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Palestinian Statehood: Quality as Well as Quantity

By John V. Whitbeck | Palestine Chronicle | December 22, 2010

On December 17, Bolivia extended diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine within its full pre-1967 borders (all of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem). Coming soon after the similar recognitions by Brazil and Argentina, Bolivia’s recognition brought to 106 the number of UN member states recognizing the State of Palestine, whose independence was proclaimed on November 15, 1988.

While still under foreign belligerent occupation, the State of Palestine possesses all the customary international law criteria for sovereign statehood. No portion of its territory is recognized by any other country (other than Israel) as any other country’s sovereign territory, and, indeed, Israel has only asserted sovereignty over a small portion of its territory, expanded East Jerusalem, leaving sovereignty over the rest both literally and legally uncontested.

In this context, it may be enlightening to consider the quality as well as the quantity of the states extending diplomatic recognition.

Of the world’s nine most populous states, eight (all except the United States) recognize the State of Palestine. Of the world’s 20 most populous states, 15 (all except the United States, Japan, Mexico, Germany and Thailand) recognize the State of Palestine.

By contrast, the 72 UN member states which currently recognize the Republic of Kosovo as an independent state include only one of the nine most populous states (the United States) and only four of the 20 most populous states (the United States, Japan, Germany and Turkey). When, in July, the International Court of Justice held that Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence did not violate international law because international law is silent on the subject of the legality of declarations of independence (meaning that no declarations of independence violate international law and all are “legal”, albeit subject to the political decisions of sovereign states to recognize or not the independence declared), the United States responded by calling on all countries which had not already recognized Kosovo to do so promptly. Five months later, only three more have seen fit to do so — Honduras, Kiribati and Tuvalu.

If the Arab League were now to call on the minority of UN member states which have not already recognized Palestine to do so promptly, it is certain that the response would be far superior (both in quantity and in quality) to the response to the recent American appeal on behalf of Kosovo. It should do so.

Notwithstanding that (by my rough calculations) states encompassing between 80% and 90% of the world’s population recognize the State of Palestine while states encompassing only between 10% and 20% of the world’s population recognize the Republic of Kosovo, the Western media (and, indeed, much of the non-Western media as well) act as though Kosovo’s independence were an accomplished fact while Palestine’s independence is only an aspiration which can never be realized without Israeli-American consent, and much of international public opinion (including, apparently, the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah) has, at least until recently, permitted itself to be brainwashed into thinking and acting accordingly.

As in most aspects of international relations, it is not the nature of the act (or crime) which matters but, rather, who is doing it to whom. Palestine was conquered and is still occupied, 43 years later, by the military forces of Israel. What most of the world (including the UN and even five EU member states) still regards as the Serbian province of Kosovo was conquered and is still occupied, 11 years later, by the military forces of NATO, the American flag is flown there at least as widely as the Kosovo flag and the capital, Pristina, boasts a Bill Clinton Boulevard and a larger-than-life-size statue of the former American president.

Might makes right, at least in the hearts and minds of the mighty, including most Western decision-makers and opinion-formers.

Meanwhile, as a perpetual “peace process” appears suddenly threatened by peaceful recourse to international law and international organizations, the U.S. House of Representatives has adopted by a unanimous voice vote a resolution drafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) calling on President Obama not to recognize the State of Palestine and to veto any effort by Palestine to obtain UN membership.

Western politicians and the Western media customarily apply the term “international community” to the United States and whatever countries are willing to publicly support it on a given issue and apply the term “rogue state” to any country which actively resists Israeli-American global domination. By its slavish subservience to Israel, as reflected yet again both in the absence of a single brave voice raised against this new House resolution and in the Obama administration’s recently rejected offer of a huge military and diplomatic bribe to Israel in reward for a mere 90-day suspension of its illegal colonization program, the United States has effectively excluded itself from the true international community (redefined to refer to the great majority of mankind) and become a true rogue state, acting in consistent and flagrant contempt of both international law and fundamental human rights.

One might hope that the United States could still pull back from the abyss and recover its own independence, but all signs are pointing in the opposite direction. It is a sad ending for a once admirable country.

– John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel, is author of “The World According to Whitbeck”.

December 23, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism | Leave a comment

Not seen in American media: 131 anti war protesters arrested in DC

American Goy | December 21, 2010

131 anti war protesters arrested in DC.

News Black-Out in DC: Pay No Attention to Those Veterans Chained to the White House Fence

Whether you agree or disagree with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an anti war demonstration in front of the White House where 131 people are arrested is very probably national news.

Even more newsworthy seems this tidbit:

Among those arrested were Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who used to provide the president’s daily briefings, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the government’s Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, and Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for the New York Times.

In any normal country, this would be at least a blurb, a short mention on a nightly newscast.

But in our “democracy”, there is nary a mention of this, er, non-event.

Actually, I am wrong.

Nary a mention implies some kind of a mention, even in passing.

There is no mention of this event on any American media.

It is almost like the media and the government elites are cooperating.

Don’t believe me?

Use google news to search for this story, use “veterans DC protest” as the keywords and only use the “news” search option.

Google news search.

Do you see any NBC, CNN, ABC, FOX stations?

What about big newspapers?

