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Israel Obstructs Entry Of Medicine, Medical Equipment To Gaza

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – May 20, 2010

Despite Israeli guarantees to the International Community, the Israeli Authorities are still obstructing the entry of medicine and medical equipment to the besieged Gaza Strip. The last time medicine was allowed into Gaza was mid October 2009.

Raed Fattouh, who heads a committee in charge of the entry of good into the Gaza Strip, stated that since mid October 2009 until this day, Israel has been obstructing the entry of all medical equipment and medications transferred from the West Bank to Gaza.

Some of the urgently needed equipment are CT scan machines, incubators and their equipment, heart machines, dialysis machines and other urgently needed equipment.

Fattouh held Israel responsible for the lives of the patients in the Gaza Strip as the siege has already led to the death of hundreds of patients, including children and infants.

Israel claims that the equipment and the medicines are undergoing “security check” as they “can be used in a counterproductive way.”

Fattouh said that the Palestinian Authority asked the World Health Organization and other international groups to intervene and pressure Israel into allowing the needed medical equipment.

May 20, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Official: Israeli forces destroy pipelines in Hebron village

Ma’an – 19/05/2010

Hebron – Israeli army bulldozers reportedly destroyed several water pipes as they attempted to block the main road from the Adh-Dhahiriya village to Hebron on Wednesday, effectively cutting off the village’s water supply, an official said.

A representative from the Palestinian Authority Water Authority, Nabil Abu Aqel, said the bulldozers were in the process installing a road block near the adjacent Otni’el settlement, destroying a number of essential water pipelines in the process.

However, a spokesman for Israel’s Civil Administration said a pipe had burst in the area and that it was currently being repaired.

Two weeks prior, Israeli forces piled earth at the northern entrance of Adh-Dhahiriya, closing off the main road to Hebron in what town residents said at the time was an attempt to restrict access to roads near settlements.

In the process of digging, forces destroyed pipes to the town, again cutting off its water supply, Adh-Dhahiriya Mayor Sami Estanyur said at the time.

The Hebron-Dhahiriya road bypasses the Otni’el settlement was established on 150 dunums of private Palestinian land in 1983, and Eshtanyur said the road overlays the water network of the town.

At the time, Israel’s army said it was not familiar with the incident.

May 19, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

“What kind of democracy is America, where people do not ask these questions?”

By Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier | Pulse Media | May 18, 2010

Islamabad–On May 12th, the day after a U.S. drone strike killed 24 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, two men from the area agreed to tell us their perspective as eyewitnesses of previous drone strikes.

One is a journalist, Safdar Dawar, General Secretary of the Tribal Union of Journalists. Journalists are operating under very difficult circumstances in the area, pressured by both militant groups and the Pakistani government.  Six of his colleagues have been killed while reporting in North and South Waziristan. The other man, who asked us not to disclose his name, is from Miranshah city, the epicenter of North Waziristan.  He works with the locally based Waziristan Relief Agency, a group of people committed to helping the victims of drone attacks and military actions.  “If people need blood or medicine or have to go to Peshawar or some other hospital,” said the social worker, “I’m known for helping them. I also try to arrange funds and contributions.”

Both men emphasized that Pakistan’s government has only a trivial presence in the area. Survivors of drone attacks receive no compensation, and neither the military nor the government investigate consequences of the drone attacks.

Mr. Dawar, the journalist, added that when he phoned the local political representative regarding the May 12th drone attack, the man couldn’t tell him anything.  “If you get any new information,” said the political representative, “please let me know.”

In U.S. newspapers, reports on drone attacks often amount to about a dozen words, naming the place and an estimated number of militants killed.  The journalist and social worker from North Waziristan asked us why people in the U.S. don’t ask to know more.

It’s hard to slow down and look at horrifying realities.  Jane Mayer, writing for The New Yorker, (“The Predator War,” October 26, 2009), quoted a former C.I.A. official’s description of a drone attack:

People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. ‘You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,’ a former C.I.A. officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack.

“Human beings running for cover are such a common sight,” Jane Mayer continues, “that they have inspired a slang term: ‘squirters.’”

