Eight years after negotiations began in May 2004, the U.S.Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) came into force on May 15.
Negotiations began together with the four member countries of the Andean Community that are beneficiaries of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), which permits the entry of products not traditionally tariff-free into the U.S. market. One of Colombia’s central reasons for the FTA lay in ensuring that such tariff preferences were made permanent, since ATPDEA officially expired on December 31, 2006.
Businesses that exported under this program—especially in the textile and floriculture sectors in the case of Colombia—pushed hard for the FTA. They believed that it would allow them to gain competitiveness against other countries that did not enjoy similar preferences, and to be on equal terms with those who already had them.
The governments sought to shield important aspects of economic policy—like the treatment to foreign investment, liberalization of the services sector and strengthening intellectual property protection, among others—against the probable intent that a new administration would try to change them. The consolidation of economic liberalization would, according to authorities, attract foreign investments that generate jobs.
In this evaluation, the Andean governments dismissed the fact that tariffs are not currently the main barriers to access to industrialized country markets. They also did not consider that as the United States continued to sign FTAs such with other countries, as it was clear they would, the Andean region would lose its advantages.
Indeed, the U.S. government, as well as the European Union and Japan, use free trade agreements as a way to establish trade and economic rules that in the multilateral World Trade Organization cannot be implemented because of the resistance of a significant number of developing countries.
The Trade Act or Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) of 2002-which authorized the United States government to negotiate FTAs with other countries, says that the expansion of international trade “is vital to national security. Trade is critical to the country’s economic growth and leadership in the world.”
The same act states that trade agreements maximize opportunities for critical sectors of the U.S. economy, such as information technology, telecommunications, basic industries, capital equipment, medical equipment, services, agriculture, environmental technology and intellectual property. The TPA indicates that trade creates new opportunities for the United States, thus preserving its economic, political and military strength.
The process of meetings to achieve the FTA was extensive. What started as a joint negotiation (Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, with Bolivia as an observer) ended with individual negotiations. Peru was the first to secure the signatures of presidents Toledo and Bush in December 2007 and came into force in February 2009, while Bolivia and Ecuador rejected the FTA following changes in their governments.
Venezuela withdrew from the Andean Community in April 2006 and applied for incorporation into Mercosur, arguing that “the free trade agreements by Colombia and Peru with the United States of America have formed a new legal body that attempts to assimilate the rules of the FTA within the Andean Community, changing de facto its nature and original principles.”
While the presidents of Colombia and the United States, Uribe and Bush signed in 2006, the U.S. Congress did not ratify the act because of complaints from some quarters in Congress and civil organizations that pointed to violations of human rights and labor laws. After lengthy negotiations, and commitments made by acting President Santos, the act was ratified by Congress in October 2011. Meanwhile, the tariff advantages achieved under the ATPDEA were renewed annually.
Myth of the “special relationship” under FTA
With the enforcement of the FTA, Colombian authorities hope to convert the country into an export platform for those countries that “do not enjoy privileged relations with this large market, such as Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela.” Government officials from Peru and Chile had previously expressed the same hope.
However, experience shows that these hopes did not become reality for Colombia’s neighbors. Sales to the U.S. market have lost momentum. In Peru, for example, exports to the United States fell 4% in 2011 over the previous year, although the total exports increased by 28% in that period.
The United States dropped from being the top destination for Peruvian exports, to the third–after China and Switzerland. In 2006 24.2% of Peruvian exports were destined for the U.S. market, in 2011 they were only for 12.7%. By contrast, imports from the United States, which in 2006 represented 16.4% of total imports, in 2011 increased to 19.5%. The U.S. has managed to reverse its trade balance with Peru, which has gone from a surplus favorable to Peru of $3.26 million in 2006 to a deficit of $1.52 million.
It is true that in this evolution the [exchange rates] of local Latin American currencies against the dollar have had a major impact, but the slowdown in growth and consumption in the United States does not predict a scenario favorable for emphasizing exports to the United States.
In his speech to the State of the Union in January this year, President Obama proposed a recovery of the economy based on boosting local manufacturing. He proposed tax cuts to companies that invest in the country, tax increases to those established abroad and measures to increase U.S. global market share, creating “millions of new customers for U.S. products in Panama, Colombia and South Korea.”
Colombia should be asking itself: Who really benefits from the Free Trade Agreement?
Ariela Ruiz Caro is an economics graduate of the Humboldt University in Berlin, with an MA in Economic Integration from the University of Buenos Aires. She does international consulting on trade, integration, and natural resources for ECLAC, the Latin American Economic System (SELA), the Institute for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean (INTAL), and other organizations. She worked for the Comunidad Andina from 1985 to 1994, as an advisor to the Commission of Permanent Representatives of MERCOSUR from 2006 to 2008, and is a writer for the Americas Program.
Translated by Yasmin Khan
June 6, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, ATPDEA, Colombia, Ecuador, Free trade area, FTA, Peru, United States |
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Invited paper to be presented at the national conference on “Multinationals, Violence, Trade Union Freedom and Democracy in Colombia” organized by the SINALTRAINAL International Trade Union on its 30th anniversary, July 26, 2012 at Autonomous University of Colombia in Bogota, Colombia.
Introduction
The US military intervention in Colombia constitutes the longest counter-insurgency war in recent world history. Beginning with President John F. Kennedy’s launch of the “Green Berets” in 1962 and escalating in the new century with President Clinton’s $7 billion dollar military program (Plan Colombia) in 2001 to Obama’s inauguration of seven new military bases in the present, the US has been at war in Colombia for 50 years. Ten US presidents, 5 Democrats and 5 Republicans, both liberals and conservatives, have alternated in carrying out one of the most brutal counter-insurgency wars ever recorded in Latin America. In terms of civilian killings, trade union and human rights activist murders and the dispossession of peasants, the US backed oligarchy has the dubious distinction of being at the top of the list of tyrannical rulers.
To understand the bloody history of US imperial intervention in Colombia requires us to examine several key dimensions of the relation in a comparative-historical framework that highlights the specificities of Colombia’s ruling class and the strategic geo-political importance of Colombia to US hemispheric dominance.
Colombia: A Ruling Class in Search of Hegemony
Violence is endemic in a society ruled by a ‘closed’ ruling class governing through 19th century oligarchical parties (and their competing factions) for the greater part of the 20th and 21st centuries. Colombia differs from most of the rest of the major countries of Latin America which early on in the 20th century expanded representation to diverse middle class parties. In the post-World War 1 period and certainly by the World Depression of the 1930’s, Latin America witnessed the emergence of socialist, communist and national populist parties and Popular Front type regimes. However, Colombia remained frozen in a time warp of a closed political system dominated by two oligarchical parties which competed with bullets and ballots.
When in the immediate post WWII period a dynamic nationalist- populist figure emerged, Jorge Elicier Gaitan, he was assassinated and the country entered a period of a society-wide blood bath, dubbed “La Violencia”. Factions of Conservative and Liberal oligarchs financed armed bands to murder each other resulting in over 300,000 killings. The oligarchs ended their internecine war by signing an agreement to alternate electoral office, the so-called “National Front” further consolidating their stranglehold on power and forcibly excluding new political movements from achieving any significant representation.
Even when a pseudo alternative emerged, under the rule of rightwing populist, Rojas Pinilla, the mass urban and rural poor were subject to the private armies of the landlords, while the urban workers movement was brutally repressed by the military and police. Dissident democrats usually formed a faction of the Liberal Party; while activist workers were drawn to the militant trade unions and the clandestine or semi-legal Communist Party or smaller socialist parties.
The Cold War and US Imperial Penetration
With the onset of the Cold War, Washington found a willing accomplice in the bi-party oligarchical alliance, especially after the elimination of Gaitan and the savage repression of militant class based unions in the US agro-business complexes. Beginning with the bi-lateral and multi-lateral anti-communist military agreements of the early 1950’s, Colombian politics was frozen into a pattern of subordination and collaboration with Washington, as the US extended its empire from Central America and the Caribbean into Latin America.
The similarities between the bi-partisan political systems of Colombia and the US and the exclusion of any effective opposition in both countries, facilitated continuity and collaboration. As a result, Colombia’s oligarchy did not face the challenges that emerged from time to time in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay.
The Cuban Revolution and the US-Colombian Alliance
The Cuban revolution, especially its transition toward socialism and the multiplication of guerilla movements throughout Latin America, marked a turning point in US-Colombian relations. Colombia became a pivotal country in Washington’s counter-revolutionary strategy. Colombia served as a US “laboratory” in the effort to defeat the revolutionary upsurge of the 1960’s.
Colombia served as a trampoline for Washington to launch a counter-offensive based on military regimes to establish an empire of dependent client-states, open to US economic interests and obedient to Washington’s foreign policy dictates.
US Imperialism and Latin American Nationalism: Impositions and Adaptations
The US Empire did not emerge ready-made at the end of World War II. It confronted and had to overcome many domestic and overseas obstacles and challenges. Domestically at the end of WW II, after years of war, most US citizens demanded a military demobilization (1945-47) which weakened the capacity to intervene against the emerging progressive governments in Guatemala, Chile, Argentina and elsewhere. However, with the Cold War and the “hot war” in Korea, the US rearmed and launched its quest for world dominance. Social democratic and progressive governments and leaders were ousted from governments and jailed in Venezuela, Guatemala and Chile. Throughout the 1950s Washington embraced the “First (but not last) Age of Dictators and Free Markets”. They included Odria in Peru, Perez Jimenez in Venezuela, Ospina and Gomez in Colombia, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Duvalier in Haiti; Somoza in Nicaragua, Armas in Guatemala, Batista in Cuba.
Between 1948-1960 the US Empire totally relied on the brute force of the dictators and the complicity of the local agro-mineral oligarchy to secure its dominance.
The Empire, built on the basis of rightwing dictators, however, did not last beyond a decade. Beginning with the victory of the 26th of July Movement in Cuba, a decade-long (1960-1970) continent-wide revolutionary upsurge challenged imperial power and client collaborators of Empire.
US imperialism, faced with the demise of its dictatorial clients, was forced to adapt to the new configuration of forces composed of reformist middle class electoral parties and a new generation of radicals and a revolutionary movement of intellectuals, peasants and workers inspired by the Cuban example.
In 1962 Washington launched a new strategy called the “Alliance for Progress” (AP) to divide reformers from revolutionaries: the AP promised economic aid to the reformist middle class regimes and military advisors, arms and special forces to destroy the revolutionary insurgents. In other words imperial violence was more selective; it was directed against the independent revolutionary movements and involved greater direct military involvement in the counter-insurgency programs of the electoral regimes.
Colombia the Exception: Repression with Reform
In contrast to the rest of Latin America, where agrarian, democratic and nationalist reforms accompanied the counter-insurgency programs (Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Venezuela), in Colombia the oligarchy retained power, blocked the emergence of a reformist – democratic alternative and relied wholly on a strategy of total militarization – polarizing politics between revolution and reaction.
In Colombia the US Empire did not face a choice between a reformist middle class regime or a revolutionary movement because the oligarchical bi-party system dominated the electoral arena. The US did not need to combine the “carrot with the stick” – it concentrated all its efforts in strengthening the military power of the dominant oligarchy.
The Colombian ruling class ruled out any “agrarian reform” like in Chile, Peru and Ecuador for the obvious reason that they were the landowning elite. The Colombian oligarchy did not face a ‘nationalist military’ pressuring to nationalize strategic industries, like in Bolivia (tin and petrol), and Peru (oil and copper) because the military was under US tutelage and was closely linked with the emerging narco bourgeoisie. The Colombian ruling class served as the US “counter-point” to launch its second and most brutal counter-revolutionary offensive beginning with a coup in Brazil in 1964.
By the end of the 1960’s Colombia became the centerpiece (“model”) of US policy for Latin America. The region moved from reform to radical nationalism and democratic socialism in the early 1970’s – especially among the Andean countries and the Caribbean. Colombia was the anomaly in an Andean region ruled by nationalists like Guillermo Rodriguez in Ecuador, Juan Velasco Alvarez in Peru, J J Torres in Bolivia and democratic socialists like Salvador Allende in Chile.
Subsequently the US invaded and occupied the Dominican Republic in 1965/66 and supported the overthrow of Allende, Rodriquez, Torres, Velasco Alvarez in the Andean countries.Later the US backed military coups in Argentina (1976) and Uruguay(1972).
The Pentagon organized mercenary death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala killing nearly 300,000 peasants, Indian workers, teachers and other citizens. The US organized a mercenary army (the “Contras”) in Honduras to destroy the Sandinista revolution.
Colombia’s ruling class, backed by US and Israeli counter-insurgency experts, tried to follow the US counter-revolutionary lead by engaging in a “scorched earth policy” to defeat the popular insurgency. But narco-presidents Turbay, Betancur,Barco , Gaviria and Samper were only partially successful – they destroyed the popular legal Union Patriotica but increased the size, scope and membership of the armed insurgency.
The second wave of “Dictators and Free Markets” (1970’s – 1980’s), including Pinochet (Chile), Videla (Argentina) and Alvarez (Uruguay) came under popular pressure and faced the insurmountable debt crises of the early 1980’s. Once again US imperialism faced a challenge and choice: continue with the dictators and a deepening financial crisis or engineer a “democratic transition” which would preserve the state and the neo-liberal economy.
