Another EU policy statement will not stop Israel’s colonization
Hasan Abu Nimah, The Electronic Intifada, 9 December 2009
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| As EU diplomats waste time arguing over words, Israeli occupation forces continue to demolish Palestinian homes. (Meged Gozani/Activestills) |
Israel started a preemptive campaign against a EU statement on the Middle East session even before it was formally presented for discussion by EU ministers this week on whether to adopt it. Israeli spokesmen expressed outrage at what they saw as an EU effort to “divide” Jerusalem, and claimed that the European position would “harm the peace process,” as if it is only Israel that has been carefully protecting it from the harmful moves of others.
Despite the usual hype, the document, a version of which was published by the Israeli daily Haaretz on 2 December, does not contain much that should cause Israel any undue worry. It is no more than a fine tuning of long-stated, and ineffectual EU positions. The statement is of course “balanced” — meaning it goes out of its way not to offend the Israeli occupier and lawbreaker — and it is strewn with cliches and contradictions.
“The European Union calls for the urgent resumption of negotiations that will lead, within an agreed time frame, to a two-state solution, with an independent democratic, contiguous and viable state of Palestine, comprising the West Bank and Gaza and with East Jerusalem as its capital, living side by side in peace and security with the State of Israel,” the statement reads.
This sounds straightforward enough, but that’s only the case if there are agreed upon definitions for the “West Bank” and “East Jerusalem,” but this is not the case. Does the EU mean the West Bank and East Jerusalem as they existed the day before they were conquered and occupied by Israel on 4 June 1967? Reading through the rest of the statement does indeed indicate the opposite.
If the EU were really committed to an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, then all the Israeli settlements built illegally on occupied Palestinian land must go, as was the case in Sinai and Gaza. But that is not what the EU stipulates at all.
In more than one location the document says one thing for the Palestinians, but then effectively negates it by deferring to Israeli demands. For example, it commits to “Palestinian statehood” but with recognition deferred until “the appropriate time.” Hence there is no real commitment here, just a vague, easily deferred promise that costs nothing.
On settlements, the document quite rightly “urges the government of Israel to immediately end all settlement activities, including in East Jerusalem and including natural growth, and to dismantle all outposts erected since March 2001.” “Outposts” is a term Israel uses for small settlements erected in violation of Israeli regulations, as if settlements Israel has authorized are somehow legal. So by asking only for the dismantling of “outposts,” the EU is in effect recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank by deferring to Israel’s definition of what is and is not a “legal” settlement. This EU recognition is a major diplomatic victory for Israel. All the settlements are equally illegal under international law, and Israel is equally obligated to remove all of them.
The EU document does recognize that “settlements, the [West Bank] separation barrier, on occupied land are illegal under international law,” but does not call for their complete removal.
The EU, the statement says, “will not recognize any changes to the pre-1967 borders” — that sounds like a commitment to applying international law, until it adds, “other than those agreed by the parties.” But it is utterly meaningless to talk about “agreement” between a military occupier colonizing land by force and its victims. This is just another way of saying that Palestinians will be forced to acquiesce to an Israeli-imposed, EU-blessed fait accompli where they give up their claim to their stolen land, and possibly receive some sand dunes elsewhere in compensation.
It seems that democratic Europe is ready to forgive Israel’s systematic theft of Palestinian lands for more than 42 years (counting only from the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip), just as long as there is an illusory “land swap” to legitimize and cover up this theft. But did any of these Europeans bother to ask what land could compensate Palestinians for the hills of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarm and Jenin? Is there any place on earth that could “compensate” Europeans for London, Paris, Berlin and Stockholm?
In any case, any lands that Israel might “give” to the Palestinians were most likely lands Israel seized illegally from Palestine in 1948. So it is as if a robber offers to “compensate” you for something he stole, using something else he stole from you! Does the EU ever bother to question the legality, if not the morality, of donating other people’s rights and lands to merely appease a rogue state like Israel?
And why should the EU Council promise to “further develop its bilateral relations with Israel within the framework of the [European Neighborhood Policy]” if the latter is blocking Middle East peace, laying siege to Gaza, demolishing civilian homes in Jerusalem after throwing their inhabitants out in the open and building an apartheid wall on occupied land, as clearly spelled out in the European document? Why should Israel be expected to pay any attention to the European position if so much groveling and appeasement follow every mild criticism?
Let us not forget that this follows after many European countries lacked the moral courage to support the Goldstone report and help Palestinians pursue real justice for Israel’s atrocities in Gaza last winter.
So why should Israel heed any statement of EU policy when the Europeans make it clear that Israel will receive its rewards regardless of what it does, and never be punished regardless of its repeated violations of international law? For decades, such European duplicity, vagueness and weakness has encouraged Israel’s crimes and violations. The EU tried to wash its hands of its legal and moral obligations of the Palestinians by showering the Palestinian Authority with cash — which has done nothing to bring Palestinians any closer to liberation. It only financed the continued occupation, freeing Israeli hands and cash to build more illegal settlements.
Israel probably knows that it has little to fear from the EU, but it made a huge fuss because from experience, such behavior will intimidate the EU into watering the statement down even further before it is adopted in the futile search for “balance” and appeasement.
The EU statement is empty and meaningless. At this stage only real action, in the form of firm diplomatic, trade and economic sanctions against Israel could be taken as evidence of a real European commitment to peace. The EU must also crack down on all European firms — such as French conglomerate Veolia which is building a light railway linking Israeli settlements — that war profiteer from Israel’s occupation.
But that’s not likely, unfortunately. As EU diplomats waste time arguing over words, Israeli occupation forces will continue to demolish Palestinian homes, ethnically cleanse Jerusalem and colonize more Arab lands.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times.
Iraq buys Israeli equipment to observe border with Syria
08/12/2009 – 23:27:24
Iraq’s Interior Ministry has bought from the US modern Israeli-made equipment worth $ 49million for observing part of borders with Syria and Iran.
According to the US army’s statement issued yesterday, the equipment includes towers with cameras and system for transmitting information.
In this context, the Israeli Yedioth Ahranoth reported the transaction between Iraq and the US provides for buying equipment made in Israel.
It added that the equipment are of high quality in technical field as Israel planted several equipmet on the Lebanese borders and Gaza borders.
“The US-Iraqi transaction is part of the US-Israeli military cooperation which is of benefit to Israel as its weapons are exported abroad”, the paper added.
Under the US-Israeli military cooperation, the US has to help Israel promote its products in the countries with which Israel has no relations, especially the Arab countries.
Yedioth Ahranoth alleged that Kuwaiti, Bahraini and Omani armies are using Israeli “Gore” guns on which US flag is printed.
The US army claims that Iran backs gunmen who are attacking its forces, while the Iraqi government accuses Syria of providing shelter for leaders behinds Baghdad- bombs.
Damascus has asked the US to provide it with sophisticated systems to control borders with Iraq, but Washington rejected the demand because it fears that the systems would reach the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance.
الكاتب: Basma Qaddour
مصدر الخبر: source
Living by the Gate From Hell
A portrait of nonviolent resistance in one Palestinian village
By Ellen Cantarow
December 9, 2009
Much is heard of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the story of the determined, long-term nonviolent resistance of many Palestinian villagers to the loss of their lands, striking as it may be, is seldom told. Here’s my report from just one village on the West Bank.
At no time since its 1967 West Bank occupation have Israel’s seizures of Palestinian land and water resources seemed as shocking as the ones attending its construction of “the wall,” begun in 2002. Vast, complex, and shifting in form, the wall appears most dramatically as 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.
In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared the wall illegal, but Israel ignored the ruling. Now, it undulates through the West Bank for over 170 miles, clasping Israel’s major colonies and some minor ones in its embrace. The completed wall will incorporate more than 85 percent of the West Bank’s settler population, a de facto annexation by Israel of significant chunks of the territory it first occupied in 1967. This is the dream of Greater Israel rapidly turned into architecture. For the Palestinians, however, the wall means theft, separating many Palestinian cities and villages from their land and water.
Jayyous, with a population of 3,500, is one of those villages. It lies nestled in a mountainous northern West Bank landscape with the Palestinian city of Qalqilya just to its west. The scenery here remains one of the Mediterranean’s loveliest, a cross, let’s say, between Tuscany and parts of Yugoslavia. Greek and Roman ruins mark the village’s great age. This was one of the West Bank’s most fertile areas. Farming involving a lively variety of nut, citrus, and olive trees, as well as vegetables, flourished around Jayyous, drawing life from abundant underground wells. The aquifers beneath Jayyous and Qalqilya, in fact, constitute a West Bank treasure. Lands belonging to both the city and the village abut Israel’s pre-1967 border – the “Green Line.”
Before the wall’s advent, Qalqilya’s merchants and Israelis did regular business on either side of the border, while Jayyous’ farmers worked their land all the way up to the Green Line. Now, the monstrous, concrete version of the wall surrounds Qalqilya entirely, bringing to mind high-security prisons or ghettoes from other eras. Jayyous is segregated from most of its former land by the wall in what one could call its “barrier” form – a system of steel fences, razor wire, and patrol roads manned by Israeli soldiers.
Four thousand of the village’s olive and citrus trees were uprooted to make way for the wall. All the village’s wells and over 75 percent of the land are now sequestered behind the wall, isolated on its west – that is, “Israeli” – side. A small Israeli settler colony called Zufim sits amid Jayyous’ former wealth. Israeli plans are on the books to build up to 1,500 new housing units on the bounty confiscated from the village. The new units will destroy the only road over which Jayyous’ farmers can now travel to and from their land: there used to be six of these roads. Israel has already blocked five of them.