Just rubble and charred stuff…

The social worker recalled arriving at a home that was hit, in Miranshah, at about 9:00 p.m., close to one year ago.  The house was beside a matchbox factory, near the degree college.  The drone strike had killed three people.  Their bodies, carbonized, were fully burned. They could only be identified by their legs and hands.  One body was still on fire when he reached there.  Then he learned that the charred and mutilated corpses were relatives of his who lived in his village, two men and a boy aged seven or eight.  They couldn’t pick up the charred parts in one piece.  Finding scraps of plastic they transported the body parts away from the site.  Three to four others joined in to help cover the bodies in plastic and carry them to the morgue.

But these volunteers and nearby onlookers were attacked by another drone strike, 15 minutes after the initial one. 6 more people died. One of them was the brother of the man killed in the initial strike.

The social worker says that people are now afraid to help when a drone strike occurs because they fear a similar fate from a second attack. People will wait several hours after an attack just to be sure.  Meanwhile, some lives will be lost that possibly could have been saved.

The social worker also told us that pressure from the explosion, when a drone-fired missile or bomb hits, can send bystanders flying through the air.  Some are injured when their bodies hit walls or stone, causing fractures and brain injuries.

The social worker described four more cases in which he had been involved with immediate relief work, following a drone attack.  He didn’t supply us with exact dates, and we weren’t able to find news articles on the internet which exactly matched his accounts.  Riaz Khan, an AP reporter covering a drone strike on May 15th, noted differences in details reported by witnesses and official sources.  “Such discrepancies are common and are rarely reconciled,” according to Khan (May 15th , Officials: US missiles kill 5 in NW Pakistan‘).

Exasperated by the neglect and indifference people in Waziristan face, especially those who say they have nowhere to hide, the journalist and social worker began firing questions at us.

“If the US had good intelligence and they hit their targets with the first strike,” Safdar asks, “why would the second one be necessary? If you already hit the supposed militant target, then why fire again?”

“Who has given the license to kill and in what court?  Who has declared that they can hit anyone they like?”

“How many ‘high level targets’ could there possibly be?”

“What kind of democracy is America,” Safdar asks, “where people do not ask these questions?”

Reliance on robotic warfare has escalated, from the Bush to the Obama administrations, with very little significant public debate. More than ever before, it is true that the U.S. doesn’t want our bodies to be part of warfare; there’s also not much interest in our consent.  All that is required is our money.

But, you get what you pay for in the U.S.A.  The social worker and the journalist assured us that all of the survivors feel hatred toward the United States.  “It is a real problem,” said Safdar, “this rising hatred.”

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) and Josh Brollier (Joshua@vcnv.org) are co-coordinators of Voices for Creative Nonviolence  www.vcnv.org



May 18, 2010 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Israel charged with 14 cases of sexual assault and threats to children

Defence for Children International | May 18, 2010

On 18 May 2010, DCI-Palestine submitted 14 cases to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture for investigation. The submission relates to the sexual assault, or threat of sexual assault, of Palestinian children at the hands of Israeli soldiers, interogators and police between January 2009 and April 2010. The ages of the children range from 13 to 16 years.

DCI-Palestine is becoming increasingly alarmed at reports contained in sworn affidavits received from children that they are being subjected to sexual assault, or threat of sexual assault, in order to obtain confessions.

DCI-Palestine has reviewed 100 sworn affidavits collected from children in 2009, and in four percent of cases, children report being sexually assaulted, whilst in 12 percent of cases, the children report being threatened with sexual assault. The sexual assault and threats of sexual assault documented by DCI-Palestine include grabbing boys by the testicles until they confess and threatening boys as young as 13 years with rape unless they confess to throwing stones at Israeli settler vehicles in the occupied West Bank. DCI-Palestine suspects that these figures may understate the extent of the problem.

In one of the cases documented by DCI-Palestine, a 15 year-old boy recalls his experience after being arrested by Israeli soldiers from his family home at 2am, in September 2009:

‘While sitting on the ground near the truck, a person speaking Arabic approached me and grabbed my hands and ordered me to stand up and accompany him. He grabbed me so violently and pulled me. He forced me to walk with him for about 20 metres and I could see from under the blindfold that we stopped behind a military jeep. He slapped me hard twice and grabbed my testicles so hard and started pressing them. Then, he asked me whether I threw stones and Molotov cocktails and I said I did not. He started shouting and saying ‘liar, your mother’s a c**t.’ He started beating me all over my body and once again he grabbed my testicles and started pressing hard. “I won’t let go of your testicles unless you confess,” he said to me. I felt so much pain and kept shouting. I had no other choice but to confess to throwing stones.’

