The Decline of Israel: Interview with Jonathan Cook
By New Left Project | March 12, 2010
In a wide-ranging interview with the New Left Project, Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook describes the increasingly repressive nature of Israeli society and the prospects for a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict
NLP: What did you make of Ehud Barak’s recent comparison of Israel to South Africa?
JC: We should be extremely wary of ascribing a leftwing agenda to senior Israeli politicians who make use of the word “apartheid” in the Israeli-Palestinian context. Barak was not claiming that Israel is an apartheid state when he addressed the high-powered delegates at the Herzliya conference last month; he was warning the Netanyahu government that its approach to the two-state solution was endangering Israel’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world that would eventually lead to it being called an apartheid state. He was politicking. His goal was to intimidate Netanyahu into signing up to his, and the Israeli centre’s, long-standing agenda of “unilateral separation”: statehood imposed on the Palestinians as a series of bantustans (be sure, the irony is entirely lost on Barak and others). Barak knows that Netanyahu currently has no intention of creating any kind of Palestinian state, even a bogus one, despite his commitments to the US.
The last senior Israeli politician to talk of “apartheid” was Ehud Olmert, and it is worth remembering why he used the term. It was back in November 2003, when he was deputy prime minister and desperately trying to scare his boss, Ariel Sharon, into reversing his long-standing support for the settlements and adopt instead the disengagement plan for Gaza. Olmert’s thinking was that by severing Gaza from the Greater Israel project – by pretending the occupation had ended there – Israel could buy a few more years before it faced a Palestinian majority and the danger of being compared to apartheid South Africa. It worked and Sharon became the improbable “man of peace” for which he is today remembered. (Strangely, Olmert, like Barak, defined apartheid in purely mathematical terms: Israeli rule over the Palestinians would only qualify as apartheid at the moment Jews became a numerical minority.)
Barak is playing a similar game with Netanyahu, this time trying to pressure him to separate from the main populated areas of the West Bank. It is not surprising the task has fallen to the Labor leader. The two other chief exponents of unilateral separation are out of the way: Olmert is standing trial and Tzipi Livni is in the wilderness of opposition. Barak is hoping to apply pressure from inside the government. Barak is eminently qualified for the job. He took on the mantel of the Oslo process after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and then tried to engineer the final separation implicit in Oslo at Camp David in 2000 – on extremely advantageous terms for Israel.
Can he succeed in changing Netanyahu’s mind? It seems unlikely.
NLP: Avi Shlaim recently described Tony Blair as ‘Gaza’s Great Betrayer’. What do you make of Tony Blair’s role as Middle East peace envoy?
JC: Blair is a glorified salesman, selling the same snakeoil to different customers.
First, he is here to provide a façade of Western concern about mending the Middle East. He suggests that the West is committed to action even as it fails to intervene and the situation of the Palestinians generally, and those in Gaza in particular, deteriorates rapidly. He sells us the continuing dispossession of the Palestinians in a bottle labelled “peace”.
He is also here as a sort of European proconsul to advise the Americans on how to repackage their policies. The US has become aware that it has lost all credibility with the rest of the world on this issue. Blair’s job is to redesign the bottle labelled “US honest broker” so that we will be prepared to buy the product again.
His next task is to try to wheedle out of Israel any minor concession he can secure on behalf of the Palestinians and persuade Tel Aviv to cooperate in selling an empty bottle labelled “hope” as a breakthrough in the peace process.
And finally, he is here to create the impression that his chief task is to defend the interests of the Palestinians. To this end, he collects the three bottles, puts them in some pretty wrapping paper and writes on the label “Palestinian state”.
For his labours he is being handsomely rewarded, especially by Israel.
NLP: You have described how Israel is becoming increasingly repressive regarding its own Arab population. In what ways?
JC: Let’s be clear: Israel has always been “repressive” of its Palestinian minority. Its first two decades were marked by a very harsh military government for the Palestinian population inside Israel. Thousands of Bedouin, for example, were expelled from their homes in the Negev several years after Israel’s establishment and forced into the Sinai. Israel’s past should not be glorified.
What I have argued is that the direction taken by Israeli policy since the Oslo process began has been increasingly dangerous for the Palestinian minority. Before Oslo, Israel was chiefly interested in containing and controlling the minority. After Oslo, it has been trying to engineer a situation in which it can claim to no longer be responsible for the Palestinians inside Israel with formal citizenship.
This is intimately tied to Israel’s more general policy of “unilateral separation” from the Palestinians under occupation: in Gaza, through the disengagement; in the West Bank, through the building of the wall. Israel’s chief concern is that – post-separation, were Palestinian citizens to remain inside the Jewish state – they would have far greater legitimacy in demanding the same rights as Jews. Israelis regard that as an existential threat to their state: Palestinian citizens could use their power, for example, to demand a right of return for their relatives and thereby create a Palestinian majority. The problem for Israel is that Palestinian citizens can expose the sham of Israel’s claims to being a democratic state.
So as part of its policy of separation, Israel has been thinking about how to get rid of the Palestinian minority, or at the very least how to disenfranchise it in a way that appears democratic. It is a long game that I describe in detail in my book Blood and Religion.
Policymakers are considering different approaches, from physically expelling Israel’s Palestinian citizens to the bantustans in the territories to stripping them incrementally of their remaining citizenship rights, in the hope that they will choose to leave. At the moment we are seeing the latter policy being pursued, but there are plenty of people in the government who want the former policy implemented when the political climate is right.
NLP: The frequent claim by Israeli officials is that Israel is a democracy and that Israeli Arabs are afforded the same rights as other citizens. What is your view?
JC: The widely shared assumption that Israel is a democracy is a strange one.
This is a democracy without defined borders, encompassing parts of a foreign territory, the West Bank, in which one ethnic / religious group – the Jewish settlers – has been given the vote while another – the Palestinians – has not. Those settlers, who are living outside the internationally recognised borders of Israel, actually put Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman into power.
It is also a democracy that has transferred control over 13 per cent of its sovereign territory (and a large proportion of its inhabited land) to an external organisation, the Jewish National Fund, which prevents a significant proportion of Israel’s own citizenry – the 20 per cent who are Palestinian – from having access to that land, again based on ethnic / religious criteria.
It is a democracy that historically gerrymandered its electoral constituency by expelling most of the indigenous population outside its borders – now referred to as the Palestinian refugees – to ensure a Jewish majority. It has continued to gerrymander its voting base by giving one ethnic group, Jews around the world, an automatic right to become citizens while denying that same right to another ethnic group, Palestinian Arabs.
This is a democracy that, despite a plethora of parties and the necessity of creating broad coalition governments, has consistently ensured that one set of parties (the Palestinian and anti-Zionist ones) has been excluded from government. In fact, Israel’s “democracy” is not a competition between different visions of society, as you would expect, but a country driven by a single ideology called Zionism. In that sense, there has been one-party rule in Israel since its birth. All the many parties that have participated in government over the years have agreed on one thing: that Israel should be a state that gives privileges to citizens who belong to one ethnic group. Where there is disagreement, it is over narrow sectoral interests or over how to manage the details of the occupation – an issue related to territory outside Israel’s borders.
Defenders of the idea that Israel is a democracy point to the country’s universal suffrage. But that is hardly sufficient grounds for classing Israel as a democracy. Israel was also considered a democracy in the 1950s and early 1960s – before the occupation began – when a fifth of the populace, the Palestinian minority inside Israel, lived under a military government. Then as now, they had the vote but during that period they could not leave their villages without a permit from the authorities.
My point is that giving the vote to 20 per cent of the electorate that is Palestinian is no proof of democracy if Israeli Jews have rigged their “democracy” beforehand through ethnic cleansing (the 1948 war); through discriminatory immigration policies (the Law of Return); and through the manipulation of borders to include the settlers while excluding the occupied Palestinians, even though both live in the same territory.
Israeli academics who consider these things have had to devise new classifications to cope with these strange features of the Israeli “democratic” landscape. The generous ones call it an “ethnic democracy”; the more critical ones an “ethnocracy”. Most are agreed, however, that it is not the liberal democracy of most Westerners’ imaginations.
NLP: You describe the long time anti-occupation activist and writer Uri Avnery as being a “compromised critic” of Israel. What do you mean by this? What is wrong with Avnery’s position on the occupation?
JC: There’s nothing wrong with Avnery’s position on the occupation. He wants to end it, and he has worked strenuously and bravely to do so over many decades.
