Palestinians repair thoroughfare in nonviolent action
CPTnet | November 15, 2014
SOUTH HEBRON HILLS — On Saturday, 15 November 2014 the South Hebron Hills Popular Committee (a nonviolent Palestinian organisation resisting occupation in the South Hebron Hills region), coordinated an action to develop the road that connects the city of Yatta to At-Tuwani and surrounding villages located in the area Israel has designated Firing Zone 918. Under the watchful eyes of the Israeli military and police, the action was attended by members of the South Hebron Hills Popular Committee, residents of At-Tuwani, Israeli peace activists from Ta’ayush, and internationals from Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and EAPPI.
The unpaved road that runs between villages and the town of Yatta is the access route that Palestinians travel for employment, education, water, healthcare, and other necessities of life. Surrounded by the tarmacked roads developed by the Israeli state for the settlers living illegally in the area, the rubble and holes in the Palestinian roads illustrate the stark inequalities of power that characterise the Israeli occupation, and the specific context of the South Hebron Hills and Firing Zone 918.
Because Israel bans Palestinian construction with tractors and other machines in the area without rarely-given Israeli permits, busy hands set about with buckets and hoes attempting to remove rubble and stones and fill in the many potholes on the road.
A member of the South Hebron Hills Popular committee from At-Tuwani explained, “This road serves all the people from Yatta and around… This is a very bad road – the school bus can’t [travel on it] and when people need to bring something by tractor, it is very difficult. This road is also not good if you need to use an ambulance to take people to the hospital. Ten years ago it was an asphalt road, but at the start of the Al Aqsa intifada (in 2002), Israel demolished the road.”
He also said, “we need to build a channel for rain water… Last year with the snow, all this is closed with water…You need a machine to fix this road but the DCO asks us for a permit, but will not give one to us to use a machine to work here… Now every week we try to fix it with small things, with our hands, before the rain comes.”
The racial politics of occupation are clear in his statement that “if a Palestinian comes alone to work here, the army and the police would arrest him quickly and stop him working, but it helps having international people and cameras to film everything.”
Despite the slow progress made with hands, buckets and hoes, six Israeli police and military jeeps arrived. They told the Palestinians they could not carry the work out without a permit, and a soldier declared such work a supposed ‘health and safety’ hazard, an ironic statement given the ‘health and safety’ hazards of the current state of the road, not to mention the myriad physical and psychological effects of occupation.
Legal issues surrounding the firing zone and the South Hebron Hills are complex, with numerous bureaucratic intricacies through which it is nigh impossible for Palestinians to gain a permit for construction. Members of the South Hebron Hills Popular Committee asserted the unlikelihood of gaining such a permit demanded by the military, and managed to converse with soldiers until the action ended at the time initially planned by the committee.
Missouri governor unable to explain who’s in charge in Ferguson
RT | November 18, 2014
The governor of Missouri activated the National Guard on Monday ahead of what could be a new wave of mass protests, but doesn’t seem certain at all about who will be in charge of law enforcement operations in the coming days.
Gov. Jay Nixon’s decision to call up the Guard and declare a state of emergency raised questioned on Monday about what authorities are anticipating will happen when a federal grand jury will decide — likely within days — whether or not to indict Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson on charges related to the August shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen.
Nixon was largely unable to provide answers during a telephone press conference that occurred with reporters later that day, though. Audio of that teleconference captured by Guardian journalist Jon Swaine is now causing concerns to mount further as reporters realize that the governor might have less of a grasp on the situation in Ferguson than many would like to believe.
The audio, published on the internet by Swaine late Monday, shows Nixon struggling to answer a question posed by Huffington Post’s Matt Sledge: “Does the buck ultimately stop with you when it comes to how any protests are policed?”
“Um, we’re, um, I, you know, it, uh, our goal here is to, you know, keep the peace, and allow all voices to, uh, to be heard,” Nixon replies with a rambling, 14-second-long attempt at a response.
“I don’t spend a tremendous amount of time personalizing this,” Nixon says later, adding, “I’d prefer not to be a commentator on it.”
Nearly two minutes after Sledge first asked Nixon to explain who will be in charge of maintaining the peace at any potential protests, he rephrased his question and attempted again to get an answer.
“Is there any one official or agency ultimately in charge here in terms of response?” Sledge wondered.
Again, Nixon is heard on tape meandering between words while failing to actually explain who will ultimately be tasked with responding to any civil unrest in Ferguson or elsewhere in the coming days — be it the National Guard, local police forces, county sheriffs or whomever — this time trailing off at moments for seconds at a time as he struggles to provide an explanation.
“Well, I mean, it uh, clearly [silence] I feel good about the… we worked hard to establish unified command, to outline our responsibilities now with the additional assets provided by my order today of the Missouri National Guard we have worked through, uh, a number of, uh, operational issues the folks have and, uh, I’ll only say, uh, our efforts today are on top of a lot of last hundred days to make sure we’re prepared for any contingency.”