The Golden Age of Imperialism … Neoliberalism and Elections 1990-2000 (except Colombia)
The 1990’s witnessed the greatest pillage of the Latin American economies since the times of Pizzaro and Cortes. Presidents Menem in Argentina, Salinas and Zedillo in Mexico, Cardoso in Brazil, Sanchez de Losado of Bolivia and Fujimori in Peru privatized and de-nationalized over 5,000 public enterprises, mines, energy resources, banks, telecommunication networks – mostly through executive decrees – worth over $1 trillion dollars. During the 1990’s over $900 billion dollars flowed out of Latin America in profits, royalties and interest payments to multi-national corporations, bankers and speculators. In Colombia, narco-trafficking became the principle source of profits as the traditional oligarchy joined with the new “narco-bourgeoisie” in laundering billions of dollars via “correspondence” accounts with the major US banks in Miami, Wall Street and Los Angeles.
The “transition” from military dictatorships to neo-liberal authoritarian electoral systems in Latin America was paralleled in Colombia by the transition from an oligarchical to a narco-state. In Colombia the military and para-military death squads dispossessed millions of peasants, and confronted the armed insurgency. There was no “democratic transition” – the democratic opposition was murdered! Between 1984-1990 over 5,000 members of the Patriotic Union were slaughtered.
US empire builders looked on neo-liberal Latin America in the 1990’s as the “model” for expanding on a world-scale. The formula was to combine pillage via privatization in Latin America and dispossession via militarization in Colombia.
The Crises of the Neo-liberal-Militarist Model of Empire 2000-2012
The entire basis of US imperial supremacy in Latin America in the 1990’s was built on fragile foundations: pillage, plunder and corruption led to a profound class polarization and economic crises which culminated in mass popular uprisings overthrowing US backed client regimes in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador. In Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela the incumbent neo-liberal Presidents were defeated by center-left and national populist’s parties and leaders.
In Colombia, mass rejection of the ruling neo-liberal narco-bourgeoisie expressed itself via massive electoral abstention (over 75%): the exponential growth of influence and the presence of the armed insurgency in over one-third of the municipalities and the tactical retreat of President Pastrana. He accepted a demilitarized zone for direct peace negotiations with the FARC-EP.
The entire basis of US imperial rule built on the collaboration of the neo-liberal client regime crashed. Between 2000-2005 popular social movements succeeded in defeating a counterrevolutionary coup and lock-out in Venezuela(2002-3). A victorious President Chavez accelerated and radicalized the process of socio-economic change and deepened Venezuela’s anti-imperialist foreign policy. Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay rejected US free trade agreements.
Once again Colombia went against the progressive tide of the region. Colombia’s narco-bourgeoisie and oligarchy opted for total militarization to avoid the popular democratic movements occurring in the rest of Latin America. The Colombian-US response to democratic revolution in Latin America was “Plan Colombia” – a $10 billion dollar war on the Colombian people financed by the governments of the US, Colombia and the European Union.
Plan Colombia: Imperialism’s Response to Latin America’s Democracy Movement
“Plan Colombia” was the US response to the spread of the popular democratic revolution throughout Latin America. Plan Colombia represented the biggest US military aid program in the entire region and was designed with several strategic goals.
1. To ‘fence in’ Colombia from the “contagion” of the anti-neo-liberal revolution which had undermined the proposed US Free Trade of the Americas agreement.
2. Plan Colombia served to build-up Colombia’s capacity to threaten and pressure Venezuela’s anti-imperialist government and to provide the US with multiple military bases from which to launch a direct intervention in Venezuela if an ‘internal’ coups took place.
3. ‘Plan Colombia’ had an important internal political and economic function.
It was designed to militarize society and to empty the countryside; 300,000 soldiers together with 30,000 death squad paramilitary forces, forced millions to flee guerrilla controlled territory. The guerrillas lost important intelligence and logistical support but gained new recruits. As a result of the Uribe/Santos “scorched earth policy” and the mass violence, entire new economic sectors, especially in mining, oil and agriculture, were secured for foreign investors, laying the groundwork in 2012 for the Obama-Santos free trade agreement.
There is a direct connection between Plan Colombia (2001), militarization of the state, mass repression and dispossession (2002-2011), the deepening of neo-liberalization and the free trade agreement (2012).
4. Colombia serves a strategic geo-political role in the US militarized empire.
In the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa the US has used the pretext of the “War against Terrorism” to invade and establish an empire of military bases, in alliance with Israel and NATO. In Latin America, the US in alliance with Colombia and Mexico and under the pretext of the “War on Drugs” has built an empire of military bases in Central America, the Caribbean and increasingly in Latin America. Currently the US has military bases in Colombia (8), Aruba, Costa Rica, Guantanamo (Cuba), Curacao, El Salvador , Honduras (3), Haiti, Panama (12), Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico (several).
The US: A Militarized Empire
Because of the relative decline of US economic power and the rise of militarism, the US Empire today is largely a military empire engaged in perpetual wars. Washington’s close ties with Colombia reflect the close structural features of the state – heavily weighted toward military institutions – and economy, skewed toward neo-liberal and free market policies.
Once again, Colombia is the anomaly in Latin America. Nearly ten years after Latin America rejected neo-liberalism and eight years after the center-left regimes rejected a free trade agreement with the US, Colombia under Uribe-Santos embrace neo-liberalism and a free trade agreement with Washington.
Facing two major economic initiatives from Venezuela , Plan Caribe and ALBA, challenging US hegemony in the Caribbean and Andean region, Washington tightens its ties with Colombia via the free trade agreement.
Conclusion
US Empire depends on collaborator regimes everywhere in order to defend its military dominance. In Latin America, Colombia is the biggest and most active collaborator, especially in the Central American-Caribbean region.
But like the US, Colombia’s militarized state does not ‘fit’ in with the rest of Latin America. The US has no new economic initiatives to offer Latin America and has lost significant influence and witnessed a relative decline in trade, investment and market shares. Because Colombia, as a militarized-neo-liberal state complements the US global project, it became a special recipient of massive US military aid – precisely to prevent it from joining the new bloc of independent progressive states and further isolating Washington.
Colombia’s increasing dependence on the US economy via the free trade agreement sacrifices a large sector of domestic producers in agriculture and manufacturing but increases vast opportunities for the oligarchy and foreign investors in mining, oil and finance. The free trade agreement will increase the opportunities of the powerful narco-financial-bourgeoisie which launders over $20 billion dollars annually in drug revenues through leading US and EU banks.
Colombia is the ‘model state’ of the US Empire in Latin America. Colombia is ruled by a triple alliance of a narco-oligarchy, neo-liberal bourgeoisie and the military. The Santos regime depends increasingly on the large scale inflow of foreign capital, which is oriented toward producing for overseas markets. The military expenditures, the mass terror of the Uribe regime, the political isolation from the regional economic powers (Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina) and the limitation of the stagnant US economy are serious obstacles to the neo-liberal model. President Santos is attempting to reconcile these “internal contradictions”. Santos has replaced mass terror with selective assassinations of key activists in the trade unions and the human rights and social movements. He has focused on co-opting electoral politicians and centering the activity of the paramilitaries on eliminating popular opponents in the new mining and investment zones. He has combined major economic agreements with Venezuela and deepened military ties with the US.
The Santos-White House agreements and the strategy of diversified dependence and free markets rest on very fragile domestic and global foundations. The repression of dissent, the regressive taxes, the depression of living standards, the millions of rural dispossessed have led to the vast growth of inequalities and pent-up mass demand and rising popular pressure. The military commitments to the US impose a heavy economic cost with no economic compensation. The cost of US promoted militarism undermines efforts by Colombian business to expand in regional markets. The US economy is stagnant, the EU is in recession and the outlook for 2012 is precarious, especially for an open economy like Colombia.
At the turn of the 21st century Latin American countries faced a similar situation: neo-liberal regimes in crises, the US in economic decline and a ruling class unable to grow externally and unwilling to develop the internal market. The result was the popular democratic revolutions which led to a partial rupture with US hegemony and neo-liberalism. A decade later Colombia faces a similar situation. The question is whether Colombia will follow the rest of progressive Latin America in breaking with imperial militarism and embracing a new developmental road. The time is ripe for Colombia to cease being a ‘political anomaly’, a client of a militarized imperialism. The popular movements in Colombia,as evidenced in the Patriotic March movement are ready to make their own popular democratic and anti-imperialist revolution and establish their own Colombian road to 21st century Socialism.
June 5, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Colombia, John F. Kennedy, Latin America, United States |
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It seems like yesterday that we watched Israeli tanks rolling down the hills towards our sleepy town of Beit Sahour 45 years ago today. As a child it was the most frightening sight. The second stage of the Zionist expansion on the land of Palestine unleashed terror that our generation had not experienced but my parents generation had during eth Nakba when between January 1948 and the end of 1949, some 530 villages and towns were ethnically cleansed. The changes I witnessed the 45 years since the “6 day” invasion of 1967 have been nothing short of monumental. Those hills that the tanks rolled down on are all now filled with colonial settlements that scar the ancient landscape. The Israeli quarries have literally dug up other hills and trucked stone and soil away to build the “Jewish state” while destroying Palestinian lives. But I do not want to take time here to write of these violations. I think anyone can find thousands of documents and reports from independent human rights groups and international agencies describing the horrors of colonization, apartheid, and occupation in this “holy land”. Nor will I address how people who teach their children about Jewish suffering over the ages teach them that it is OK to inflict this suffering on native/indigenous people. Nor do I want to write on this occasion of the treachery of western countries who profess human rights and international law actually become complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nor do I want to address the treachery of Arab leaders (yes including some Palestinians) who were complicit in helping make 7 million of us refugees or displaced people. I do want to talk about us, the people, and especially about mental occupation.
Occupiers/colonizers are of course always dependent not just on military might but also on propaganda and psychological manipulation to reach their goals. For example, from the late 19th century, the Zionists successfully infiltrated the minds of their victims with notions like “Arabs” and/vs. “Jews”. With this one simple concept, Zionists succeeded in 1) equating a linguistic group with a religion and elevating Jewishness to a supposed national structure (“a people”), 2) removing Arab Jews as a viable group whose allegiance lies naturally with their fellow Arabic speaking people, 3) fostering anti-Jewish feelings (mistakenly called anti-Semitism) to help their cause in conflating Zionism with Judaism. Before that they coined and popularized the term anti-Semitism to confuse the Europeans and claim they are Semites. From those early efforts in the 19th century, the people of the world were subjected to sustained intensive efforts at brainwashing.
We actually understand these propaganda efforts as natural and expected in efforts to propel racist ideologies. What we do not understand is why many native Palestinians accepted defeat and even adopted the Zionized version of history. Even some of our school textbooks perpetuate the mythologies that keep the Zionist nightmare a reality. It is easy to keep it alive when we, the victims keep the myth of the exodus from Egypt to Masada to the falsified history of Josephus to the suppression of our Canaanite ancestry to the notion that Jewishness is somehow biological. Some of this is due to those who are religious confusing metaphors and myths with historiography. Some of it is due to ignorance: e.g. ignorance of the fact that the Philistines were actually Canaanite people and not from Crete or that both ancient Arabic and Hebrew were dialects of Canaanite Aramaic. Some of it is pure foolishness; for example that somehow we can “return” Palestine to an idealized (fictional) Islamic or Jewish state. Would it not be better to admit the wrong that was done to the native people, do some restorative justice, and begin to discuss among ourselves how we Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and others can live TOGETHER in a country in full equality? How about a new joint political movement to reform and to dismantle the dysfunctional Israeli and Palestinian political structures so as to build a new reality? Aren’t 64 years of Nakba and 45 years of Naksa long enough? There are 11.5 million Palestinains in the world and billions of fellow human beings who know what is right to contend with at best half a million deluded Jewish Zionists (and the equally deluded Christian Zionists who support them). What prevents justice (ie. peace) is apathy and ignorance. Is it not time to shed these?
Cover-up of the deliberate Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. We should remember the victims of the Israeli attack 45 years ago and the cowardice of the US government which succumbed to the Israel lobby and buried the incident http://www.ussliberty.org
The 2011 Humanitarian Overview addresses the key advocacy priorities identified by the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), the main humanitarian coordinating body for UN agencies and NGO partners in the the occupied Palestinian territories. http://www.ochaopt.org/annual/
Israel is new South Africa as boycott calls increase
After Madonna began her world tour there last week, campaigners urge cutting of cultural tieshttp://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/israel-is-new-south-africa-as-boycott-calls-increase-7813538.html
Boycott Israeli Blood Diamonds, Dublin 2-6-2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPb5bFEJX7c
Don’t Let Mahmoud Sarsak Die – Act Now!: http://freehaifa.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/dont-let-mahmoud-sarsak-die-act-now/
ACTION: Consider introducing resolutions for boycotts, divestment and sanctions at your union, church, organization, group, political party, association. You may also start a petition to have your town, city council, state or other government entity divest from Israel and companies that support the Israeli apartheid system. To help, we put together some relevant information on this link http://www.qumsiyeh.org/calltobds/ and will try to keep it updated for use in promoting BDS (send me anything you think should be added)
Here are other links with lots of information
http://www.pacbi.org/
http://www.bdsmovement.org/
http://www.kairospalestine.ps/
http://qumsiyeh.org/boycottsanddivestment/
http://www.christianzionism.org/
http://www.righttoenter.ps
http://www.qumsiyeh.org/christianlinks/
June 4, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Beit Sahour, Israel, Jews, Judaism, Palestine, Zionism |
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In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel?
Part of the answer is in a single word – pride. From the Jewish perspective there was indeed much to be proud about. Little Israel with its small but highly professional defence force and its mainly citizen army had smashed the war machines of the frontline Arab states in six days. The Jewish David had slain the Arab Goliath. Israeli forces were in occupation of the whole of the Sinai and the Gaza Strip (Egyptian territory), the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem (Jordanian territory) and the Golan Heights (Syrian territory). And it was not much of a secret that the Israelis could have gone on to capture Cairo, Amman and Damascus. There was nothing to stop them except the impossibility of maintaining the occupation of three Arab capitals.