Sixty-five-year-old Sharif Omar Khalid, known more familiarly as Abu Azzam, has spent half his life struggling to preserve Jayyous’ land. In 1980, with other farmers representing villages throughout the West Bank, he founded the Land Defense Committee, one of 18 organizations that now make up the Stop the Wall campaign. Gifted with stubborn optimism, he counts as victory an Israeli Supreme Court decision in April 2006, which pushed the path of the wall back from the south side of the village. The decision returned 11 percent of Jayyous’ former land – 750 dunams of the 8,600 blocked by the barrier. (A dunam is a little over a quarter of an acre.)
The wall remains, as does one of its most essential parts: the “agricultural gate.” There are two of these on Jayyous’ land – one to the north; another to the south. Almost all of the village’s farmers are forced to use the north gate. Opened by Israeli soldiers for two 45-minute intervals at dawn and dusk, the gate blocks a patrol road manned by the Israelis.
But to get beyond the gate, across the patrol road, and from there to their farmland, Jayyous’ farmers need “visitors’ permits.” Since 2003, Israel has decreed that the villagers are only “visitors” on land they have worked for generations. Obtaining the permits is an excruciating obstacle course that only begins with proof of land ownership. Abu Azzam is one of the village’s major landowners; his title goes back several generations to the time when Jordan occupied the West Bank. Being a known activist, he was periodically denied his permit until the Israeli Supreme Court finally granted him a permanent permit noting that its bearer is a “security problem.” This produces extra problems for him in his daily odyssey to his fields and back.
The Gate From Hell
The first time I saw an “agricultural gate” was in 2004 outside the northern Palestinian village of Mas’ha. It was terrible to behold. Immense steel jaws painted a bright ochre-yellow creaked open, thanks to the Israeli Occupation Forces’ finest, for about 30 minutes at dawn and again at dusk. Between those two moments, it remained locked, leaving the local farmers with no possibility of returning home for lunch or emergencies, nor even for crop-irrigation at the appropriate time (after sundown).
Each opening of the Mas’ha gate permitted a lone farmer, Hani Amer – his home locked in on three sides by the wall and on the fourth by an Israeli settlement – to make sporadic trips to his fields. At both sides of the gate lay coils of razor wire snarled in front of a barrier ditch which stretched into the distance as far as we could see. Beyond this ditch, more razor wire. Then a “military road” meant for Israeli soldiers patrolling the boundaries of an Arab world considered burdensome to the Greater Israel.
Across the military road lay yet more razor wire and another ditch before Hani Amer could finally reach his fields.
To grasp what the gate really means, though, you’d have to stay, as I did, at least a night with a farmer in Jayyous at harvest time. You’d awaken with his wife and him at 5:30 a.m., drink a cup of strong Arabic coffee, eat bread spread with jam made from fruit he grows on the land remaining to him, and then go jolting down the white, rutted, stony road on his tractor. Finally, of course, you would wait with him in a gathering line of farmers at the gate.
Now watch, in the dawn of another day in the forty-second year of occupation, in front of this steel raptor out of some mad filmmaker’s imagination, as they all arrive: one on his tractor, another on a donkey laden with sacks and harvest tools, until finally a long line stands waiting. Note those ubiquitous coils of razor wire, and the ditches, and that military road, just one form of the endless wall that imprisons Palestine’s people. Watch as the soldiers turn languidly and unlock the gate, swinging its jaws wide to transform it, and the military road it bars, into a checkpoint for the brief morning opening.
As I waited and watched from Abu Azzam’s tractor this past October, I imagined the hillside on the other side of the road as it must have been decades ago, when I still reported regularly from the West Bank. The region’s steep hills were then punctuated by lines of drywall terracing that enclosed olive trees whose leaves billowed silver in the wind, and the darker greens of fruit trees and grapevines. The Greater Israel’s new, California-style urban sprawl, its cities that now ooze through the West Bank, were still part of an expansionist dream, not a burgeoning reality, and of course there was no wall, nor a “military road,” nor, of course, an agricultural gate.
Watch now, as each farmer with his donkey, his tractor, his work-tools, approaches the passage between the gaping steel jaws. Watch each as he moves into the military road, brings his donkey to a halt, dismounts, and offers his ID card to a stout, impassive Israeli soldier. Flanked by two other soldiers, he, in turn, calls a control tower rising in the distance and in Hebrew recites each bearer’s name and ID numbers. Take in the stoicism, the resignation, the endurance of these farmers as they accept the indignity of all this because there is no other choice. Think that they are trying to do one simple thing: harvest their olives.
But first each must move into the road, stand with head bowed or eyes averted as his fate is determined for this day, and then, if he’s approved, move forward. Beyond lie more ditches at the other side of the road, more razor wire, and – at last – something that masquerades as freedom but isn’t. The farmer is now permitted to climb the hill in his vehicle. Beyond its crest he may reach his fields, for whose sake he has endured this daily torment.
And now, consider the Israeli settlers and soldiers, whose absolute rule, running the gamut from control over this gate through vigilantism against villagers like those in Jayyous, make a nightmare of this simple thing, the olive harvest. Settlers from Zufim actually uprooted olive trees in Jayyous in 2004. Some were carted away for sale in Israel; sewage from the colony has destroyed others.
A week after my stay, according to the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, Jewish settlers elsewhere in the northern West Bank “clashed with Palestinians picking olives.” The settlers called the farmers trying to bring in their crops a “security” threat because they “could gather intelligence and launch attacks from the olive groves.”
Elsewhere in the area that same week, Israeli security forces stood by as settlers entered a Palestinian village “to hold a brief rally” against the harvest. (Israel’s army is now dominated from top to bottom by ultra-religious-expansionist settlers, which makes a mockery of the “settler-soldier” distinction.) Meanwhile, near an Israeli “outpost” settlement called Adi Ad, settlers “uprooted dozens of olive trees.” As I write, similar alarums reach me by e-mail daily.
Several times since October the Israeli army has imposed curfews on Jayyous – collective punishment for the weekly anti-wall demonstrations staged by village youth here. Most of the time the curfews have been levied after the farmers were already in their fields and haven’t interrupted the harvest. But they have punished the rest of Jayyous. Collective punishment – reprisals against all for the actions of a few – is illegal under the 1949 Fourth Geneva convention.
Keeping Going
“A state gone mad,” observed Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh when, a day after visiting Jayyous, I described the scene at the gate. This particular barrier of steel, these particular patient farmers, those particular soldiers enforcing Israel’s banality of evil – they offer but a taste of the insane ingenuity that is the still-developing Greater Israel. A Dutch filmmaker who had interviewed some West Bank Jewish settlers, related this little exchange to Shehadeh: “What is your dream?” she asked one of the settlers. “My dream,” he replied, “is that my grandchildren will say someday, ‘Here, they say that once upon a time there were Arabs.’”
The evening before we all arose to go to the gate, Abu Azzam took a German visitor and me to see the local olive press where he and other farmers unload each day’s harvest. The sight of Jayyous’ olives moving up a conveyor belt and into the press, finally to emerge as a stream of oil bottled in large plastic containers, was joyous. Children ran and slid about on the slick floor, laughing; their parents dipped bread for them in the delicious, freshly pressed oil. What human madness would inflict constant torment on such peaceful labor?
Later, Abu Azzam told me stories about his life as an activist, his marriage, and his children. Jailed by Jordan for belonging to the Communist Party and later by Israel for his attempts to preserve the village land, he says he can’t imagine anything but keeping going. “I have no other choice” is the way he puts it, with a shrug and a smile.
He recalled the moment back in October 2003 as the wall was being built, when an Israeli official tried to buy off the Jayyous activists by offering them 650 permits which would have allowed that many farmers to access their land. But the Land Defense Committee made “a team decision” not to use them. Accepting the permits would have meant recognizing the validity of the wall and the whole system of dispossession that went with it. Israeli soldiers closed the gate; it was the height of the olive, guava, and clementine harvests. Abu Azzam and other farmers cut gaps in the barrier and crept through to work their fields “without a tractor, without horses, without carriages, without anything. Only our bodies.”
More arrests followed. The farmers made a decision to stay on their land and not return to the village. “My wife was very angry,” Abu Azzam recalls. “She called me on Oct. 21 asking me, ‘Are we divorced? Are we separated?’ I said, ‘I’m resisting.’ ‘Resisting? Can you see one box of guavas, cucumbers, or tomatoes?’ ‘Enough, to be on the land is resistance,’ I said.”
Since 2003 Abu Azzam and other Jayyous farmers have continued their obdurate odyssey to their lands. This determination to keep farming on the 3,250 dunams – of an original 8,050 – that the villagers still have, rather than live elsewhere in the West Bank or abroad is itself resistance. In Palestine, this “just staying” is called samid. It means “the steadfast,” “the persevering,” and eloquently expresses the oldest form of Palestinian nonviolent resistance.
“You have so many problems,” I said to Abu Azzam. “Would you ever leave?” He smiled at me indulgently. “All our life is a problem. I don’t want to be a new refugee. I am against the emigration that took place through the Israelis.”
Since 2008, Jayyous’ young people have staged weekly demonstrations against the wall. One of their leaders – Mohammed Othman – was arrested by Israeli authorities this past fall when he returned from a speaking tour in Norway. He is still in jail under indefinite administrative detention.
Jayyousi leaders have also written to high officials in Norway and Dubai imploring them to divest from companies owned by the Uzbekistan-born Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev. In doing so, Jayyous joins growing international revulsion at, and refusal to deal with, Leviev’s companies. Their reach is vast and diverse, extending to Angola’s diamond mines, New York real estate, and Israeli settlements in whose planning and building (including Zufim) they are heavily involved. Last March, Ha’aretz’s Barak Ravid reported that the British embassy in Tel Aviv “stopped negotiations to lease a floor in Africa-Israel’s Kirya Tower because of the [Leviev-owned] company’s involvement in settlement construction.” Oxfam has severed ties with him for the same reason.