No?

What do you see?

Local papers, blogs, even AOL News (these exist!?).

Lets go with “veterans DC protest cnn”…

Eagle Tribune, Brad Blog (blog), Socialist Worker Online, GC Advocate.

That is it – a grand total of 4 entries, and no CNN.

Do it yourself.

Goto the google news tab and make up your own searches.

Make sure to use veterans and protest and then put your mainstream TV conglomerate(s) and/or newspaper(s).

Then make sure to turn on your TV, preferably onto a cable news channel, and see what they consider news.

That’s all I ask of you…

December 22, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

Israeli Troops Invade Hospital Near Bethlehem

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – December 19, 2010

The Bethlehem Arab Rehabilitation Hospital reported Sunday that a group of Israeli soldiers surrounded the hospital with armored vehicles and jeeps, then invaded the Emergency Room, pointing guns at patients.

The soldiers then roughly demanded of the ER staff that they produce admissions records for the past 48 hours, according to the Director of the Hospital, Edmund Shehadeh. They threatened to confiscate a computer containing medical records, but ended up leaving the hospital empty handed.

Invasions of hospitals are routine in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite the fact that hospitals are accorded special protection under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and are not supposed to be invaded by military force.

Israeli military forces routinely violate their obligations as an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention, particularly in the areas concerning protection of civilian populations, and attacks on schools and hospitals.

Some patients in Palestinian hospitals are civilian victims of Israeli military attacks, and the invasions of hospitals are especially traumatic to these patients, according to psychologists who work with Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.

December 20, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Israel/West Bank: Separate and Unequal

Under Discriminatory Policies, Settlers Flourish, Palestinians Suffer

Human Rights Watch | December 19, 2010

Jerusalem – Israeli policies in the West Bank harshly discriminate against Palestinian residents, depriving them of basic necessities while providing lavish amenities for Jewish settlements, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The report identifies discriminatory practices that have no legitimate security or other justification and calls on Israel, in addition to abiding by its international legal obligation to withdraw the settlements, to end these violations of Palestinians’ rights.

The 166-page report, “Separate and Unequal: Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” shows that Israel operates a two-tier system for the two populations of the West Bank in the large areas where it exercises exclusive control. The report is based on case studies comparing Israel’s starkly different treatment of settlements and next-door Palestinian communities in these areas. It calls on the US and EU member states and on businesses with operations in settlement areas to avoid supporting Israeli settlement policies that are inherently discriminatory and that violate international law.

“Palestinians face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits,” said Carroll Bogert, deputy executive director for external relations at Human Rights Watch. “While Israeli settlements flourish, Palestinians under Israeli control live in a time warp – not just separate, not just unequal, but sometimes even pushed off their lands and out of their homes.”

By making their communities virtually uninhabitable, Israel’s discriminatory policies have frequently had the effect of forcing residents to leave their communities, Human Rights Watch said. According to a June 2009 survey of households in “Area C,” the area covering 60 percent of the West Bank that is under exclusive Israeli control, and East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed, some 31 percent of Palestinian residents had been displaced since 2000.

Human Rights Watch looked at both Area C and East Jerusalem and found that the two-tier system in effect in both areas provides generous financial benefits and infrastructure support to promote life in Jewish settlements, while deliberately withholding basic services, punishing growth, and imposing harsh conditions on Palestinian communities. Such different treatment on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin that is not narrowly tailored to legitimate goals violates the fundamental prohibition against discrimination under human rights law.

Israeli policies control many aspects of the day-to-day life of Palestinians who live in Area C and East Jerusalem. Among the discriminatory burdens imposed on Palestinians that Human Rights Watch found are Israeli practices of expropriating land from Palestinians for settlements and their supporting infrastructure; blocking Palestinians from using roads and reaching agricultural lands; denying access to electricity and water; denying building permits for houses, schools, clinics, and infrastructure; and demolishing homes and even entire communities. Such measures have limited the expansion of Palestinian villages and imposed severe hardships on residents, including leaving them with limited access to medical care.

By contrast, Israeli policies promote and encourage Jewish settlements to expand in Area C and East Jerusalem, often using land and other resources that are effectively unavailable to Palestinians. The Israeli government grants numerous incentives to settlers, including funding for housing, education, and infrastructure, such as special roads. Those benefits have led to the consistent and rapid expansion of settlements, the population of which grew from approximately 241,500 inhabitants in 1992 to roughly 490,000 in 2010, including East Jerusalem.

“While Israeli policy makers are fighting for the ‘natural growth’ of their illegal settlements, they’re strangling historic Palestinian communities, forbidding families from expanding their homes, and making life unlivable,” Bogert said. “The policies surrounding Israel’s settlements are an affront to equality and a major obstacle to ordinary Palestinian life.”

One of the Palestinian communities that Human Rights Watch examines in the report is Jubbet al-Dhib, a village with 160 residents southeast of Bethlehem that dates from 1929. The village is often accessible only by foot because its only connection to a paved road is a rough, 1.5 kilometer-long dirt track. Children from Jubbet al-Dhib must walk to schools in other villages several kilometers away because their own village has no school.