But the intensity of the pride most Jews of the world experienced with Israel’s military victory was in large part a product of the intensity of the fear that came before it. In the three weeks before the war, the Jews of the world truly believed, because (like Israeli Jews) they were conditioned by Zionism to believe, that the Arabs were poised to attack and that Israel’s very existence was at stake and much in doubt. The Jews of the world (and Israeli Jews) could not be blamed for believing that, but it was a big, fat propaganda lie. Though Egypt’s President Nasser had asked UNEF forces to withdraw, had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and had reinforced his army in the Sinai, neither his Egypt nor any of the frontline Arab states had any intention of attacking Israel. And Israel’s leaders, and the Johnson administration, knew that. In short, and as I detail and document in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, the offensive Israel launched at 0750 hours (local time) on Monday 5 June was not a preemptive strike or an act of self-defence. It was a war of aggression.
The summary truth about that war is this.
Assisted by the regeneration Palestinian nationalism, which became the tail that wagged the Arab dog despite the brutal efforts of the intelligence services of the frontline Arab states to prevent it happening, Israel’s military and political hawks set a trap for Nasser; and he walked into it, with eyes half-open, in the hope that the international community, led by the Johnson administration, would restrain Israel and require it and Egypt to settle the problem of the moment by diplomacy. From Nasser’s perspective that was not an unreasonable expectation because of the commitment, given by President Eisenhower, that in the event of the closure of the Straits of Tiran by Egypt to Israeli shipping, the U.S. would work with the “society of nations” to cause Egypt to restore Israel’s right of passage, and by so doing, prevent war.
A large part of the reason why today rational debate about making peace is impossible with the vast majority of Jews everywhere is that they still believe Egypt and the frontline Arab states were intending to annihilate Israel in 1967, and were only prevented from doing so by Israel’s pre-emptive strike.
If the statement that the Arabs were not intending to attack Israel and that the existence of the Zionist state was not in danger was only that of a goy (a non-Jew, me), it could be dismissed by supporters of Israel right or wrong as anti-Semitic conjecture. In fact the truth the statement represents was admitted by some of the key Israeli players – after the war, of course.
On this 45th anniversary of the start of the Six Days War, here is a reminder of what they said.
In an interview published in Le Monde on 28 February 1968, Israeli Chief of Staff Rabin said this: “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on 14 May would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”
On 14 April 1971, a report in the Israeli newspaper Al-Hamishmar contained the following statement by Mordecai Bentov, a member of the wartime national government. “The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.”
On 4 April 1972, General Haim Bar-Lev, Rabin’s predecessor as chief of staff, was quoted in Ma’ariv as follows: “We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six Days War, and we had never thought of such a possibility.”
In the same Israeli newspaper on the same day, General Ezer Weizmann, Chief of Operations during the war and a nephew of Chaim Weizmann, was quoted as saying: “There was never any danger of annihilation. This hypothesis has never been considered in any serious meeting.”
In the spring of 1972, General Matetiyahu Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war and one of 12 members of Israel’s General Staff, addressed a political literary club in Tel Aviv. He said: “The thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June 1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival, was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the war.”
In a radio debate Peled also said: “Israel was never in real danger and there was no evidence that Egypt had any intention of attacking Israel.” He added that “Israeli intelligence knew that Egypt was not prepared for war.”
In the same programme General Chaim Herzog (former Director of Military Intelligence, future Israeli Ambassador to the UN and President of his state) said: “There was no danger of annihilation. Neither Israeli headquarters nor the Pentagon – as the memoirs of President Johnson proved – believed in this danger.”
On 3 June 1972 Peled was even more explicit in an article of his own for Le Monde. He wrote: “All those stories about the huge danger we were facing because of our small territorial size, an argument expounded once the war was over, have never been considered in our calculations. While we proceeded towards the full mobilisation of our forces, no person in his right mind could believe that all this force was necessary to our ‘defence’ against the Egyptian threat. This force was to crush once and for all the Egyptians at the military level and their Soviet masters at the political level. To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel’s existence does not only insult the intelligence of any person capable of analysing this kind of situation, but is primarily an insult to the Israeli army.”
The preference of some generals for truth-telling after the event provoked something of a debate in Israel, but it was short-lived. If some Israeli journalists had had their way, the generals would have kept their mouths shut. Weizmann was one of those approached with the suggestion that he and others who wanted to speak out should “not exercise their inalienable right to free speech lest they prejudice world opinion and the Jewish diaspora against Israel.”
It is not surprising that debate in Israel was shut down before it led to some serious soul searching about the nature of the state and whether it should continue to live by the lie as well as the sword; but it is more than remarkable, I think, that the mainstream Western media continues to prefer the convenience of the Zionist myth to the reality of what happened in 1967 and why. When reporters and commentators have need today to make reference to the Six Days War, almost all of them still tell it like the Zionists said it was in 1967 rather than how it really was. Obviously there are still limits to how far the mainstream media is prepared to go in challenging the Zionist account of history, but it could also be that lazy journalism is a factor in the equation.
For those journalists, lazy or not, who might still have doubts about who started the Six Days War, here’s a quote from what Prime Minister Begin said in an unguarded, public moment in 1982. “In June 1967 we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us, We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
June 4, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Golan Heights, Haim Bar-Lev, Israel, Six-Day War, Zionism |
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By Ali Mallah* and Eva Bartlett** | Global Research | June 4, 2012
I may lose my daily bread, if you wish
I may hawk my clothes and bed
I may become a stone-cutter, or a porter
Or a street-sweeper
I may search in animal dung for food
I may collapse, naked and starved
Enemy of light
I will not compromise
And to the end
I shall fight.
You may rob me of the last span of my land
You may ditch my youth in prison holes
Steal what my grandfather left me behind:
Some furniture or clothes and jars,
You may burn my poems and books
You may feed your dog on my flesh
You may impose a nightmare of your terror
On my village
Enemy of light
I shall not compromise
And to the end
I shall fight.
–Samih_al-Qasim
With the passing of the 64th anniversary of the Nakba, (the establishment of the illegal Zionist state on the land and homes of Palestinians), should we mourn or celebrate? Professor Nurit Peled–Elhanan wrote of her mourning:
“I will mourn on Nakba Day. I will mourn for vanished Palestine most of which I never knew. I will mourn for the holy land that is losing its humanity, its landscape, its beauty and its children on the altar of racism and evil. I will mourn for the Jewish youngsters who invade and desecrate the homes of families in Sheikh Jarrah, throw the inhabitants into the street, and then sing and dance in memory of Baruch Goldstein, the infamous murderer of Palestinian children, while the owners of the desecrated houses with their children and old people are sleeping in the rain, on the street, opposite their own homes. … All these things I will mourn on Nakba Day. I will join the millions of dispossessed, downtrodden and humiliated who have not given up on the future and who still believe there is a chance, who stand as witnesses and as firebrands of the true human spirit.…”
For the last 64 years, Palestinian women, men, elderly, and youth have steadfastly and spiritedly resisted the occupation and the Zionist state. It is a resistance that continues flourishing among Palestinians from all walks of life both inside and outside Palestine, be they farmers, workers, students, poets, or intellectuals.
The criminal Zionist campaign to erase Palestinian history and to whitewash Zionist massacres and the expulsion, imprisonment, and abuse of Palestinians continues 64 years after the Zionist state was founded on the ethnically-cleansed land of Palestine. In spite of the decades that have passed since May 15, 1948, Palestinians have not forgotten the Nakba, nor the 531 Palestinian villages razed and destroyed by Zionists before and after 1948, nor the over 750,000 Palestinians violently expelled from their homes in Palestine. The refugees are future returnees, and as they await justice—the right to return to the homes and land from which they were forcibly expelled—they don’t do so complaisantly.
The shelves of the United Nations Security Council and UN General Assembly are full of resolutions affirming the illegality of the Zionist state’s actions and colonies. Among these resolutions, the right to return is spelled out clearly in the first resolution listed below, along with other integral resolutions:
Palestinian Refugees have the right to return to their homes
(General Assembly Resolution 194, Dec. 11, 1948 ):
“Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return…”
Palestinians have the right to Self-Determination
(General Assembly Resolution 3236, November 22, 1974 ):
“Reaffirms the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine…to self-determination without external interference” and “to national independence and sovereignty.”
Israel’s occupation of Palestine is Illegal
(Security Council Resolution 242, Nov. 22, 1967):
Calls for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict”and “acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”
Israel’s settlements in Palestine are Illegal
(Security Council Resolution 446, March 22, 1979):
“Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”
Palestinians have a long, rich history of struggling for their fundamental and inalienable rights—those rights affirmed by numerous more UN resolutions and human rights enshrined in international law and enjoyed by people around the world. It is a struggle which goes back to the early days of Zionist colonization of Palestine and which thrives in various forms today throughout occupied Palestine and in exile. Palestinian scholar and rights activist Mazin Qumsiyeh recently wrote: “We have an amazing history of 130 years of struggle against the most well-financed, most-organized, most-supported colonial project in human history.” As Qumsiyeh alludes, Zionist terrorism extends back decades before the Jewish state was formed on the ruins of Palestinian towns. Palestinian popular resistance against the racist and destructive Zionist project, extends back to the late 1800s when the first Zionist colonists began arriving in Palestine.
The Nakba is imprinted in the minds of 11 million Palestinian women, men and children, passed on from generation to generation along with the keys to their homes in occupied Palestine. Every day in occupied Palestine there are new Nakbas as still more Palestinians are violently displaced from their homes, land, and families or are murdered at the hands of the IOF and Jewish colonists. Badil reports that:
“Internal displacement continues unabated in the OPT today. Thousands have been forcibly displaced in the Jordan Valley as a result of closure, home demolition and eviction orders, and the threat of displacement hangs over those who remain. Similar patterns of forced displacement are found in Israel, where urban development plans for the exclusive benefit of Jewish communities are displacing indigenous Palestinian communities in the Naqab (Negev) and Galilee.”
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine at the hands of Zionist terrorists organizations like the Irgun, the Stern Gang, and the Hagana, began years before 1948 and continues until this day, under the more palatable (to unethical politicians and apologists around the world) pretext of a state “defending” itself.
According to Al Awda (the Return) website:
“Jewish terrorist groups such as Haganah, Irgun and Stern terrorized the Palestinian street, destroyed villages and slaughtered entire Palestinian families. Approximately 50% of all Palestinian villages were destroyed in 1948 and many cities were cleared from their Palestinian population… Israeli forces killed an estimated 13,000 Palestinians and forcibly evicted 737,166 Palestinians from their homes and land.”
Throughout occupied Palestine, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) “defend” the Zionist state by demolishing Palestinian homes, expelling Palestinian residents from homes their families have lived in for generations, escorting armed Jewish colonists as they attack and shoot Palestinians, imposing lock-downs on Palestinian towns, arresting Palestinian men, women, teens and children under false pretexts of “security threats”, violently quelling non-violent demonstrations, firing on Palestinian farmers and fishers in the Gaza Strip, and abusing and torturing Palestinian political prisoners—including hunger-strikers demanding their most basic rights.
The Zionist state “defends” itself by annexing more Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem with its Separation Wall, expanding already-massive illegal Jewish colonies in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, periodically waging brutal and criminal bombing campaigns on the imprisoned population of the Gaza Strip, enforcing 35 discriminatory laws against Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship (non-Jews), and refusing to enact UN Resolution 194 which has been reiterated over 130 times.
In one of its more recent criminal acts, the Zionist state “defended” itself when slaughtering over 1450 Palestinians in the 2008-2009 Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, as it “defended” itself when perpetrating similar massacres in Lebanon and Gaza in 2006 and later. It “defended” itself on May 15, 2011 by opening live fire on crowds of Palestinian women, men and youths commemorating Nakba Day, killing 14 civilians and injuring hundreds more.
It again “defended” itself in March 2012 when violently quelling Palestinians’ popular demonstrations on Land Day—killing a youth from Gaza and injuring over 300 throughout occupied Palestine—and two months later in Nakba commemorations. The United Nations reports that “at least 370 Palestinians were injured by Israeli forces in demonstrations” on Nakba Day 2012. In weekly non-violent demonstrations throughout the occupied West Bank against the Zionist Separation Wall, the IOF have killed at least 21 Palestinians (10 of them minors) and have injured hundreds more.
Right of Return:
My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller” – Mahmoud Darwish
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, among other things, that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” Yet the Zionist regime does not allow Palestinians violently expelled from their homes and land to return, although this was conditional for Israel’s entry into the United Nations. An inalienable and non-negotiable right, the right for Palestinian refugees to return cannot be sold by anyone, be they Zionist or compromised Palestinian representatives.
The Zionist state passed a Jewish-specific law on coming to occupied Palestine. Badil notes: “In 1950, Israel enacted the Law of Return, granting any Jew anywhere the right to citizenship as a Jewish national in Israel and (since 1967) also in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) while the 1952 Citizenship Law denationalised the Palestinian refugees.”
Al Awda, the Return:
Little known nowadays, Palestinians in the 1980s attempted to use creative non-violent resistance against the Zionists’ banning of Palestinians’ right to return. And while Cyprus and freedom boats would come into the spotlight in 2008 and later years, the initial concept of sailing from Cyprus dates back to early 1988. PLO officials and activists Marwan Kayyali, Mohammed Tamimi, and Mohammed Buheis organized the first of what would two decades later be a stream of boats sailing to Palestine. Purchasing a Greek ferry, the Sol Phryne, the team re-named it al-Awda and readied it to carry over 130 Palestinians, along with an anticipated several hundred journalists and observers, to Haifa port.