Nixon’s reply without a doubt was ripe with uncertainty, which rightfully causes concern ahead of what may be mass protests of a caliber previously unseen in Missouri. Demonstrations waged for days in Ferguson for days, then weeks, after Brown was shot and killed by Wilson more than three months ago. Now as the city braces itself to hear whether or not Wilson will be charged with that shooting death, officials are expecting the worst, to say the least: not only has Nixon asked the National Guard for assistance during the coming days, but a warning to law enforcement agencies across the country from the FBI on Monday revealed that the bureau believes the grand jury’s impending decision “will likely” lead to attacks against the police.
Galilee Town Boils at Israeli Police “Execution”
Brutality from security forces and a sense of oppression connect Palestinians on both sides of Green Line
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | November 15, 2014
KAFR KANA, Galilee – Rauf Hamdan admitted to one small consolation as he sat in his mourning tent, greeting the steady stream of well-wishers paying condolences nearly a week after his son was gunned down in the street by Israeli police.
“At least his death was caught on camera,” he told Middle East Eye. “Otherwise the police would accuse me of lying when I said that he was executed in cold blood. The police can claim whatever they like. The truth is there for all to see.”
The killing of 22 year-old Kheir Hamdan – and the footage of it caught on security cameras that quickly went viral on social media – set off a firestorm of protests in Palestinian communities across Israel this past week that has yet to die down.
Hamdan instantly became a symbol: a victim of Israeli brutality and oppression, merging the experiences of Israel’s large minority of 1.5 million Palestinian citizens with those of their kin in the occupied territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
Although their inhabitants are disconnected politically and geographically, all these Palestinian areas currently simmer with a shared and barely suppressed rage that may yet erupt into a new uprising, or Intifada.
The Hamdan family home in Kafr Kana, a town of 22,000 Palestinians in northern Israel near Nazareth, is located in an overcrowded backstreet, close to a church over the site where Jesus supposedly performed his first miracle, turning water into wine at a wedding.
But Kafr Kana, like other Palestinian communities in Israel, feels like a community under an occupation of sorts.
Land and jobs scarce
Despite the flood of pilgrims, there are no hotels or major restaurants in the town. Israeli tour buses pay a flying visit that offers Kafr Kana none of the usual benefits of tourism.
Wadea Awawdy, a local journalist, pointed out that half of the town’s inhabitants were under 18. But jobs are scarce, as are the chances of finding land to build a home, usually a cultural pre-requisite here for getting married. None of that looks accidental to residents.
Kafr Kana’s only land reserves for housing and industry have been seized by the state and reassigned to Nazareth Ilit, a Jewish city built decades ago to “Judaise” Nazareth and its environs. “They have a large industrial zone on our land,” said Awawdy. “The only thing we get from it is pollution from a glass smelting factory.”
It is a picture of neglect and marginalisation common in Palestinian communities across the Galilee. Excluded from a meaningful Israeli identity, the minority increasingly feels it shares a common struggle with Palestinians across the Green Line.
The entrance to the Hamdan home hosts a martyr poster of the kind familiar when Palestinians are killed by the Israeli army in the occupied territories. Hamdan’s face is framed by the Palestinian flag.
The passage down to the mourning tent is adorned with images of the al-Aqsa mosque, the Islamic holy site regularly at the centre of Palestinian protests in occupied East Jerusalem.
Wrapped around 50 year-old Rauf Hamdan’s neck is a keffiyeh, a scarf that Yasser Arafat made a symbol of Palestinian resistance.
Concealing faces
Over the past week, such scarves have been concealing the faces of some of the thousands of youths who have clashed with police in Kafr Kana and elsewhere during protests against Hamdan’s killing. That has not stopped police arresting dozens of youths.
The keffiyeh has also been adopted by thousands of Palestinian children in Israeli schools as a visual protest. On Wednesday, a Palestinian Knesset member, Basel Ghattas, caused a flood of complaints when he donned it inside the Knesset.
“We are seen as the enemy by Israel because we are Palestinians,” said Rauf Hamdan. “Our citizenship makes no difference to the security forces.”
Hamdan’s assessment echoes that of an official inquiry into an earlier incident, 14 years ago, when the police fired live ammunition and rubber bullets at unarmed demonstrators in the Galilee at the start of the Second Intifada. Thirteen Palestinian citizens were killed and hundreds wounded in what have come to be known as the October 2000 events.
The Or Commission concluded that Israeli police related to the Palestinian minority “as an enemy.”
This week, one of the three members of that commission, Shimon Shamir, a noted history professor, said on Israeli radio that the police’s approach to the country’s Palestinian minority had only gotten worse in the intervening years.
That, said Awawdy, was how it looked to most Palestinian citizens too as they watched the video of Hamdan’s killing.
‘Sack of potatoes’
Hamdan’s final moments late on the night of 7 November were captured by cameras from several angles outside an electrical shop close to his home.
The store’s owner, Ehab Khoury, tutted angrily as he watched the video again. Like others, he was outraged by footage showing Hamdan being shot in the upper body from close range as he tried to flee from a police van.
Judging by Khoury’s reaction and the hushed conversations in the mourning tent, even more infuriating were the scenes of Hamdan, moments after he was severely wounded, being dragged along the ground by his arms and into the van.
“What is he?” said Khoury. “A citizen or a sack of potatoes? Why did they not call an ambulance when it was clear he was badly wounded?”
Police claim they fired a warning shot, though the cameras do not show the officer who fired on him doing so. But one of Khoury’s videos reveals the shadow of a policeman’s raised arm, holding a gun, from the far side of the van, out of the camera’s view.