Jubbet al-Dhib lacks electricity despite numerous requests to be connected to the Israeli electric grid, which Israeli authorities have rejected. Israeli authorities also rejected an international donor-funded project that would have provided the village with solar-powered street lights. Any meat or milk in the village must be eaten the same day due to lack of refrigeration; residents often resort to eating preserved foods instead. Villagers depend for light on candles, kerosene lanterns, and, when they can afford to fill it with gasoline, a small generator.

Approximately 350 meters away is the Jewish community of Sde Bar, founded in 1997. It has a paved access road for its population of around 50 people and is connected to Jerusalem by a new, multi-million-dollar highway – the “Lieberman Road” – which bypasses Palestinian cities, towns, and villages, like Jubbet al-Dhib. Sde Bar operates a high school, but Jubbet al-Dhib students may not attend. Settlements are designated closed military areas that may be entered only with special military permits. Residents of Sde Bar have the amenities common to any Israeli town, such as refrigerators and electric lights, which Jubbet al-Dhib villagers can see from their homes at night.

“Palestinian children in areas under Israeli control are studying by candlelight while watching the electric lights in settlers’ windows,” Bogert said. “Pretending that depriving Palestinian kids of access to schools or water or electricity has something to do with security is absurd.”

In most cases where Israel has acknowledged differential treatment of Palestinians – such as when it bars them from “settler-only” roads – it has asserted that the measures are necessary to protect Jewish settlers and other Israelis who are subject to periodic attacks by Palestinian armed groups. But no security or other legitimate rationale can explain the vast scale of differential treatment of Palestinians, such as permit denials that effectively prohibit Palestinians from building or repairing homes, schools, roads, and water tanks, Human Rights Watch said.

Moreover, in addressing security concerns, Israel often acts as if all Palestinians pose a security threat by virtue of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, rather than narrowly tailoring restrictions to specific individuals who are shown to pose a threat. The legal prohibition of discrimination prohibits such broad-brush restrictions.

“The world long ago discarded spurious arguments to justify treating one group of people differently from another merely because of their race, ethnicity, or national origin,” Bogert said. “It’s time for Israel to end its policies of discrimination and stop treating Palestinians under its control markedly worse than Jews in the same area.”

Israel’s highest court has ruled that certain measures against Palestinian citizens of Israel were illegal because they were discriminatory. However, Human Rights Watch is not aware that the courts have adjudicated whether any Israeli practice in the West Bank discriminated against Palestinians, although petitioners have raised such claims in a number of cases.

Human Rights Watch said that the blatantly discriminatory practices make it an urgent matter for donor countries to avoid contributing to or being complicit in the violations of international law caused by the settlements. These countries should take meaningful steps encourage the Israeli government to abide by its obligations, Human Rights Watch said.

Human Rights Watch reiterated its recommendation that the United States, which provides US$2.75 billion in aid to Israel annually, should suspend financing to Israel in an amount equivalent to the costs of Israel’s spending in support of settlements, which a 2003 study estimated at $1.4 billion. Similarly, based on numerous reports that US tax-exempt organizations provide substantial contributions to support settlements, the report urges the US to verify that such tax-exemptions are consistent with US obligations to ensure respect for international law, including prohibitions against discrimination.

Human Rights Watch called on the EU, a primary export market for settlement products, to ensure that it does not provide incentives for settlement exports through preferential tariff treatment, and to identify cases where discrimination against Palestinians has contributed to the production of goods. For example, the report documents how crops exported from settlements using water from Israeli-drilled wells have dried up nearby Palestinian wells, limiting Palestinians’ ability to cultivate their own lands and even their access to drinking water.

The report also describes cases in which businesses have contributed to or benefited directly from discrimination against Palestinians, for example through commercial activities on lands that were unlawfully confiscated from Palestinians without compensation for the benefit of settlers. These businesses also benefit from Israeli governmental subsidies, tax abatements, and discriminatory access to infrastructure, permits, and export channels. Human Rights Watch called on businesses to investigate, prevent and mitigate such violations, including ending any operations that cannot be separated from discriminatory Israeli practices.

“Discrimination of the kind practiced daily in the West Bank should be beyond the pale for anyone,” Bogert said. “Foreign governments and businesses at risk of being tainted by Israel’s unlawful practices should identify and end policies and actions that support them.”

Also available in:

AlJazeeraEnglish | December 19, 2010

December 19, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Video | Leave a comment

The delusions of the peace process

The politics of the peace process have emphatically ensured that the mere prospect for producing peace is nonexistent

By Richard Falk | Al-Jazeera | 18 December 2010

It is astonishing that despite the huge gaps between the maximum that Israel is willing to concede and the minimum that the Palestine Authority could accept as the basis of a final settlement of the conflict, governmental leaders, especially in Washington, continue to pull every available string to restart inter-governmental negotiations.

Is it not enough of a signal that Israel lacks the capacity or will to agree to an extension of the partial settlement freeze for a mere additional 90 days, despite the outrageous inducements from the Obama Administration (20 F-35 fighter jets useful for an attack on Iran; an unprecedented advance promise to veto any initiative in the Security Council acknowledging a Palestinian state; and the assurance that Israel would never again be asked to accept a settlement moratorium) that were offered to suspend partially their unlawful settlement activity.