Each year around 700 Palestinian children are arrested, interrogated and prosecuted in the Israeli military courts. The most common charge is for throwing stones. The children are interrogated in the absence of a lawyer and family members and in 2009, over 80 percent of these children provided confessions after a coercive interrogation, of which 32 percent were written in Hebrew, a language few Palestinian children understand. Following their conviction in the military courts, the majority of these children are incarcerated inside Israel in contravention of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

DCI-Palestine is requesting that the Special Rapporteur investigates these and other reports relating to the apparent widespread and systematic ill-treatment of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and to publish the findings.

For further information please see DCI-Palestine’s latest report on Palestinian child prisoners.

May 18, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Remarkable Urgency

By Eva Bartlett | In Gaza | May 18, 2010

*wheat crops bulldozed in a roughly 15 metre wide track clawed into the land by Israeli military bulldozers and tanks.

A dry winter with very late rains –at the end of January, the last possible time for planting, the farmers said –followed by a dry spring evolved into the beginnings of a dry summer.

Called yesterday to accompany farmers in the Faraheen and Khoza’a regions, each east of Khan Younis, we were suddenly busy again.  So it goes with the farmers who’ve been forced to give up high-maintenance agriculture and try for the lowest-maintenance crops possible: wheat, rye, lentils.  No more trees, they’ve all been bulldozed too many times.  Not so many potatoes, nor much parsley–they require more water than the sparse rains provided or the destroyed water cisterns, wells and piping allowed for.

Whereas before the heightened Israeli army aggressions against these visibly unarmed farmers they would live on their land, at the very least daily visit and work on it, they are now resigned to rushed attempts at sowing and harvesting some of Gaza’s richest soils, under the thud and whiz of Israeli army bullets.

We were to join Leila Abu Dagga’s sister to harvest 5 dunams of lentils.  But when we arrived were told, “it’s gone, the Israelis bulldozed it all”. [The land in question is near where the young, deaf farmer was shot by an Israeli soldier last year.  Over 500 metres from the border, I remember it well (and remember the shock of the Israeli soldiers having shot around us to reach this unarmed farmer just trying to earn 20 shekels a day. The horror: shit, is he dead? The disbelief: but they saw us farming for over 2 hours… why shoot now? The disgust: this kid is just trying to add to his large family’s small income)]

*a roughly 15 metre wide track clawed into the land by Israeli military bulldozers and tanks.

So we moved to Abu Tabbash land, roughly 12 dunams of wheat which we had accompanied the elderly farmer on four months ago. Then, the Israeli army jeeps had lorded atop earth mounds just across the Green Line border fence as Abu Khader walked the length of his accessible land, back and forth, hand-spraying wheat seeds.

*Faraheen farmland [photo: Rada Daniell]

As we arrive, shortly after 7 am, he tells us “we started at 5 am.  The jeeps were there, but no shooting yet”.  He is neither surprised nor grateful, just matter of fact.  Matter of fact is the Israeli soldiers can appear at any moment and shoot at any moment, any whim.  There is no pattern, no predictability, and the only seeming reason, quite obviously, is pure harrassment with the intent of driving Palestinians off their land and destroying the agricultural sector.

So farmers like Abu Khader risk working on their land, abadoning the tens, hundreds for some families, of dunams lost to within and near the Israeli-imposed “buffer zone”.  But they do so at frantic paces, determined to work even the smallest section of their land.

“It’s quite remarkable,” says Adie, one of us accompanying the farmers. “It’s unbelievable that the Israeli army would fire on a scene like this.  It’s one of the most tranquil things you could be doing, this hand-harvesting.”

Abu Khader has the bearing, humility, and cracked heels of someone who has toiled the land all his life.  His dignity shines, as does his sense of urgency to harvest the crop, and he wastes no time with small-talk or breaks.

Working with three other family members, he hand-plucks the wheat from its earth, noting “it’s so meagre this year.  It should be up to here,” gesturing near head level.