That night, a bullet smashed through neighbour Edward Khoury’s bedroom window. If that was the warning shot, it looks suspiciously like it was fired with no regard to the safety of the residents close by.
Other details have further inflamed passions. The video shows the police van driving past the camera on its way out of Kafr Kana, having made a late-night arrest of Hamdan’s cousin following a domestic incident. Hamdan himself had been pepper-sprayed during the arrest.
Many seconds later, Hamdan comes into view chasing after the departing police. Then the van suddenly appears again in view of the camera, the police apparently having decided to return to deal with Hamdan.
Hospital trip delayed
The youth is seen banging on the window with an object police say was a knife. But he flees as the police emerge. According to medical reports, he was shot twice.
The cousin’s testimony to lawyers suggests the police drove around for some long minutes away from the nearest hospitals in Nazareth before heading for a much more distant one in Afula, losing vital time.
“His killing was pre-meditated,” said his father. “The police were leaving. They came back only to kill him.”
Human rights lawyers at Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s Arab minority, believe the evidence suggests Hamdan was “executed.”
Unlawful killings by police have been a continuing occurrence since the 13 deaths in October 2000, said Jafar Farah of Mossawa, an advocacy group for the Palestinian minority.
Mossawa has identified 35 cases of Palestinian citizens being killed in similar circumstances by security forces since 2000, including previous incidents in Kafr Kana. Only in three cases were officers convicted, but the courts handed down short sentences.
“There is the same impunity for the security forces when it comes to using live ammunition against civilians, whether it is in Israel or the occupied territories,” said Farah.
Comments a few days before Hamdan’s killing by the police minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, that terrorists “should be sentenced to death” rather than arrested had, said Farah, given “a green light” to police to use live ammunition against civilians.
Sceptical of inquiry
Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein has insisted on an investigation by a justice ministry unit known as Mahash, but few in the Palestinian minority expect it to be thorough.
“I have no trust that Mahash will get to the truth,” said Rauf Hamdan.
That scepticism is shared by human rights lawyers. A recent report by Adalah noted that Mahash had closed without action 93 per cent of complaints between 2011 and 2013, including in cases of clear breaches of police regulations.
Earlier, Mahash was accused of failing to properly investigate the police officers responsible for killing the 13 demonstrators in October 2000. None were ever indicted.
There are signs that the police are expecting similar lenience on this occasion. National Commissioner Yohanan Danino dismissed criticism of the police’s treatment of Hamdan as “unfounded” and “irresponsible.”
But the Palestinian minority’s concerns are not limited to police brutality. The political reaction has been equally disturbing.
Rauf Hamdan said no government official had visited the tent, or called to offer condolences. Instead, government leaders have used Hamdan’s death to further question the minority’s status as citizens.
Both Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his economics minister, Naftali Bennett, have suggested Hamdan was a “terrorist,” placing his fight with the police on a par with recent Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians.
‘Move to Gaza’
But more worrying still, Netanyahu has exploited the outpouring of anger in the Galilee to confirm the Palestinian minority’s growing suspicion that the Israeli authorities see no future for them in a Jewish state.
Netanyahu has called on the interior minister to investigate stripping the protesters in Kafr Kana and elsewhere of their citizenship. He has also urged them to “move to the Palestinian Authority or to Gaza … Israel will not put any obstacles in your way.”
Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, leapt at the chance to promote again his plan to redraw Israel’s borders to expel a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens, saying: “It is clear that territorial and population swaps must be part of the solution. Us here and them there.”
A Palestinian Knesset member, Ahmed Tibi, said Netanyahu had “gone off the rails” in making his remarks, a view shared by the liberal daily Haaretz. An editorial accused Netanyahu of “exposing his nationalist face to the public.”
Since earlier in the year, Netanyahu and his government have been intensifying their efforts to silence the minority’s Palestinian representatives, both in and out of the parliament.
The electoral threshold was raised in March to a level that may ensure there are no Palestinian parties in the next Knesset. Meanwhile, Netanyahu used the protests over Hamdan’s killing to reiterate plans to outlaw the Islamic Movement, the minority’s most popular extra-parliamentary political faction.
Farah noted that clashes between police and the Palestinian minority were occurring more regularly and growing in intensity. “Once these crises occurred once every decade or more. But they are now a pattern. We saw violent confrontations over the summer during the attack on Gaza and only weeks later it’s happening again.”
There is deep distrust of the police and politicians, but Farah believes the anger is unlikely for the time being to translate into an Intifada. “The leadership here is opposed,” he said. “Despite the hostile atmosphere in the Israeli parliament, courts, media and public, there is still a preference to seek redress through political and legal channels.”
Awawdy, the journalist from Kafr Kana, is more pessimistic. “This government sees us at worst as enemies and at best as guests whose rights can be taken away at any moment. If things keep on this way, an explosion is coming. You can sense it in the air.”
South Africa Marikana Massacre Defense Blames Victims
teleSUR | November 13, 2014
The defense team of the South African police who dispersed a demonstration by killing 34 miners on August 16, 2012, said on Thursday that the surviving demonstrators should be charged with treason.
The Marikana Massacre happened after the Lonmin mine workers started a strike to demand better wages.
