence against journalists, particularly the case of Mohammad Othman, shot by Israeli soldiers while covering the Al Nakba commemoration at the Erez crossing a year ago.
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Aletho News 