They rip, pile and bundle wheat and the dry hay-grass which will serve as animal feed.  The bundles are stuffed into large sacs or piled on too-small donkey carts and hauled off.

Day one they’ve harvested from 5 am to 10 am and call it a day.  Day two –”there was shooting this morning,” we are told, and an hour and a half another round of shots at visibly unarmed farmers –they work roughly the same, with same intensity, saying “tomorrow we’ll finish, just need an hour and a half”.

We leave, some of the plucked wheat still in small piles to be collected the next morning.

We learn hours later that after farmers and accompaniers left the land, Israeli bulldozers crushed in and lit afire by incendiary devices the land in and along the “buffer zone” including Abu Khader Abu Tabbash’s remaining wheat.

May 18, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Israel to Europe: Stop your citizens from sailing to Gaza with aid

By Jack Khoury and Barak Ravid | Haaretz | May 17, 2010

Israel warned a number of European states that it would not permit leftist-organizations planning to sail to the Gaza Strip with international aid to complete their mission.

The director of European affairs for the Foreign Ministry, Naor Gilon, met separately with envoys from Turkey, Greece, Ireland and Sweden to convey the message that any of their citizens intending to set sail for Gaza would be stopped before they could reach the coastal territory.

Describing such mission as provocative and in violation of Israeli law, Gilon told the diplomats: “Israel has not intention of allowing these sailboats in Gaza.”

The Foreign Ministry message essentially entails that anybody who tries to sail to Gaza with aid, or who tries to transfer goods into the Hamas-ruled territory, must do so in accordance with procedure.

The diplomats promised to pass the message along to the appropriate sources, said the Foreign Ministry, with some even offering to help prevent their citizens from attempting the mission.

Earlier Monday, Israeli security forces released a Turkish national arrested this month for allegedly belonging to an outlawed Islamic group, and were set to deport him later in the day.

Izzet Shahin, a volunteer for the Turkish NGO Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), was arrested in the West Bank by the Israel Defense Forces and was then transferred to the Shin Bet for investigation.

IHH, who had been organizing a Gaza aid boat planned to depart at the end of the month, was outlawed in Israel a few years ago.

According to the IHH website, the organization had been organizing a “major initiative…to deliver aid via the sea to the Gaza Strip, which has been under an embargo for over three years.”

“Hundreds of concerned people will set out on 10 ships in May to take over 5,000 tons of relief aid and materials to Gaza,” the website statement said,

May 18, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

“Israel” calls for expelling anyone marking Nakba from occupied Palestinian lands

Palestine Information Center | May 17, 2010

NAZARETH – Israeli minister of finance Yuval Steinitz called for withdrawing the nationality from everyone inciting against Israel and commemorating the 62nd anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).

During the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Steinitz said it was intolerable and unforgivable to see Arabs and some Jews challenging the mere existence of Israel.

The Israeli minister also condemned the recent remarks made by head of the Islamic Movement Sheikh Ra’ed Salah in which he highlighted the Arab identity of occupied Jerusalem and the Aqsa Mosque and defended the right of return.

For its part, the right-wing party of Yisrael Beiteinu led by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman called for opening investigation with Arab Knesset member Jamal Zahalka for his participation in a march organized to mark the Nakba anniversary.

In a separate incident, Israeli minister of education Gideon Sa’ar declared his intention to force the Palestinian high school students in the 1948 occupied lands to study the Nazi holocaust as of next year.

Yedioth Ahronoth on Sunday reported that Sa’ar also intends to send a delegation of Arab teachers and school principals to Poland to visit the alleged Nazi extermination camp in order to qualify them to teach this subject efficiently.

In the same context relating to Nakba, Palestinian officials and politicians called Sunday for pooling the efforts to protect the right of return and confront attempts to dilute this right and twist its concept into the idea of resettling Palestinian refugees in their current residential countries and compensating them.

They stressed during their participation in a conference on the Nakba held in Gaza the need for raising the awareness of the Arab nation about the right of return so as to sustain it.

Dr. Ahmed Bahar, the first deputy speaker of the Palestinian legislative council, stated in his speech that the right of return is a sacred right that belongs to all Palestinians and anyone waiving it is considered an apostate from the Palestinian national rank as stipulated by the right of return law.