Prior to the massacre, two police were killed by the miners during clashes outside the Lonmin compound; however, the legal representatives of the miners union asserts that the police were killed by one or two workers and that not everybody was violent or even armed at the time.
Ishmael Semenya, who is representing the South African Police Service (SAPS), says that the miners were planning to attack the police, a state organ, so they should be charged with treason.
However, lawyer Dali Mpofu, who represents the miners, said that the tension was caused by the police, who failed to advise the demonstrators that they were planning to disperse the rally.
Police assert that the miners, some of whom were armed with spears and sticks, tried to kill them; however, the union legal advisers assert that the police reactions were a result of the anger of their two colleagues’ death.
Mpofu also said that the police acted on political considerations and rushed to end the strike, fearing Julius Malema, a controversial politician who is popular among the poorer sectors of the population, could interfere and worsen the situation.
Malema said he was with the workers and urged them to maintain their strike. He has served in different public positions with the African National Congress party administration, but he was expelled from the party on 2012 over a hate speech accusation.
Now he is commander-in-chief of his new party, the Economic Freedom Fighters.
Both sides’ arguments were submitted this week, marking the final phase of the investigation being carried out by the Farlam Commission of Inquiry, which was ordered by President Jacob Zuma.
Jerusalem child shot by Israeli forces loses eyesight
Ma’an – 14/11/2014
JERUSALEM – An 11-year-old Palestinian child shot in the face by a sponge bullet during clashes in al-Issawiya on Thursday has been left blind in one eye, a local official said.
Member of a local neighborhood committee, Muhammad Abu al-Hummus, told Ma’an that Saleh Samer Attiyeh Mahmoud, 11, was shot in the face at close range by Israeli forces firing sponge bullets in al-Issawiya during clashes.
He was hit directly between the eyes, causing severe bleeding to his nose and the loss of sight in his left eye. The vision in his right eye is also severely damaged.
Villagers in the East Jerusalem neighborhood were protesting the closure of three out of four entrances to the village by Israeli forces when the incident took place.
Sponge rounds are made from high-density plastic with a foam-rubber head, and are fired from grenade launchers.
Israeli police have been using them in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem since the use of rubber-coated metal bullets was prohibited, but protocol explicitly prohibits firing them at the upper body.
Israel Has Banned Renowned Doctor and Human Rights Activist Mads Gilbert from Entering Gaza for Life
By Ben Norton | Dissident Voice | November 14, 2014
Israel has banned Norwegian doctor and human rights activist Mads Gilbert from entering Gaza for life.
Gilbert, a professor at the University Hospital of North Norway, where he has worked since 1976, earned international renown for his philanthropic work in late 2008, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, an attack that, according to Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, killed roughly 1,400 Gazans, including almost 800 civilians, 350 of whom were children.
The aid worker, along with fellow Norwegian doctor Erik Fosse, decided to volunteer in Gaza as soon as he heard that bombing had started, on 27 December 2008. Thanks to diplomatic and economic support (in the sum of $1 million dollar of emergency funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the two physicians managed to arrive in the strip by 30 December.
The Israeli government prevented all international press from entering Gaza during Cast Lead (a documentary, The War Around Us, was made about the only two foreign reporters in the strip at the time), in what Gilbert called Israel’s insidious “PR plan.” The doctor, as one of the only international aid workers in Gaza, thus devoted considerable time to speaking with local Palestinian news outlets, some of whom were reporting on behalf of foreign networks including BBC, CNN, ABC, and Al Jazeera.
BBC aired an interview with Gilbert, conducted in the hospital. The questions asked, and the answers garnered, were eerily similar to those he would give just five years later, during Operation Protective Edge. The interviewer began asking him to respond to Israel’s claims that it was not targeting civilians, that it was only attacking Hamas militants. Gilbert called the claim “an absolutely stupid statement” and explained that, among the hundreds of patients he had seen at that point, only two had been fighters. The “large majority” were women, children, and men civilians. “These numbers are contradictory to everything Israel says,” he reported.
Gilbert drew attention to the fact that the overflowing hospital did not have enough supplies to treat all of its patients, and censured the international community for doing nothing to assist them. Israel would not let in foreign doctors, and yet Palestinians were “dying waiting for surgery.” “This is a complete disaster,” he remarked, calling it “the worst man-made disaster” he could think of. “There are injuries you just don’t want to see in this world.”
Operation Protective Edge
In 2008 and 2009, Gilbert treated Palestinians who had been grievously wounded by Israel’s use of experimental and illegal chemical weapons, including white phosphorous, dense inert metal explosives (DIME) munitions, and flechette shells. In July 2014, in the midst of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, Gilbert spoke with Electronic Intifada, revealing that he saw indications of renewed use of DIME weapons and flechettes.
While volunteering in Shifa hospital, Gaza’s principal medical facility, Gilbert penned an open letter, lamenting the unspeakable horrors the Israeli military was instigating.
[Israel’s] “ground invasion” of Gaza resulted in scores and carloads with maimed, torn apart, bleeding, shivering, dying… All sorts of injured Palestinians, all ages, all civilians, all innocent.