On Sept. 9, 2009, a month before my arrival, the Israeli Supreme Court handed down a new ruling moving the route of the wall again and returning an additional 2,448 dunams to Jayyous. “Because of your efforts?” I asked Azzam.
“It is because of Jayyous,” he replied. “It is a group struggle.”
Ellen Cantarow, a Boston-based journalist, first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979. Her work has been published in the Village Voice, Grand Street, and Mother Jones, among other publications, and was anthologized by the South End Press. This essay is part of a series on Palestinian nonviolent resistance, “Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape.”
Note: Another of Cantarow’s Palestinian portraits can be read by clicking here. A comprehensive UN account of Israel’s wall can be found by clicking here [.pdf].
Copyright 2009 Ellen Cantarow – Source
Amira Hass: Two state solution died in 1993
Israel has made settlers of all its citizens
By Amira Hass, Haaretz
December 9, 2009
Would any of the settlers who opposed the Civil Administration inspectors this week be living in the territories had the governments of Israel not established and encouraged them? Would the Gush Katif evacuees have moved to mobile homes in Ariel in the expectation of spacious permanent housing had the government clearly declared that this was forbidden – because the settlements will be evacuated in the near future for a peace agreement – and that evacuation-compensation money would not be paid to anyone who moves to the West Bank?
Do the settlers clashing with the forces of law and order not know that those who have committed crimes – from racist threats and blocking roads, to wholesale cutting down of trees, arson and beating and murdering Palestinians – have not been investigated or have been forgiven and forgotten with a wink?
The settlers’ feeling of betrayal is natural. Haven’t the state and its institutions taught us that the settler is superior to everyone else?
Yes. The settler, in fact, is us.
The freeze orders will not change what exists now: an elite state for Jews and a sub-space for Palestinians – truncated, cut up, asphyxiated.
The distinction in the mind nowadays between the state of Israel and the settlers is artificial.
So is the distinction between the bad and the good, the violent and the law-abiding, the residents of the Migron outpost and the residents of Etzion Bloc settlements and the territories that have been annexed to Jerusalem, or those who live to the West of the separation fence.
Those who laud the freeze orders are thinking about relations with the United States.
The subordinated and occupied do not factor into their calculations. And indeed the land that was stolen from them in Beit Jala (for the benefit of Gilo) is like the land of Qalqilyah that Alfei Menashe coveted and is coveting.
The legitimacy of the settlement blocs exists only in the Israeli consensus. In reality, it is these blocs and Ma’aleh Adumim that are destroying the chance of a fair peace, because they and their separated roads are laying the groundwork for a crippled Palestinian political entity.
There is a lot of ingratitude in the media assault on the settlers, who have been manning barricades for the sake of a reality from which many Israelis are benefiting and accept as natural.
Had the governments of Israel been interested in containing the Golem they had created on time, they would not have cynically exploited the Oslo agreement to accelerate building and lure more and more Israelis with settlers’ benefits.
Former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin would have evacuated the Hebron and Kiryat Arba settlers after the massacre Baruch Goldstein committed in the Tomb of the Patriarchs / Ibrahimi Mosque.
His government and subsequent governments would not have strangled Bethlehem with the Tunnels Road and with the “moderate” settlement of Efrat that snakes and twists along the hills.
They would have prepared the public for a just scenario by which to bring all the settlers back home and would have apologized for having lured them to transgression.
However, in 1993 we missed a one-time opportunity to develop as an entity, the aim of which is not territorial expansion at the expense of another people – who were prepared for very painful concessions for the sake of its independence and for the sake of peace.
We missed an opportunity to expel the deed of disposession from our state’s institutional and mental chromosomes.
It is no wonder the setters are saying there is no difference between Kibbutz Baram and Psagot, between Givat Shaul and Alon Moreh.
Precisely in the shadow of diplomatic negotiations, Israel chose a policy of accelerated settlement in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
It is expelling Palestinian inhabitants from their homes there by various methods.
In this way, Israel is drawing a straight line between Kiryat Shmona and Beit El, between Tel Aviv and Givat Ze’ev. It has made settlers of us all.
The US cash behind extremist settlers
- Andrew Kadi and Aaron Levitt
- guardian.co.uk, December 8, 2009 12.30 GMT
Last month, a Brooklyn-based non-profit organisation called the Hebron Fund, which supports Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied city of Hebron, held a fundraiser at the New York Mets‘ stadium, Citi Field.
The fundraiser went forward despite calls for its cancellation from grassroots human rights organisations from the US, Palestine and Israel. The fact that the Hebron Fund likely raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for extremist Israeli settlers at a major US venue with little public scrutiny is a troubling sign for those who hope that the US can play a constructive role in achieving a just peace in the Middle East.
Perhaps more worryingly, according to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius: “A search of IRS records identified 28 US charitable groups that made a total of $33.4m in tax-exempt contributions to settlements and related organisations between 2004 and 2007.” Some of the larger organisations, including Friends of the Ateret Cohanim and Friends of Ir David, both leading the Jewish settler takeover of Palestinian East Jerusalem, are based in New York City.
Israeli settlements violate the Geneva convention’s prohibition against an occupying power transferring its population into occupied territory, and Israeli settlement expansion directly contradicts the US call for a settlement freeze.
Hebron’s Jewish settlers, who are supported by the Hebron Fund, are openly fundraising in New York City. Under the protection of the Israeli military, they are expanding settlements in Hebron’s Old City and driving out the Palestinian residents.
The Hebron Fund’s extremist positions are clear. Hebron Fund executive director Yossi Baumol told The American Prospect that “[d]emocracy is poison to Arabs”, “Israel must not give Arabs a say in how the country is run” and “[y]ou’ll never get the truth out of an Arab”. Hebron’s chief rabbi, Dov Lior, a featured participant in some Hebron Fund events, recently praised a new book that says it is permitted for a Jew to kill civilians who provide moral support to an enemy of the Jews, and to even kill young children, if it is foreseeable that they will grow up to become enemies.
Settlers and the Israeli army routinely attack and terrorise Palestinians in Hebron, according to human rights groups such as B’Tselem in Israel. In 1994, Hebron settler Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 unarmed Palestinians who were praying in a Hebron mosque. One of the honorees at the 2009 Hebron Fund dinner, Noam Arnon, called Goldstein “an extraordinary person” in 1995. In 1990 Arnon called three Jewish terrorists who were convicted of killing three Palestinians and maiming two Palestinian mayors “heroes”.
Though the Hebron Fund tells the IRS that its purpose is to “promote social and educational wellbeing”, in 2008 Baumol assured New York radio listeners: “There are real facts on the ground that are created by people helping the Hebron Fund and coming to our dinners.”
A 2007 appeal explained: “Dozens of new families can now come live in Hebron … waiting for you to be their partners in the redemption of Hebron.”
Baumol dedicated the 2009 fundraiser to protesting at “racist limitations, led by President Barack Obama on Jewish growth”.
Settlers frequently claim that preventing Jews from living anywhere they want in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is “racist”, regardless of the settlers’ severe infringement on the rights of longstanding Palestinian residents. Settlers justify their takeover of Hebron by invoking the massacre of 67 Jewish residents of Hebron by Palestinians in 1929. But rather than equality, Hebron’s settlers aim for superior rights enforced from the barrel of a gun.
Non-profit organisations like the Hebron Fund play a substantial role in fuelling the Middle East conflict, but largely fly under the radar in the US. They brazenly hold public fundraisers, and the media generally ignore them. Major US advocacy organisations that claim to oppose Israeli settlements typically fail to criticise them. In one rare mainstream media report, David Ignatius highlighted the US government’s self-defeating policy, writing that “critics of Israeli settlements question why American taxpayers are supporting indirectly, through the exempt contributions, a process that the government condemns”.
Until the public, advocacy groups, media and the US government scrutinise and rein in settlement non-profits like the Hebron Fund, policy statements about peace in the Middle East will do nothing to stop the daily violence and dispossession suffered by Palestinians.
• Andrew Kadi is an IT professional and a member of the Middle East rights organisation, Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East. Aaron Levitt has volunteered as a human rights monitor in Hebron and is a member of Jews Against the Occupation-NYC
Israel’s justice minister calls for Jewish law
December 8, 2009
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s justice minister reportedly called for basing the country’s judicial system on Torah laws.
“Step by step, we will bestow upon the citizens of Israel the laws of the Torah, and we will turn halachah into the binding law of the nation,” Ya’akov Ne’eman said Tuesday morning at a Jewish law conference in Jerusalem, according to Ha’aretz. “We must bring back the heritage of our fathers to the nation of Israel. The Torah has the complete solution to all of the questions we are dealing with.”
Ne’eman received applause for his comments. Many rabbis and rabbinical judges were at the convention.
In a statement released later Tuesday, the Justice Ministry’s spokesman clarified Ne’eman’s comments.
“The minister clarifies that his address did not contain an appeal to replace the state’s laws with the laws of halacha, neither directly nor indirectly,” the statement said. “The minister spoke in general and broad terms about returning the glory of Hebrew law and the importance of Hebrew law in the state.” … continue
Who is responsible for the anarchy in Afghanistan?