Dr. Bahar stressed that the Palestinian people reject being resettled in alternative homelands and insist on returning to their homes which they were expelled from, adding that this right can come true only through the option of resistance and national unity.

May 17, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Jewish Settler Flees Scene After Ramming Vehicle Into Mother with Two Little Girls

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – May 16, 2010

Palestinian medical sources in Bethlehem reported Saturday at night that a Jewish settler rammed his vehicle into a mother and her two girls in Al Jab’a village near Bethlehem, and fled the scene.

The sources identified the woman as Aneesa Hasan Al Tous, 35, and her two daughters Ro’a, 2 years old, and Nagham, 5. They were moved to Al Ahli Hospital In Hebron; the mom and one of her children are in moderate conditions while the second child is in a serious condition.

Eyewitnesses reported that the mother and her children were walking at the entrance of the village when the settler rammed his vehicle into them and fled the scene.

The Israeli army managed to apprehend the settler later on.

Al Jab’a is located south of Bethlehem and is under full Israeli security and military control and its residents are facing constant violations and attacks carried out by the settlers.

In a separate incident, resident Ahmad Al Alami, 22, from Beit Ummar town near Hebron, was also wounded after a settler rammed his vehicle into him. He was moved to Hadassah Israeli hospital in Jerusalem. His condition was described as moderate but stable. This time, the settler reportedly did not leave the scene and called an Israeli ambulance.

May 16, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Obama’s torture loophole

By Paul Woodward on May 14, 2010

What’s the difference between a US-military-run detention facility and an intelligence gathering facility? For one thing, Red Cross officials are being prevented from seeing how prisoners are treated when held at Bagram’s intelligence gathering facility. Is that so that they can be tortured in secret?

Two days after taking office, Barack Obama signed an executive order banning torture. The era of secret detention facilities and CIA-administered waterboarding were over. Or so we thought.

Earlier this week, the BBC reported:

The US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan contains a facility for detainees that is distinct from its main prison, the Red Cross has confirmed to the BBC.

Nine former prisoners have told the BBC that they were held in a separate building, and subjected to abuse.

The US military says the main prison, now called the Detention Facility in Parwan, is the only detention facility on the base.

However, it has said it will look into the abuse allegations made to the BBC.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that since August 2009 US authorities have been notifying it of names of detained people in a separate structure at Bagram.

“The ICRC is being notified by the US authorities of detained people within 14 days of their arrest,” a Red Cross spokesman said.

“This has been routine practice since August 2009 and is a development welcomed by the ICRC.”

The spokesman was responding to a question from the BBC about the existence of the facility, referred to by many former prisoners as the Tor Jail, which translates as “black jail”.

Prisoners say they have been kept in isolation in cold cells and subjected to sleep deprivation, but it turns out the CIA’s hands are clean — this time it’s the Defense Intelligence Agency at work. And as for the fact that the Red Cross has been barred from entering this facility, that’s because it isn’t being called a detention facility.

Marc Ambinder reports:

Defense officials said that the White House is kept appraised of the methods used by interrogators at the site. The reason why the Red Cross hasn’t been invited to tour it, officials said, was because the U.S. does not believe it to be a detention facility, classifying it instead as an intelligence gathering facility.

A Defense official said that the agency’s inspector general had launched an internal investigation into reports in the Washington Post that several teenagers were beaten by the interrogators, but [Pentagon spokesman, Bryan] Whitman disputes this.

When the Obama Administration took over, it forbade the DIA from keeping prisoners in the facility longer than 30 days, although it is not clear how that dictum is enforced. It is also not clear how much Congress knows about the DIA’s interrogation procedures, which have largely escaped public scrutiny.

May 14, 2010 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Israel’s Disappeared

Legal Persecution

By NADIA HIJAB | May 14, 2010

At first it seemed bizarre. Israel slapped a blanket gag order to prevent media coverage of the May 6 arrest of Ameer Makhoul, a prominent Palestinian citizen of Israel who heads Ittijah, a coalition of 64 major civil society organizations. Yet in no time at all the news had shot round the world, and Facebook pages were up calling for his freedom and for a demonstration in Haifa to demand his release.