The boat never left Cyprus. In February, 1988 a bomb was planted on the boat, and shortly afterwards, on February 15, Kayyali, Tamimi and Buheis were assassinated when a remote-controlled bomb was detonated in their car. All fingers pointed to “Israel”—which had publicly stated that the boat would never be allowed near Haifa—and its Mossad (Secret Services). Yet, as with uncountable assassinations by “Israeli” agents, “Israel” got away with murder.
The Intifada:
In 1976, the Zionist state announced plans to expropriate still more Palestinian land—thousands of acres—for “security and settlement purposes.” On March 30, Palestinian citizens of 1948 Palestine (pre-”Israel”) responded by holding a general strike, and organized marches throughout occupied Palestine. Not surprisingly, the IOF was heavy-handed in their quashing of the demonstrations and killed six Palestinians in the process, injuring hundreds more. Land Day, as it came to be known, is commemorated yearly, with ever more reasons annually to protest continuing Zionist land-grabs.
The First Intifada (uprising) broke out throughout occupied Palestine in December 1987, lasting until 1993, with popular demonstrations, strikes, civil disobedience and other manifestations of unified non-violent resistance to the Zionist occupation. The IOF killed over 1,000 Palestinians during the years of the Intifada and employed a criminal bone-breaking campaign on Palestinian protesters and other civilians.
On September 28, 2000, when war criminal Ariel Sharon—accompanied by 1,000 troops and paramilitary police, and scores of Jewish colonists—entered the al-Haram al-Sharif complex, one of Islam’s holiest sites and in which Al Aqsa Mosque is housed, hundreds of Palestinians revolted, starting off the Second Intifada. Like the First Intifada, the collective uprising against the Zionist occupation spread throughout occupied Palestine. It lasted until 2005, with Palestinians subjected to more Zionist crimes and brutality, including massive IOF invasions into Palestinian towns and cities and the bulldozing of thousands of homes throughout occupied Palestine. Well over 5,500 Palestinians were killed in the Second Intifada. Yet, Palestinians’ uprising has not stopped as the Zionist occupation continues.
In August 2008, after planning and mobilizing for two years, the Free Gaza movement completed what Marwan Kayyali and others had been trying to do before they were assassinated: Free Gaza sailed two rickety fishing boats filled with international solidarity activists, journalists, and Palestinians from Cyprus to Gaza, Palestine. Four more successful missions carried Free Gaza activists, including Palestinians, to and from the Gaza Strip. On the next three attempts, Israeli gunboats rammed a Free Gaza boat three times, nearly sinking it, and forcibly boarded the other two Free Gaza boats, abducting and deporting all on board.
New initiatives sprang forth from Free Gaza’s example, including boats from Malaysia, Libya, Canada, Ireland, Turkey, and a boat of Jewish activists. All of these were prevented by the IOF from reaching Gaza, Palestine. In another brazen display of ruthlessness, Israeli commandos assassinated nine Turkish civilians participating in the Freedom Flotilla in May 2010. Air-dropped onto the Turkish Mavi Marmara, the Israeli commandos descended firing machine guns and proceeded to hunt down passengers, shooting many “point-blank assassination style,” as Kevin Neish, a Canadian participant, described.
The return movement inspired by Kayyali has not been limited to sea travel. Since early 2009, land convoys from Africa, Europe, and around the world have proceeded to Gaza via the Egyptian Rafah crossing, bringing supplies of humanitarian aid vitally needed in Gaza, but more importantly challenging the illegal Israeli-enforced complete closure of Gaza’s borders to people, goods and exports.
Palestinians, later supported by international activists, expanded the growing BDS (Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign of 2005, the Gaza Freedom March, the Global March to Jerusalem, and organized the Welcome to Palestine campaign which saw people from around the world fly to Tel Aviv with the intent of visiting Palestine. Zionist security prevented the vast majority from entering Palestine, going as far as to send “no-fly” lists to airports around the world.
Final Comments:
For the last 64 years, Zionists in Palestine have been killing Palestinians, destroying homes, uprooting ancient olive trees, burning, poisoning, and destroying farm land, stealing water, imprisoning Palestinian men and women, girls and boys, and breaking their bones. They have been strangling the 1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza, denying them rights to employment, agriculture, fishing, clean water, electricity, travel, education, and adequate medical care.
The massacres, from Deir Yassin to Gaza, are permanent witness to the Zionists’ crimes. However, the Palestinian spirits will never be broken and, with every new Palestinian infant born inside occupied Palestine or in the diaspora, the spirit of resistance is passed along to each new generation. Palestinian youths memorize the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Samih Al Qassem and many others as they memorize the names of every Palestinian town, hill and valley. They will return.
Enemy of light
The signs of joy and the tidings
Shouts of happiness and anthems
Are there at the port
And at the horizon
A sail is defying the wind and the deep seas
Overcoming all the challenges
It is the return of Ulysses
From the lost sees
It is the return of the sun
And the return of the ousted
And for their sake
I swear
I shall not compromise
And to the end
I shall fight!
–Samih_al-Qasim
*Ali Mallah is a member of the National Steering Committee of Canadian Peace Alliance, is on the coordinating committee of the Toronto Coalition Against the War and the Board of Directors of Alternatives Canada and the Centre for Social Justice. Ali serves on the International Central Committee of Global March to Jerusalem, and was deeply involved in the previous Gaza Freedom March Initiative, was a founding member of Canadian Boat to Gaza, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, and the Muslim Unity Group. He is a former Vice-President of the Canadian Arab Federation and is a CUPE activist.
**Eva Bartlett is a Canadian activist and freelance journalist who has spent collectively three years in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). In November 2008, Eva sailed with Free Gaza the Gaza Strip where until June 2010 she joined the ISM in accompanying fishermen on the sea and farmers in the border regions. During the 2008-2009 Israeli massacre of Gaza, Eva and other ISM members accompanied Palestinian medics in their ambulances, documenting the victims of Israel’s massacre, including Palestinian medics and rescuers. She writes for IPS news, the Dominion, and various independent media, as well as maintaining her blog, In Gaza.
see also:
Jerusalem Day
A strategy of liberation requires emancipation
The Right to Return, a Basic Right Still Denied
A Review of the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
More UN Resolutions on Israel, 195-1992:
Res 106: condemns Israel for Gaza raid
Res 111: condemns Israel for raid on Syria that killed fifty-six people.
Res 127: recommends Israel suspend its no-man’s zone’ in Jerusalem.
Res 162: urges Israel to comply with UN decisions.
Res 171: determines flagrant violations by Israel in its attack on Syria.
Res 228: censures Israel for its attack on Samu in the West Bank, then under Jordanian control.
Res 237: urges Israel to allow return of new 1967 Palestinian refugees.
Res 248: condemns Israel for its massive attack on Karameh in Jordan.
Res 250: calls on Israel to refrain from holding military parade in Jerusalem.
Res 251: deeply deplores Israeli military parade in Jerusalem in defiance of Resolution 250.
Res 252: declares invalid Israel’s acts to unify Jerusalem as Jewish capital.
Res 256: condemns Israeli raids on Jordan as flagrant violation.
Res 259: deplores Israel’s refusal to accept UN mission to probe occupation.
Res 262: condemns Israel for attack on Beirut airport.
Res 265: condemns Israel for air attacks for Salt in Jordan.
Res 267: censures Israel for administrative acts to change the status of Jerusalem.
Res 270: condemns Israel for air attacks on villages in southern Lebanon.
Res 271: condemns Israel’s failure to obey UN resolutions on Jerusalem.
Res 279: demands withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon.
Res 280: condemns Israeli’s attacks against Lebanon.
Res 285: demands immediate Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
Res 298: deplores Israel’s changing of the status of Jerusalem.
Res 313: demands that Israel stop attacks against Lebanon.
Res 316: condemns Israel for repeated attacks on Lebanon.
Res 317: deplores Israel’s refusal to release.
Res 332: condemns Israel’s repeated attacks against Lebanon.
Res 337: condemns Israel for violating Lebanon’s sovereignty.
Res 347: condemns Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
Res 425: calls on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon.
Res 427: calls on Israel to complete its withdrawal from Lebanon.
Res 444: deplores Israel’s lack of cooperation with UN peacekeeping forces.
Res 446: determines that Israeli settlements are a serious obstruction to peace and calls on Israel to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention
Res 450: calls on Israel to stop attacking Lebanon.
Res 452: calls on Israel to cease building settlements in occupied territories.
Res 465: deplores Israel’s settlements and asks all member states not to assist its settlements program.
Res 467: strongly deplores Israel’s military intervention in Lebanon.
Res 468: calls on Israel to rescind illegal expulsions of two Palestinian mayors and a judge and to facilitate their return.
Res 469: strongly deplores Israel’s failure to observe the council’s order not to deport Palestinians.
Res 471: expresses deep concern at Israel’s failure to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Res 476: reiterates that Israel’s claim to Jerusalem are null and void.
Res 478: censures (Israel) in the strongest terms for its claim to Jerusalem in its Basic Law.
Res 484: declares it imperative that Israel re-admit two deported Palestinian mayors.
Res 487: strongly condemns Israel for its attack on Iraq’s nuclear facility.
Res 497: decides that Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights is null and void and demands that Israel rescinds its decision forthwith.
Res 498: calls on Israel to withdraw from Lebanon.
Res 501: calls on Israel to stop attacks against Lebanon and withdraw its troops.
Res 509: demands that Israel withdraw its forces forthwith and unconditionally from Lebanon.
Res 515: demands that Israel lift its siege of Beirut and allow food supplies to be brought in.
Res 517: censures Israel for failing to obey UN resolutions and demands that Israel withdraw its forces from Lebanon.
Res 518: demands that Israel cooperate fully with UN forces in Lebanon.
Res 520: condemns Israel’s attack into West Beirut.
Res 573: condemns Israel vigorously for bombing Tunisia in attack on PLO headquarters.
Res 587: takes note of previous calls on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and urges all parties to withdraw.
Res 592: strongly deplores the killing of Palestinian students at Bir Zeit University by Israeli troops.
Res 605: strongly deplores Israel’s policies and practices denying the human rights of Palestinians.
Res 607: calls on Israel not to deport Palestinians and strongly requests it to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Res 608: deeply regrets that Israel has defied the United Nations and deported Palestinian civilians.
Res 636: deeply regrets Israeli deportation of Palestinian civilians.
Res 641: deplores Israel’s continuing deportation of Palestinians.
Res 672: condemns Israel for violence against Palestinians at the Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount.
Res 673: deplores Israel’s refusal to cooperate with the United Nations.
Res 681: deplores Israel’s resumption of the deportation of Palestinians.
Res 694: deplores Israel’s deportation of Palestinians and calls on it to ensure their safe and immediate return.
Res 726: strongly condemns Israel’s deportation of Palestinians.
Res 799: strongly condemns Israel’s deportation of 413 Palestinians and calls for their immediate return.
June 4, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Nakba, Palestine, Zionism |
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Are you wondering about the disconcerting contradictions in the nuclear news in recent weeks?
Following the release of a May 2012 report, newspapers around the world posted headlines announcing that the World Health Organization concludes that Fukushima radiation emissions pose minimal health risk. Based on an assessment of reported emissions of radioiodine and cesium up through September 2011, Japan’s nuclear meltdown poses no serious cancer risk, except for localized exposures around Fukushima prefecture, which may result in increased risk of thyroid cancer.
In the same week, Japanese press reported the alarming news that TEPCO’s assessments of total radioiodine releases were some 1.6 times greater than the Japanese Government’s assessment while, on the same day, the Japanese government issued a reassuring statement that “while gross releases of iodine-131 and cesium-137 are actually far greater than originally estimated, the public can rest assured, as releases to the sea have not resulted in contamination beyond the plant’s immediate area because the mixing power of ocean currents has dispersed the substances beyond the limits of detection in seawater samples”
Meanwhile, the US press reported findings from a study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrating that by August 2011, cesium-134 and cesium-137 from Fukushima was present in the tissue of Pacific blue fin tuna, as evidenced samples taken off the coast of San Diego, in Southern California. In the media storm that followed this report, government experts with the US Food and Drug Administration proclaimed no need for public panic, as radiation levels were detectable but simply too low to be hazardous and independent scientists explained why the presence, even at small levels, was so alarming and noted the need for additional monitoring.
As has been the norm in this most recent nuclear disaster, contradictory information abounds, with alarming news countered or contradicted by reassurances that muddy the water, yet achieve the goal of containing and controlling an impotent public.
We have been here before, in a world blanketed with nuclear fallout, where massive amounts of iodine, cesium, strontium and other radioactive isotopes moved through the marine and terrestrial food chain and the human body, in well-documented ways, with degenerative and at times deadly outcomes. Yet, for many reasons, while the environmental and biomedical trajectory of such exposures are well documented, the human experience and associated public health risks are largely suppressed, classified, or simply and persistently denied.
Sometimes clarity is best achieved by stepping back, taking pause, and considering the historical antecedents and experiences that have brought us to these chaotic times. A new documentary film by Adam Horowitz offers an opportunity to do just that.
Premiering June 2, at 6:30 pm at the Lincoln Center in New York City, Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1 is a poignant, provocative, and deeply troubling look at lingering and lasting effects of nuclear disaster and the human consequences of US government efforts to define, contain, and control public awareness and concern. Nuclear Savage recounts the experiences of the Marshallese nation in the years following World War II, as they played host to the US’s Pacific Proving Grounds and served as human subjects in the classified, abusive pseudoscience that characterized the US government medical response to civilian exposures from the 1954 Bravo Test, the largest and dirtiest hydrogen bomb detonated by the United States. Detonated in the populated nation of the Marshall Islands.