Afghan Resistance Statement | December 5, 2009
Obama’s new strategy which is the result of the same mentality that wants to continue the occupation of Afghanistan by military means, will add to the anarchy prevailing in the country. In fact, Americans are responsible for the chaotic situation. They handed over power to notorious warlords, venal officials and mafia-linked governors;
But still, they claim that they want a clean government in Kabul while their convoys of logistics are escorted by some murderous militias involved in kidnapping and the extortion of arbitrary taxes. There are hundreds of private unregistered militias in Afghanistan under the guise of security guards who carry heroin in official vehicles. These militias have links with warlords who have a hold over high government positions. They carry out their criminal activities with impunity.
The warlords usurp government and people’s lands and buildings. No one can ask them why. A government land in Shirpur, located to the north-east of the Kabul city is a good example at hand. Once a property of the Ministry of Defense, now it is a posh area usurped by the warlords who have built luxurious houses there. Karzai himself has granted 6000-7000 acres of lands to his favorites. Many drug-smugglers who had been sentenced to prison by court have been released by decrees of the President.
General Khudaidad, Minister of the Narcotic Campaign of the the Kabul Administration has acknowledged in a press conference that US military officers had hands in the drug trafficking. Abdul Jabbar Sabit, former attorney general of the Kabul Administration, says he was not able to lay his hand on some notorious governors involved in drug trafficking and bribery because they were protected by high-ups in the government. Ultimately, Abdul Jabar Sabit was forced to resign. US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, many times has referred to Afghanistan as a Mafia State but she did not disclose that the Mafia State was their own handiwork.
Independent analysts around the world believe that USA wants to keep a corrupt government installed in Kabul because this will provide a justification to maintain American military presence in the country. Similarly, on the one hand, the White House Security Advisor James Jones says there are fewer than 100 Al-qaeda members in Afghanistan and on the other hand, Obama sends 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. This high gap between words and deeds shows that America has other colonialist objectives in Afghanistan and in the region, ostensibly under the name of the so-called War on Terror. Furthermore, they claim that they want to resolve the Afghan issue through negotiation and reconciliation; but practically, they want the Mujahideen to lay down arms and accept the Constitution conceived and framed by America and want to keep their bases in Afghanistan for a longer period. Thus under the ploy of negotiation, the White House wants to find a pretext to continue their occupation of Afghanistan.
The Afghans, particularly the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, have no agenda of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to give legal guarantee if the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan. But the Mujahideen are not ready to allow foreign bases in Afghanistan or trade on the independence of the country. Ironically, after American invasion of Afghanistan, the country has been turned into a battle ground of rival intelligence agencies which are linked with the regime in Kabul and have hidden agendas against surrounding countries.
Bomb blasts in public places are the work of these agencies. The more the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan, the more such gruesome events will take place. At the present time, the Mujahideen are the only force which wants to release the Afghans and the country from being hostage in the cobweb of foreign agencies. With the victory of Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the whole region will take a breath of relief and the current bloodshed will come to an end. But it is the responsibility of all who have free conscience to morally help the Mujahideen to free the region from the vortex of the colonialist machinations.
The question of Terminology in the Zionist propaganda to colonize Palestine
By Salim Nazzal – December 3, 2009
By terminology I mean roughly the semantic or the concepts which are mental representation or abstract ideas produced to explain things. My point is to unearth some of the Zionist terminology used in the Zionist propaganda which has sadly dominated the western media for decades and brainwashed millions in Europe and the USA.
The function of these terminologies is to legitimize the Zionist policy of occupation and to conceal the truth especially for the western opinion.
In Arabic language there is a semantic link between darkness and tyranny and absenting the truth. The word “Dhallam” stands for darkness, the term “Dhulm” means oppression, if Darkness can be explained in the absence of light, and consequently the absence of truth, oppression is a form of concealing the truth. The problem of the Zionist thinking as in all racist ideologies is that it claims to own the absolute truth. Claiming to own the absolute truth is as the Syrian poet Adonis says is the source of all oppression in history.
This question was raised by the Palestinian thinker Azmi Bishra who wrote about the importance of terminology use in the Palestinian struggle against the Judio Zionist invaders stressing the importance to be attentive in this question.
Obviously, Bishara who spent years confronting the Zionist apartheid knows well the tremendous quantity and quality of falsification Jewish Zionist produced to legitimate their conquest of Palestine. For that reason, Bishara demands from those interested in unmasking the brutal face of Zionism to be extremely watchful in this regard.
Ron Wilkinson notes in an article about conflict terminology some examples of how Zionist used terminology with the aim to present a negative picture for Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims. He cites few examples of the Zionist terminology use, such as the Israeli army “enters” a place in Palestine (to refer to the daily Zionist attracts) while Palestinians “Infiltrate” an area (referring to Palestinian resistance).
Yet the history of the Zionist propaganda is earlier than the Zionist invasion. The Zionist experience of bringing Jews to Palestine to commit war crimes has been put on a sacred level and was called Aliyah. Which is considered the fulfillment of the promises of the Jewish god? However the question of portraying everything Zionist on a sacred level needs another time to talk about it.
For the sake of clarity I shall divide the Zionist semantic propaganda use into two periods: the first I call the negation period. The focus in this period was on the terminologies which negate Palestinians from existence. Palestinians are chosen enemies by being in their country.
The most dominant Zionist expressions of that period that Palestine is empty of folk and that Palestinians do not exist. And in cases when they cannot conceal the truth, they describe Palestinians as Bedouins, which means they have no particular attachment to Palestine. The mental association here is that Jews take no body of land, it is either empty or waits for others to develop it, or it is populated by “primitive” people (who do not deserve it!) and who need somebody else (who deserve it!) to help them in developing the country.
Therefore the Zionist policy of collective crimes and displacement was the parallel work of the semantics they use. The Zionist logic can be explained as such, if Zionists believe there are no Palestinians, and since they know that this is groundless, the work to be done is to murder Palestinians and to push them to leave because Zionists have to create facts on the ground which accord with the Zionist semantics and vision.
The question is how to explain Zionist focusing on murdering Palestinian olive trees and Palestinian babies?
Zionists saw both aspects as threatening, Palestinian trees represent the Palestinian past, culture and the continuous existence in Palestine, especially the olive trees which live thousands of years. The seasons of harvesting the olives have always been connected with Palestinian culture, songs and folklore and the oil produced from the olive trees is related to popular medicine traditions. In murdering trees, they think they murder the culture of harvest linked to the harvesting seasons. And to murder Palestinian babies, Zionists think they can murder the future in terms of demography and in terms of the future Palestinian struggle for freedom.
The idea of killing Palestinian children has been one of the aspect of the Zionist thinking since their invasion. Here are two examples, one from 1947, the other is recent.
(At night of 15th of July 1947, a force of the Hagana “A Jewish terror organization” entered an orange field owned by Rashid Abo Laban which lies between Yafaa and Betah tekfa.Inside the house there is a family of 7 all were sleeping, and there were 9 workers at the house. The Hagana shot at them killed 11 including the mother and her three kids at ages 3, 7, 8).
The second is from the war on Gaza 2009 (Mordechi Elyahu,one of the leading rabbinic figures in Israel, urged the army not to refrain from killing enemy children in order to save the lives of Israeli soldiers).
Therefore it is not surprising that Zionist Jews expressed in many occasions their worry about Palestinian pregnant women which they call the demographic bomb, and that too explains why one third of the murdered in Gaza war were Palestinian children. The Zionist negation of Palestinians was done on three levels, to negate Palestinians from the past through absenting them from history and through destroying any cultural or archeological findings that belong to Palestinians, to negate Palestinian culture by both destroying it, or drying its sources including trees and water sources and sometimes by claiming Palestinian cultural heritage as belonging to Jews, and finally to negate Palestinians physically by means of ruthless terror.
Within the framework of this thinking it is possible to explain the Zionist collective crimes. The Zionist psyche has already murdered Palestinians on the semantic and psychological levels. Therefore the actual murder of Palestinians becomes easy because it concords the Zionist self made image that Palestinians do not exist and thusly Jews murder nobody! But when Zionists cannot escape the reality of the Palestinian existence they portray them as part of ”the whole world which hates Jews” or as “animals and insects” which made the actual murder an easy job since it is directed against non humans or that Jews are defending themselves against “terrorists”. In this line of thinking the Zionist state was born out of war crimes and its existence surpassed all notions of ethics.
Zionists show neither care nor mercy towards Palestinians and Arabs. This is due to the racist thinking which is an integral part of the Zionist ideology and the Jewish Zionist culture. But, since the Zionist state was and still is heavily dependent on the west, Zionists are keen to conceal their crimes from the western media. For that reason a great part of their propaganda terminology was mostly designed for Western public opinion. Raising the banner of the “only democracy in the middle east” and the “civilized country” against the “extremist Islamists” are just few examples of the arsenal of the Zionist propaganda directed towards the west.
And when they occupied Jerusalem and the west bank and Gaza they called it “administrative areas”. The aim here is clear that which is to absent the name of Palestine, a name which Zionists fear most because it indicates that the victim is alive despite all the Zionist crimes.
However after three generation of Palestinian struggle, and after the world has largely become sympathetic with Palestinians, the Zionist terminologies have relatively changed from full negation to the second period which I call the reduction period. The reduction period does not mean at all that Zionists suddenly become moral creatures; Zionism will be always the source of wars and instability in the Middle East. But, the reality that Zionists are extremely clever to change their skin to fit changing situations, without changing its essence as an anti humanity ideology.
The most recent Zionist propaganda is focusing on Hamas. They seek to benefit from the anti Islamic atmosphere found in the West to present themselves as part of the West which fights “Islamic terror”. For that reason their propaganda terminology has changed to focus on Hamas. They instructed their propaganda machine to say that Zionists are not against Palestinians but against Hamas as if Hamas is not part of the Palestinian people. So following this logic Hamas is the problem and not the Zionist occupation. Off course it is very easy to tear up this argument because Hamas was born in 1987 but what about the ethnic cleaning of Palestine in 1948, and in 1967? What about the long history of war crimes?