In effect, a habitual armed robber was being asked to stop robbing a few banks for three months in exchange for a huge financial payoff. Such an arrangement qualifies as a transparently shameless embrace of Israeli lawlessness on behalf of a peace process that has no prospect of producing peace, much less justice.

Justice here is conceived in relation to the satisfaction of Palestinian rights, especially the right of self–determination that has through the years been whittled down.

The continued division of Historic Palestine

The Palestinian acceptance of the 1967 borders (a decision ratified by the PLO in 1988) as the unilaterally reduced basis of the territorial claims associated with Palestinian self-determination, which is only 22 per cent of historic Palestine, and this is less than half of what the UN had proposed in its 1947 partition plan that was at that time quite reasonably rejected by the Palestinians and their Arab neighbours as a colonialist ploy in which the indigenous population was adversely affected and never consulted.

In retrospect, the Palestinian readiness to settle for the 1967 borders was an extraordinary concession in advance of negotiations that was never acknowledged by either Israel or the United States, casting real doubt on whether there was ever a credible commitment to end the conflict by diplomacy.

The shamelessness continues. Instead of castigating Israel for its refusal to show even a pretense of pragmatic flexibility that would make the Obama approach seem slightly less fatuous and regressively wimpy, the US government simply announced that it was abandoning its efforts to persuade Israel to extend the moratorium, and was now embarking on a resumption of the negotiations between the parties without any preconditions, that is, settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing could now continue uncontested.

EU: vocal on settlements and silent of statehood

This was too much even for the normally passive European Union. A few days ago a meeting of the EU Foreign Ministers in Brussels issued a statement insisting that all Israeli activity cease in what was called the “illegal settlements” and that the Gaza blockade be ended “immediately” by an opening of all the crossings to humanitarian and commercial goods, as well as to the entry and exit of persons.

The EU statement was impressively forthright for once: “Our view on settlements, including East Jerusalem, are clear: they are illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace.”

Regrettably, the EU statement was silent on the issue of recognition of Palestinian statehood, losing the opportunity to reinforce the symbolically important diplomatic step taken by Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay to accord Palestine recognition within its 1967 borders.

Nevertheless, the EU did distance itself from Washington, leaving the United States to the discomfort of its lonely solidarity with Israel. By refusing a diplomatic accommodation with Turkey in the aftermath of the flagrantly criminal attack last May on the Freedom Flotilla carrying humanitarian assistance to the beleaguered people of Gaza, Israel confirms this perception of its pariah status.

Underneath these dark clouds of deception and delusion, the peoples of occupied Palestine, as well as the several million refugees, endure their harsh daily existence while the world watches and waits, seemingly helpless.

The durable American envoy to the conflict, George Mitchell, continues to say that the objective of the talks is “an independent, viable state of Palestine..living side by side with Israel.” The incoherence of such an objective should be palpable. How can one honestly talk about such an envisioned Palestinian state as “viable” when the American leadership agrees with Israel that “subsequent developments” (the code phrase for settlements, land seizures, wall, ethnic cleansing, annexation of Jerusalem) need to be embodied in the outcome of negotiations?

And what sort of “independence” is being contemplated if the Palestinian borders are to be still controlled by Israeli security forces and a demilitarised Palestine is expected to live side by side with a highly militarised Israel? The American approach plays with lives as it plays with language, and yet most of the mainstream media swallows this latest bend in the river without raising even a sceptical eyebrow.

The value of retrospection

These considerations ignore some other problematic aspects of the current framework. The Netanyahu government demands PA acknowledgement of Israel as “a Jewish state,” thereby overlooking the human rights of the Palestinian minority in pre-1967 Israel, numbering about 1.5 million or about 20 per cent of the total population, to live as citizens under conditions of non-discrimination and dignity.

Sometimes history is useful. Even the notorious Balfour Declaration, a pure assertion of British colonial prerogative, promised the Zionist movement only “a homeland,” not a sovereign state. The workings of warfare and geopolitics and clever propaganda gradually shifted the parameters of understanding, allowing a homeland to be transformed into a sovereign state with disastrous chain of consequences for the indigenous population.

In this respect the most recent Hamas position of refusing recognition of Israel while agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders is a reasonable effort to draw a line between affirming the illegitimate and being reconciled to political circumstances. To expect more is to drive the Palestinians into an unacceptable corner of humiliation, in effect, endorsing the nakba, and all that has followed by way of dispossession and abuse.

Of course, the issue of self-determination is not for non-Palestinians to determine. Those who call upon Washington, even now and despite its partisanship and ill-concealed alignments, to impose a solution are thus doubly misguided. Even Hilary Clinton acknowledged days ago the impossibility of adopting such an approach.

What seems clear at present is that both the PA and Hamas seem ready to accept a state of their own within 1967 borders, more or less along the lines set forth back in 1967 in the Security Resolution 242, which remains an iconic document that supposedly embodies a continuing international consensus. What it would mean with respect to implementation is certain to be highly contentious, especially in relation to those infamous “subsequent developments,” better understood as massive encroachments on Palestinian prospects for separate statehood.