Here is the story: Following World War II, the Marshall Islands became part of the Trusteeship of the Pacific, and in 1946 after the detonation of two atomic bombs in the Bikini lagoon, the United States was given the authority to administer the islands as a Strategic Trusteeship. The terms of this agreement included the US obligation to “Protect the inhabitants against the loss of their lands and resources” and “Protect the health of the inhabitants of the Trust Territory.”
Between 1946 and 1958 the United States tested 66 nuclear weapons on or near Bikini and Enewetok atolls, atomizing entire islands and, according to records declassified in 1994, blanketing the entire Marshallese nation with measurable levels of radioactive fallout from 20 of these tests. To consider the gravity of this history: the total explosive yield of nuclear militarism in the Marshall Islands was 93 times that of all US atmospheric tests in Nevada, and more than 7,000 Hiroshima bombs. Hydrogen bomb tests were especially destructive, generating intense fallout containing an array of isotopes, including radioactive iodine, which concentrates in the thyroid and can cause both cancer and other medical conditions.
All told, by US estimates, some 6.3 BILLION curies of radioactive Iodine‐131 were released to the atmosphere as a result of the nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands: 42 times greater than the 150 million curies released as a result of the testing in Nevada, 150 times greater than the 40 million curies released as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. And, while comparison to the ongoing Fukushima meltdown is difficult as emissions continue, estimates to date have ranged from 2.4 to 24 million curies. Simply put, radioactive contamination in the Marshall Islands was, and is, immense.
Radioactive fallout from the 1954 Bravo Test not only blanketed a populated nation, but also severely harmed the 23 Japanese crew members of Daigo Fukuryu Maru (No. 5 Lucky Dragon) who were in Marshallese waters harvesting a school of tuna when fallout blanketed their vessel. The US provided antibiotics to treating doctors at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Japan. One of the crew members, Kuboyama Aikichi, died a few weeks later. In the Marshall Islands, residents of Rongelap and Rongerik Atolls who were evacuated in earlier weapons test but not informed nor moved before this largest of all detonations, experienced near fatal exposures.
News of the disastrous exposure of Japanese fishermen and Marshallese island residents fueled international outrage, prompting demands in the United Nations for a nuclear weapons test ban, a series of pacifying news releases from the US about the rapid return to health of exposed civilians.
What was not reported to an interested world public, is the news that the heavily exposed people of Rongelap, once evacuated, were immediately enrolled as human subjects in a top-secret study, Project 4.1, which documented the array of health outcomes from their acute exposures, but did not treat the pain or discomfort of radiation burns, nor utilize antibiotics to offset any potential infection.
Nor did the US make public the full array of findings from their extensive documentation of the character and extent of radioactive fallout during the 1954 and other nuclear weapons tests, which demonstrated the deposition, movement, and accumulation of radioisotopes in the marine and terrestrial environment of Rongelap and other northern atolls.
In 1957, the people of Rongelap were returned to their homelands with great fanfare, moving into newly built homes on islands still dangerously contaminated from prior nuclear weapons tests and clearly vulnerable to the fallout from the 33 bombs detonated in 1958. This repatriation of the Rongelap community was both planned and celebrated by scientists and officials at the US Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, who saw a significant opportunity to place a human population in a controlled setting to document how radiation moves through the food chain and human body. Annually, and then as the years progressed and degenerative health symptoms increased, biannually, the US medical teams visited by ship to examine, with x-ray, photos, blood, urine and tissue samples, the relative health of the community.
It is this story of human subject experimentation with unwitting subjects that forms the core of the Nuclear Savage film, illustrating both the abusive disregard and human consequences of experiments that violate US law, the Nuremburg Code, and Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which states that “no one shall be subject without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.”
Research conducted for the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal and recently submitted to a UN Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights adds more detail to narrative played out in Horowitz’s Nuclear Savage film.
The long term study of the human health effects of exposure to fallout and remaining nuclear waste in the Marshallese environment extended over four decades with a total of 72 research excursions to the Marshall Islands involving Marshallese citizens from Rongelap, Utrik, Likiep, Enewetak and Majuro Atolls. Some 539 men, women, and children were subject to studies documenting and monitoring the varied late effects of radiation. In addition to the purposeful exposure of humans to the toxic and radioactive waste from nuclear weapons, some Marshallese received radioisotope injections, underwent experimental surgery, and were subject to other procedures in experiments addressing scientific questions which, at times, had little or no relevance to medical treatment needs and in some instances involved procedures that were detrimental to their health. The United States Department of Energy acknowledged in 1994 administration of Cr-51 and tritiated water, and in at least three instances, Cr-51 was injected in three young women of child-bearing age. A 2004 review of declassified research proposals, exam reports, and published articles in support of a Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal proceeding found that a broader array of radioisotopes were used — radioactive iodine, iron, zinc, carbon-14 — for a wide array of experiments including research demonstrating the linkages between radiation exposure, metabolic disorders, and the onset of type-2 diabetes.
Arguably, while these experiences were abusive, a broader public health interest was being served, as the results of such science could potentially influence government policy and actions to protect humanity from the adverse health outcomes of nuclear fallout. And indeed, significant scientific knowledge was accumulated. However, the bulk of these findings demonstrated varied degenerative health effects resulting from chronic exposure to low-level radiation in the environment, findings which threatened political (nuclear proliferation) and economic (nuclear energy) agendas. Such findings were buried in the classified files.
For example, the presence and bioaccumulation of radioiron (Fe-55) in fallout from the 1958 detonations of nuclear bombs was documented in terrestrial and marine environments, including lagoon sediments, coral reefs, and reef fish, with alarming levels in goat fish liver, but this knowledge was not shared with the larger scientific world until 1972, nor shared with Marshallese until the declassification process supporting an Advisory Commission on Human Radiation investigation forced bilateral disclosure to the Marshall Islands Government in the 1990s. The movement of cesium through the soils, and bioaccumulation in coconut crabs, trees, and fruit – primary sources of food and liquid in the Marshallese diet — was also documented, with restrictions on the consumption of coconut crab periodically issued, without explanation. The movement through the food chain, bioaccumulation, and biological behavior of radioiodine in the human body was documented, and when thyroid nodules, cancers, and disease resulted, these conditions were studied and treated through various experimental means, though the relationship between nuclear weapons testing, fallout, contamination of the environment, and human subsistence in that environment was not explained until decades had passed.
In short, a wide array of other degenerative health outcomes were documented, including changes in red blood cell production and subsequent anemia, metabolic and related disorders; immune system vulnerabilities; muscoskeletal degeneration; cataracts; cancers and leukemia; miscarriages, congenital defects, and infertility…
However, when Marshallese residents suggested to US scientists that these and other unusual health problems were linked to the environmental contamination from nuclear fallout, their concerns were repeatedly and, because of the classified nature of the science, easily dismissed then. And, because time and the US power over the radiation health effects narrative is so immense and entrenched, they continue to be dismissed now.
The experiences of the Marshallese are particularly relevant to a world still coming to terms with the ulcerating disaster that is Fukushima, a point that is not lost to the members of United Nations Human Rights Council, which has been engaged in an effort over the past number of years to explore the varied means by which humans are unable to enjoy their right to a healthy environment, including the human rights abuses associated with movement and dumping of toxic and dangerous products and wastes.
Mr. Calin Georgescu (Romania), the UN Special Rapporteur for toxics and human rights, has a mandate that includes, among other directives, a country-specific mission to investigate these concerns in the Marshall Islands, especially the human rights consequences of environmental contamination pertains from nuclear weapons testing and other US military activities. In March 2012, Mr. Georgescu visited the RMI, interviewing displaced members of the Bikini, Enewetak, and Rongelap Atolls and other Marshallese citizens whose health and other rights have been severely impacted by living in a contaminated environment.
In April he traveled to Washington DC where he interviewed US government officials, met with independent experts such as myself, and discussed his investigation with the Marshall Islands Ambassador and the RMI UN representative. The Special Rapporteur is now preparing a report that will be presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva during their September 2012 meeting.
Why should a world community care about Cold War nuclear militarism in the Marshall Islands and its varied ulcerating consequences, especially given the many urgent and all to current crises we now face?
The US knowingly and willfully exposed a vulnerable population to toxic radioactive waste as a means to document the movement and degenerative health outcomes of radiation as it moves through the food chain and human body. This human subject experiment extended over the decades with profound consequences for individual subjects and the Marshallese nation as a whole. The Marshallese have become a nation whose experience as nuclear nomads, medical subjects, citizen advocates and innovators is shared by many citizens, communities and indigenous peoples around the world. Their experiences, consequential damages, and their struggles to restore cultural ways of life, quality of life, inter-generational health, and long term sustainability, are especially salient to a nation and to a world concerned with the lingering, persistent, and invasive dangers of a nuclear world.
With both the US and RMI participating in the UN Special Rapporteur’s investigation, there is an obligation for both governments to receive and respond to the report recommendations in a timely fashion, and in subsequent reviews, to demonstrate truly meaningful remediation and reparation for their nuclear legacies in the Marshall Islands.
Furthermore, given the timing of the Human Rights Council review – when the US Presidential election cycle is in full swing – international scrutiny of Marshallese nuclear legacy issues may provide further fuel for the fires now raging over such questions as the effects of chronic exposure to low-level radiation, radiation monitoring, permissibility levels, who pays for the long term public health costs of nuclear energy, and the absurd notion that a tactical strategic nuclear military is a sustainable and viable option.
And, finally, given the historical role of the United Nations in designating the Marshall Islands as a strategic trust, there is a moral and legal obligation for the United Nations community to assist in the remediation, restoration and reparation due to the environment, health, and dignity of the Marshallese nation. International attention to this history and experience is long overdue, and sadly and sorely relevant to a post-Fukushima world.
BARBARA ROSE JOHNSTON is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Center for Political Ecology. She is the co-author of The Consequential Dangers of Nuclear War: the Rongelap Report. Her most recent book, Water, Cultural Diversity and Global Environmental Change: Emerging Trends, Sustainable Futures? was copublished by UNESCO/Springer in 2012. She is currently assisting the Special Rapporteur’s efforts to document the human rights consequences of nuclear militarism in the Marshall Islands, and supporting advocacy efforts to bring Marshallese citizens to Geneva so their own voices can be heard. Contact her at: bjohnston@igc.org.
- Fukushima Roulette (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- The Dangerous Myths of Fukushima (alethonews.wordpress.com)
June 3, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Chernobyl disaster, Fukushima, Fukushima Prefecture, Iodine-131, Japan, Marshall Islands, United States, World Health Organization |
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The Palestinians must not ‘negotiate’
Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that Israel deliberately undermines peace and is single-mindedly pursuing the Palestinians’ socio-political extinction and national erasure, liberal supporters of Israel, who may acknowledge that Zionism’s historical and legal claims to Palestine do not hold up, insist on the “existential threat” rationale—the murderous historical persecution of Jews and its potential recurrence. This to them encapsulates Zionism’s and Israel’s justification.
This argument constitutes a variation of what one might call “saving a drowning man” analogy. That is, the ethical justification that European Jews, drowning in raging water (Nazi genocide), are not acting unethically in grasping to and taking possession of the Palestinian house unaffected by the currents. Force is ethically justified, an existential necessity, even if the goal of that force, as it was with Zionism, is not sharing the house, but replacing its occupants for the “good” of a moral imperative against which Palestinian injustice pales. To object that the Palestinians are not morally obligated to give away their house or even parts of it, much less die (drown), leave, and suffer to save others, more so because they are an innocent party, does not morally deter the existential threat argument.
I can understand the emotion, but the empirical and historical evidence and logic for all such contentions whose purpose is to support Zionism’s core argument are not borne out. For a number of reasons, which I will not detail here, the survival of the Jewish people in the mid-20th century hardly depended on or required a sovereign “Jewish state” in others’ land. To argue that Israel was inevitable by 1948 in light of the Holocaust does not constitute a moral justification for its creation. Actually, the supreme guarantor against anti-Semitism and persecution is living in liberal democratic, pluralist societies, which the West constructed. It certainly does not require Zionism’s vicious brutalization of the Palestinians.
One can also understand Israeli fear and trauma as cause for their irrationality. While this explanation—and the psychological need to neatly separate between a good pre-1967 Israel and an Israel corrupted by occupation—reassures well-meaning Israeli and American Jews, the nagging reality is of a proto-state Zionism and post-1948 Israel clearly aware of its military superiority and driven to colonize all of historic Palestine. It’s not clear at all that Zionism is compatible with a citizenship-based liberal democracy.
Israel’s behavior, like that of Washington’s, is neither accidental nor reluctant. Palestinian oppression and disappearance is Zionism’s precondition for its existence. Their displacement, dispossession, and the theft of their land—even their culture—continue remorselessly unabated. This, colonization, is a century’s long process, the remainder of historic Palestine, the occupied territories, cut and swallowed in whole swaths, given impetus since the early 1990s under cover of Oslo, Camp David, and the Quartet’s fictitious two-state “roadmap.” True sovereignty in the 1967 frontiers, coexistence, governance sharing of Jerusalem, refugee return will not be. Neither one state nor two, neither bi-national nor unitary secular democratic; instead, deliberate strangulation. The Zionists by ideological design have made living together in any form impossible.