The problem derives from our, his readers’, tendency to misunderstand his reasons for seeking an end to the occupation, and in that sense I think his role in the Palestinian solidarity movement has not been entirely helpful. Avnery wants the occupation to end but, it is clear from his writings, he is driven primarily by a desire to protect Israel as a Jewish state, the kind of ethnocratic state I have just described. Avnery does not hide this: he has always declared himself a proud Zionist. But in my view, his attachment to a state privileging Jews compromises his ability to critique the inherent logic of Zionism and to respond to Israel’s fast-moving policies on the ground, especially the goals of separation.
In a sense Avnery is stuck romantically in the 1970s and 1980s, the heydey of Palestinian resistance. Then the Palestinian struggle was much more straightforward: it was for national liberation. In those days Avnery’s battle was chiefly inside the Palestine Liberation Organisation, not inside Israel. He favoured a two-state solution when many in the PLO were promoting a vision of a single democratic state encompassing both Palestinians and Israelis. As we know, Avnery won that ideological battle: Arafat signed up to the two-state vision and eventually became the head of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian government-in-waiting.
But with Oslo, and formal Palestinian consent to the partition of historic Palestine, Avnery had to switch the focus of his struggle back to Israel, where there was much more resistance to the idea. While the Palestinian leaders were willing, even enthusiastic participants in the Oslo process, Israel’s leaders were much more cynical. They wanted a Palestinian dictatorship in the OPTs, led by Arafat, that would suppress all dissent while Israel would continue exploiting the land and water resources and the Palestinian labour-force through a series of industrial zones.
Because of his emotional investment in the separation policy of Oslo, Avnery has been very slow to appreciate Israel’s bad faith in this process. As the horrors of the wall and the massacres in Gaza have unfolded, I have started to see in his writings a very belated caution, a hesitation. That is to be welcomed. But I think looking to Avnery for guidance about where the Palestinian struggle against the occupation should head now – for instance, on the question of boycott, divestment and sanctions – is probably unwise. On other matters, he still has many fascinating insights to offer.
NLP: You are an advocate of a one state solution to the conflict. Given the overwhelming opposition of most Israelis to such a solution how is this to come about?
JC: Let me make an initial qualification. I do not regard myself as being an “advocate” for any particular solution to the conflict. I would happily support a two-state solution if I thought it was possible. I do not have a view about which technical arrangement is needed for Palestinians and Israelis to live happy, secure lives. If that can be achieved in a two-state solution, then I am all in favour.
My support for one state follows from the fact that I have yet to see anyone making a convincing case for two states, given the current realities. Those in the progressive community who advocate for the two-state solution seem to do so because their knowledge of the conflict is based on understandings a decade or more out of date, and typically because they know little about what drives Israeli policies inside Israel’s internationally recognised borders – which is hardly surprising, given the dearth of reporting on the subject.
This relates to the question of how Israelis can be won over. If the criterion for deciding whether a solution is viable is whether it is acceptable to Israeli Jewish public opinion, then the two-state crowd have exactly the same problem as the one-state crowd. There is no popular backing in Israel for a full withdrawal to the 1967 borders; a connection between the West Bank and Gaza; open borders for the Palestinian state and the right for it to forge diplomatic alliances as it chooses; a Palestinian army and air force; Palestinian rights to their water resources; Jerusalem as Palestine’s capital; and so on. Almost no Israeli Jews would vote for a government advocating that solution.
When we hear of polls showing an Israeli majority for a two-state solution, that is not what the respondents are referring to: they mean a series of bantustans surrounded by Israeli territory and settlers; severe controls on Palestinian movement between those bantustans; Palestine’s capital in Abu Dis or some other village near Jerusalem; Israel’s continuing control of the water; no Palestinian army; and so on. The Israeli public’s vision of Palestine is the same as its leadership’s: an extension of the Gaza model to the West Bank.
So we might as well forget about pandering to Israeli public opinion for the moment. It will change when it is offered a different cost-benefit calculus for its continuing rule over the Palestinians, as occurred among white South Africans who were encouraged to turn against the apartheid regime. That is the purpose of campaigns like boycott, divestment and sanctions. Let’s think instead about workable solutions that accord with the rights of Israelis and Palestinians to live decent lives.
Interestingly, despite the mistaken assumption that Israelis favour a (real) two-state solution over a one-state solution, there are now indications that a broad coalition of Israelis accept that the moment for a two-state solution has passed. Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, is one from the Zionist left. But surprisingly he was recently joined by Tzipi Hotovely, an influential MP from Netanyahu’s Likud party, who argues for granting citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank.
NLP: Other writers such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein argue in favour of a two-state solution, pointing out that world opinion and international law is firmly on the side of such a solution. How do you respond?
JC: Much as I respect Finkelstein and Chomsky, I find those arguments unconvincing.
“World opinion” in this case means little more than opinion in Washington, and as Chomsky has eloquently pointed out on many occasions the US, along with Israel, is the rejectionist party to the conflict. In fact, it is precisely because the US and Israel are the rejectionist camp that we should be wary of accepting that a two-state arrangement is a viable solution to the conflict now that the leaderships of both countries ostensibly support it.
Rather I would argue that the US and Israel pay lipserve to a two-state solution to provide cover for the emerging reality on the ground, in which Jewish privilege is being maintained in a unilaterally imposed one-state solution by Israel. Without that cover, the apartheid nature of the regime and the creeping programme of ethnic cleansing would be blindingly obvious to everyone.
Since Oslo, Barak, Sharon, Olmert and Livni all understood that “world opinion” could be kept at bay only as long as Israel appeared to favour a two-state solution. Netanyahu has embarrassed the West, and the US in particular, by dropping that pretence. It is why he is so unpopular and why we are starting to see more critical coverage of Israel in the media. Things are not worse, at least in the occupied territories, than they were under Olmert and co (in fact, it could be argued that they are moderately better), but it is much easier for journalists to cover some of the reality now. I guess this is a way of bringing Netanyahu into line.
The international law argument in this context is not much more helpful. While international law offers a discrete and invaluable set of principles when it comes to determining the rules of war, for instance, matters are not so straightforward when related to borders and territory.
Which bit of international law are we referring to? Why not take as our reference point the 1947 partition plan, which would see nearly half of historic Palestine returned to the Palestinians, and Jerusalem under international control? And what are we to make of UN Resolution 242, which refers to “the acquisition of territories” in the English version and “the acquisition of the territories” in the French version? Should the Palestinians be offered 28 per cent of their homeland or less than 28 per cent? And what do the Oslo accords mean in practice for Palestinian statehood, given that the final status issues were left open?
One can argue over these points endlessly, and dwelling on them to the exclusion of all other considerations is a recipe for helping the powerful in their struggle to ensure that the status quo – the occupation – is maintained.
The primary goals of international law are twofold: to safeguard the dignity of human beings; and to ensure their right to self-determination. In my view, those aims cannot be realised in a two-state solution, given both the realities on the ground and the conditions on Palestinian sovereignty being demanded by Israel and the international community.
Instead we should look to international law to provide a frame of reference for finding a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it should not tie our hands. The objective is to find a practical and creative political arrangement that has legitimacy in the eyes of both parties and can ensure that Israelis and Palestinians lead happy, secure lives. The goal here is not a technical solution; it is an enduring peace.
NLP: British media coverage of the conflict is typically more sympathetic towards Israel than towards Palestinians and generally fails to give proper historical background to the conflict. Why do you believe the British media behaves in this way regarding the conflict?
JC: There are various reasons that are sometimes difficult to disentangle. For the sake of simplicity, I will separate them into three categories: practical issues facing journalists covering the conflict; expectations imposed by the supposed “professionalism” of journalism; and ideological and structural constraints that reflect the fact that the dominant journalism practised today is a journalism cowed by corporate interests.
Of the practical issues, one of the most important – though least spoken of, for obvious reasons – is the fact that foreign desks prefer to appoint Jewish reporters to cover the conflict. In part the preference for Jewish reporters reflects an assessment, and probably a correct one, by editors that Israel, not the Palestinians, makes the news and that Jewish reporters will fare better as they negotiate the corridors of power in a self-declared Jewish state. Faced with candidates for the job, a foreign editor will often take the easy choice of a Jew who speaks fluent Hebrew, has family here who will provide ready-made contacts, and has some sort of commitment to living here and gaining a deeper understanding of (Israeli) life. Of course, those are precisely the reasons why an editor ought to judge the reporter unsuitable, but in practice it does not work that way.