So is there a point to such gag orders? It turns out there is. Unlike Makhoul’s case, the news about some arrestees remains unknown for weeks. As people mobilized for Makhoul, reports began to surface about another Palestinian citizen of Israel, Omar Said, who was arrested on April 25 on his way to Jordan.

Said holds a PhD from Israel’s Technion, and his innovative work at the Antaki Center for Herbal Medicine was featured in Haaretz in 2007. Legal sources affirmed that there was also a gag order against media coverage of his case and that, like Makhoul, he has not yet been allowed to see a lawyer.

Then of course there is the now famous case of Anat Kamm, the journalist who was held secretly under house arrest for more than three months earlier this year, accused of having leaked Israeli military documents concerning the premeditated killing of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

How many more are there? So wonders Didi Remez, an Israeli Jewish human rights advocate who blogs at Coteret. How many indeed? As Remez notes, Makhoul’s prominence may now draw attention to a much more widespread phenomenon. Writing about the Kamm case, The Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli police ask the courts for a gag order about 100 times a year.

Although Israel on Monday lifted the gag orders against both Makhoul and Said, the question of “how many more” is now posed with urgency, given the Israeli state’s growing crackdown on its citizens — crackdowns that are enthusiastically supported by the settler movement as it remorselessly colonizes Palestinian land.

The Israeli Palestinian community is clearly at risk. Israel has now accused Makhoul and Said of spying for Hizbullah — similar accusations drove former Knesset member and community leader Azmi Bishara into self-imposed exile to avoid ending up in prison. Still. the community is determined to stand its ground. “We won’t be silent,” Ynet quoted Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights, and others as saying, but will struggle against “the ‘legal’ persecution by the Israeli government against the Arab sector.”

But Jewish human rights advocates are at risk too. Israeli rightwing groups have targeted both Naomi Chazan, head of the New Israel Fund, along with Adalah in the same billboard campaign.

One outcome of the crackdown may be growing Israeli Palestinian and Jewish collaboration in defence of basic rights and freedoms: Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel together protested the Makhoul gag order to the Supreme Court. As Moshe Yaroni wrote in Zeek, a progressive American Jewish online magazine, “The erosion of rights is a dynamic that threatens every Israeli,” And, he predicted, “Israel is moving toward a very frightening future; a future where most Jews will no longer be able to support Israel.”

Frightening is the word that best describes the state of a person completely cut off from his world, without recourse or rights. The soft-spoken, steel-willed Makhoul has played a major role in defending Palestinian rights and identity in Israel — indeed, Ittijah’s member groups have doubled over the past few years. Makhoul’s dedication has now landed him in jail. His wife, feminist scholar Janan Abdu, writes bravely on her Facebook page, “No prison in the world can absorb a whole nation.” But the family must be frantic with worry — as must other community activists. Who will be next?

Not many countries claiming to be democracies “disappear” their own citizens and deny them due process. Ironically the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sets democracy as a condition of membership, just welcomed Israel into its midst. By so doing, the OECD sent a terrible signal that state power trumps human rights. Further, by not holding Israel accountable for its ongoing violations in the occupied Palestinian territories, its member states risk rendering themselves complicit in its crimes.

Ever since its attack on Gaza in 2008-2009, Israel has mounted a major public relations campaign to counter popular outrage and the growing boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement calling on it to uphold international law. It accuses its critics of anti-Semitism — even the fast-growing Jewish communities working for equality and justice. Wouldn’t it be easier to admit that maybe, just maybe, Israel is doing something wrong? And that until it respects equality, justice and freedom at home and abroad, it will not secure the legitimacy it craves?

Nadia Hijab is a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies.

May 14, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Israeli settler kills Palestinian youth

There has been a spike in settler violence against Palestinians in recent weeks

Al-Jazeera | May 14, 2010

A Palestinian teenager has been shot dead by an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank, witnesses and activists said.

The settler opened fire after Palestinian youths threw stones at his car travelling along Route 60 in Mazra’a al-Sharqia, east of Ramallah.

The Popular Struggle Co-ordination Committee activist group said that Aysar al-Zaben was not involved in the stone throwing, but was tending his family’s land when he was shot.

“According to his uncle, his lifeless body was found lying face down on the ground with a bullet hole in his back,” the group said in a statement.