The mindlessness of diplomacy

Many in the Palestinian diaspora doubt whether a two-state solution is attainable or desirable. Instead they are calling for a single secular, bi-national democratic state that is co-terminus with the historic Palestinian mandate, and alone has the inherent capacity to reconcile contemporary ideas of democracy, human rights, and a belated realisation of Palestinian rights, including the long deferred claims of Palestinian refugees.

Geopolitics is stubborn, and is not moving in hopeful directions. Now arms are being again twisted by American diplomacy in the region to resume talks between the parties on what are being called “core issues” (borders, security arrangements, Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, relations with neighbours).

While this mindless diplomatic spinning goes forth, other clocks are ticking madly: the settlements expanding at accelerating rates, new segments of the wall are being constructed, ethnic cleansing intensifies in East Jerusalem, the apartheid practices and structures in the West Bank are being steadily strengthened, the entrapped and imprisoned population of Gaza lives continuously on the brink of a survival crisis, the refugees in their camps endure their dreary and unacceptable confinement.

Netanyahu thunderously warns that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, that never will a single Palestinian refugee be allowed to return, that Israel is a Jewish state, and that whatever Tel Aviv calls “security” must be treated as non-negotiable. Given these predispositions, combined with the disparities in bargaining power between the parties, as well as the one-sided hegemonic role of the United States, who but a fool could think that a just peace could emerge from the such a deformed pattern of geopolitical diplomacy?

Is it not better at this time to rely on the growing Palestine Solidarity Movement, peace from below, and the related success being experienced in waging the Legitimacy War against Israel, what Israel itself nervously calls “the de-legitimacy project” that is viewed by its leaders and think tanks as a far greater threat to its illicit ambitions than armed resistance?

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice (Routledge, 2008).

He is currently serving his third year of a six year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

December 18, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Gains in Kandahar Came with More Brutal U.S. Tactics

Analysis by Gareth Porter* | IPS | December 17, 2010

The Barack Obama administration’s claim of “progress” in its war strategy is based on the military seizure of three rural districts outside Kandahar City in October.

But those tactical gains have come at the price of further exacerbating the basic U.S. strategic weakness in Afghanistan – the antagonism toward the foreign presence shared throughout the Pashtun south.

The military offensive in Kandahar, which had been opposed clearly and vocally by the local leadership in the province, was accompanied by an array of military tactics marked by increased brutality. The most prominent of those tactics was a large-scale demolition of homes that has left widespread bitterness among the civilians who had remained in their villages when the U.S.-NATO offensive was launched, as well as those who had fled before the offensive.

The unprecedented home demolition policy and other harsh tactics used in the offensive suggest that Gen. Petraeus has abandoned the pretense that he will ever win over the population in those Taliban strongholds.

The New York Times first reported the large-scale demolition of houses in a Nov. 16 story that said U.S. troops in Arghandab, Zhari and Panjwaii districts had been using armoured bulldozers, high explosives, missiles and airstrikes in “routinely destroying almost every unoccupied home or unused farm building in areas where they are operating”.

Neither U.S. nor Afghan officials have offered any estimate of the actual number of homes destroyed, but a spokesman for the provincial governor told the Times that the number of houses demolished was “huge”.

Confirming the widespread demolition policy, Col. Hans Bush, a spokesman for Petraeus, suggested that it was necessary to provide security, because so many houses were “booby- trapped” with explosives.

But Bush also acknowledged that U.S. troops were using a wide array of “tools” to eliminate tree lines in which insurgents could hide. And the demolition policy was clearly driven primarily by ISAF’s concerns about the IED war that the Taliban has been winning in 2010.

The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran revealed in a Nov. 19 article that, in one operation in Zhari district, the military had used more than a dozen mine clearing charges, each of which destroyed everything – houses, trees, and crops – in a 100-yard-long path wide enough for a tank.

The district governor in Arghandab, Shah Muhammed Ahmadi, acknowledged that entire villages had been destroyed – a policy he defended by claiming that there were no people left in them. “[I]n some villages, like Khosrow,” he said, “that we’ve found completely empty and full of IEDs, we destroy them without agreement, because it was hard to find the people, and not just Khosrow but many villages we had to destroy to make them safe.”

But Col. David Flynn, the battalion commander of a unit of the 101st Airborne Division responsible for a section of the district, contradicted the claim that demolition was only carried out if the people who owned the houses could not be found.

Flynn told reporters of London’s Daily Mail he had issued an ultimatum to residents of Khosrow Sofia: provide full information on the location of IEDs the Taliban had planted there or face destruction of the village, according to the account published Oct. 26.

Flynn told the reporters that one of his platoons had a casualty rate of 50 percent in the village.

Flynn later claimed that the residents had responded to his threat by clearing out all the IEDs themselves, according to Carl Forsberg of the Institute for the Study of War. Researcher and author Alex Strick Van Linschoten, one of the only two Westerners to have lived independently in Kandahar City in recent years, said a friend had been told the same thing.

However, Linschoten told IPS that he understands from an eyewitness that at least two other villages in Flynn’s area of responsibility, including the nearby Khosrow Ulya, were leveled and one was reduced to “a dust bowl”.

District chief Ahmad referred to “Khosrow” as one of the villages he said the Americans “had to destroy to make them safe”.