The heroes in the ambulances and in all of Gaza’s hospitals are working 12 to 24‑hour shifts, grey from fatigue and inhuman workloads (without payment in Shifa for the last four months). They care, triage, try to understand the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. Humans!
…
Ashy grey faces – Oh no! not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding. We still have lakes of blood on the floor in the emergency room, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out – oh – the cleaners, everywhere, swiftly shovelling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the leftovers from death – all taken away… to be prepared again, to be repeated all over.More than 100 cases came to Shifa in the last 24 hours. Enough for a large well-trained hospital with everything, but here – almost nothing: electricity, water, disposables, drugs, operating-room tables, instruments, monitors – all rusted and as if taken from museums of yesterday’s hospitals. But they do not complain, these heroes.
Now, once more treated like animals by “the most moral army in the world.”
The doctor directed one heart-wrenching passage to President Obama, writing “Mr Obama – do you have a heart? I invite you – spend one night – just one night – with us in Shifa. I am convinced, 100 per cent, it would change history. Nobody with a heart and power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.”
Israel later attacked Shifa hospital. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) “strongly condemn[ed]” the incursion, saying it “demonstrate[d] how civilians in Gaza have nowhere safe to go.” MSF director Marie-Noëlle Rodrigue stated, in an official statement, “When the Israeli army orders civilians to evacuate their houses and their neighborhoods, where is there for them to go? Gazans have no freedom of movement and cannot take refuge outside Gaza. They are effectively trapped.” Shifa was one of the over 10 medical facilities Israel bombed in its 50-day offensive.
Human Rights Work
In 2000, Gilbert made headlines for saving the life of a skier who had been trapped in sub-zero water. She had been pronounced clinically dead, with a body temperature of 57 °F, but Gilbert managed to revive her. For his service, Gilbert was awarded the Northern Norwegian of the Year award.
Before Operation Protective Edge commenced in early July 2014, Gilbert toured medical and health facilities and individual homes in Gaza, researching for a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) report on the dire state of the strip’s health sector. He wrote of “overstretched” health facilities, widespread physical and psychological trauma, “a deep financial crisis,” a lack of needed medical supplies, and a “severe energy crisis.” He also noted the “devastating results of the blockade imposed by the Government of Israel,” with rampant poverty, a 38.5% unemployment rate, food insecurity in at least 57% of households, and inadequate access to clean water. All of these already extreme ills were only exacerbated by the July-August Israeli assault on Gaza, an onslaught that left roughly 2,200 Palestinians dead, including over 1,500 civilians, more than 500 of whom were children.
Gilbert is not the only one Israel has recently prevented from entering Gaza. In August, just after the end of its military assault, Israel refused to allow Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the world’s leading human rights organizations, from entering the strip, impeding them from conducting war crimes investigations. The organizations had been requesting access for over a month, before Israel had even begun its ground invasion of Gaza, yet were continuously prevented from doing so, Israeli journalist Amira Hass reported in Haaretz, “using various bureaucratic excuses.”
Israel has banned Human Right Watch investigators from entering Gaza since 2006; Amnesty International has been refused access since 2012. Dr. Mads Gilbert is the latest esteemed persona non grata to be added to this growing list.
Solidarity, Not Pity
Other aid workers and medical professionals have faced even worse consequences for volunteering to help Palestinians. In August, Israeli occupation forces killed a social worker. In the same month, as the Israeli military engaged in a campaign to target and openly murder Palestinian civilians who spoke Hebrew, Israeli forces assassinated volunteers working with the Palestine Red Crescent, a non-profit humanitarian organization, part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.
A common myth suggests that Israel ended its occupation of Gaza with its 2005 disengagement. The state’s ability to ban, and even kill, internationally recognized human rights organizations and doctors—not to mention food, construction equipment, and medical supplies—from entering Palestinian territory, however, demonstrates that Gaza is by no means autonomous. Israel’s siege of the strip is clearly a continuation of its 47-year-long illegal military occupation.
As legal scholar Noura Erakat explains
Despite removing 8,000 settlers and the military infrastructure that protected their illegal presence, Israel maintained effective control of the Gaza Strip and thus remains the occupying power as defined by Article 47 of the Hague Regulations. To date, Israel maintains control of the territory’s air space, territorial waters, electromagnetic sphere, population registry and the movement of all goods and people.
…
Palestinians have yet to experience a day of self-governance. Israel immediately imposed a siege upon the Gaza Strip when Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 and tightened it severely when Hamas routed Fatah in June 2007. The siege has created a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip. Inhabitants will not be able to access clean water, electricity or tend to even the most urgent medical needs. The World Health Organization explains that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020. Not only did Israel not end its occupation, it has created a situation in which Palestinians cannot survive in the long-term.
In his July interview with Electronic Intifada, Gilbert made it clear that his work as a medical professional cannot be done—the Palestinian people cannot live healthy, yet alone free, lives—while Israel continues its illegal siege and occupation. “As a doctor, my prescription is very clear. Number one, stop the bombing, and that means stop Israel from bombing civilians and indiscriminately hitting families. Number two, lift the siege. And number three, find a political solution,” he stated.
In a late October discussion with the Daily Targum, Gilbert encouraged Americans to do what they can to speak out against Israel’s illegal occupation and blockade of the Palestinian territories, and to pressure their government to stop its indefatigable support for Israeli crimes.