The most ridiculous thing in the new terminology tactics is that Zionists began to say that they want the best for Palestinians! Of course Palestinians know well that Zionism and murder, Zionism and occupation are twins, but it is obvious that the new tactics are because Zionists know that the time of truth is coming and that they can no longer brain wash the world.
Netanyahu’s recent speech about accepting the idea of the Palestinian state is yet another good example of the new Zionist tactic. When he referred to Palestinians in (Judea and Samaria!!!), he could not reject the idea of a Palestinian state which is the actual position of his party. He mentioned the existence of Palestinians in the context that it happens that Palestinians are there! (As if Palestinians are there by accident) and accordingly it’s a problem that Israel must deal with. In this way he reflects without any doubt the Zionist mentality, psyche and logic which tries to be flexible under international pressures but without change in its supremacist nature.
He did not recognize that Palestinians are an occupied nation and that they have the right for self determination. He did not recognize the responsibility of Zionist Jews of creating a life of hell for 70 years for Palestinians. He used the same terms Zionist used when they for instance say that they decide to lift the siege on Gaza for one day, which creates a positive impression about Israeli “generosity” and its “great charity” while the original question is why the zionist state besieges Gaza in the first place? The same “positive impression” they try to create when they say they decided to reduce the check points in the west bank from 620 to 590! While the real question is why there are check points in the first place and Zionists know very well that there is no single Palestinian who does not dream every single day to get rid of the Zionist occupation.
Dr. Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian-Norwegian historian in the Middle East, who has written extensively on social and political issues in the region.
Are They Really Oil Wars?
By Ismael Hossein-zadeh
July 9, 2008
A most widely-cited factor behind the recent U.S. wars of choice is said to be oil. “No Blood for Oil” has been a rallying cry for most of the opponents of the war. While some of these opponents argue that the war is driven by the U.S. desire for cheap oil, others claim that it is prompted by big oil’s wish for high oil prices and profits. Interestingly, most antiwar forces use both claims interchangeably without paying attention to the fact that they are diametrically-opposed assertions.
Not only do the two arguments contradict each other, but each argument is also wanting and unconvincing on its own grounds; not because the U.S. does not wish for cheap oil, or because Big Oil does not desire higher oil prices, but because war is no longer the way to control or gain access to energy resources. Colonial-type occupation or direct control of energy resources is no longer efficient or economical and has, therefore, been abandoned for more than four decades.
The view that recent U.S. military adventures in the Middle East and the broader Central Asia are driven by energy considerations is further reinforced by the dubious theory of Peak Oil, which maintains that, having peaked, world oil resources are now dwindling and that, therefore, war power and military strength are key to access or control of the shrinking energy resources.
In this study I will first argue that the Peak Oil theory is unscientific, unrealistic, and perhaps even fraudulent. I will then show that war and military force are no longer the necessary or appropriate means to gain access to sources of energy, and that resorting to military measures can, indeed, lead to costly, not cheap, oil. Next, I will demonstrate that, despite the lucrative spoils of war resulting from high oil prices and profits, Big Oil prefers peace and stability, not war and geopolitical turbulence, in global energy markets. Finally, I will argue a case that behind the drive to war and military adventures in the Middle East lie some powerful special interests (vested in war, militarism, and geopolitical concerns of Israel) that use oil as an issue of “national interest”—as a façade or pretext—in order to justify military adventures to derive high dividends, both economic and geopolitical, from war.
Has Oil Really Peaked—and Is It Running Out?
Peak oil thesis, as noted above, maintains that world oil reserves, having reached their maximum capacity, are now dwindling—with grave consequences of oil shortage and high energy prices. While this has led many to call for more vigorous conservation, it has led others to argue in favor of unrestrained exploration and extraction of oil reserves, especially those located in the Alaskan Wildlife regions.
Significant policy and/or political implications follow from the view that oil is running out. For one thing, this view provides fodder for the cannons of war profiteering militarists who are constantly on the look out to invent new enemies and find new pretexts for continued war and escalation of military spending. For another, it tends to disarm many antiwar forces that accept this thesis and, therefore, “internalize responsibility for U.S. foreign policy every time they fill their gas tank. Thus they own the wars.”[1]
The Peak Oil thesis serves as a powerful trap and a clever manipulation in that it lets the real forces of war and militarism (the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby) “off the hook; it is a fabulous redirection. All evils are blamed on a commodity upon which we are all utterly dependent.”[2]
The fact, however, is that there is no hard evidence that oil has peaked, or that global oil reserves are shrinking, or that the current skyrocketing price of oil is due to a supply shortage. (As shown below, there is actually an oil surplus, no shortage.)
Peak oil theory is not altogether new. It was originally floated around in the 1940s, arguing that world oil reserves would be exhausted within the next two decades or so. It then resurfaced in the 1970s and early 1980s in reaction to the oil price hikes of those years—which were, incidentally, precipitated not by oil shortages but by international political convulsions, revolutions and wars. But it died down once the price of oil fell back to pre-crises levels.
As recent geopolitical convulsions in the Middle East (especially the U.S. war on Iraq, and the resultant booming speculation in oil markets) have triggered a new round of oil price hikes, Peak Oil theory has once again become fashionable. The theory is being promoted not only by war profiteers and proponents of an unbridled domestic oil exploration and extraction, especially in Alaska, but also by some apparently antiwar liberals such as Michael T. Klare and James H. Kunstler.[3]
Peak oil theory is based on a number of assumptions and omissions that make it less than reliable. To begin with, it discounts or disregards the fact that energy-saving technologies have drastically improved (and will continue to further improve) the efficiency of oil consumption. Evidence shows that, for example, “over a period of five years (1994-99), U.S. GDP expanded over 20 percent while oil usage rose by only nine percent. Before the 1973 oil shock, the ratio was about one to one.”[4]
Second, Peak Oil theory pays scant attention to the drastically enabling new technologies that have made (and will continue to make) possible discovery and extraction of oil reserves that were inaccessible only a short time ago. One of the results of the more efficient means of research and development has been a far higher success rate in finding new oil fields. The success rate has risen in twenty years from less than 70 percent to over 80 percent. Computers have helped to reduce the number of dry holes. Horizontal drilling has boosted extraction. Another important development has been deep-water offshore drilling, which the new technologies now permit. Good examples are the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and more recently, the promising offshore oil fields of West Africa.[5]
Third, Peak Oil theory also pays short shrift to what is sometimes called non-conventional oil. These include Canada’s giant reserves of extra-heavy bitumen that can be processed to produce conventional oil. Although this was originally considered cost inefficient, experts working in this area now claim that they have brought down the cost from over $20 a barrel to $8 per barrel. Similar developments are taking place in Venezuela. It is thanks to developments like these that since 1970, world oil reserves have more than doubled, despite the extraction of hundreds of millions of barrels.[6]
Fourth, Peak Oil thesis pays insufficient attention to energy sources other than oil. These include solar, wind, non-food bio-fuel, and nuclear energies. They also include natural gas. Gas is now about 25 percent of energy demand worldwide. It is estimated that by 2050 it will be the main source of energy in the world. A number of American, European, and Japanese firms have and are investing heavily in developing fuel cells for cars and other vehicles that would significantly reduce gasoline consumption.[7]
Fifth, proponents of Peak Oil tend to exaggerate the impact of the increased oil demand coming from China and India on both the amount and the price of oil in global markets. The alleged disparity between supply and demand is said to be due to the rapidly growing demand coming from China and India. But that rapid growth in demand is largely offset by a number of counterbalancing factors. These include slower growth in U.S. demand due to its slower economic growth, efficient energy utilization in industrially advanced countries, and increases in oil production by OPEC, Russia, and other oil producing countries.
Finally, and perhaps more importantly, claims of “peaked and dwindling” oil are refuted by the available facts and figures on global oil supply. Statistical evidence shows that there is absolutely no supply-demand imbalance in global oil markets. Contrary to the claims of the proponents of Peak Oil and champions of war and militarism, the current oil price shocks are a direct consequence of the destabilizing wars and geopolitical insecurity in the Middle East, not oil shortages. These include not only the raging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the threat of a looming war against Iran. The record of soaring oil prices shows that anytime there is a renewed U.S. military threat against Iran, fuel prices move up several notches.
The war also contributes to the escalation of fuel prices in indirect ways—for example, by plunging the U.S. ever deeper into debt and depreciating the dollar, or by creating favorable grounds for speculation. As oil is priced largely in U.S. dollars, oil exporting countries ask for more dollars per barrel of oil as the dollar loses value. Perhaps more importantly, an atmosphere of war and geopolitical instability in global oil markets serves as an auspicious ground for hoarding and speculation in commodity markets, especially oil, which is heavily contributing to the recently soaring oil prices.