I know from my own experiences that most Israeli officials try to find out whether you are Jewish before they will build any kind of intimacy with you as a reporter. That works to the advantage of Jewish reporters when a job comes up in Jerusalem.
I should add that the historical tendency of the British media to appoint Jewish reporters has diminished in recent years, possibly because the desks have become more self-conscious about it. But it is still very strong among the American media, and it is the American media that set the news agenda on the conflict. The NYT’s Ethan Bronner is fairly typical on that score and the paper’s indulgent decision to allow him to continue in his posting after revelations of a clear conflict of interest – that his son has joined the Israeli army – simply highlights the point.
A second practical issue is the location of British bureaus: in Jewish West Jerusalem. That results in a natural identification with Israeli concerns. It would be just as easy, and cheaper, to locate journalists a short distance away in Ramallah, or even in a Palestinian neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, but few if any do so.
Then there are the local sources of information that a reporter relies on. He or she reads the Israeli media, most of which have English editions, and comes to understand the conflict through the analyses and commentaries of Israeli journalists. This is even more true for those reporters who read Hebrew. Are there any British journalists reading the Palestinian media in Arabic? I doubt it.
Similarly, Israeli spokespeople are much more likely to be sources of information: they usually speak English; they are accessible, especially if you are Jewish and seen as “sympathetic” to Israel; and they are authoritative from the point of view of the correspondents. By contrast, the Palestinians are in a much weaker position. Who counts as a Palestinian spokesperson? Usually reporters turn to the Palestinian Authority for comments, even though the PA’s agenda is severely compromised and Palestinian opinion is deeply divided. In addition, official Palestinian spokespeople are often hamstrung by a rigid bureaucracy, lack of accountability, problems of language, and little knowledge of the decisions being taken in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem that shape their lives.
Issues deriving from journalism’s so-called “professionalism” must be factored in too. The professional training of journalists encourages them to believe that there are objective criteria that define what counts as news. A consequence is that professional journalists are expected to follow similar lines of inquiry and turn to the same groups of “neutral” contacts. This justifies both the hunting-in-packs philosophy that underpins most mainstream journalism and the reliance on establishment sources whom journalists use to interpret the news story.
In the case of Israel-Palestine, we end up with very similar looking accounts of the conflict that are usually filtered through the perspectives of a narrow elite of politicians, academics and diplomats who share in the main fanciful assumptions about the conflict: that there is a meaningful peace process; that Israeli leaders are acting in good faith; that the occupation is unpleasant but temporary; that the Palestinians are their own worst enemies or genetically prone to terrorism; that the occupation in Gaza has ended; that the Americans are a neutral broker in the conflict; and so on.
“Balance” is also seen as an essential quality in any professional news report. Balance of the “Israel said-the Palestinians said” variety encourages a view that the two sides in the conflict are equal. It favours the status quo, which favours Israel because it is the dominant party.
Another issue that skews coverage is the fact that professional journalists are supposed to take directions in their coverage from senior editors, usually thousands of miles away. The mainstream media is very hierarchical and few journalists will risk engaging in repeated fights with senior editors if they wish to be successful. The problem is that those editors have formed their views of the conflict in part by reading influential columnists, particularly those in the US who are considered to be close to the centres of power. That means that Zionist commentators like Thomas Friedman and the late William Safire shape British editors’ understanding of the region and therefore also the sort of coverage they expect from their reporters. Professional journalists do not usually invent things to satisfy their editors but they do steer clear of certain topics and lines of inquiry that conflict with their editors’ assumptions.
This tendency is strongly reinforced by the pro-Israel lobby in Britain, which gives reporters and their editors a hard time whenever they depart from common, and usually erroneous, assumptions about Israel. The sheer weight of the lobby, both in terms of its leaders’ connections to the British elites and its large number of foot soldiers, makes it very intimidating to the media. Minor matters of interpretation by a reporter can quickly be blown into a full-scale scandal of biased reporting or accusations of anti-Semitism. Even accurate reporting that is critical of Israel can be damaging to a journalist’s reputation, as Jeremy Bowen found out last year when absurd complaints against him were upheld by the BBC Trust.
The effect of the lobby in Britain is further heightened by the far greater power of the pro-Israel lobby in the US. British editors, as we have already noted, look to US commentators for guidance about the conflict. So the US lobby, in shaping the views of the American media, also affects the British media’s conceptions too.
These last problems are closely related to the much larger structural and ideological issues affecting modern journalism that direct the coverage of Israel-Palestine.
In my early career working for British newspapers, I was a very traditional liberal journalist. Only when I turned freelance, moved to the Middle East and started covering the Israel-Palestine conflict from a Palestinian city did I discover that most of my life-long assumptions about the liberal British media were untenable. It was a period of rapid and profound disillusionment. Out here, I was faced with a stark choice: report the conflict in the same distorted and misleading manner adopted by the mainstream reporters or become a so-called “dissident” journalist. I struggled with the first option for a while, publishing in the Guardian and the International Herald Tribune when I could, but it was with a heavy conscience. It was during this period that I heard about the propaganda model of Ed Hermann and Noam Chomsky, as well as websites like Media Lens, which finally made sense of my own experiences as a journalist.
The structural problem of modern journalism is a huge subject I cannot do more than outline here.
Professional journalism exists in its current state because it is subsidised by fabulously wealthy owners and fabulously wealthy advertisers, both of whom share the interests of the corporate elites that rule our societies. The corporate-owned media ensures its journalists share its corporate values through a process of “filtering”. Journalists who make it to a position like Jerusalem bureau chief, for example, have gone through a very lengthy selection process that weeds out anyone considered undesirable. Typically an undesirable journalist fails to abide by the implicit rules of the profession: she is not intimidated in the face of power and authority, she looks beyond the elites to other sources of information, she rejects the bogus idea of objectivity and neutrality, and so on. Such journalists either get stuck in lowly jobs or are pushed out.
The result is a sort of Darwinian natural selection that ensures corporate, clubbable journalists rise to the top and select in their image those who follow behind them.
Related articles
- Report details ill-treatment of Palestinian children by Israeli forces (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- he Rise of Ultra-Semitism in Israel (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Sending a laptop to Gaza
Ahmed Moor writing from al-Arish, Egypt, Live from Palestine, 12 March 2010
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Underground tunnels along the border with Egypt have become the main way for besieged Palestinians in Gaza to receive the most basic goods. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages) |
I sat outdoors at a cafe on the Mediterranean Sea in al-Arish, a dusty seaside town in Egypt’s northern Sinai. I drank a tea and smoked a water pipe; it gave me something to do while I waited for Ismail — that’s not his real name — an Egyptian Bedouin tunnel smuggler who was going to deliver a package for me into Gaza.
It’s been nearly ten years since I’ve been to Palestine. I vividly remember the summer of 2000 when I left Palestine with my family. We passed through the Rafah crossing into Egypt. A long Mercedes taxi — they’re ubiquitous in Egypt and Palestine — carried us from Egyptian Rafah to al-Arish and finally to Cairo. From there, we boarded a flight to New York. Most of our extended family remained — they have nothing approaching our freedom of movement because we hold the American passport.
Much has changed since I’d been there last. The second Palestinian intifada flared, raged and then died. Hamas won a majority of seats in the 2006 parliamentary elections and was nearly overthrown by Fatah a year later. When the coup didn’t go as planned the people of Gaza were shut in.
Israel imposed its siege on Gaza in June 2007, after the Fatah coup attempt. The tunnel trade between Egypt and Gaza became the chief mode of transferring commodities into the tiny coastal territory. Flour, gasoline, soda, toys, electronics and yes, small arms are moved into Gaza through hundreds of subterranean tunnels.
I went back to Egypt several weeks ago. A friend in Cairo mentioned that he had a laptop and some CDs that were intended for a friend of his in Palestinian Rafah. He knew that I planned to go to al-Arish, and if I could make it past the checkpoints, to Egyptian Rafah, and asked if I could arrange to have the items smuggled to Gaza. I agreed; the siege is an expression of moral bankruptcy and responsible human beings are compelled to undermine the regime in every way. Furthermore, the Palestinians of Gaza have very few options when it comes to receiving basic goods.