The threat to destroy a village if its residents did not come forward with information would be a “collective penalty” against the civilian population, which is strictly forbidden by the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.

It is unclear how widely the threat to demolish homes was used in Zhari and Panjwaii and how many of the villages were destroyed in retribution for refusing to do so.

According to data provided by the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), however, only 13 IEDs were turned in by the population in the entire country in October. That suggests that the residents of the newly occupied villages in the three districts did not provide any information about IEDs.

The house demolition policy and the increased use of collective punishment were part of a broader strategy of increasing the pressure against the Pashtun population in the south. The level of targeted raids by U.S. Special Operations Forces against suspected Taliban was tripled before Petraeus took over command from Gen. Stanley McChrystal in June, even though McChrystal acknowledged publicly that those raids generated intense anger across the country against foreign forces.

Although those targeted raids killed and captured a large number of Taliban commanders, they also subjected thousands of part-time guerrillas and supporters to arrest and detention. The effort to weaken the Taliban insurgency through such violent tactics is bound to continue the cycle of more Pashtuns vowing revenge against foreign troops and rejecting the Afghan government.

Journalist Anand Gopal, a Dari-speaking specialist on Afghanistan, discovered another form of collective punishment practiced during the offensive. Gopal told IPS that people in Zhari district reported two cases in which U.S. and Afghan forces rounded up and detained virtually everyone in a village after receiving small arms fire from it.

The house demolitions in Kandahar have apparently affected many thousands of people. The demolitions “have made a whole lot of people very angry, because they will be cold and hungry in the coming months”, said a U.S. source who asked not to be identified.

But the U.S.-NATO command is evidently unconcerned about that anger. Chandrasekaran quoted a “senior official” as asserting that, by forcing people to go to the district governor’s office to submit their claims for damaged property, “in effect you’re connecting the government to the people.”

Now Brig. Gen. Nick Carter, commander of U.S.-NATO troops in southern Afghanistan, has openly embraced that justification of the house demolition policy. In an interview with AfPak Channel published last week, he suggested that the demolition of houses “allows the district governor to connect with the population…”

But that connection is certain to be marked by bitterness. A tribal elder in Panjawaii was quoted by the Post’s Chandrasekaran as dismissing the offer of compensation for houses destroyed as “just kicking dirt in our eyes.”

The new level of brutality used in the Kandahar operation indicates that Petraeus has consciously jettisoned the central assumption of his counterinsurgency theory, which is that harsh military measures undermine the main objective of winning over the population.

But there are tell-tale signs that higher-level commanders in Kandahar know that those tactics will not defeat the Taliban either. Col. Flynn, the U.S. commander in a section of Arghandab, told the Daily Mail, “At the end of the day, you cannot kill your way to victory here. It will have to be a political solution.”

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

December 18, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Palestine Campaigners Claim BDS Success as Edinburgh Council Rejects Veolia

13 December 2010 | Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign

A pro-Palestinian pressure group claimed success last week after Edinburgh Council rejected an attempt by a controversial firm to take over a range of public services in the city.

The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) had argued that Veolia should be excluded from Council contracts because of the company’s involvement in Israel’s Occupation of Palestine.

Veolia had been shortlisted to take over environmental services contracts, including refuse collection and street cleaning, but a Council report published Friday indicated that the firm is no longer being considered. This latest blow for Veolia comes on top of similar multi-billion pound losses around the world, and is likely to add to the pressure on the firm to cease providing waste and transport services to Israel’s illegal settlements in Palestine, including the construction of a tramway that the United Nations Human Rights Council deems, “in clear violation of international law”.  The line is set to link Israel with some of its illegal settlements.

Council leaders also heard from leading law firm, Hickman & Rose, who warned that employing the French multinational could expose the local authority to “legal action for failing to take on board their obligation to recognise and comply with their duties and responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions and international law.”

Green Councilor Maggie Chapman, who had campaigned for Veolia’s exclusion, was pleased the Council had moved in line with other local authorities such as Swansea and Dublin who had already chosen to distance themselves from the multinational. “It is not enough for us to use warm words in support of the Palestinian people; we have to act on our convictions. Veolia props up the illegal Occupation by Israel of the Palestinian Territories, and the Council should have no part in such despicable activities.”

The Labour group had also argued for a boycott of the company during the Council’s August meeting. A motion proposed by Councilor Angela Blacklock stated, “Veolia provides services to illegal settlements in Occupied Palestinian land and is therefore complicit in grave breaches of international and human rights law committed by the state of Israel”.

Unison activist, Marlyn Tweedie, is campaigning against the Council’s Alternative Business Model (ABM) plans to privatise public services generally, but said she was pleased about the rejection of Veolia’s bid specifically. “It’s bad enough that the Council intends to privatise essential public services, but it would have really rubbed salt in our wounds if Veolia had won the bid.”

SPSC Chair, Mick Napier, said the decision was “a victory for human rights”. He continued, “We have a duty to stand with the Palestinians and against the Israeli Occupation. Any company that helps maintain that illegal Occupation should not be surprised when local authorities chose to avoid them.”