At present, the US provides Israel with over 3.1$ billion of military aid per year. In the past 52 years, over $100 billion US tax dollars have been given to the country in military aid alone.
“You are the change-makers,” Gilbert told American readers. “The key to the change when it comes to the occupation of Palestine lies in the United States.” “Solidarity, not pity,” he said, is the solution.
Ben Norton is an activist, artist, and freelance writer. He can be found on Twitter at @HeartsMindsEars.
US words on Gitmo torture ‘laughable’ without release of force feeding tapes
Reprieve | November 13, 2014
The US has announced that it will this week tell the United Nations that it now considers a ban against torture to apply to US prisoners held overseas – including those 148 men held without charge or trial at Guantanamo Bay. The US had previously only considered the U.N. Convention Against Torture to apply within US borders.
A US Federal Judge recently ordered the US government to release to the public video tapes of a hunger striking detainee being force-fed and manhandled, a decision the Obama administration is expected to appeal.
Commenting, Reprieve staff attorney Alka Pradhan, said:
“For the US to say it has ‘banned’ torture at Guantanamo is laughable, given the ongoing abuse at the prison. The rules at GTMO are actually written precisely to allow such abuse, and the video footage of force feedings is incredibly disturbing. Our clients, on hunger strike in peaceful protest at their indefinite detention without charge, are regularly hauled to what they call the ‘torture chair’, and force-fed in such a painful, punitive manner that even some camp personnel refuse to be involved. But don’t take my word for it – US medical experts and the World Medical Association have also condemned these abuses. The US needs to uphold its supposed ‘torture ban’ and stop punishing the detainees for their rightful protest – while the tapes I have seen should be released to the public without delay.”
Obama and the Convention Against Torture
By Steve Breyman | CounterPunch | November 13, 2014
US and ARVN soldiers waterboard a North Vietnamese prisoner during Operation Wheeler in 1967
On November 12—thirteen years after the onset of George W. Bush’s dirty underground war against “unlawful combatants”—the Obama administration finally told the United Nations Committee Against Torture that the United States believed, in the words of Assistant Secretary of State Tom Malinowski, “that torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment are forbidden in all places, at all times, with no exceptions.” Finally! Not so fast.
Torture is as old as human civilization. Assyrians skinned victims alive. Torture was a routine feature of Greek and Roman interrogations. Execution by torture took the form of crucifixion for the Romans, stoning for the Jews, and desert sun death for the Egyptians. Chinese emperors preferred lingchi—the slow slicing—of their prisoners (the infamous “death by a thousand cuts”). The Aztecs favored blood sacrifices that included consumption of the hearts of their victims.
Torture was not the sole preserve of heathens and idolators. The Dominicans, endlessly inventive in the torture of “heretics” and “witches” in Spain, made sexual humiliation of victims their trademark. John Calvin had a fellow early Protestant tortured and beheaded. Guy Fawkes spent time on the rack following his capture during the Gunpowder Plot.
As with slavery and the mass execution of hostages, torture slowly, fitfully came to be seen as barbaric and ineffective, although it took over two millennia for official if hypocritical and imperfect bans to appear. The British outlawed “cruel and unusual” punishment in the Bill of Rights of 1689; the prohibition protected Britons only as American, Boer, Irish, Indian, and Iraqi patriots knew well. The Americans included a similar ban in the Eighth Amendment to their Constitution—which applied only to citizens, not slaves or Natives. And lynching did not of course end following the Reconstruction Amendments. Napoleon forbade the use of torture by his armies in 1798, history forgotten by French troops in Algeria a century and a half later. Pius VII waited until 1816 to overturn the papal bull of 1252 permitting torture during the Inquisition. The Chinese outlawed lingchi in 1905 (which did not stop Nationalists and Communists from torturing one another before and during the Civil War).
The horrors of the twentieth century’s two world wars led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which effectively (in the legal sense of the word) banned torture of civilians or military personnel. That these icons of international law weren’t effective in reality became abundantly clear during the counter-insurgencies waged by the United States and European imperial powers resistant to decolonization of the Third World from the late forties through the mid-seventies. They were joined by the secret police of the Soviet bloc controlling Eastern European dependencies. They were joined too by the secret police and armed forces of dozens of Arab monarchies, and Latin American, African and Asian (military) dictatorships. Torture during the Cold War knew no ideological or territorial boundaries.
The United States and the Soviet Union masterfully outsourced and offshored torture during their decades long rivalry. Vast empires run by remote brutes require burden sharing with local brutes. The Soviets trained East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Bulgarians, Romanians, and Poles in the dark arts. As Chomsky and Herman detailed in The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (1979), Americans trained military and police in twenty-six countries that according to Amnesty International practiced torture. These included Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey and Brazil.
The Pentagon cast further light on the postwar American way of torture with the release of seven “intelligence training” manuals in 1996. Written and perfected by the CIA during spasms of concentrated violence like Operation Phoenix in South Vietnam, the manuals were widely distributed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and put into practice by Special Forces Mobile Training Teams. US Special Forces are today present (mostly on training missions) in more than one hundred countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan. The US Army’s School of the Americas crafted a custom manual for Central and Latin American trainees.