The Palestinians’ current situation is in shambles. Their spatial fragmentation by Israel hardly leaves room (literally) for rebellions or Intifadas, not to mention the nationally exhausted West Bank Palestinians seem to want only to live their mundane lives, while those in refugee camps in surrounding states seem lost, leaderless, forgotten, isolated and unwanted, without national compass. Yet their self-appointed leaders, at least those in the occupied territories, continue to pretend they’re engaged in something worthwhile, even while Israel takes and takes and atomizes and walls, eventually annexing between 60 and 70 percent of the West Bank, leaving the Palestinians their few cities and towns in which to live and govern.
Jeff Halper, reminding us that Israel is in the process of annexing “Area C,” some 60 percent of the West Bank, dubs the Palestinians’ current situation as “warehousing,” a condition beyond occupation, beyond apartheid.
“…we’re finished. Israel is now from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, the Palestinians have been confined in areas A and B or in small enclaves in East Jerusalem, and that’s it. …
“Warehousing is permanent. Apartheid recognizes that there is another side. With warehousing it’s like prison. There is no other side. There is us, and then there are these people that we control, they have no rights, they have no identity, they’re inmates. It’s not political, it’s permanent, static. Apartheid you can resist. The whole brilliance of warehousing is that you can’t resist because you’re a prisoner.”
Anthropologist and lawyer, Darryl Li, looking at Gaza, offers a more illuminating and contextualized conceptualization. He argues that Israel’s historic strategy of “managing” the Palestinians evolved from Bantustan to internment camp to animal pen (“whose denizens cannot be domesticated and so must be quarantined”), under an overarching policy of what he terms “controlled abandonment.” Writing in 2008, he says:
“Since its beginnings over a century ago, the Zionist project of creating a state for the Jewish people in the eastern Mediterranean has faced an intractable challenge: how to deal with indigenous non-Jews—who today comprise half of the population living under Israeli rule—when practical realities dictate that they cannot be removed and ideology demands that they must not be granted political equality. From these starting points, the general contours of Israeli policy from left to right over the generations have been clear: First, maximize the number of Arabs on the minimal amount of land, and second, maximize control over the Arabs while minimizing any apparent responsibility for them.
“As Israel has experimented with various models for controlling Gaza over the decades, the fundamental refusal of political equality that undergirds them all has taken on different names, both to justify itself and to provide a logic for moderating its own excesses. During the bantustan period, inequality was called coexistence; during the Oslo period, separation; and during disengagement [from Gaza in 2005], it is reframed as avoiding “humanitarian crises,” or survival. These slogans were not outright lies, but they disregarded the unwelcome truth that coexistence is not freedom, separation is not independence and survival is not living.
“Disengagement, however, is not merely the latest stage in a historical process; it is also the lowest rung in a territorially segregated hierarchy of subjugation that encompasses Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and within the Green Line. Half of the people between the Mediterranean and the Jordan live under a state that excludes them from the community of political subjects, denies them true equality and thus discriminates against them in varying domains of rights. Israel has impressively managed to keep this half of the population divided against itself—as well as against foreign workers and non-Ashkenazi Jews—through careful distribution of differential privileges and punishments and may continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Of course there is always the possibility of occasional, dramatic acts of resistance…But…the inexorable governing logic of controlled abandonment seems likely to remain intact.”
There is another, lower rung to “controlled abandonment,” and that is genocide, which is happening on many levels anyway. The Israeli state has no plan, no vision of coexistence, certainly no intention of recognizing Palestine’s politico-moral equality or making peace other than to manage a population that it desperately wishes to make vanish. Israel’s apparent brilliance in implementing its will and getting its way is not about brilliance at all—it’s really self-destructive and stupid—but about the sheer, conscience-devoid application of violence against defenseless people, in all its forms, supported by unconditional imperial American power and disgusting self-righteous Western hypocrisy.
Mindful of the differences, the American Indian encounter with European settler colonists essentially offers the closest historical comparison to what is happening to the dispersed Palestinians, including the denuding of their national cohesion and identity.
Despite the persistently lamentable trajectory of their history, the abject failure, autocracy, corruption, rapacity, and incompetence of their leadership and the Arab regimes, the hopeless socio-cultural divisions of Arab societies, including the factionalized Palestinians, the unremitting hostility of Washington, the Israeli state’s prime directive of sustaining mayhem, division, and demoralization among them, the Palestinians, if nothing else, must merely be. Their reality, their existence in their homeland, forever an uncomfortable, unnerving reminder to their ethnic cleansers of their fact; they will not recede or vanish or be erased from history.
In historic Palestine and in exile, in the Arab world and farther afield, the Palestinians are in many ways a unique people. They never enjoyed an independent state or a constituted legitimate government, have no such reference, many of their educated segments perhaps even incapable of great love of country, construed in its menacing nationalist, hidebound, insular sense, for their condition is precisely that of the rootless, world wise, and transnational.
These powerless and forsaken people must insist on telling and retelling their story, despite being pushed aside, their authentic history denied and suppressed, by the Israeli-Zionist historical narrative, for that is the thin thread holding together their existence and identity. Jews understand this well.
At the same time, they must always reject violence and persist in engaging the Israeli opposition: the dissidents, humanist thinkers, leftists, human rights activists. The Palestinians must not “negotiate,” for there is nothing for which to do so. Their role is that of reminders to Zionist Israelis of their own humanity, despite the latter’s fear, hatred, and greed. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian people will disappear, the resolution of whose claims can only be based on democratic citizenship and human rights, on recognition of sins and suffering.
Zionism, unlike the Palestinians, of course is nowhere near this moral space, the eventual cause of its undoing. Nothing is finished, as nothing is permanent.
– Issa Khalaf has a Ph.D. in political science and Middle East Studies from Oxford University.
June 3, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Al-Araqib village in the Naqab (© Photo: Rich Wiles/BADIL, 2011)
Father: This land was Arab land before you were born. The fields and villages were theirs. But you do not see many of them now. There are only flourishing Jewish colonies where they used to be… because a great miracle happened to us…
Daughter: How can one take land which belongs to someone else, cultivating that land and living off it?
Father: There is nothing difficult about that. All you need is force. Once you have power you can.
Daughter: But is there no law? Are there no courts in Israel?
Father: Of course there are. But they only held up matters very briefly. The Arabs did go to our courts and asked for their land back from those who stole it. And the judges decided that yes, the Arabs are the legal owners of the fields they have tilled for generations.
Daughter: Well then, if that is the decision of the judges… we are a law-abiding nation.
Father: No, my dear, it is not quite like that. If the law decides against the thief, and the thief is very powerful, then he makes another law supporting his view.
–The father was Maariv founder and first editor, Dr. Israel Carlebach. This exchange was published in Ma’ariv, 25th December 1953.
Since December 1947, the Zionist movement has carried out the largest, planned and comprehensive ethnic cleansing operation in modern history: the ongoing Nakba. Between that month and April of 1949, 675 Palestinian towns and villages were totally depopulated. Their inhabitants are still homeless and are refugees to this day. Israel was declared on 78 percent of the Mandate territory of Palestine, 93 percent of which is Palestinian-owned land.2 In the southern half of Mandate Palestine, the Naqab (Negev), Jewish possession did not exceed 60,000 dunams; amounting to less than 0.5 percent of the 12,577,000 dunams of the Beer Sheba district. This negligible Jewish presence was augmented by force through the military occupation of the district in 1948 (the town of Beer Sheba was occupied on October 21, 1948), massacres and forced displacement of the indigenous population leading to the almost complete ethnic cleansing of the district. The majority of the more than 100,000 native Palestinians of the district were expelled to the Gaza Strip, Al Khalil (Hebron) district, Jordan, and the Sinai.
After declaring its independence, Israel applied martial law to those Palestinians who had not been displaced beyond the borders of the new state. In the Beer Sheba district, it took the drastic measure of rounding up all those Palestinians who remained, 12 percent of the original population of the district, and concentrated them in a reserve to the north and north east of the town of Beer Sheba. This area, known as the siyag (“fenced off area”), makes up 7 percent of the district. In 1952, Israel confiscated a further 1,225,000 dunams of the land owned by the internally displaced southern Palestinians who had become its citizens; reclassifying them as Present Absentees. Then in 1965, it passed the Planning and Construction Law which rendered around forty of the Palestinian villages in the siyag (as well as a further dozen villages in the Galilee) unrecognized, meaning they were not to receive any government services (such as water, electricity, education, roads, waste collection and healthcare) and that all construction in these areas became illegal.
Beginning in 1968, Israel planned seven townships—the so-called “recognized villages” of Rahat, Tel Sheva, Kessifa, Ar’ara, Shegib, Hura, Laqiya—on a total land area of 57,778 dunams. The combined purpose and effect of the recognized and unrecognized communities is to confiscate what remains of Palestinian land in the Naqab, and concentrate the Palestinian population in residential dormitories to provide cheap labor for Jewish industries while detaching them from their land and depriving them of their pastoral and agricultural livelihoods. By 2002, about 50 percent of the 130,000 Palestinians in the district had been concentrated in the planned townships, while the other half had managed to resist displacement and remain in the squalid conditions of the unrecognized villages.
Various aspects of displacement and land confiscation in the Naqab—including such practices as the terrorism perpetrated by the “Green Patrols;” ongoing house, school and clinic demolitions; the environmental and health impact of industrial zones and the dumping of toxic wastes; and the aerial spraying of poisonous pesticides on Palestinian crops and communities—have been discussed elsewhere.3 What I examine in what follows is one particular aspect of the Naqab’s ongoing Nakba: Israel’s use of the Ottoman “mewat” classification of land as legal justification for the ongoing confiscation of Palestinian land in the Naqab.
The Mewat Pretext
Israel considers itself a successor state. If this assumption refers to its military conquest outside the limits of the Partition Plan, then the inadmissibility of conquest and the Fourth Geneva Convention safeguard the sanctity of the property of the subjugated people. International law stipulates that, upon extending a new sovereignty on a territory, people and land go together, both stay protected. Expelling people and confiscating their land is not permissible. On the other hand, if this assumption refers to the UN Partition Plan resolution No. 181, which was the basis of Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, this resolution clearly stipulates that Arabs in the Jewish-majority state (and vice versa) shall enjoy full civil and political rights, including ownership, without discrimination on any grounds and of course without expulsion.
As such, Israeli authorities had to find ways of inventing legal justifications for the confiscation of Palestinian lands. In the Naqab, the main justification has been that Palestinians did not have rights to their land under the regime’s that preceded Israel, and the title to these lands should thus revert to the state. The Head of the Land Title Settlement Unit in the Southern District, Havatzeler Yahel, gave a summary of the standard Israeli position in this regard when he boldly stated that “neither the Ottoman Empire nor the British Mandate recognized the ownership of nomadic Bedouin over land in the Negev… Israeli Law… is based on earlier Ottoman and British Legislation.”4 The Goldberg Report follows the same contention, based as it is on the claims that the Ottomans never recognized the Bedouin ownership in Beer Sheba and that the Palestinian population of the Naqab are “nomads.”5 In examining the legal arguments surrounding these claims, we find that the main Israeli justification is that the lands of the Naqab were classified as mewat lands under Ottoman law, and that this classification continued under the British Mandate.
According to Ottoman Law, mewat land is that which is dead, uncultivated, or vacant. Article 103 of the 1858 Ottoman Land Code specifies mewat land as (1) vacant (2) grazing land not possessed by anybody (3) not assigned ab antiquo to the use of inhabitants and (4) land where no human voice can be heard from the edge of habitation, a distance estimated to be 1.5 miles (2.85 km). The latter is a distance travelled on a horse in about 40 minutes, in wilderness where no human being lives ordinarily. The text of Article 103 reads as follows:
The empty (Khali) places, such as rocky or stony areas, or lands where cultivable soil is scarce or grazing land not held by anyone with tapu or not assigned ab antiquo to the use of towns and villages or far from towns and villages such that a clear loud cry would not be heard from the edge of cultivation, is mewat land. Any one in need of a tract from this land can, free of charge, break up or dig a place with permission and make it a field on condition that its raqaba belongs to Beit el Mal. All the applicable legal rules of other agricultural areas will then apply to this land fully. But if the person who had permission to dig [and cultivate] a place did not do so for 3 years without a good reason, the place is given to someone else. If someone digs one of these lands without permission and made it into a field, he will be charged bedl mithl (equivalent price) and the land will be allocated to him and he will be granted title deed (tapu).6
It is clear that the objective of the Ottoman law was to encourage cultivation for the good of the community and not to restrict it. In 1969, the Israeli Knesset passed a law stating that “all mewat land is state land,” and that long-time possession does not confer ownership rights.7 By claiming that Naqab lands were classified as mewat and then passing legislation transferring mewat lands to state control, Israel seemingly got around the international legal protection of Palestinians and their properties in the Naqab. The main problem, as I show in the next section, is that at no point in the centuries of Ottoman rule, or the decades of British occupation, were the lands of the Naqab ever classified as mewat. On the contrary, Palestinians’ ownership of these lands was recognized in both the Ottoman and Mandate periods.
Ottoman Period
Ownership of land in Islam rests ultimately with the umma (Islamic nation), as God’s trustee. The Ottomans adopted and developed the same Islamic principle into a refined set of state laws. In the words of Halil Inalcik, an authority on Ottoman history, “the underlying argument always was that such lands belonged to God, or to the imam as His trustee, who represented the Islamic community, it was his duty to see that such lands were administered in the way that would best serve the interests of the community and Islamic state.”8 The principle was applied in a two-tier system: (1) rakaba, ownership rested with the Caliph, imam, Sultan or state, (2) tasarruf, manfa’a, usufruct. While the first was always held by the state, the second was granted to a member(s) of the community, ra’iya, in a manner close to independent ownership in that the land in question may be inherited. Over 90 percent of arable land in the Ottoman empire, was considered state land (miri). The rest had been removed from this domain by a special dispensation from the Sultan. The underlying aim was to put all land for the use of the community as cultivators of the land and a source of income tax for the general benefit of the umma. Accordingly, foreigners were not allowed to own land. Late in the nineteenth century, under intense European pressure, the Ottoman laws restricting the sale of land to non-Muslims were relaxed. But these sales were insignificant.