A few days later, I caught a bus to al-Arish. I arrived at about 10pm and checked into my hotel. My friend in Cairo had given me Ismail’s number after speaking to him about me and when I’d be going. So, the next morning I called Ismail and we agreed to meet at a cafe in the afternoon.
Some time later, I made my way to the beach and sat at the seaside cafe when a man approached; it was Ismail. He smiled broadly as we shook hands and introduced ourselves. The deep-brown skin in the corner of his eyes crinkled. His dark hair was short and neat and combed to the side. He reminded me of my father. I ordered a second tea as he sat down on the chair beside me so that we both had a view of the sea’s expanse.
We started talking:
“You know I’m from Gaza,” I said, “Tal al-Sultan in Rafah.”
“Oh, I’ve been there. I have family in Jabaliya.”
We chatted for some minutes about the weather and al-Arish and families we knew in common. He’d been working in the tunnel trade since the siege began. It was a natural way to earn income for him — as a Bedouin, he moved more freely than others in the Sinai, and his relatives in Gaza provided a secure trust network.
Indeed, many Palestinians from Gaza have relatives in Egypt, and vice versa. My own paternal grandmother is a Sinai Bedouin. The extensive kinship networks and intermarriage thrived until Israel occupied the territory in 1967, when it became harder for people to cross the new borders.
Ismail explained how he would deliver the package, stating that “I’ll take it back to [Egyptian] Rafah in my car and hand it over to someone who will give it to a Palestinian from the tunnel. ‘B’ [the person for whom the package is intended] will call the guy and meet up with him. He’ll pay him on that end.”
My package would cost 50 cents to $1 a kilo, but bigger loads would have a cheaper rate. It would take a day or two to deliver at a total cost of roughly $10 — not too expensive by American standards but a considerable sum in Gaza.
Ismail explained that although the tunnels were owned by Palestinians and they did all of the work to construct them — typically at night — the traffic was usually only one way: Egyptian goods into Gaza.
He was deliberately vague about whether the Egyptian army knew the locations of the tunnels and received bribes to allow them to operate. “You have to be careful,” Ismail said, referring to offering bribes to the authorities, “sometimes you can do that but sometimes no. It depends but there isn’t any way to know.”
When I asked about the new wall being constructed underground between Egypt and Gaza with the assistance of the US Army Corps of Engineers, he was dismissive. Ismail explained that it had yet to affect trade and that “some guys have already cut through it.” He noted however that “it hasn’t reached the part of the border where most of the tunnels are. And people are coming up with ways to get around it.”
As our meeting drew to a close Ismail offered me a ride back to town all the while apologizing for not offering me a ride to Rafah. Security on the main road was tough he explained and he couldn’t afford to be subjected to too much scrutiny with a foreigner in the car. He also warned me, saying, “If you make it to Rafah, don’t tell anyone that you’re a journalist — don’t talk to anyone. It’s all mukhabarat [intelligence]. Just say you’re going home.”
I did make it to Rafah later that day. What I saw wasn’t so much a town as a military encampment. Heavy equipment, likely tied to the subterranean wall, was everywhere. Dusty day laborers swarmed the tea shops. Armored personnel carriers patrolled the streets while checkpoints closed off access towards Palestine and the Mediterranean.
It wasn’t long before some men approached me and started asking questions in a non-official, but probing and intrusive way. “Who are you? Where are you from? How did you get here?” Motioning to the military, they asked, “Did they clear you?” I answered the way Ismail told me and decided to leave pretty soon after that; my paranoia got the better of me.
My trip back to al-Arish was uneventful and it gave me an opportunity to reflect about the events of the day and how my home has become a concentration camp. The pressures on the Palestinians in Gaza are immense, but they have not succumbed to the pressure.
By the time I reached Cairo the next day, my friend had confirmed that the laptop was received by his friend in Gaza. Even with billions of dollars expended and complete military siege, Palestinians choose not to die and this story is evidence of that.
Born in the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Ahmed Moor graduated from university in Philadelphia, after which he spent three years working in finance in New York. He is currently based in Beirut, Lebanon.
Brutalizing Palestinian Children
By Stephen Lendman | March 11th, 2010
As an isolated incident, it would be appalling and criminal. As a regular occurrence, it’s state-sponsored terrorism against defenseless children, subjected to barbarism by Israeli soldiers committing crimes against humanity to crush their will for wanting to live free on their own land – what Westerners take for granted; what Palestinians since 1948 haven’t had, and since 1967, under military occupation denying their very humanity.
Nora Barrows-Friedman does heroic reporting for Pacifica Radio’s KPFA Flashpoints Radio and as an activist/teacher/journalist in Occupied Palestine during regular visits. On March 8 on the Electronic Intifada, she wrote about Amir al-Mohteseb, a 10-year old Hebron child, arrested, detained, and savagely beaten after his 12-year old brother Hasan endured similar treatment a week earlier.
On March 7 at 2AM, “Israeli soldiers (broke) into (his) house, snatch(ed) Amir from his bed, threatened his parents with death by gunfire if they” interfered, took him down the stairwell, and brutally beat him causing internal abdomen bleeding, requiring overnight hospitalization. “In complete shock and distress, Amir would not open his mouth to speak for another day and a half.”
Before the incident, he told Barrows-Friedman he was playing in the street on his way with Hasan to see their aunt when:
“Two….soldiers stopped us and handcuffed us, (took) us to two separate jeeps, (took) me to the settlement and put me in a corner, (put) a dog next to me,” refused to let him use the bathroom, threatened to hold him forever, wouldn’t let him call his mother, blindfolded him, and held him until his father managed to get him late at night.
He was terrified, held for 10 hours, traumatized by the incident, and unable to sleep, “worried sick about his brother in jail and extremely afraid that the soldiers would come back” and do it again, which they did, and do repeatedly to hundreds of Palestinian youths, their siblings, parents and friends, guilty of being Palestinian on land Israel wants to make historic Palestine an ethnically pure Jewish state.
On March 9, Haaretz writer Nir Hassan headlined, “Israel using strong arm tactics against young Palestinian stone-throwers,” saying several Silwan, East Jerusalem youths “were arrested and taken from their home(s) in handcuffs in the middle of the night over the past few months, as part of a police crackdown on suspected stone-throwers….,” not militants, gunmen, murderers, or bomb throwers threatening civil society – alleged stone-throwers punishable by imprisonment up to 20 years under Military Order 378 if convicted.
Children 12 – 15 have been targeted, arrested, detained, and savagely beaten following complaints by Jewish settlers who usually take the law into their own hands using weapons they’re allowed to carry.
Parents intervening are threatened, often beaten, and at times detained and charged with interference. Some arrested children “had their remands extended by the court, and others were released on certain conditions. All the suspects against whom (authorities have dubious evidence) will be brought to trial” before military or Magistrate Court judges where due process and judicial fairness are denied, so their fate is pre-determined.
On February 17, B’Tselem highlighted the same story about Silwan, East Jerusalem youths seized from their beds in the middle of the night, handcuffed, taken to the Russian Compound police station and interrogated “on suspicion of stone throwing.” According to some, children aged 12 – 15 were threatened, detained, and beaten.
Muhammad Dweik, aged 12 said:
“Around 4:30 – 5:00 in the morning, I woke up from the sound of knocking at the door. Shabak (ISA) agents asked my father for (his son’s) ID card. My father told them that I don’t have” one. They refused his father’s request to let him bring him to the police station later that morning.
“They tied my hands behind my back and took me. The policemen put me into a Border Police jeep. A friend of mine was also inside it. A policeman who sat next to me kept kicking me in the leg all the way.”
Lu’ai a-Rajabi, aged 14, was also arrested and interrogated, denied he threw stones at settler houses, and was punched in the nose with his hands and legs cuffed. He was then hit in the face and head, ordered to confess, and, while he was sitting, three interrogators beat and kicked him “all over my body, and (swore) at me and Allah.”
They told him to sign a Hebrew document saying he wasn’t beaten. He refused and was beaten again. The next day, he was brought before a Magistrates Court judge who extended his detention for a week.
Others, as young as 12, told similar stories of arrests, detentions, interrogations, and beatings when they denied doing anything. One youth told B’Tselem he hasn’t been able to sleep, afraid he’ll again be arrested.
This treatment “contravenes the Youth Law, as amended in 2008 (Amendment No. 14),” under which suspected minors are entitled to consult a parent or relative prior to interrogation, and have an adult present while ongoing. “The Law also generally prohibits interrogating a minor at night and states (they) should not be arrested if the objective can be achieved in a less harmful way.”