Israeli police said that the killing was being investigated, while the Israeli military stressed that it was not involved in the incident during which “shots were fired after stones were thrown at an Israeli car”.

Route 60, which runs from Beersheba to Nazareth and connects a number of Israeli settlements, is closed to Palestinians in areas of the West Bank. It has seen a number of protests against the restrictions imposed on Palestinians by Israel.

Settler violence

About 500,000 settlers and about 2.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and areas near Jerusalem annexed by Israel after the 1967 Middle East war.

Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros, reporting from the West Bank, said there had recently been a spike in settler violence against Palestinians.

“Many people are saying this is a direct response to what the settlers feel is a threat from the United States that there will be pressure put on the Israeli administration to stop, or at least freeze, its settlement building empire that it’s constructed here in the occupied West Bank,” she said.

“Many people are saying Palestinian blood has been shed as a price tag, if you like, for the setters to give that message to Prime Minister Netanyahu and his administration that he cannot touch these illegal settlements in the West Bank.

“And if he does try and dismantle them in any way or freeze construction, this will be the result.”

In a report published on Thursday, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Palestinian territories said that there had been been at least nine violent incidents involving Israeli settlers in the last week.

Israeli settlers injured five Palestinians, including three children, aged five, nine and 12, in two separate incidents of stone-throwing and physical assault, it said.

‘Catastrophe continues’

Thursday’s attack in the West Bank came as Palestinians marked the 62nd anniversary of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when an estimated 700,000 Arabs were forced to flee the creation of Israel.

Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian negotiator, said “the catastrophe continues” for Palestinians.

“In other conflicts, refugee rights have been honoured and respected, including the right of return, restitution and compensation. In stark contrast, however, Israel refuses to even recognise the Palestinian right of return, thus continuing to deny the refugees’ basic rights.

“No state is above the law,” Erekat said, calling on the international community to end Israeli “beligerence and disregard for international law”.

Candle-lit vigils were planned in refugee camps on Friday evening and major demonstrations were scheduled in the Palestinian territories on Saturday, including a march to the grave of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Ramallah.

The Palestinians recently resumed indirect peace talks with Israel, mediated by the United States, but both sides have spoken pessimistically about the chances of tangible results.

May 14, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Israel’s red line: Shin Bet arrests boycott leader

By Jonathan Cook | May 14, 2010

Amir Makhoul is leading an emerging movement inside Israel

The recent arrest of two respected public figures from Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority in night-time raids on their homes by the Shin Bet secret police – brought to light this week when a gag order was partially lifted – sent shock waves through the community.

The arrests were not the first of their kind. The Shin Bet has been hounding and imprisoning politicians and intellectuals from the country’s Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population, since the birth of the Jewish state more than six decades ago. Currently, two MKs from Arab political parties, as well as the leader of the popular Islamic Movement, are facing trials.

But the detention of Amir Makhoul and Omar Sayid by Israeli intelligence forces has been seen differently – as the gathering storm clouds in a political climate already fiercely hostile to its Palestinian citizens.

Mohammed Zeidan, the head of the Human Rights Association in Nazareth, said: “We are used to our political leaders being persecuted but now the Shin Bet is turning its sights on the leaders of Palestinian civil society in Israel, and that’s a dangerous development.”

Makhoul and Sayid were not accused of the usual public order offenses, nor had they simply violated chauvinistic legislation that criminalizes Palestinian citizens’ visits to neighboring Arab states. Both are facing the much more serious charge of espionage, on behalf of Lebanon’s Hizbullah.

Makhoul, who appears to be the chief object of the Shin Bet’s interest, is the head of Ittijah, an umbrella organization coordinating the activities of Palestinian human rights groups in Israel. More specifically, he has become the leading voice inside Israel backing the growing international campaign for boycott, sanctions and divestment against Israel.

On Wednesday, the courts approved an extension of Makhoul’s remand. He was not allowed to be present and was denied the right to a lawyer until at least next Monday, 12 days since his arrest. He is reportedly being interrogated around the clock.

Sayid, an activist with the Tajamu political party and a scientist who specialises in developing new medicines from Middle Eastern plants, has been held by the Shin Bet since 24 April.

Amnesty International threatened to declare Makhoul a “prisoner of conscience,” saying his arrest “smacks of pure harassment, designed to hinder his human rights work.”