For over fourteen centuries, the land was cultivated under Islamic rules, and Beer Sheba land was no exception. It was cultivated where possible according to rainfall and taxes were paid. There was no question that such land was not mewat. We have one of the earliest Ottoman documents to prove this. The Dafteri Mufassel of 1596, one of the earliest Ottoman Tax Registers, gives information on sites in the Beer Sheba Sub-District which grew wheat, barley and summer crops (e.g. maize, melon) and paid taxes accordingly. Remarkably, the names of these sites remained the same until the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
At no time, whether before the promulgation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 or after, did the Turks challenge the land ownership of Palestinians in Beer Sheba. Three hundred years after the Dafteri Mufassel, at about the end of the nineteenth century, we have further confirmation that the Turkish authorities recognized the land ownership in Beer Sheba. On May 4, 1891, upon orders from the Ministry of Interior in Istanbul, the Gaza District Council (which the British split into two sub-districts: Gaza and Beer Sheba for the same region: Bilad Gazzeh) decided to “register these lands in the Gaza District of Jerusalem Mutassarefiyat and cultivated by ‘urban (tribes) at the Land Registry (tapu) since absence of this registration may cause conflict and inter-fighting.”9
The council sent a five-member committee of notables together with official surveyors “to delimit and record the lands of each tribe. The officials sent by the Mutassarefiyat delineated 5 million dunams out of lands exceeding 10 million dunams [of the District] among its ancient holders with the approval of the Special Military Committee. Then the approval of the sheikhs was obtained.” The Turkish document goes on to state that three survey officers were needed to plot demarcation points on a “proper basis.”10
The boundaries of individual ownership of the land in most of Palestine, including Beer Sheba, was known and acknowledged by Custom Law (al-‘urf wa al-‘ada). In other words, it is an observed legal practice and the relevant actors consider it to be law. On this basis tracts of land were bought, sold, inherited and taxes paid for. The town site of Beer Sheba itself was “purchased”, not confiscated, from al-Mohamadiyeen, Azazema, in 1900. If the land was mewat or state land, this would not be needed. A proof of this may be found in two documents registered at the Shari’a Court in Jerusalem, in the period 1906-1910. The first of these two documents deals with appointing a power of attorney to carry out the transaction of the ownership of a tract of land in Abu Sdeir “whose borders are known, requiring no description or delimitation as well-known to all,”11 and the second in Khirbet Muleih “judged by District Council to be the property of Sheikh Ismail.”12 These locations are deep into Beer Sheba district and roughly correspond to sites in the 1596 Tax Register.
Thus it may be concluded that during the Ottoman period (1517 – 1917), land ownership in Beer Sheba was recognized, its boundaries were defined through customary law; land was purchased and sold by individual owners; and citizens paid taxes. There is no evidence whatsoever that land in the Beer Sheba district was at any point classified as mewat.
The Period of the British Mandate
Arab scholars have written about Palestinian clans since the tenth century, and particularly through the description of Dar al Haj al-Masri and al-Shami. European accounts of Naqab lands and tribes began with the Napoleon Description de l’Egypte, and continued through the writings of European missionaries, travelers and spies such as W. M. Thompson, Edward Hull, Victor Guérin, Alois Musil, Max von Oppenheim, T.E. Lawrence, C. Leonard Woolley and Britain’s Royal Geographic Society.13 Each of these records, taken on its own, would be sufficient to dispel the Zionist mythologies that have been used to justify the confiscation of Beer Sheba land on the pretext that this land had no owners and that it was barren. Taken together, the Zionist myth of a “land without a people” appears for what it is: a pure forgery and outright mendacity.
Beer Sheba Sub-District, as delineated by the Mandate government of Palestine, is the largest district of Palestine, at 12,577,000 dunams, or 62 percent of Israel today. Apart from grazing, its southern half is rich in minerals and archeological sites dating back to the fourth century A.D, while the northern half is fertile and was the home of 95 percent of the district’s population who used to live and cultivate their land, with only 5 percent living on grazing. The total population of Beer Sheba district was about 100,000 in 1948. Israeli population estimates are considerably lower because they erroneously use the 1931 census figures, which do not correct for underestimation of females or absence of figures for some tribes.
The British Mandate government listed 77 official clans (ashiras) grouped into seven major tribes, in addition to Beer Sheba town and about a dozen settlements around police stations. As illustrated earlier, the land ownership has always been held by Custom Law, on which basis individual plots were sold, inherited, mortgaged, rented, divided or taxes paid. This customary ownership of land was recognized by the British government in the person of Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, and Herbert Samuel, the first High Commissioner of Palestine.14 In March 1921, Churchill met with leading Beer Sheba sheikhs, Sheikh Hussein Abu Sitta and Sheikh Freih Abu Middain, and assured them that their land ownership and Custom Law are respected.15 Indeed, Article 45 of the Palestine Order in Council confirmed that legal jurisdiction in Beer Sheba district would be governed by tribal custom. The government waived the Land Registry fees to facilitate the acquisition of title deeds, but the clans did not take up the offer as they saw no need for confirming land ownership on paper. Their response was “with this (pointing to their swords), we register”, meaning they could defend their land against aggressors.
During the British military administration (1917-1920), the Zionists took steps for the eventual takeover of territory in Palestine. Chaim Weizmann headed the newly formed Zionist Commission for Palestine and appointed Herbert Samuel, the Jewish future High Commissioner for Palestine, as the head of its Advisory Committee.16 Weizmann urged the British to close Land Registry books to prevent rise in land prices and called for the formation of a Land Commission to examine land status in Palestine. The most urgent task was to possess as much land as possible, particularly ‘state land, waste land’, ‘abandoned’ and uncultivated land, whose definition was left to interpretation.17 When Samuel took his post as High Commissioner of Palestine under the Mandate, his bias was clearly in favor of Zionist interests. During his tenure (1920-1925) he issued dozens of ordinances changing or modifying land laws in order to enable Zionist acquisition of land. As a prelude he engineered the formation of the Land Commission to evaluate available land for Jewish settlement.
Contrary to general practice in which country surveys begin with topographical maps, there was great rush to produce cadastral maps. A survey department was hastily established using the services of highly experienced British colonial officials, particularly from Egypt. The aim, as Weizmann demanded, was to undertake “legal examination of the validity of all land title deeds in Palestine.”18 Thus, the extent and ownership of private land, if proven beyond doubt, would be determined. All else would be subject to interpretation as ‘state or waste land’, open for Jewish settlement.
The Zionist pressure on the British Mandate to start immediately land survey pertaining to ownership of land, rather than the basic topographical mapping, caused confusion and delayed the surveying project for almost eight years. The necessary ordinance (“the Land Settlement Ordinance”) was finally promulgated in 1928 using the Australian Torrens system. The British started applying this system, and by the end of 1946, the initial triangulation was completed for Palestine from Khalasa in the south to el Khalisa in the north. The emphasis was always on the coastal plain and water resources and, in particular, on areas with Jewish land ownership or interest.
The British, however, left Palestine in a hurry in May 1948 leaving the armed Zionists to deal with the defenseless Palestinians. As such, the map of completed Land Settlement (of title), up to 1947, which covered only 20% of Palestine (5,243,042 dunams as of 30 April 1947) corresponds very closely to the area in Palestine proposed to be the northern part of a Jewish state under the Partition Plan of 1947. In this area lies the Jewish-held land during the Mandate, which was about 5% of Palestine. During the Mandate, the British saw no urgent need to complete Land Settlement in the Galilee, West Bank and Naqab because it was predominantly Arab. After 1948, Israel used this accidental fact to show that no title existed for Arab owners in these areas. Thus, Israeli legislation created new criteria for settlement of title to deny Arab ownership and confiscate land, and were particularly applied to Palestinian properties in Beer Sheba.
When Britain decided to abandon its obligations in Palestine after WWII, without completing the Land Settlement, the British Mandate, by way of compensation, undertook an aerial survey in 1945-1946. Over 5000 aerial photos were taken mostly at a scale of 1:15,000, yet again with emphasis on the coastal areas with Jewish concentration, and less emphasis on the West Bank, Jordan River and Beer Sheba district. The populated northern half of Beer Sheba district was covered by this aerial survey. The photographs show intensive and close cultivation everywhere, which belies the Israeli myth that it was barren. This is further proof that cultivation and land ownership have been maintained and recognized, at least since 1596.
Further proof can be found in British policies and practices regarding mewat land under the Mandate. Herbert Samuel and his legal secretary Norman Bentwich, known for their Zionist sympathies, reformulated Art 103 of the Ottoman Land Code that was intended to revive mewat land (as described above), to do the opposite by punishing those carrying out such cultivation. Instead of recognizing the title (tapu) of a person who cultivated mewat and paid its value (Bedl Misl) to the state, Bentwich’s Mewat Land Ordinance of 1921 provides that a person who breaks up mewat without authorization has no legal right to title over the land and is also committing a wrongful act and would be treated as a trespasser. In spite of this Ordinance, a more lenient view was later taken by the British administration, and the practice during the Mandate was to make tapu grants on payment of Bedl Misl to persons who could show cultivation and revival of mewat lands even if they had no authorization to do so.19 The practice of not enforcing this Ordinance, was confirmed by the last official report by the Government of Palestine, prepared for the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry in 1947, which stated that “it is frequently difficult to assume that there was in the past no grant, and consequently it is not safe to assume that all the empty lands south of Beersheba or east of Hebron, for instance, are mewat… [indeed] it is possible that there may be private claims to over 2000 square kilometers which are cultivated from time to time. The remainder may be considered to be either mewat or empty miri.20
The British retracted some of their Zionist policies and instituted in 1940 a law restricting the alienation of Arab land to Jews. Zionist attempts to avoid the application of the 1940 Transfer Regulations by fraud or deceit had been rebuffed by the Mandate authorities. For example, much of land claimed by Zionists in Beer Sheba was not legally registered. The fortnightly reports of the Beer Sheba District Commissioners to the High Commissioner in Jerusalem, forwarded to London, are replete with examples of such fraud and illegal land dealings, particularly in the 1940s. A case in point is this excerpt from the Gaza Fortnightly Report No. 161, of 1-15 October 1945 from District Commissioner (Gaza) to Chief Secretary, Jerusalem:
para 209: Protests have been raised at attempted ploughing by Jews of land in Asluj to which they have an extremely doubtful title. I am hearing a case under the Land Dispute (Possession) Ordinance, pending a decision by the Land Court. There are large areas in Beer Sheba sub-district which the Jews claim to have bought before the date of the Land Transfer Regulations but which are not registered in the Land Registry.21
In order not to be exposed, the Jews submitted to the following court session an undertaking to the District Commissioner not to plough the land in question. Otherwise the Court would have clearly ruled against them. The land was never registered in the Land Registry. Yet it appeared as ‘Jewish’ in maps prepared by the Jewish National Fund’s Yosef Weitz, and settler colonies were built on it after 1948.
The British Mandate never considered lands in Beer Sheba district as State Land or State Domain. Indeed, maps showing State Land (Domain) in Palestine in 1947, just before the end of the Mandate clearly do not include the land of Beer Sheba. To conclude, the British did not even enforce their own 1921 mewat ordinance created by Herbert Samuel. More importantly, like the Ottoman authorities before them, the British Mandate authorities recognized Palestinians’ individual and customary ownership in Beer Sheba. They did not consider this land to be mewat or State land.
The Absurdity of the Mewat Pretext
In two excellent papers, Ronen Shamir and Sandy Kedar have analyzed the anomalies of the Israeli claim that Beer Sheba land is mewat.22 They have summarized the Israeli courts’ arguments for a mewat classification of Beer Sheba lands as follows:
1. The voice criterion is not acceptable. What was needed is a “modern” or “objective” criterion.
2. The distance to mewat land should be greater than 1.5 miles (2.5 km). The distance is the criterion.
3. The distance is to be measured from a town or village.
4. Cultivated (miri) tract of land is not an acceptable point of measurement, as a town or village would be.
5. Similarly, a movable abode such as tents is not an acceptable reference, even if this cluster of tents includes a school or cemetery.
6. Also unacceptable is an inhabited area with amenities, houses and some cultivation around a government centre such as police or railway station.
7. Also unacceptable are measurements from an isolated house at the edge of a village.
8. An Arab tribe abode should prove existence before 1858, otherwise all cultivated land after 1858 will be classified mewat (the case of Arab Suead).
9. To prove that an area is not mewat, cultivation must cover at least 50% of the land.
10. Tax records are not proof of ownership.
11. RAF aerial photography (1945) is acceptable if it shows more than 50% cultivation, as certified by the government expert, provided that the holder possessed and cultivated the land for 20 years. That is, if land was cultivated in 1945 as shown on aerial photos, it should be held and cultivated till 1965. (All Palestinian lands were confiscated according to Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) law, 1953. This makes this condition impossible to fulfill.)
12. The onus of proof of ownership lies with the holder – that is, he has no ownership rights unless he proves the opposite. His long history before the arrival of the Jewish immigrants does not count.
In short, the Israeli judiciary has made it absolutely impossible for Palestinians to argue that their land is not mewat land, thereby “legalizing” the state confiscation of these lands. Of course, Israeli law is the law of the conqueror, a tool to deprive the vanquished of their rights. Thus, mirroring the conversation between father and daughter quoted at the beginning of this essay, not only does the Israeli legal system offer no redress for Palestinians, it has been one of the primary means through which Zionist injustices have been committed.