Nonetheless, Israeli security forces violated their rights for being alleged stone-throwers, and all of them are Israeli residents. It’s virtually impossible for Israeli Jews to be subjected to similar treatment, either adults or youths. Palestinians get no such respect or safety under laws not protecting them or their rights.
As for Amir, after Barrows-Friedman’s interview, he “sent a message to American children,” saying:
“We are kids, just like you. We have the right to play, to move freely. I want to tell the world that there are so many kids inside the Israeli jails. We just want to have freedom of movement, the freedom to play,” and grow up like kids in America and the West. In Occupied Palestine, he’ll be lucky to survive, perhaps never his former self or living free from occupation and brutality.
Relevant International Law
Since September 2000, the beginning of the Second Intifada, over 2,500 Palestinian children (as young as 12 or younger) have been arrested, hundreds at any time imprisoned within Israel, treated the same as adults, kept with Israeli prisoners, stabbed or otherwise harmed as a result, subjected to sexual abuse, and denied family visits or other outside contacts.
Yet, numerous international laws, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Israeli law define a child as anyone under 18. So do UN Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty with provisions stating:
— imprisoning children should only be a “last resort and for the minimum period and should be limited to exceptional cases;”
— fundamental international law must be respected at all times with no exceptions;
— the welfare, special needs, best interests, and human rights of juveniles “shall be a primary consideration;” and
— they must be helped to return to society as soon as possible.
Yet, in violation of international law, Israel willfully and repeatedly arrests children randomly, at checkpoints, on streets, at play, and in the middle of the night at home, then subjects them to threats, cursing, beatings, detention, and imprisonment, often without informing their parents.
In facilities like Megiddo military prison, Hasharon (Telmond) prison, and others, children are held in inhumane conditions in overcrowded filthy cells. Some are kept in 1.5 square meter windowless solitary confinement under bright 24-hour light. None get enough or proper nutrition, medical care, clothing changes, sleep, or consideration for basic sanitation standards.
They’re subjected to harsh interrogations, including torture, abuse, and degrading treatment, hard enough on adults, but on children are traumatically life changing.
Most are accused of stone-throwing. In isolation, they’re pressured to confess, even if innocent, then sign a Hebrew document they can’t read or understand stating their guilt – to stop the pain that continues until they do for up to eight days after which they’re brought before a military or magistrate judge. Some are also coerced to be collaborators under threat of future arrests, imprisonment, and mistreatment, including against parents and siblings.
Israel remains unaccountable because world nations violate their obligations under Geneva’s Common Article 1 obliging:
“The High Contracting Parties (to) undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances;”
— the Lisbon Treaty obliging the 27-member EU states to affirm fundamental freedoms, peace, democracy, human rights and dignity, justice, equality, the rule of law, security, tolerance, solidarity, mutual respect among peoples, the rights of the child, strict adherence to the UN Charter and international law, and to prevent conflicts and combat social exclusion and discrimination; along with
— the indifference and complicity of Arab states.
Short of fundamental change, Palestinian men, women and children will continue to be victimized by state-sponsored terrorism, a condition no longer to be tolerated by nations claiming they’re civilized.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Homes and livelihoods gone in an instant
Eva Bartlett writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 11 March 2010
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Israeli bulldozers destroyed three homes and 17 dunams of agricultural land in eastern Khan Younis on 18 February. |
Radia Abu Sbaih, 47, lives with her sister and one niece on family land roughly 700 meters from the “green line” boundary between Israel and Gaza. Until 18 February 2010, they had nearly 600 olive, fruit, date and nut trees, an agricultural cistern, a water well, various vegetables and a house.
Theirs was one of three homes demolished by Israeli military bulldozers that day in al-Mossadar, eastern Gaza. Around 8am that morning, approximately five Israeli military bulldozers and upwards of 10 Israeli tanks, accompanied by more than 50 foot soldiers, invaded the farming region, according to locals.
“We were in our home when we heard the Israeli tanks and bulldozers approaching. We ran off immediately,” says Sbaih.
She walks over felled trees, past the bulldozed cistern, and to the ruins of their home.
“It’s all destroyed. Look, our clothes are buried,” she shouts, pulling at a sweater caught beneath the concrete block pile.
Household belongings are strewn on top of and beneath the pyramid of rubble. A gas range, several cooking pots, a plastic water bottle filled with olives, another with olive oil — both from their land and their destroyed olive trees — denote where the kitchen once stood.
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Radia Abu Sbaih on her land after it was destroyed by Israeli military bulldozers.
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“We were self-sufficient. Twenty people lived off this land. We had our own water source and we grew all our own vegetables: onions, spinach, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, radishes, beans …” Nothing, save a stray sprig of green onion, remains.
Beyond the lean-to sun shade, a donkey stands next to the crushed remnants of his cart.
“Now we have no electricity, no shelter, no water. I walk one hour both ways every day to bring jugs of water for drinking,” says Sbaih.
But for her, it is the loss of their trees that hits the hardest. In the hour or less it took the bulldozers to raze all their property and possessions, Radia Sbaih’s trees were cut to the ground and plowed into the valley. Haggard limbs studding the earth and thick ground-level stumps are all the evidence of the 10 dunams (a dunam is the equivalent of 1,000 square meters) of formerly thick growth.
“They were healthy trees, many over 50 years old. And so many fruit trees: guava, orange, lemon, pomegranate, date, almond, sugar cane, cactus fruit …” recalls Sbaih.
“This was our life, we grew up here, we put our sweat, love and everything we had into the land,” she says. “We watched the trees mature and cared for them as though they were family.”
Sbaih’s niece feeds trampled olive branches to kindle a smoky fire for tea. An Israeli warplane thunders over and Sbaih comments, “It’s normal, they’re always over us.” The roar is accompanied by the continual whine of Israeli “drones” (unmanned aerial vehicles) patrolling the skies.
“We actually didn’t have any problems during the war,” Sbaih says, recalling the winter 2008-2009 Israeli massacres on Gaza. “But now we are destroyed. If it rains, where will we go? We have no shelter, not even a tent.”
As the tea boils, the rain starts to fall.
Sbaih’s words and losses are echoed by the two other families half a kilometer south.
Moin Abu Said, 32, stands beside the fresh ruins of his home roughly 600 meters from the border. His father Ali, 63, sprawls on a blanket spread nearby on churned earth.
“I’ve got three children. When the bulldozers and tanks came, I was taking my son Nassim to school, around 7:30am. I heard the noise of the invasion even from the school.”
Abu Said returned to find the house that he had worked eight years to build completely flattened.
“We only lived in it one month,” he says in disbelief.
He points out the wreckage of a chicken barn, home to 1,000 chickens, the stubs of olive, date and lemon trees.
Like most in the border region, this is not the first time Abu Said’s land has been razed.
“Ten years ago they bulldozed everything, but we replanted. Now it’s all gone again.”
Aouni Abu Said, Moin’s brother, still has a home. Shot-up by Israeli machine-gun fire, the nearby one-level house somehow escaped the bulldozers. But his family was caught in the attack, terrified.
“My wife and kids were in kitchen when the Israelis began shooting at our house,” he says, pointing out the lattice of bullet holes in the kitchen windows and walls, children’s bedroom and nursery.
“The area was filled with Israeli tanks, bulldozers and soldiers from morning till around 4:30pm,” he says.
Closer to the border fence, but still 450 meters away, Abdel Hai Abu Said, 40, his wife and their six children sit with his father near the A-frame wreckage of their two-story home.
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Two of Abdel Hani Abu Said’s children sit on the ruins of their home. |
Five dunams of olive and date trees were mowed, along with 150 pigeons and a donkey.
“[The donkey] was in a concrete shelter when the bulldozers attacked,” he explains, pointing out the carcass in the treeless field.
One room of the house remains partially intact, ceiling corners sloped at 45 degree angles and walls punctured by bullet holes and cracks. The cramped, dust- and rubble-filled room serves as their shelter at night, despite the dangling clumps of concrete and the threat that the house might completely collapse.
A plastic bag keeps the surviving items of clothing protected, another the pieces of bread.
“We lived in this house for 11 years,” Said says. “Upstairs there were three bedrooms for my wife and our children. My father and aunt slept downstairs.”
Salem Abu Said, Abdel Hai’s father, was born 1943 in Beerseeba, before the 1948 ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine by the nascent Israeli military.