By the eighties, amidst the bloody interventions of the Reagan administration and the brutal Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the world was ready to make another effort at outlawing torture. The United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment was adopted in 1984, entered into force in 1987, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988, and ratified by Congress during Bill Clinton’s first term in 1994. The US—with the largest prison population in the world—failed to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention (adopted in 2002; entered into force in 2006) that provides for regular, unannounced visits to prisons and detention centers, and for private interviews with detainees.
Barak Obama first criticized the Bush record on torture following revelations that emerged from the Senate confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General in 2005. Gonzalez claimed that the provisions of the Convention Against Torture did not govern official US behavior against “aliens” overseas. Obama was a strong rhetorical supporter of the legislation reaffirming official US condemnation of torture that passed the following year (to which George Bush added a signing statement permitting the CIA to continue should the Commander in Chief deem it necessary).
On his second day in office, Obama issued Executive Order 13491—“Ensuring Lawful Interrogations”—to revoke Bush’s Executive Order 13440 of 2007 (designed to further ‘legalize’ CIA detention and “interrogation” of al Qaeda and Taliban “unlawful enemy combatants” after the fact; Bush’s lawyers first invented the category of “unlawful enemy combatant” in 2002). The long international nightmare of official US endorsement of torture—brought to life in the shameful corridors of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and the CIA’s “black sites”—appeared over. Not even close.
The Convention on Torture, other international treaties, and domestic law require the president to investigate allegations of torture, and to prosecute those responsible. Obama has, contrary to the law, shown zero interest in pursuing Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice or the other enablers and defenders of criminal behavior in the country’s name; “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” There’s been no full-scale public inquiry into or publication of the various torture memos written by John Woo, or other records of official lawlessness. Neither have we witnessed a reckoning by the Obama Justice Department with the illegal and outrageous practice of extraordinary rendition.
The White House (with the CIA looking over its shoulder) holds up publication of a five hundred page executive summary of the Senate’s 6300 page report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. Chances are that what finally squirts out will be so blacked out as to further shield the evildoers.
Indefinite detentions in Guantanamo likely violate the Convention; the failure to offer redress to detainees certainly does. US military commissions violate at least two articles of the Convention. US refusal to grant independent monitors access to Guantanamo violates at least two articles of the Convention. Transfer of prisoners to countries known to practice torture (common during the Bush years) clearly violates the Convention. Hyper-aggressive domestic counter-terror investigations (especially the widespread use of sting operations by the FBI) appear to violate “human rights safeguards in law and practice.”
“Special housing units,” supermax cells, and other forms of solitary confinement of domestic prisoners, including children, clearly constitute torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. On any given day, more than 80,000 people are held in isolation in US federal and state prisons. Capital punishment appears to most civilized peoples as torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Continued US failure to put in place adequate safeguards against sexual assault in state and federal prisons violates the Convention.
Local police departments’ failure to pursue allegations of sexual assault (the most underreported crime in the country) violates victims’ right to be free from mistreatment. The epidemic of police killings, brutality, racial profiling, and asset seizures is among the most egregious violations of the Convention during the Obama years. The policy of deporting immigrants (including especially unaccompanied children) without proper screening to assess their prospects for torture or mistreatment violates the Convention, and deserves a special place in the annals of perfidy.
When George Bush declared “we don’t torture,” the world knew it was a lie. What about when Nobel Peace Prize winner Barak Obama says it?
Steve Breyman is a former William C. Foster Visiting Scholar Fellow in the US State Department. Reach him at breyms@rpi.edu
Police investigation failure increases in ideological offenses against Palestinians despite new Nationalistic Crimes Unit
Everyone did as they saw fit
By Yossi Gurvitz | Yesh Din | November 12, 2014
Imagine the following scenario: you’re in your courtyard, when a gang shows up, insulting you in what is supposed to be your safest place, beating you in the presence of your children, stealing or destroying your belongings. Picking yourself up, you know there’s no point in calling the police – because in the vast majority of cases, the police won’t catch the offenders. Oh, by the way – the criminals are from a different ethnic group.
Do you think you could live this way? Because this is how many Palestinians in the West Bank have to live. We have just published our annual data sheet on law enforcement – or rather the lack of law enforcement – in the West Bank.
If you are a Palestinian and you’ve been attacked or otherwise harmed by Israeli civilians in the West Bank, there is little to no chance the police will solve the case. Yesh Din has been monitoring the police investigation cases of complaints filed by Palestinians against Israeli civilians since 2005. The unambiguous data show that of 1,045 cases we are monitoring, the police concluded its investigation of 970 cases. 72 indictments were made (about 7.4% of the cases), and the police managed to lose 11 file cases. 884 cases were concluded due to police investigation failure.
593 cases were closed as “perpetrator unknown”, meaning the police failed to identify a suspect. 195 cases were concluded because of “lack of sufficient evidence”, i.e. the police managed to suggest a suspect but lacked the evidence to indict the suspect. 76 cases were closed on the grounds of “absence of criminal culpability” – that is, police claims that no crime was committed; we appealed 25 of these cases, since the investigation was unfinished or we believed there was enough evidence for an indictment. Finally, 12 cases were closed due to “lack of public interest”.