Observers from the Palestinian minority too have ridiculed the allegations, based on secret evidence, that the pair made “contact with a foreign agent.” They point out that under the draconian emergency regulations being used in this case the Shin Bet needs only the flimsiest circumstantial evidence to lay such a charge.

Zeidan called it an easy, “one size fits all” security offense that was difficult to challenge but persuasive to the Jewish majority. “You only need unwittingly to meet at a conference a relative of a relative of someone in Hizbullah and the Shin Bet thinks it has grounds to arrest you.”

The Palestinian minority is not alone in believing that Makhoul and Sayid have not spied in the accepted sense of passing classified or sensitive information to an enemy: Israel’s military correspondents have been largely dismissive of the espionage charges too. In the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, writers Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff pointed out that neither Palestinian citizen is privy to secrets that would interest Hizbullah.

Instead, the correspondents hinted at other motives behind the arrests. Any contacts between Israel’s enemies such as Hizbullah and Palestinian rights activists in Israel are a threat, they surmise, because Palestinian leaders in Israel might offer assistance in “co-ordinating political positions” or initiate “protests and riots during sensitive periods.” That radically expands the traditional definition of “espionage”.

The Shin Bet’s pursuit of Makhoul and Sayid, in the view of community leaders, needs to be understood in terms of a fixed assumption by the Israeli establishment that the Arab minority poses a political threat to the continued survival of a Jewish state.

The roots of this worldview can be traced back to the signing of the Oslo accords. With the launch of a peace process with the Palestinians, Israeli politicians began to reconsider the status of the large Palestinian minority. Many believed that allowing a significant population of Palestinians to remain inside Israel as citizens after the creation of a neighboring Palestinian state might one day prove to be the country’s Achilles’ heel.

Might not the Palestinian minority provide the Palestinians in the occupied territories with a “foot in the door” to try to win back the whole of historic Palestine rather than settle for a mini-state in the West Bank and Gaza?

Those fears escalated dramatically when Oslo turned sour and the second intifada erupted in 2000. Israel believed the Palestinians had refused its “generous” offer at Camp David in the hope that they could use the Palestinian minority as a “Trojan horse” to destroy the Jewish state demographically from within.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister at the time, called the Palestinian minority the “spear point” of what he believed was Yasser Arafat’s attempt to dismantle Israel as a Jewish state. He feared that a political reform program demanding a “state of all its citizens”, which had become a rallying cry for Palestinian citizens, was really intended to bring the return of millions of Palestinian refugees under cover of an equal rights struggle.

Israel responded by making contact all but impossible between Palestinians in Israel and those in the occupied territories, including by building a wall around the West Bank and legislating an effective ban on marriages across the Green Line.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Shin Bet’s chief target prior to the latest arrests was Azmi Bishara, the architect of the “state of all its citizens” campaign. In 2007 Bishara was accused of spying for Hizbullah too, and has been in exile ever since.

At that time, Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, warned that he regarded it as his job to “thwart” any activities, including political ones, that threatened Israel’s survival as a Jewish state.

According to Zeidan and other analysts, the Shin Bet’s hand in the latest arrests appears to be guided by a similar assessment that the Palestinian minority is again posing an “existential threat” to Israel – even if for different reasons.

Makhoul is seen as the figurehead of an emerging movement inside Israel that, faced with the refusal of Israelis to countenance political reforms to democratize the country, is devising new political strategies.

He has not hidden the extensive contacts he has developed both among western Palestinian solidarity activists and in the Arab world, urging the need for a boycott of Israel. He was also at the forefront of the protests inside Israel against its attack on Gaza last year. He was called in for interrogation by the Shin Bet at the time.

“The occupation isn’t news anymore,” Zeidan said. “The big threats facing Israel, in the Shin Bet’s view, are its deteriorating image in terms of human rights and the growing sense abroad that it is an apartheid state.

“Palestinian civil society in Israel, more so even than our political parties, is best placed to make the case on those issues to the international community, to expose the racism and discrimination inherent in a Jewish state. Amir Makhoul’s arrest should be understood in that light.

“The Shin Bet believes we have crossed a red line in our international advocacy.”

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jkcook.net.

May 14, 2010 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

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