As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price. . . . Since the advent of oil futures trading and the two major London and New York oil futures contracts, control of oil prices has left OPEC and gone to Wall Street. It is a classic case of the ‘tail that wags the dog.’[8]
Wall Street financial giants that created the Third World debt crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the tech bubble in the 1990s, and the housing bubble in the 2000s are now hard at work creating the oil bubble. By purchasing large numbers of futures contracts, and thereby pushing up futures prices to even higher levels than current prices, speculators have provided a financial incentive for oil companies to buy even more oil and place it in storage. A refiner will purchase extra oil today, even if it costs $115 per barrel, if the futures price is even higher.[9]
This has led to a steady rise in crude oil inventories over the last two years, “resulting in US crude oil inventories that are now higher than at any time in the previous eight years. The large influx of speculative investment into oil futures has led to a situation where we have both high supplies of crude oil and high crude oil prices. . . . In fact, during this period global supplies have exceeded demand, according to the US Department of Energy.”[10]
The fact that the skyrocketing oil prices of late have been accompanied by a surplus in global oil markets was also brought to the attention of President George W. Bush by Saudi officials when he asked them during a recent trip to the kingdom to increase production in order to stem the rising prices. Saudi officials reminded the President that “there is plenty of oil on the market. Iran has put some 30 million barrels of oil that it can’t sell into floating storage. ‘If we produced more oil, it wouldn’t find buyers,’ says the Saudi source. It wouldn’t affect the price at all.”[11]
And why producing more oil “wouldn’t affect the price at all”? Well, because what is driving the soaring oil prices is not shortage but speculation: “with so much investment money sloshing around in the commodities markets, the Saudis calculate they have no hope of controlling short-term price fluctuations. They blame the recent price run-ups on speculation and fear of shortages [not real shortages], factors they say are beyond their control.”[12]
War for Cheap Oil?
The widely-shared view that the U.S. desire for access to abundant and cheap oil lurks behind the Bush administration’s drive to war in the Middle East rests on the implicit but dubious assumption that access to energy resources requires direct control of oil fields and/or oil producing countries. There are at least three problems with this postulation.
First, if control of or influence over oil producing countries in the Middle East is a requirement for access to cheap oil, the United States already enjoys significant influence over some of the major oil producers in the region—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and a number of other smaller producers. Why, then, would the U.S. want to bring about war and political turmoil in the region that might undermine that long and firmly-established influence?
Let us assume for a moment that the neoconservative militarists are sincere in their alleged desire to bring about democratic rule and representational government in the Middle East. Let us further assume that they succeed in realizing this purported objective. Would, then, the thus-emerging democratic governments, representing the wishes of the majority of their citizens, be as accommodating to U.S. economic and geopolitical objectives, including its oil needs, as are its currently friendly rulers in the region? Most probably not.
Secondly, and more importantly, access to oil no longer requires control of oil fields or oil producers—as was the case in times past. For more than a century, that is, from the early days of oil extraction in the United States in the 1870s until the mid-1970s, the price of oil was determined administratively, that is, by independent producers operating in different parts of the world without having to compete with each other. Under those circumstances, colonial or imperial wars of conquest and occupation were crucial to the control of oil (and other) resources.
Beginning with the 1950s, however, that pattern of local, non-competitive price determination began to gradually change in favor of regional and/or international markets. By the mid 1970s, an internationally competitive oil market emerged that effectively ended the century-old pattern of local, administrative pricing. Today, oil prices (like most other commodity prices) are determined largely by the forces of supply and demand in competitive global energy markets; and any country or company can have as much oil as they wish if they pay the going market (or spot) price.[13]
To the extent that competitive oil markets and/or prices are occasionally manipulated, such subversions of competitive market forces are often brought about not so much by OPEC or other oil producing countries as by manipulative speculations of financial giants in New York and London. As was discussed earlier, gigantic Wall Street financial institutions have accomplished this feat through “innovative” financial instruments such as establishment of energy hedge funds and speculative oil futures markets in New York and London.[14]
It is true that collective supply decisions of oil producing countries can, and sometimes does, affect the competitively determined market price. But a number of important issues need to be considered here.
To begin with, although such supply manipulations obviously affect or influence market-determined prices, they do not determine those prices. In other words, competitive international oil markets determine its price with or without oil producers’ supply manipulations. Such supply managements are, however, designed not to create volatility in energy markets, or chronic oil price hikes. Instead, they are designed to stabilize global oil prices because oil exporting countries prefer stability, predictability and long-term planning for their economic development and industrialization projects. Here is how Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo describe this relationship:
As a result, we conclude that the global oil market is the prime mover [i.e., prime determinant of oil price] and OPEC indeed follows its trajectory accordingly and consistently. . . . When market price (both spot and futures) is falling, OPEC decreases its output; when market price is rising, OPEC attempts to increase its output; and when market price is steady, OPEC keeps its output unchanged. . . . And, this is a kind of oil market we have experienced after the dust settled following the crisis of de-cartelization and globalization of oil industry in the 1970s.[15]
Producers’ policy to sometimes curtail or limit the supply of oil, the so-called “limited flow” policy, is designed to raise the actual trading price above the market-determined price in order to keep high-cost U.S. producers in business while leaving low-cost Middle East producers with an above average, or “super,” profit. While for low-cost producers this limited flow policy is largely a matter of making more or less profits, for high-cost U.S. producers it is a matter of survival, of being able to stay in or go out of business—an important but rarely mentioned or acknowledged fact.
A hypothetical numerical example might be helpful here. Suppose that the market-determined, or free-flow, price of oil is $30 per barrel. Further, suppose this price entails an average rate of profit of 10 percent, or $3 per barrel. The word “average” in this context refers to average conditions of production, that is, producers who produce under average conditions of production in terms of productivity and cost of production. This means that producers who produce under better-than-average conditions, that is, low-cost, high productivity producers, will make a profit higher than $3 per barrel while high-cost, low efficiency producers will end up making less than $3 per barrel. This also means that some of the high-cost producers may end up going out of business altogether. Now, if the limited flow policy raises the actual trading price to $35 per barrel, it will raise the profits of all producers accordingly, thereby also keeping in business some high-cost producers that might otherwise have gone out of business.
Furthermore, supply manipulation (in pursuit of price manipulation) is not limited to the oil industry. In today’s economic environment of giant corporations and big businesses, many of the major industries try, and often succeed in controlling supply in order to control price. Take, for example, the automobile industry. Theoretically, automobile producers could flood the market with a huge supply of cars. But that would not be good business as it would lower prices and profits. So, they control supply, just as do oil producers, in order to manipulate price. During the past several decades, the price of automobiles, in real terms, has been going up every year, at least to the tune of inflation. During this period, the industry (and the economy in general) has enjoyed a many-fold increase in labor productivity. Increased labor productivity is supposed to translate into lower costs and, therefore, lower prices. Yet, that has not materialized in the case of this industry—as it has in the case of, for example, pocket calculators or computers.
Another example of price control through supply manipulation is the case of U.S. grain producers. The so-called “set aside” policy that pays farmers not to cultivate part of their land in order to curtail supply and prop up price is not different—nay, it is worse— than OPEC’s policy of supply and/or price manipulation.
It is also necessary to keep in mind that OPEC’s desire to sometimes limit the supply of oil in order to shore up its price is limited by a number of factors. For one thing, the share, and hence the influence, of Middle Eastern oil producers as a percentage of world oil production has steadily declined over time, from almost 40 percent when OPEC was established to about 30 percent today.[16] For another, OPEC members are not unmindful of the fact that inordinately high oil prices can hurt their own long-term interests as this might prompt oil importers to economize on oil consumption and search for alternative sources of energy, thereby limiting producers’ export markets.
OPEC members also know that inordinately high oil prices could precipitate economic recessions in oil importing countries that would, once again, lower demand for their oil. In addition, high oil prices tend to raise the cost of oil producers’ imports of manufactured products as high energy costs are bound to affect production costs of those manufactured products.
War for Expensive Oil?
Now let us consider the widely-shared view that attributes the Bush administration’s drive to war to the influence of big oil companies in pursuit of higher oil prices and profits. As noted, this is obviously the opposite of the “war for cheap oil” argument, as it claims that Big Oil tends to instigate war and political tension in the Middle East in order to cause an oil price hike and increase its profits. Like the “war for cheap oil” theory, this claim is not supported by facts. Although the claim has an element of a prima facie reasonableness, that apparently facile credibility rests more on precedent and perception than reality. Part of the perception is due to the exaggerated notion that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were “oil men” before coming to the White House. But the fact is that George W. Bush was never more than an unsuccessful petty oil prospector and Dick Cheney headed a company, the notorious Halliburton, that sold (and still sells) services to oil companies and the Pentagon.
The larger part of the perception, however, stems from the fact that oil companies do benefit from oil price hikes that result from war and political turbulence in the Middle East. Such benefits are, however, largely incidental. Surely, American oil companies would welcome the spoils of the war (that result from oil price hikes) in Iraq or anywhere else in the world. From the largely incidental oil price hikes that follow war and political convulsion, some observers automatically conclude that, therefore, Big Oil must have been behind the war.[17] But there is no evidence that, at least in the case of the current invasion of Iraq, oil companies pushed for or supported the war.