December 14, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

Israel’s War on Children

1,500 Arrested in a Year

By JONATHAN COOK | CounterPunch | December 13, 2010

Israeli police have been criticised over their treatment of hundreds of Palestinian children, some as young as seven, arrested and interrogated on suspicion of stone-throwing in East Jerusalem.

In the past year, criminal investigations have been opened against more than 1,200 Palestinian minors in Jerusalem on stone-throwing charges, according to police statistics gathered by the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). That was nearly twice the number of children arrested last year in the much larger Palestinian territory of the West Bank.

Most of the arrests have occurred in the Silwan district, close to Jerusalem’s Old City, where 350 extremist Jewish settlers have set up several heavily guarded illegal enclaves among 50,000 Palestinian residents.

Late last month, in a sign of growing anger at the arrests, a large crowd in Silwan was reported to have prevented police from arresting Adam Rishek, a seven-year-old accused of stone-throwing. His parents later filed a complaint claiming he had been beaten by the officers.

Tensions between residents and settlers have been rising steadily since the Jerusalem municipality unveiled a plan in February to demolish dozens of Palestinian homes in the Bustan neighbourhood to expand a Biblically-themed archeological park run by Elad, a settler organisation.

The plan is currently on hold following US pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.

Fakhri Abu Diab, a local community leader, warned that the regular clashes between Silwan’s youths and the settlers, termed a “stone intifada” by some, could trigger a full-blown Palestinian uprising.

“Our children are being sacrificed for the sake of the settlers’ goal to take over our community,” he said.

In a recent report, entitled Unsafe Space, ACRI concluded that, in the purge on stone-throwing, the police were riding roughshod over children’s legal rights and leaving many minors with profound emotional traumas.

Testimonies collected by the rights groups reveal a pattern of children being arrested in late-night raids, handcuffed and interrogated for hours without either a parent or lawyer being present. In many cases, the children have reported physical violence or threats.

Last month 60 Israeli childcare and legal experts, including Yehudit Karp, a former deputy attorney-general, wrote to Mr Netanyahu condemning the police behaviour.

“Particularly troubling,” they wrote, “are testimonies of children under the age of 12, the minimal age set by the law for criminal liability, who were taken in for questioning, and who were not spared rough and abusive interrogation.”

Unlike in the West Bank, which is governed by military law, children in East Jerusalem suspected of stone-throwing are supposed to be dealt with according to Israeli criminal law.

Israel annexed East Jerusalem following the Six-Day war of 1967, in violation of international law, and its 250,000 Palestinian inhabitants are treated as permanent Israeli residents.

Minors, defined as anyone under 18, should be questioned by specially trained officers and only during daylight hours. The children must be able to consult with a lawyer and a parent should be present.

Ronit Sela, a spokeswoman for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), said her organisation had been “shocked” at the large number of children arrested in East Jerusalem in recent months, often by units of undercover policemen.

“We have heard many testimonies from children who describe terrifying experiences of violence during both their arrest and their later interrogation.”

Muslim, 10, lives in the Bustan neighbourhood and in a house that Israeli authorities have ordered demolished. His case was included in the ACRI report, and in an interview he said he had been arrested four times this year, even though he was under the age of criminal responsibility. On the last occasion, in October, he was grabbed from the street by three plain-clothes policemen who jumped out a van.

“One of the men grabbed me from behind and started choking me. The second grabbed my shirt and tore it from the back, and the third twisted my hands behind my back and tied them with plastic cords. ‘Who threw stones?’ one of them asked me. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. He started hitting me on the head and I shouted in pain.”

Muslim was taken into custody and released six hours later. A local doctor reported that the boy had bleeding wounds to his knees and swelling on several parts of his body.

Muslim’s father, who has two sons in prison, said the boy was waking with nightmares and could no longer concentrate on his school studies. “He has been devastated by this.”

Ms Sela said arrests had risen sharply in Silwan since September, when a private security guard at a settler compound shot dead a Palestinian man, Samer Sirhan, and injured two others.

Clashes between the settlers and Silwan youths came to prominence in October when David Beeri, director of settler organisation Elad, was shown on camera driving into two boys as they threw stones at his car.

One, Amran Mansour, 12, who was thrown over the bonnet of Mr Beeri’s car, was arrested shortly afterwards in a late-night raid on his family’s home.

Also in October, nine rightwing Israeli MPs complained after stones were thrown at their minibus as they paid a solidarity visit to Beit Yonatan, a large settler-controlled house in Silwan. Israel’s courts have ordered that the house be demolished, but Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, has refused to enforce the order.

In the wake of the attack, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, the public security minister, warned: “We will stop the stone-throwing through the use of covert and overt force, and bring back quiet.”

Last month police announced that house arrests would be used against children more regularly and financial penalties of up to $1,400 would be imposed on parents.

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, reported the case of “A.S.”, a 12-year-old taken for interrogation following an arrest at 3am.

“I sat on my knees facing the wall. Every time I moved, a man in civilian clothes hit me with his hand on my neck … The man asked me to prostrate myself on the floor and ask his forgiveness, but I refused and told him that I do not bow to anyone but Allah. All the while, I felt intense pain in my feet and legs. I felt intense fear and I started shaking.”