“First I was expelled from my land, and now our house is destroyed. Once again, I have to start all over.”
All the families report that the area was calm, without regular Israeli invasions, at the time of the invasion. They had a false sense of security and worked the land, lived off of it and planned their futures. In half a day this was all destroyed.
All images by Eva Bartlett.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who arrived in Gaza in November 2008 on the third Free Gaza Movement boat. She has been volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement and documenting Israel’s ongoing attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. During Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, she and other ISM volunteers accompanied ambulances and documenting the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Gaza war injured still lack prosthetics
IRIN – 10/03/2010
Imad Ghanem, 21, a cameraman for the Hamas-allied Al-Aqsa TV, lies on a bed
at Ash-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, 9 July 2007. [MaanImages/Hatem Omar]
Gaza City – A half-finished two-story building in central Gaza City is one of the few places providing support to amputees, most of them civilian victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as they try and come to terms with their injuries.
Ten patients were waiting to see Dr Hazem Ash-Shawwa, the director of the Artificial Limb and Polio Centre, when IRIN visited. Mostly young, they had been caught in the violence of Israel’s 23-day assault on Gaza at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, and were still learning to use their new prosthetic limbs.
“We have 250 new amputees following the Israeli war to add to the 5,000 cases we had before the war,” said Ash-Shawwa. “Some of the injured from the Gaza war are still having problems with their amputated limbs as they were not treated properly at the time due to the hectic situation; initial treatments focused on saving lives.”
A new upper floor extension to the center is under construction, reflecting the demand for its services, but a lack of funds has delayed work.
In the center’s ground-floor training room, 15-year-old Jamila Al-Habbash took a firm grip on the parallel bars and shuffled forward. She lost both her legs in a missile strike by an unmanned Israeli drone as she played on the roof of her home in eastern Gaza City; her sister and cousin were killed in the blast.
Mohamed Ziada, one of five specialists at the center, said Jamila was making good progress since her artificial legs were fitted in December, and may soon not need her crutches. He pointed out that treating teenagers was expensive as they quickly outgrow their prosthetics and need numerous re-fittings.
‘Worse than a nightmare’
Fifteen-year-old Ghassan Mattar also lost his legs when an Israeli missile hit his home in eastern Gaza City on 5 January 2009, an incident documented by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). “I still can’t believe I’ve lost my legs. It’s worse than a nightmare,” he told IRIN.
The only rehabilitation hospital with the capacity to treat amputee patients effectively is the Al-Wafaa Rehabilitation Centre in northern Gaza. Ghassan should have been sent there directly but the hospital was hit by artillery fire during Israel’s Gaza incursion, and its wards were evacuated, according to PCHR.
Ghassan was able to leave Gaza for Egypt and received six months of treatment at the Palestine Hospital in Cairo. However, back in Gaza he found his artificial legs were giving him problems as they did not fit properly so he visited the artificial limb center and got a better fitting pair.
A below-the-knee prosthetic costs about US $800 at the center. An above-the-knee limb is twice as much, and an arm costs $1,200. Although seemingly expensive, Ziada told IRIN it was a fraction of the cost charged in other countries.
Imports interrupted
The problem facing the center is that a blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel since June 2007 has interrupted imports of both prosthetic limbs – mainly from Germany – and the raw materials with which to make them.
“We use hundreds of different parts, plastics and materials to make prosthetic arms and legs. Without even just one of the materials, the limb cannot be made,” Ziada said.
It takes about 30 hours to manufacture a limb when all the parts are available. “The Red Cross helps the centre to mediate between us and the Israelis to let materials cross, which takes about three months,” Ziada added.
Prosthetics specialists from other countries who had tried to come and train Gazan doctors had been denied entry into Gaza, according to Ziada. “We need at least another five specialists because of the large number of amputees from the Gaza war.”
The center is assisted by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and NGOs Handicap International and Islamic Relief.
Israel says the aim of its 27 December 2008 – 18 January 2009 incursion was to destroy the military infrastructure of Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, and to prevent the firing of rockets into Israel. According to the PCHR, 5,303 Palestinians were injured in the conflict.
This item comes to you via IRIN, the humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The views expressed are the author’s alone.
Japan reveals secret nuclear pact with US
Press TV – March 9, 2010
Japanese people have been protesting against US military bases in Japan for years
Japan has verified the existence of a secret nuclear pact with the United States that allows US forces to bring nuclear weapons into the country.
Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada said on Tuesday that a panel of experts confirmed the existence of the pact after examining thousands of documents over a period of months.
From the 1960s, Japan has allowed the United States to deploy nuclear weapons on the southern island of Okinawa, the panel said. Japan’s previous governments had always denied the existence of such secret agreements.
However, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s government, which came to power six months ago, has adopted less US-friendly policies.
Yet Hatoyama says he believes the nuclear deterrence is necessary to maintain regional security.
In its calls for total nuclear disarmament, Japan has always emphasized its status as the only country to have been attacked with nuclear weapons.
Ahmadinejad calls US bluff on counter-terrorism
Press TV – March 10 2010
Iran’s president says the US must explain what its troops are doing in Afghanistan, as catching terrorists only requires intelligence work not military deployments.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the comment in a joint press conference with his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai in Kabul on Wednesday morning.
The Iranian president was responding to a question about the recent arrest of Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi.
“Rigi is supported by the same people [and] governments, who have ill intentions for the government of Afghanistan and the Iranian nation. Rigi was a terrorist, who along with his associates killed more than 140 people,” said Ahmadinejad.
“Was Iran able to stop him? Yes, we arrested Rigi. Of course that was achieved with the cooperation of the Afghan and Pakistani intelligence services… but [in that process] Iran killed no innocent people,” he added.
“Is this not an example of the right way to fight terrorism? Why those who claim to be eager to fight terrorism are unsuccessful? Well the answer is that they themselves started terrorism and they want to fight it now. But they can’t.”
Ahmadinejad said that fighting terrorism is not possible with military surge, adding that terrorism can only be fought with intelligence cooperation.
Ahmadinejad was also asked about the significance of the simultaneous visit of US Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Afghanistan, to which he responded by asking the American official about the objectives of his trip.
“My question to Mr. Gates is what is he doing here? Your country is 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) away from the Middle East…Are you here to capture terrorists? Well if so it is clear what you must do, but if you are here to do something else, admit to it.”
Israeli Defense Ministry goes on trial for Corrie death
By Mya Guarnieri – Ma’an – 09/03/2010
Jerusalem – On Wednesday, the Israeli Defense Ministry will go on trial as a court hears a case filed by the parents of an American woman run down by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza, in March 2003.
A civil suit seeks to hold Israeli forces responsible for the death of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old activist who was crushed to death as she protested a Palestinian home from demolition in the Gaza Strip.
“We claim that her assassination was intentional,” or, at the very least, that the army is guilty of “huge negligence,” Hussein Abu Hussein, the attorney who filed the petition on behalf of Corrie’s parents, commented.
Abu Hussein cites the state’s acknowledgment of the fact that Corrie and other members of the International Solidarity Movement—a Palestinian-led peace organization that advocates non-violent means of resistance to the Israeli occupation—were demonstrating in the area for several hours before Corrie was struck by the bulldozer. He also points out that Corrie was wearing a fluorescent orange vest to increase her visibility.
At the time of her death, the Israeli military response was that the driver of the machine did not see Corrie.
“If you see people, you should stop and think of all the needed steps not to harm [them]. Instead of stopping the D9, which weighs 64 tons, they continued. And due to that, [Corrie] was killed,” Abu Hussein said.
Four of Corrie’s fellow activists who witnessed her death were initially denied entry into Israel where they were asked to testify at the trial, but US pressure reportedly changed the Israeli position. A US citizen and three UK nationals will now be able to speak at the trial, which is expected to last two weeks.
Israel will not issue an entry permit to Dr Ahmed Abu Nakira, the Gazan physician who saw Corrie after she was injured and declared her dead. The state rejected the request for his entry on the grounds that there is no coordination between Israel and Gaza, due to the Israeli blockade that began after Hamas rose to power in 2007.
“It’s an obstacle to justice,” Abu Hussein said. “On the one side, [Israel] won’t give permission [for Dr Abu Nakira] to come; on the other they won’t allow him to testify by video-conference, which is used daily by courts everywhere in the modern world.”