On the contrary, there is strong evidence that, in fact, oil companies did not welcome the war because they prefer stability and predictability to periodic oil spikes that follow war and political convulsion: “Looking back over the last 20 years, there is plenty of evidence showing the industry’s push for stability and cooperation with Middle Eastern countries and leaders, and the U.S. government’s drive for hegemony works against the oil industry.”[18] As Thierry Desmarest, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of France’s giant oil company, TotalFinaElf, put it, “A few months of cash generation is not a big deal. Stable, not volatile, prices and a $25 price (per barrel) would be convenient for everyone.”[19]
It is true that for a long time, from the beginning of Middle Eastern oil exploration and discovery in the early twentieth century until the mid-1970s, colonial and/or imperial powers controlled oil either directly or through control of oil producing countries—at times, even by military force. But that pattern of colonial or imperialist exploitation of global markets and resources has changed now. Most of the current theories of imperialism and hegemony that continue invoking that old pattern of Big Oil behavior tend to suffer from an ahistorical perspective. Today, as discussed earlier, even physically occupying and controlling another country’s oil fields will not necessarily be beneficial to oil interests. Not only will military adventures place the operations of current energy projects at jeopardy, but they will also make the future plans precarious and unpredictable. Big Oil interests, of course, know this; and that’s why they did not countenance the war on Iraq: “The big oil companies were not enthusiastic about the Iraqi war,” says Fareed Mohamedi of PFC Energy, an energy consultancy firm based in Washington D.C. that advises petroleum firms. “Corporations like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco want stability, and this is not what Bush is providing in Iraq and the Gulf region,” adds Mohamedi.[20]
Big Oil interests also know that not only is war no longer the way to gain access to oil, it is in fact an obstacle to gaining that access. Exclusion of U.S. oil companies from vast oil resources in countries such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and a number of central Asian countries due to militaristic U.S. foreign policy is a clear testament to this fact. Many of these countries (including, yes, Iran) would be glad to have major U.S. oil companies invest, explore and extract oil from their rich reserves. Needless to say that U.S. oil companies would be delighted to have access to those oil resources. But U.S. champions of war and militarism have successfully torpedoed such opportunities through their unilateral wars of aggression and their penchant for a Cold War-like international atmosphere.
When Vladimir Putin first became president of Russia he was willing to allow American energy companies to continue with the one-sided contracts they had drawn up during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. Putin built a seemingly trusting relationship with George Bush who looked into Putin’s soul and liked what he saw. The two leaders grew even closer in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon—when Russia provided “help for America’s invasion of Afghanistan.” Soon after this generous cooperation, however, “Bush repudiated the anti-ballistic missile treaty in the belief that America could develop the technology for winning a nuclear war. This posed a huge strategic threat to Russia.”[21]
Describing the heavy-handed, imperial U.S. policy toward Russia, Stephen F. Cohen writes: “The real US policy has been very different—a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia’s post-1991 weakness. Accompanied by broken American promises, condescending lectures and demands for unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and uncompromising than was Washington’s approach to Soviet Communist Russia.”[22]
Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM treaty not merely posed an existential threat to Russia but was almost a betrayal of the trust that Putin had put in him. This led to Putin’s disenchantment with America. “Eventually he seems to have decided that every time America transgressed against Russian interests he would retaliate by stopping another American company from exploiting Russian resources.”[23]
During the past few decades, major oil companies have consistently opposed U.S. policies and military threats against countries like Iran, Iraq, and Libya. They have, indeed, time and again, lobbied U.S. foreign policy makers for the establishment of peaceful relations and diplomatic rapprochement with those countries. The Iran-Libya Sanction Act of 1996 (ILSA) is a strong testament to the fact that oil companies nowadays view wars, economic sanctions, and international political tensions as harmful to their long-term business interests and, accordingly, strive for peace, not war, in international relations.
On March 15, 1995 President Clinton issued Executive Order 12957 which banned all U.S. contributions to the development of Iran’s petroleum resources, a crushing blow to the oil industry, especially to the Conoco oil company that had just signed a $1 billion contract to develop fields in Iran. The deal marked a strong indication that Iran was willing to improve its relationship with the United States, only to have President Clinton effectively nullify it. Two months later, sighting “an extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the U.S.,” President Clinton issued another order, 1259, that expanded the sanctions to become a total trade and investment embargo against Iran. Then a year later came ILSA which extended the sanctions imposed on Iran to Libya as well.
It is no secret that the major force behind the Iran-Libya Sanction Act was the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main Zionist lobby in Washington. The success of AIPAC in passing ILSA through both the Congress and the White House over the opposition of the major U.S. oil companies is testament to the fact that, in the context of U.S. policy in the Middle East, even the influence of the oil industry pales vis-à-vis the influence of the Zionist lobby.[24]
ILSA was originally to be imposed on both U.S. and foreign companies. However, in the end it was the U.S. companies that suffered the most due to waivers that were given to European companies after pressure from the European Union. In 1996 the EU pursued its distaste of ILSA by lodging complaints with the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the U.S. and through adopting “blocking legislation” that would prevent EU companies from complying with ILSA. Meanwhile, the contract that Iran had originally signed with Conoco was awarded to TotalFinaElf of France for $760 million; the deal also left the door open for Total to sign an additional contract with Iran for $2 billion in 1997 with their partners Gazprom and Petronas.
In May of 1997 major U.S. oil companies such as Conoco, Exxon, Atlantic Richfield, and Occidental Petroleum joined other (non-military) U.S. companies to create an anti-sanction coalition. Earlier that same year Conoco’s Chief Executive Archie Dunham publicly took a stance against unilateral U.S. sanctions by stating that “U.S. companies, not rogue regimes, are the ones that suffer when the United States imposes economic sanctions.” Texaco officials have also argued that the U.S. can be more effective in bringing about change in other countries by allowing U.S. companies to do business with those countries instead of imposing economic sanctions that tend to be counterproductive.
Alas, Washington’s perverse, misguided and ineffectual policy of economic sanctions for political purposes—often in compliance with the wishes of some powerful special interests—continues unabated. “Even with the increased pro-trade lobbying efforts of the oil industry and groups like USAEngage, whose membership ranges from farmers and small business owners to Wall Street executives and oilmen, the lack of support from Washington and the Bush administration could not allow them [major oil companies and other non-military transnational companies] to overtake or counteract the already rolling momentum of AIPAC’s influence on Middle East policy or the renewal of ISLA.”[25]
Despite the fact that oil companies nowadays view war and political turmoil in the Middle East as detrimental to their long-term interests and, therefore, do not support policies that are conducive to war and militarism, and despite the fact that war is no longer the way to gain access to oil, the widespread perception that every U.S. military engagement in the region, including the current invasion of Iraq, is prompted by oil considerations continues. The question is why?
Behind the Myth of War for Oil
The widely-shared but erroneous view that recent U.S. wars of choice are driven by oil concerns is partly due to precedence: the fact that for a long time military force was key to colonial or imperialist control and exploitation of foreign markets and resources, including oil. It is also partly due to perception: the exaggerated notion that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were “oil men” before coming to the White House. But, as noted earlier, George W. Bush was never more than an ineffective minor oil prospector and Dick Cheney was never really an oil man; he headed the notorious Halliburton company that sold (and still sells) services to oil companies and the Pentagon.
But the major reason for the persistence of this pervasive myth seems to stem from certain deliberate efforts that are designed to perpetuate the legend in order to camouflage some real economic and geopolitical special interests that drive U.S. military adventures in the Middle East. There is evidence that both the military-industrial complex and hard-line Zionist proponents of “greater Israel” disingenuously use oil (as an issue of national interest) in order to disguise their own nefarious special interests and objectives: justification of continued expansion of military spending, extension of sales markets for military hardware, and recasting the geopolitical map of the Middle East in favor of Israel.
There is also evidence that for every dollar’s worth of oil imported from the Persian Gulf region the Pentagon takes five dollars out of the Federal budget to “secure” the flow of that oil! This is a clear indication that the claim that the U.S. military presence in the Middle East is due to oil consideration is a fraud .[26]
While anecdotal, an example of how partisans of war and militarism use oil as a pretext to cover up the real forces behind war and militarism can be instructive. In the early stages of the invasion of Iraq, when the anti-occupation resistance in Iraq had not yet taken shape and the invasion seemed to be proceeding smoothly, two of the leading champions of the invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, often boasting of the apparent or pre-mature success of the invasion at those early stages, gave frequent news conferences and press reports. During one of those press reports (at the end of an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore in early June 2003), Wolfowitz was asked why North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found. Wolfowitz’s response was: “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”[27]
Many opponents of the war jumped on this statement, so to speak, as corroboration of what they had been saying or suspecting all along: that the war on Iraq was prompted by oil interests. Yet, there is strong evidence—some of which presented in the preceding pages—that for the last several decades oil interests have not favored war and turbulence in the Middle East, including the current invasion of Iraq. Nor is war any longer the way to gain access to oil. Major oil companies, along with many other non-military transnational corporations, have lobbied both the Clinton and Bush administrations in support of changing the aggressive, militaristic U.S. policy toward countries like Iran, Iraq and Libya in favor of establishing normal, non-confrontational trade and diplomatic relations. Such efforts at normalization of trade and diplomatic relations, however, have failed time and again precisely because Wolfowitz and his cohorts, working through AIPAC and other war-mongering think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) oppose them.
These think tanks, in collaboration with a whole host of similar militaristic lobbying entities like Center for Security Affairs (CSA) and National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), working largely as institutional façades to serve the defacto alliance of the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby, have repeatedly thwarted efforts at peace and reconciliation in the Middle East—often over the objections and frustrations of major U.S. oil companies. It is a well established fact that Wolfowitz has been a devoted champion of these jingoistic think tanks and their aggressive unilateral policies in the Middle East. In light of his professional record and political loyalties, his claim that he championed the war on Iraq because of oil considerations can be characterized only as demagogic: it contradicts his political record and defies the policies he has been advocating for the last several decades; it is designed to divert attention from the main forces behind the war, the armaments lobby and the pro-Israel lobby.
These powerful interests are careful not to draw attention to the fact that they are the prime instigators of war and militarism in the Middle East. Therefore, they tend to deliberately perpetuate the popular perception that oil is the driving force behind the war in the region. They even do not mind having their aggressive foreign policies labeled as imperialistic as long as imperialism implies some vague or general connotations of hegemony and domination, that is, as long as it thus camouflages the real, special interests behind the war and political turbulence in the Middle East.