In a statement B’Tselem said: “It is hard to believe that the security forces would have acted similarly against Jewish minors.”

Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman, denied that the police had violated the children’s rights. He added: “It is the responsibility of parents to stop this criminal behaviour by their children.”

Jawad Siyam, a local community activist in Silwan, said the goal of the arrests and the increased settler activity was to “make life unbearable and push us out of the area”.

The 60 experts who wrote to Mr Netanyahu warned that the children’s abuse led to “post-traumatic stress disorders, such as nightmares, insomnia, bed-wetting, and constant fear of policemen and soldiers”. They also noted that children under extended house arrest were being denied the right to schooling.

Last year the United Nations Committee Against Torture expressed “deep concern” at Israel’s treatment of Palestinian minors, saying Israel was breaking the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, which it has signed.

Over the past 12 months, Defence for Children International has provided the UN with details of more than 100 children who claim they were physically or psychologically abused while in military custody.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His website is www.jkcook.net.

December 13, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Former European Leaders: Sanction Israel over Settlement Building

Press TV – December 10, 2010

A group of former European leaders have called for tough sanctions against Israel in response to Tel Aviv’s failure to stop settlement expansion on occupied Palestinian land.

Criticizing the European Union’s existing policy toward Israel, in a letter sent to European governments and EU institutions on Monday, former heads of states, ministers and heads of European organizations said Israel must be made to feel “the consequences” and face “a price tag” for breaking international law by expanding its Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

They have also urged European countries to recognize a free and independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with East al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital.

“EU will not recognize any changes to the June 1967 boundaries, and clarify that a Palestinian state should be in sovereign control over territory equivalent to 100 percent of the territory occupied in 1967, including its capital in East Jerusalem (al-Quds),” the letter asked EU foreign ministers to declare to Israel.

The ex-leaders, including the former EU foreign affairs chief, Javier Solana and former German President Richard von Weizsacker, have asked EU foreign ministers to give Israel an ultimatum that if it does not end occupation and continues violating international law by April 2011, the EU will seek an end to the US-brokered negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in favor of a United Nation solution.

“Time is fast running out, Israel’s continuation of settlement activity… poses an existential threat to the prospects of establishing a sovereign, contiguous and viable Palestinian state,” the letter warned.

The ex-leaders have also urged the European Union to link its informal freeze on an upgrade in EU-Israel diplomatic relations to a settlement freeze, block imports of products made in the illegal settlements but labeled as made in Israel, and force Tel Aviv to pay for the majority of the aid required by the Palestinians, the EUobserver website reported on Friday.

They have also asked the bloc to send a high-level delegation to East al-Quds to back Palestinian claims and reclassify EU support for Palestine as “nation building” instead of “institution building.”

The signatories also include former Italian prime ministers Romano Prodi and Giuliano Amato, ex-German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, ex- Spanish PM Felipe Gonzalez and Norway’s Thorvald Stoltenberg and 10 former ministers and two former EU commissioners.

Israel occupied the West Bank, including East al-Quds, during the Six Day War in 1967 and has settled around 500,000 Jews in the occupied area. Constructing settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory is illegal under international law.

Palestinians believe that expansion of Jewish settlements on their occupied lands will make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.

December 10, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Israel to demolish electric infrastructure near Hebron

Ma’an – 09/12/2010

HEBRON — Israeli authorities delivered demolition orders Thursday for electric transformers and powerlines in a Palestinian community south of Hebron, a local official said.

Local Popular Committee chairman Azmi Ash-Sheiyukhi said Israeli officials handed the orders to Muhammad Al-Adrah, the head of the village council of Rifaya and Ad-Deirat.

The orders call for the demolition and removal of a transformer and power lines that provide electricity to 800 people in the two remote villages near Yatta.

He said Israeli officials had previously authorized the construction of electric infrastructure to provide power to 400 Rifaya residents, while residents of Ad-Deirat had paid out of pocket for the construction of the transformer.

He also said residents planned to mount a legal challenge to the demolition orders, which he called “illegitimate and illegal.”

December 9, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Israel Approves The Construction Of 846 Settlement Units In Jerusalem

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – December 06, 2010

A report prepared and published by the National Bureau For Protecting the Land and Countering Settlements, revealed that the Israeli government approved the construction of 846 units in Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem.

The Bureau said that, last week, the Israeli government approved the construction of 130 new units in Gilo settlement, south of Jerusalem, and also started the expansion of a number of settlements north of the city.

Furthermore, the Bureau reported that Israel demolished three Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, and forced a resident to demolish his own home.

During a press release on Sunday, the National Bureau for Countering Settlements said that the Israeli Authorities in the West Bank are ongoing with their assaults against the residents, and that the army confiscated agriculture equipment in Hebron, prevented the farmers from reaching their lands and demolished a number of wells.

Israel insists the Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the country and that “it has the right to build there”.

The Israeli government and the Jerusalem Municipality are ongoing with their assaults against the residents in the city and are demolishing their homes while several Palestinian homes were taken over by extremist settlers.

In related news, the army informed the residents of al-Ma’sara village, near Bethlehem, that a decision was made to demolish the Ibrahim al-Khalid Mosque and two homes in the village.

December 6, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

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