Speaking shortly after Corrie’s death, an Israeli military representative called the incident a “regrettable accident.” An internal investigation conducted by the Israeli army later absolved the soldier operating the bulldozer of any wrongdoing.
The report, released in April 2003, claimed that Corrie was not killed by the “engineering vehicle” but “was struck by a hard object, most probably a slab of concrete which was moved or slid down while the mound of earth which she was standing behind was moved.” The army accused Corrie and the other activists present of behaving in an “illegal, irresponsible, and dangerous” manner.
Abu Hussein says that the army’s investigation lacked transparency. The civil suit, which was filed in 2005, is the only way to hold the state accountable for Corrie’s death, he says.
While it is exceedingly rare for the Defense Ministry to take direct responsibility in such cases, the state has made financial reparations to a handful of families like the Corries. Just two months after Rachel’s death, British journalist and filmmaker James Miller, 34, was shot to death by an Israeli soldier. After an army investigation found no wrongdoing, the UK warned it would extradite the soldiers involved. Last year, Israel settled out of court with Miller’s family for approximately 1.5 million pounds (2.25 million US dollars).
“The family is not seeking money. They’re seeking acknowledgment of responsibility by the state,” Abu Hussein says. If the Corries do receive compensation from Israel, they intend to donate the sum to “the matter Rachel was struggling for—for peace.”
The Corries’ suit “underscores that Israel doesn’t prosecute” soldiers accused of wrongdoing and that the state behaves as though it is “exempt from accountability,” Abu Hussein said.
“In the cases brought by Palestinians against the IDF [Israeli forces], more than 90 percent are denied,” he says, pointing to a culture of immunity that has been criticized human rights groups.
From 2000 to 2009, the Israeli NGO Yesh Din monitored almost 2000 Israeli military investigations into incidents in which a Palestinian or international claimed the army was guilty of a criminal offense, including unlawful shooting that led to injury or death. Indictments were filed in only six percent of these cases. Many of the soldiers who were prosecuted cut deals with the court that reduced the severity of both the charges and punishments.
“When we look at the number of cases, and we look at the fact that only six percent yield indictments, it is safe to assume that a soldier in the field today will know that he can get away with pretty much anything,” Yesh Din’s research director Lior Yavne remarked.
A representative for the Corries emphasized that the family hopes the upcoming trial will bring attention to ongoing human rights abuses perpetrated by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. “The issue is Palestine and human rights defenders,” the liaison says. “They want to highlight Gaza in light of [the UN-commissioned] Goldstone [report] and Operation Cast Lead.”
Mya Guarnieri is a regular contributor to The National (Abu Dhabi), The Huffington Post, and The Jerusalem Post.
Settlers destroy natural spring used by Palestinians for farming near Salfit
International Solidarity Movement | 8 March 2010
A group of Israeli settlers today destroyed a spring by the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan in the Salfit district. The settlers poured sand and cement into the spring, guarded by five armed members of the Israeli military.
Palestinians from the village were forced to watch helplessly as events unfolded, prevented by the soldiers from moving close to the spring or from filming what was happening. International Solidarity Movement volunteers were able to secretly film for a short time before the soldiers noticed, and made both Palestinians and Internationals leave, saying that the area was now designated as a Closed Military Zone.
Last Friday, a large group of both Palestinians and internationals spent the day clearing the area around the spring to make it more accessible from the village. This followed previous attacks from settlers on nearby springs and farmland, during which a child suffered serious head wounds, from which he is still recovering in hospital, and an elderly man had his arm and leg broken.
Locals intend to continue their attempts to keep the spring open, and to turn the area around it into a park for the use of the village.
Under international law, the settlement next to Qarawat Bani Hassan is illegal, as are all other settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Japanese city rejects hosting US base
Press TV – March 8, 2010
Relocation of US troops from Futenma Marine airfield in Okinawa’s Ginowan to the smaller town of Nago faces opposition by the Nago assembly.
The assembly on Monday unanimously adopted a resolution of protest against the ruling coalition’s People’s New Party (PNP).
The PNP plans to present an alternative to a 2006 US-Japan deal to relocate Futenma from the crowded city of Ginowan on Okinawa to the coastal area of Nago.
The PNP program “will result in only moving the noise and dangers of Futemma to Nago,” according to the assembly’s resolution.
It “will destroy the living and educational environments (for local residents) and is simply impermissible,” it added.
Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama had earlier announced that it would decide on the agreement by May.
Accidents and crimes committed by US service personnel near Okinawa’s residential areas have turned the local population against the presence of the American forces there.
Washington has nearly 50,000 troops based in Japan, more than half of whom are in Okinawa.
Does Israel hope to spark a new wave of suicide bombing?
By Stuart Littlewood | 9 March 2010
Here in the civilized West we hate suicide bombers with a passion.
We’re taught that the proper way to blow fellow humans to smithereens is to do it from 40,000 feet.
Or failing that, send Apache helicopter gunships at street level firing their laser-guided missiles and 30mm cannon.
Or failing that, turn loose our main battle tanks to shred and vaporize the “enemy”, reduce their homes to rubble with depleted uranium (DU) shells and spread birth defects for generations to come.
Nowadays we don’t even have to leave home to do it. We can train our really brainy chaps to steer armed drones to the target from the comfort of an armchair.
B-52s, F-16s, Apaches, drones and tanks – that’s the ticket. Awesome hardware gives any murky mission a moral superiority that gets nods of approval from the governing élite in the drawing rooms of London and Washington.
What is not acceptable is delivering the high explosive in person, all the way to the target, and looking your enemy in the eye as you push the detonator. That simply isn’t cricket.
“There can be no justification, under any circumstances, for taking innocent lives through terrorism.” Those were the very words used by Liberal Democrat Party leader Charles Kennedy in 2004, when he sacked British MP Jenny Tonge from her front-bench spokes job for suggesting she might consider becoming a suicide bomber herself if she had to live through the situation the Palestinians were in.
Statistics from Israel’s B’Tselem make the Palestinians’ situation clear. Between 2000 and the start of Israel’s “Cast Lead” blitzkrieg on Gaza in December 2008, the Israelis’ vast standing army, equipped with the most advanced weaponry American money can buy, killed 4,790 Palestinian civilians in their homeland. Of these, 952 were children.
Yes, 952 young Palestinian lives horribly snuffed out and their parents desolated…
In response Palestinians, with their garden-shed weapons, killed 490 Israeli civilians, including 84 children. In this vicious game of murder the Israelis were leading the Palestinians by 11 to 1.
Those were the “circumstances” in which Kennedy sacked Jenny Tonge.
Terrorism most foul
During the Cast Lead onslaught – the foulest act of state terrorism for decades – Israel slaughtered at least 350 more children, and Gaza has been under daily attack ever since. So the “most moral army in the world” must have blown to bits, shredded, incinerated or smashed with snipers’ bullets at least 1,400 youngsters in the last nine and a half years. The numbers left maimed and crippled don’t bear thinking about.
In their study, Palestinian Suicide Bombers: A Statistical Analysis, Sean Yom and Basel Saleh found that many Palestinian suicide attackers had been on the receiving end of violent encounters with the Israeli military, resulting in injury to themselves, or arrest, or a close family member being killed.
From October 2000 to March 2004, over 2,800 Palestinian fatalities and 25,600 non-lethal injuries were inflicted by the Israeli armed forces. Revenge, often fuelled by deteriorating economic prospects and the imposition of harsh policies, provided recruiters with a ready supply of volunteers. Persuading individuals not to support or participate in violence would necessarily involve “improving the structural health of Palestinian society”.
Fat chance of that. Israeli policy is to grind the Palestinians into poverty and helplessness, to take away everything they own and let them rot in a Zionist-prepared hell. Far from allowing the health of Palestinian society to improve, they tighten the screw of oppression further. In the period covered in the study they deliberately destroyed some 4,700 Palestinian homes while continuing their normal programme of slaughter, dispossession, abduction and all the other atrocities they are famed for.
Since 1967, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), Israel has demolished in total 24,145 homes in the occupied territories, including 4,247 (a UN figure) destroyed during Operation Cast Lead. Palestinians tend to have large families. Consider how many homeless have been created.
Professor Robert Pape’s comprehensive analysis, Dying to Win, based on his work for the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, advances the idea that suicide terrorism exerts coercive power “to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland… The bottom line, then, is that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation”
Occupation includes control of territory, as in Gaza, not necessarily military occupation.