The oil and other non-military transnational corporations’ aversion to war and military adventures in the Middle East stem, of course, from the logical behavior of global or transnational capital in the era of integrated world markets, which tends to be loath to war and international political convulsions. Considering the fact that both importers and exporters of oil prefer peace and stability to war and militarism, why would, then, the flow of oil be in jeopardy if the powerful beneficiaries of war and political tension in the Middle East stopped their aggressive policies in the region?
Partisans of war in the Middle East tend to portray U.S. military operations in the region as reactions to terrorism and political turbulence in order to “safeguard the interests of the United States and its allies.” Yet, a close scrutiny of action-reaction or cause-effect relationship between U.S. military adventures and socio-political turbulence in the region reveals that perhaps the causality is the other way around. That is, social upheavals and political convulsions in the Middle East are more likely to be the result, not the cause, of U.S. foreign policy in the region, especially its one-sided, prejudicial Israeli-Palestinian policy. The U.S. policy of war and militarism in the region seems to resemble the behavior of a corrupt cop, or a mafia godfather, who would instigate fights and frictions in the neighborhood or community in order to, then, portray his parasitic role as necessary for the safety and security of the community and, in the process, fill out his deep pockets.
No matter how crucial oil is to the world economy, the fact remains that it is, after all, a commodity. As such, international trade in oil is as important to its importers as it is to its exporters. There is absolutely no reason that, in a world free of the influence of the beneficiaries of war and militarism and their powerful lobbies (the armaments and the pro-Israel lobbies), the flow of oil could not be guaranteed by international trade conventions and commercial treaties.
Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of the recently published The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.
References
[1] Ron Andreas, reporter/researcher, e-mail correspondence with the author.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Holt paperbacks 2002); James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (Grove/Atlantic, 2005).
[4] Eliyahu Kanovsky, “Oil: Who’s Really Over a Barrel?” Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2003).
[5] Ibid.
[6] The Wall Street Journal (17 May 2001); cited in Eliyahu Kantovsky, Ibid.
[7] The Wall Street Journal (10 March 1998); cited in Eliyahu Kantovsky, Ibid.
[8] F. William Engdahl, “Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price Is Pure Speculation,” financialsense.com (2 May 2008)
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Stanley Reed, “Help from the House of Saud: Why the leading oil producer wants to cool off the market,” Business Week (29 May 2008)
[12] Ibid.
[13] Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo, “OPEC in the Epoch of Globalization: An Event Study of Global Oil Prices,” Global Economy Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (2007); for a discussion of the theory and history of oil price determination see also, Cyrus Bina, “The Rhetoric of Oil and the Dilemma of War and American Hegemony,” Arab Studies Quarterly 15, no. 3 (Summer 1993); also Cyrus Bina, “Limits of OPEC Pricing: OPEC Profits and the Nature of Global Oil Accumulation,” OPEC Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 1990).
[14] F. William Engdahl, “Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price Is Pure Speculation,” financialsense.com (2 May 2008),
[15] Cyrus Bina and Minh Vo, “OPEC in the Epoch of Globalization: An Event Study of Global Oil Prices,” Global Economy Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (2007).
[16] Gary S. Becker, “Why War with Iraq Is Not about Oil,” Business Week (17 March 2003): 30.
[17] Johnathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. The Global Political Economy of Israel (London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2002).
[18] Melinda K. Ruby, “Is Oil the Driving Force to War?” unpublished Senior thesis, Dept. of Economics and Finance, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa (spring 2004), 10.
[19] As quoted in Ruby, Ibid., P. 13.
[20] As cited by Roger Burbach, “Bush Ideologues vs. Big Oil: The Iraq Game Gets Even Stranger,” CounterPunch.
[21] Israel Shamir, The Writings of Israel Shamir, Contributor 45
[22] Stephen F. Cohen “The New American Cold War,” The Nation (10 July 2006); as quoted in Shamir, Ibid.
[23] Shamir, Ibid.
[24] Ruby, “Is Oil the Driving Force to War?” pp. 14-15; see also Herman Franssen and Elaine Morton, “A Review of U.S. Unilateral Sanctions Against Iran,” Middle East Economic Survey 45, no. 34 (26 August 2002), pp. D1-D5 (D section contains op eds. as opposed to staff-written articles).
[25] Ruby, “Is Oil the Driving Force to War?” pp. 16-17; see also David Ivanovich, “Conoco’s Chief Blasts Sanctions,” Houston Chronicle (12 February 1997).
[27] The statement was widely reported by many news papers and other media outlets. See, for example, The Guardian (4 June 2003)
Video: Occupation 101
A thought-provoking and powerful documentary film on the current and historical root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unlike any other film ever produced on the conflict — ‘Occupation 101′ presents a comprehensive analysis of the facts and hidden truths surrounding the never ending controversy and dispels many of its long-perceived myths and misconceptions.
The film also details life under Israeli military rule, the role of the United States in the conflict, and the major obstacles that stand in the way of a lasting and viable peace. The roots of the conflict are explained through first-hand on-the-ground experiences from leading Middle East scholars, peace activists, journalists, religious leaders and humanitarian workers whose voices have too often been suppressed in American media outlets.
The film covers a wide range of topics — which include — the first wave of Jewish immigration from Europe in the 1880’s, the 1920 tensions, the 1948 war, the 1967 war, the first Intifada of 1987, the Oslo Peace Process, Settlement expansion, the role of the United States Government, the second Intifada of 2000, the separation barrier and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, as well as many heart wrenching testimonials from victims of this tragedy.
Canada: Redactions hamper Afghan detainee probe
December 02, 2009
Unreadable documents make meaningful inquiry ‘almost impossible’ and reflect government efforts to keep record a secret
A detainee captured by the Afghan Army on a joint patrol with Canadian troops sits by a wall at a Canadian Forward Operating Base in Howz E Madad in Zhari District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Louie Palu/ZUMA Press
By Paul Koring – Louie Palu/ZUMA Press
Globe and Mail – Nov. 30, 2009
The Harper government has blacked out large sections of relevant files handed over to the independent inquiry probing allegations of transfer to torture of detainees in Afghanistan, despite the fact that its investigators have the highest levels of national security clearance.
The heavily redacted documents, obtained by The Globe and Mail, underscore the sweeping nature of the government’s efforts to keep the documentary record from the Military Police Complaints Commission, which is attempting to conduct an inquiry into allegations that Canada knowingly transferred prisoners to likely torturers in Afghanistan.
The MPCC’s repeatedly thwarted effort to get to the heart of the detainee-transfer issue – it has faced attempts by the Harper government to gag witnesses, limit the scope of the investigation and withhold documents – prompted opposition politicians to open their own limited probe through a parliamentary committee, leading to last week’s explosive testimony by diplomat Richard Colvin. But that committee’s efforts have been similarly stymied, since it has no power to compel the government to deliver the documentary record and no real opportunity to cross-examine witnesses.
In the material delivered to the MPCC, government blackouts render unreadable many of the documents, some drafted by Mr. Colvin. The sweeping redactions were imposed even though everyone who works with or serves on the MPCC must have at least “secret” clearance and all of the senior investigators, as well as the panelists who would conduct the inquiry, have the highest security clearances.
“I’m not sure ‘cover-up’ is the right word but someone is going to considerable lengths not to disclose what was known,” said Stuart Hendin, an expert in the law of war and international-rights issues who represented now-retired Brigadier-General Serge Labbé, one of the most senior Canadian officers embroiled in the Somalia affair 16 years ago.
“It’s almost impossible for any independent authority to conduct a meaningful inquiry” with documents rendered so unreadable, Mr. Hendin added. “It all suggests someone knew there were issues.”
Some documents dating back to spring of 2006, a full year before ministers and senior officers said they first heard of abuse allegations, are entirely blacked out. Others have whole sections censored.
The redactions aren’t based on freedom-of-information or privacy laws, but on an untested claim that the government can block access by the MPCC, an independent investigative body created in the wake of a high-level cover-up that was partly exposed by the Somalia inquiry before it was shut down in 1997.
The government contends that Section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act gives it the latitude to withhold some documents – and heavily redact others – even through the MPCC was created by Parliament with a structure and investigators capable of dealing with highly classified issues involving the military police, who are responsible for the custody and transfer of prisoners captured on the battlefield.
Until recently, the government routinely provided documents with such classifications to the MPCC, investigators say. But when it sought to investigate allegations that Canadian military police had been ordered by ministers and senior bureaucrats to transfer detainees to Afghan authorities knowing they would probably be abused and tortured, the government claimed in Federal Court that the commission had exceeded its mandate.
Transfer to torture is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. It is also outlawed by international convention.
The Globe has only a limited number – roughly 80 documents – totalling fewer than 200 pages out of thousands sought by the MPCC. Most of the heavily redacted documents carry low-level security designations, such as “CEO,” which means “Canadian Eyes Only” – a level below secret. “Many have top secret and we have secure facilities to allow for rigorous security,” said Nancy-Ann Walker, a spokeswoman for the MPCC.
[…]
Defence Minister Peter MacKay has chosen not to renew Mr. Tinsley’s appointment as chairman of the MPCC, despite the fact it is in the midst of the most complex and serious case in its 10-year history.
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From the Archives
A sample of vaccine and injectable medication tragedies during my lifetime
This is what happens when you demand speedy production in an era of politicized regulation
By Meryl Nass, MD | February 12, 2022
All these tragedies have been due to failures of testing or failures in manufacturing processes. Most occurred before vaccine manufacturers were given virtually complete protection from liability in 1987.
With the duration of patent exclusivity determining how much new products earn, products are rushed to market as quickly as possible, most using a shortened path for FDA review. Recalls and market removals of approved products are much more common than they used to be. We can only expect more of these disasters in the future, especially if the products are mandated for everyone. … continue
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- No Tricks Zone
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