In two cases, the police concluded the perpetrator could not be indicted, probably due to age (minors); and one case was closed because it fell under the jurisdiction of another agency. The police’s general failure rate in 2005-2014 is 85.2%. Ironically, it was in the two years (2013-2014) in which the Nationalist Crime Department was active that the rate of police failure actually rose to 89.6%. The police tell us they invest many more assets and efforts in fighting nationalist-based crimes; so far, it fails to demonstrate results.
And why do I speak of “people breaking into your courtyard”? Because settlers enter private Palestinian property in the West Bank time and again. In our files from 2013-2014 we emphasized the setting of the crimes. It turns out that 28.3% of the recorded incidents took place within Palestinian villages and towns. Most of the incidents still take place in the countryside near the villages – territories which are to be dispossessed – but more than a quarter of the incidents are invasions of towns and villages, places where the settlers have no reason to visit, uninvited.
And the Israeli police, including the new and much ballyhooed Nationalist Crime Department, doesn’t know – or, perhaps, knows but is unwilling – how to deal with Israelis who commit nationalist crimes. This failure is anything but new: back in 1982 the Karp Report warned that Palestinian residents in the West Bank do not trust the Israeli justice system, and that in many cases they avoid complaining to the police since it is pointless. The Karp Report further found that law enforcement in the West Bank failed – and was the first government report to note this failure.
This is Israeli law and order. This is how it has been maintained for over 30 years: an order of rulers and ruled, with a thin legal coating of “laws of occupation” which allows us to say all is well, since it is temporary. For the past 47 years.
Map of locations of offenses against Palestinians in the West Bank
Palestinian stone-throwers face up to 20 years in Israel prison
Al-Akhbar | November 3, 2014
Israeli cabinet on Sunday approved an amendment to the Israeli penal code to enable more severe punishment against Palestinians convicted of involvement in “stone-throwing” attacks against Israeli targets.
The new sections, which will be added to the Israeli penal code, would allow the imposition of a prison sentence up to 20 years for those convicted of throwing stones or other objects at Israeli vehicles.
“Israel is strongly acting against terrorists, against who throw stones, Molotov cocktails and fireworks,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting.
Netanyahu went on to say that the new legislation aims to restore what he called “peace to all parts of Jerusalem.”
“We will dedicate massive force and an aggressive legislation to restore quiet and security to every part of our capital,” he added.
The new code would slap an imprisonment sentence of ten years against whoever throws stones or other objects at vehicles and 20 years for doing so with the view of exposing passengers to danger. Whoever throws rocks at police cars in order to obstruct the work of Israeli police will be jailed for up to five years.
Moreover, the law would also allow Israeli forces to imprison Palestinian minors under the pretext of allegedly endangering the lives of Israelis by throwing stones.
On Friday, Israeli Occupation Forces in occupied East Jerusalem attempted to detain two Palestinian children, a two-year-old and a nine-year old, on suspicion of throwing stones.
Last week, Israeli forces detained four Palestinian children, aged 13 to 16, for allegedly throwing stones at Israeli cars.
In 2013, a group of seven Israeli soldiers and an officer detained 5-year old Wadi’a Maswadeh after the boy allegedly threw a stone at a Zionist settler’s car at a checkpoint near Hebron.
According to a 2013 UN children’s fund’s report, over the past decade, Israeli forces have arrested, interrogated and prosecuted around 7,000 children between 12 and 17, mostly boys, noting the rate was equivalent to “an average of two children each day.”
A report by Defense for Children International (DCI) published in May 2014 said Israeli jails 20 percent of Palestinian children prisoners in solitary confinement. … Full article
Featured Video
Fear Is the Mind Killer
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.” … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- US blockade crumbles as Iran turns to overland routes
- Hidden costs of US Iran war push total far beyond $25bn Pentagon claim
- Iran Will Respond With Long-Term Strikes to US Attack, Even If It Is Short-Term – IRGC
- Fear Is the Mind Killer
- Israeli strikes kill 10 in southern Lebanon, including 3 rescue workers
- Israeli military ‘failed on all fronts’: Poll
- US at a crossroads: Iran’s firm positions leave Trump no option but to capitulate
- Iran signals decisive response to end US maritime bullying, piracy
- Trump eager for off-ramp in war on Iran, but Netanyahu has him trapped: Former official
- Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ offers ‘limited’ shield against ballistic missiles: Defense official
- If Americans Knew
- How Tony Dokoupil Became the Face of ‘Zionist Fanatic’ Bari Weiss’s CBS
- Far Right Israeli Settler Movement Enters Syria in a Push for “Greater Israel”
- ‘People Have the Right to Be Buried’: In Gaza, Thousands of Palestinians Remain Trapped Under Rubble
- Born during Israel’s genocide: Gaza’s child survivors bear the scars of war
- Who are the women and girls behind Gaza war’s horrific casualty toll?
- Beloved Gaza doctor detained “indefinitely” without charge – Daily Update
- By Week’s End, Trump’s War Will Be Plainly Illegal
- CBS News Reportedly Ousts London Bureau Chief Over Differences With Bari Weiss Over Gaza Coverage
- State Department Says US Is in Conflict With Iran ‘At the Request’ of Israel
- What ceasefire? Israel won’t stop killing in Gaza, Lebanon – Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
Aletho News 