And of course, when it comes to Israel, we’re not talking about a democracy but a vile ethnocracy.
Religion has little to do with it. Pape dismisses the often-repeated view that Islam is the root of the problem. “Rather, the taproot is American military policy.” And the notion that Islamic fundamentalism is bent on world domination is “pure fantasy”.
Many suicide bombers are simply motivated by the desire for revenge. According to one researcher, harsh state repression “should not be perceived only as a reaction to suicide bombing” but “often precedes and is a major cause of suicide bombing.”
One Saturday night in 2001 Saeed Hotari blew himself up at the entrance to a disco in Tel Aviv, killing 21 teenagers and injuring 132. Hotari was one of nine children from a poor Palestinian family living in Jordan and had been in the West Bank for two years hoping to find a better life. He left a message saying: “If we don’t fight, we will suffer. If we do fight, we will suffer, but so will they.”
The disco bombing was cited by the Israeli government as one of the reasons for building the Apartheid Wall.
In 2003 a female Palestinian lawyer, Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, aged 29, killed 21 civilians at Maxim restaurant in Haifa. She acted to avenge the killing of her brother and a cousin (some sources say her fiancé) by Israeli security forces.
Surgeon Abdel Aziz Rantissi, co-founder of Hamas, warned: “Israelis will have no stability and no security until the occupation ends. Suicide bombers are Israel’s future.” Rantissi was assassinated in 2004 in a helicopter attack on his car. A mother and her five year-old daughter were killed in the attack and four other bystanders wounded.
How much can a person take before snapping?
Arrest, detention without due process, constant humiliation, homelessness, unemployment and other family suffering at the hands of the Israeli army are not the only spur. Yahya Ayyash, nicknamed “the Engineer” and regarded as the father of suicide bombing, became Hamas’s chief bomb maker and for several years topped Israel’s most wanted list. From a relatively well-off family, he gained a BSc in electrical engineering at Birzeit University and planned to study for a Master’s degree in Jordan but the Israeli authorities wouldn’t allow him to.
Thwarted in his life’s ambition Ayyash joined Hamas. “Don’t get sore, get even” might have been his motto. He used household chemicals to manufacture an explosive brew called Mother of Satan. His devices were used in a number of “massacres” and he quickly achieved hero status, narrowly escaping capture many times. It is claimed he was responsible for the deaths of around 90 Israelis, a high price for the occupier to pay for robbing this youngster of his rights to travel and study – rights we in the West take for granted.
Eventually in 1996 Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, eliminated Ayyash by persuading a relative to give him a rigged mobile phone that exploded when he used it. Some 100,000 people are said to have turned up at the funeral. Forty more Israelis were then killed in retaliatory bombings.
Yet Israelis still revel in targeting Palestinian students. Five years ago they forcibly removed four Birzeit University students from their studies in the West Bank and unlawfully sent them back to the Gaza Strip. All four were due to graduate by the end of that academic year.
There was an outcry from around the world and the Israeli military agreed to let them return to Birzeit, but only on condition that they signed a guarantee to permanently move back to the Gaza Strip after completing their studies. This revealed for all to see Israel’s plan to separate the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, even though the two areas are internationally recognized as one integral territory. Under international law everyone has the right to freely choose their place of residence within a single territory. Ten years ago around 350 Gaza students were studying at Birzeit, but today there are almost none and the racist regime blocks Gaza students from reaching the eight Palestinian universities in the West Bank.
It was no surprise to learn last Christmas that Berlanty Azzam, a fourth year Business Administration student from Gaza studying at Bethlehem University, was suddenly “deported” by the Israeli military back to Gaza. Berlanty, a Christian girl, had lived in the West Bank since 2005 and resisted all temptation to visit her family home in Gaza in case she was prevented from returning to Bethlehem.
The 21-year-old was only a few weeks from graduating when she was arrested after attending a job interview in Ramallah. In a deliberate attempt to rob her of her degree “the most moral army in the world” blindfolded and handcuffed her, loaded her into a jeep, drove her to Gaza and dumped her in the darkness late at night.
In the case of another university honours student in her final year, Israeli soldiers frequently rampaged through the Bethlehem refugee camp where she lived, ransacking homes and arbitrarily arresting residents. They took away her family one by one. First her 14-year-old cousin and best friend was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while she sat outside her family home during a curfew.
Next the Israelis arrested her eldest brother, a 22-year-old artist, and imprisoned him for four years. Then they came back for her 18-year-old brother. Then they came again to take her youngest brother – the “baby” of the family – just 16. These were the heartbreaking circumstances (Mr Kennedy please note) under which this student was studying for her degree.
Luckily, she had the guidance of caring university teaching staff to keep her on the straight and narrow. The “most moral army in the world” may have robbed her brothers of an education, but she was determined to complete hers.
Although Palestinians take their education seriously, not all students cruelly obstructed by the Israelis react as Yahya Ayyash did. However, there must be a limit to how much injustice and frustration a young person can take before he/she snaps.
Modern suicide bombing appears to have started in 1980 in the Iran-Iraq war when an Iranian youngster exploded himself against an Iraqi tank, but it was Hezbollah’s devastating attacks two years later in Lebanon which attracted world attention. US forces and the Israeli invader were soon expelled. The technique was then exported throughout the Middle East and beyond.
The threat of suicide bombing has receded in the Holy Land while Israeli military atrocities escalate. The regime’s leaders, seeing the Israel brand image plummet, are now pulling every dirty trick imaginable – even to the point of trying to annex sacred Islamic heritage sites – in a frantic bid to provoke a third initifada (uprising) and cast themselves once again as the victims of terror. Something has to give. Many Palestinians will snap, and no-one will be surprised to see another Ayyash emerge.
Here in the West few of us can fully comprehend what turns a bright, intelligent person into a suicide bomber. But then, we don’t have a jackboot on our throat. We don’t have our front door battered down in the middle of the night by military thugs, our family abducted, our home bulldozed and our land confiscated.
The moral to the story is surely this. You mess with other people’s rights and freedoms, and trample on their dreams, at your peril.
French protest import of Israeli settlement goods
Press TV – March 8, 2010
Thousands of French protesters have rallied against the import of Israeli goods produced in Palestinian territories.
Monday’s demonstration comes less then a month after the European Union’s Court of Justice ruled that Israeli goods made in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank cannot be considered Israeli.
This means that those products cannot benefit from a trade deal giving Israel preferential access to EU markets.
The protesters, who came from all over France, symbolically gathered in the streets of the Mediterranean port of Sete — a hub for the biggest Israeli food exporter, Agrexco.
Over fifty percent of the company, selling over 300,000 tons of fresh fruits and vegetables to Europe, is owned by the Israeli regime.
“The EU and Israel have agreed that Israel will get preferential import taxes on one condition, the goods should not come from occupied territories. But we know Agrexco grows its products in the occupied areas and is still benefiting from tax deductions,” Tannich Coupe Sud de France General Secretary said.
“This is a campaign of stigmatization. It’s not an illusion that the economy will be demolished, it’s the image of Israel that we are trying to attack,” Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan who also took part in the event told Press TV.
France is one of Israel’s top ten economic partners, a fact that has disappointed many of the French.
Israeli companies based around the illegal West Bank settlements manufacture a host of products including confectionery, wine, cosmetics and computer equipment.
Palestinians have long argued that since the settlements are not part of Israel, the goods made there should not receive trade privileges.
Pro-Palestinian campaigners have also regularly protested that European supermarkets stock goods with Israeli labels on farm products from the West Bank.
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Fanatical Followers of the Covid Regime: A Jim Jones-Style Cult?
By Professor Roger Watson and Dr. Niall McCrae | The Daily Sceptic | November 15, 2021
As scholars at leading British universities over recent decades, we witnessed the replacement of critical thinking and debate by narrative: facts are discrimination and scientific method is imperialism; truth, instead, is derived from ‘progressive’ values. This educational trend may be a major contributory factor to the ease in which society has been inculcated to the Covid ‘new normal’ of masking, testing, and repeated doses of vaccines for a disease of similar risk to severe influenza.
One doesn’t need much critical reasoning to observe the flawed logic of some vaccination enthusiasts, such as people who respond to experiencing any side effects, however debilitating, by saying “at least I know it’s working”, or, after contracting the disease despite their promised inoculation (over 90% effective, according to initial drug company claims), “I’d have been worse off without the jab.” … continue
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