The failure of the Zionist cultivation policies
The often-touted slogan, stated in Israel’s declaration of independence, that Israel made the desert bloom, has met with abject failure. With very limited means and capital, depending on rain only, Palestinians before 1948 were able to cultivate anywhere between 2 to 5 million dunams. Israelis, with their massive capital wealth, have only been able to irrigate around 880,000 dunams. Their agricultural produce hardly competes with the produce of the limited agricultural land in Gaza with its salty water.
Another indicator of this failure was the dismal performance of the so-called “development towns.” Jews from Arab countries, who were brought in on the assumption that they were used to hot arid climate, failed to flourish in the Naqab. The Ashkenazi Kibbutzim have fared no better. There are no new recruits, their population is aged, the remnants of the 1948 conquest. Although Jewish settlements of the Beer Sheba district consume about half of the irrigation water, the value of their produce is negligible.
Jewish immigrants have tended to congregate near urban centers. Only 73,000 of the Jewish Israelis in the Beer Sheba district have moved in to the rural Kibbutzim and Moshavim in the vast area of 12,000 sq. km. That is 10 percent of Palestinian population of Beer Sheba had they not been ethnically cleansed in 1948. The remaining 800,000 Jewish Israelis in the district live in three cities and a number of dysfunctional “development towns.” Of those, over 200,000 are recent Russian immigrants and twice as many are Arab Jews lower down on the socio-economic ladder.
On the other side of this, the Palestinians from Beer Sheba number about three quarters of a million. About 15 percent of them have managed to remain in Israel and the rest are refugees. Most of these refugees are in the occupied and blockaded Gaza Strip, crammed at a density of 5000 persons/sq. km while those who dispossessed them roam their land at a density of 6 Jewish Israelis/sq. km. Those Palestinians who managed to remain have fared little better, they are denied the right to their property, their houses are continually demolished, their crops destroyed, and their villages remain unrecognized. Israeli practices have led to the confiscation of most of their lands, leaving them in very poor economic, social and educational conditions. For example, the largest Palestinian town in Beer Sheba, Rahat, is the poorest in Israel. In terms of education, the percentage of those students who complete secondary education is 10 percent, compared to 47 percent for Jewish students and, significantly, 44 percent for Palestinian refugees students. In other words, Palestinian refugees facing severe economic and political hardships, achieve levels of education comparable to Jewish students, while Palestinian citizens of ‘democratic Israel’ fare far worse.
Postscript
I have shown above that the main legal pretext for Israel’s continuing confiscation of Palestinian land in the Naqab, and the displacement of those Palestinians who have remained upon it, is based on a series of fictions and lies. This legal pretext is nothing more than a flimsy veil for an outright colonial policy of land theft. A reminder of how this policy has continued came on Sunday March 18, 2012. On that day, a Beer Sheba court rejected the case of the Uqbi family for the ownership of their land in the Naqab village of Araqib on which the family has lived for hundreds of years. The Israeli court accepted the testimony of an Israeli government “expert;” a professor of Polish ancestry who does not know Arabic and who testified, contrary to research that he himself had published earlier, that the Palestinians of Araqib were merely shepherds who came from Saudi Arabia with their sheep and then left. By claiming that Palestine is a land without people and that Palestinians do not exist, and by actually expelling Palestinians and confiscating their land, Israel converted this myth into a constant war crime.
Endnotes:
1. This article is based on a much more comprehensive report submitted to the International Fact Finding Mission Initiated by the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages by the author on behalf of the Palestine Land Society. The report is titled “The Denied Inheritance: Palestinian Land Ownership in Beer Sheba,” and can be downloaded from: http://www.plands.org/store/pdf/BS%20Cte%20Paper.pdf.
2. Salman Abu Sitta, The Atlas of Palestine 1917- 1966, London: Palestine Land Society, 2010.
3. See for example, By All Means Possible: A Report on the Destruction by the State of Crops of Bedouin Citizens in the Naqab by Aerial Spraying with Chemicals. Nazareth: Arab Association of Human Rights, July 2004, website: http://www.arabhra.org/NaqabReport_English.pdf; Off the Map: Land and Housing Rights Violations in Israel’s Unrecognized Bedouin Villages, Human Rights Watch March 2008, Vol. 20, No. 5 (E); Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar, “The Legal Transformation of Ethnic Geography: Israel; Law and the Palestinian Landholder 1948, 1967,” International Law and Politics, Vol. 33, pp. 923-1000; Ronen Shamir, “Suspended in Space: Bedouins under the Law of Israel,” Law and Society Review, Vol. 30, Number 2 (1996), pp. 231-257; Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1976; David Kretzmer, The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel, Jerusalem: The Institute of Israeli – Arab Studies, 2002 (in Arabic); Hazem Jamjoum, “Al-Naqab: The Ongoing Displacement of Palestine’s Southern Bedouin,” al-Majdal, Issue 39-40, Winter 2009, pp.27-31.
4. Havatzelet Yahel, “Land Disputes Between the Negev Bedouin and Israel,” Israel Studies, Vol. II, No. 2, 2006, pp. 1-21
5. The Recommendation of the Goldberg Commission, Jerusalem, Dec. 2008 (Arabic Translation).
6. From the original Turkish and Arabic: Ottoman Land Law, Beirut: Jesuit Fathers Press, 1873.
7. Land Law, 5729-1969; see also Badil and COHRE, Ruling Palestine: A History of the Legally Sanctioned Jewish-Israeli Seizure of Land and Housing in Palestine, Bethlehem & Geneva: Badil & COHRE, 2005, pp. 46-52.
8. Halil Inalcik with Donald Quataert (ed.), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 104.
9. Turkish Document on the Registration of Beer Sheba Land to its Holders, IMMS. 122/5229 dated 4 May 1891.
10. Ibid.
11. PGR 121-078
12. PGR 116 – 078
13. See: W. M. Thompson, The Land and the Book. London: Thomas Nelson, 1911, p. 556; Edward Hull, Mount Seir; Sinai and Western Palestine. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1885, p. 139; Victor Guérin, Description de la Palestine. 7 Volumes. Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1969. See Vol. II, pp. 178-290; Alois Musil, Arabia Petraea. 3 Volumes. Vienna: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1908. Max von Oppenheim, Die Beduinen. Zurich: Georg Olms Verlag, 1983; T.E. Lawrence and C. Leonard Woolley, Wilderness of Zin, London: Stacey International, 2003; The Survey of Western Palestine, 1882-1888, 10 vols. and maps, London: PEF and The Royal Geographical Society, reprinted by Archive Editions with PEF, 1998.
14. Public Records Office CO 733/2/21698/folio 77, 29 March 1921; McDonnell, Law Reports of Palestine, 1920-1923, p. 458.
15. Taped interview with Sheikh Abu Sitta, July 1969, Amman
16. Don Gavish, A Survey of Palestine under the British Mandate, 1920-1948, Oxford: Routledge–Curzon, 2005, p. 33
17. Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19. F.M Goadby and Moses Dukhan, The Land Law of Palestine, Tel Aviv, Palestine, 1935, p. 64.
20. Survey of Palestine, Vol. I, Chapter VIII, para 77, 82, pp. 256-257
21. Political Diaries of the Arab World – Palestine and Jordan, 1945-1946, Vol. 8, Archive Editions, Reading, UK, 2001, p. 228.
22. See: Kedar, “The Legal Transformation of Ethnic Geography: Israel; Law and the Palestinian Landholder 1948, 1967” and Shamir, “Suspended in Space: Bedouins under the Law of Israel.”
June 2, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | Beersheba, Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel, Naqab |
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In May 2009, we published an op-ed in The New York Times, see here, in which we argued that “President Obama’s Iran policy has, in all likelihood already failed”—largely because “Obama is backing away from the bold steps required to achieve strategic, Nixon-to-China type rapprochement with Tehran.” Indeed,
“The Obama Administration has done nothing to cancel or repudiate an ostensibly covert but well-publicized program begun in George W. Bush’s second term, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize the Islamic Republic. Under these circumstances, the Iranian government—regardless of who wins the presidential elections on June12—will continue to suspect that American intentions toward the Islamic Republic remain, ultimately, hostile.”
Now, in an article by David Sanger, “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran,” see here, The New York Times informs that
“From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.
Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks—begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games—even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.”
The article goes on to describe multiple details about Stuxnet and the President’s decision-making as to its use. We, however, are most interested in the report for what it confirms about Obama’s approach to Iran—in particular, that Obama’s aggressiveness toward the Islamic Republic extended to a significant expansion of “America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons.” Consider what Sanger writes about the motives for Obama’s decision-making in this regard:
“Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons—even under the most careful and limited circumstances—could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.
‘We discussed the irony, more than once,’ one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a ‘grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.’ Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.
If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.”
The perceived imperative “to dissuade the Israelis from carrying out their own preemptive strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities” also reportedly motivated the Administration to have Israel “deeply involved in every aspect” of Olympic Games.
Two things strike us as significant here. First, our May 2009 analysis was right on the money. If anything, we may have underestimated the degree to which Obama was prepared to let half-baked schemes undermine any chance he might have had, at least in theory, to pursue serious diplomacy with Iran. Obama apologists, see for example here, want us to believe that the President meant well on engaging Tehran, but that what they describe (with no evidence whatsoever) as the Islamic Republic’s “fraudulent” 2009 presidential election and the resulting “disarray” within the Iranian leadership stymied Obama’s benevolent efforts. This is utterly false.
Second, the Sanger article makes undeniably clear—if it were not sufficiently evident already—that the reason for the President’s hostility toward Iran has nothing to do with American security. Rather, Obama’s aggressiveness—which carries with it a willingness to put significant long-term American interests at risk—is motivated by a perceived imperative to prevent the Israelis from doing something that they cannot credibly do in the first place: namely, strike and destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
June 1, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | George W. Bush, Iran, Obama, Olympic Games, Stuxnet |
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Ramallah – Halfway between occupied Jerusalem and Nablus, in middle of the West Bank and 9km north of Ramallah, private Palestinian funds, generously supported by Qatar, and protected by the occupation army, are building a city for the “new Palestinians,” as US General Keith Dayton, US Security Coordinator for Israel-Palestinian Authority in Tel Aviv, calls them.
Rawabi is a “Palestinian settlement” currently under construction at a cost nearing US$1 billion. It is located on a 6,300-dunum (6.3 square kilometers) piece of land seized by the Palestinian Authority (PA) through a decree signed by president Mahmoud Abbas in November 2009.
After a failed attempt by landowners to reverse the decision or reduce its impact, the land was bought by businessman Bashar al-Masri. On several occasions, al-Masri called on Israelis to buy apartments and houses in his city and become neighbors with the “new Palestinians.”
In the nearby village of Attara, residents whisper about Israeli officers who visit the city to eat breakfast with its developers. The visits are frequent and include officers from the Israeli Civil Administration accompanied by army units and border guards.
Villagers speak about soldiers who man the Attara roadblock, allowing everyone related to the Rawabi project to pass through while barring the flow of regular Palestinians.
Things were made clear following friendly conversations al-Masri had with the Israeli press. He sent out statements to appease “the neighbors” and inform them that everything is under control and security prevails, due to solid collaboration with the occupation army.
This is a new phase of spatial engineering. Israel went to war against the old camps and towns that were immune to infiltration during the intifada. It sought to destroy spaces of resistance in Palestinian towns. It even rebuilt Jenin in an exposed and permeable manner, financed by the United Arab Emirates.
Now, the architecture of Rawabi will suit the needs of the colonialist invaders. It will stand before them completely exposed. Ironically, the money for it also came from the Gulf. Thus, the architectural style bears a close resemblance to Israeli settlements.
Architect Lynn Jabri analyzed the building style in Rawabi. She compares the style to the criteria used to build Israeli settlements in mountainous regions, according to a guide used by the Israeli Construction and Housing Ministry. The same criteria are all applied in the city (with the exception of painting the roofs red for the Israeli air force to identify).
Jabri believes that “the search for a modern Palestinian architectural style remains superficial and does not exceed some formal features, without the proper understanding of local architecture. Actually, Rawabi’s “Palestinian” architects are proposing an architecture that looks Israeli.”
Bashar al-Masri considers the project to be part of building the Palestinian state. But he said in a “very friendly” interview with Israeli TV Channel 10 that he visited the Modi’in luxury settlement west of Ramallah to learn from the building experience there and create a better model.
On the way to the largest investment project in Palestine and inside the city itself, countless cameras monitor everything in sight. Nobody knows exactly who sits behind the monitors and sees all that is displayed.
The exposed nature of Rawabi is manifold: Broad streets, buildings aligned according to a strict plan, and a service center looking more like a control tower above the city. Thus, controlling the city becomes no more difficult than taking a pleasant ride in a military Jeep, as a young man from Ajoul, a village being suffocated by the project, likes to put it.
This is the other similarity with early Zionist colonies which erected control towers at the highest point in the settlement as part of their absolute security regulations.
Speaking about the sustainability of the project, Rawabi’s website asks visitors to plant a tree in the city because “the natural beauty of the country has been damaged by war, development, neglect, and climate change.”
The text fails to mention who carried out the ethnic and spatial cleansing of Palestine, destroyed its environment, then brought trees to plant and cover their crimes. Rawabi wants to mimic the Jewish National Fund’s project of planting trees in villages whose residents were expelled during and after the Nakba.
The city’s planners, enamored by Ramallah’s opulent neighborhoods, did not forget to build a mosque and a church. They even brought religious crews to run them following the inauguration of the city in front of potential clients and residents.
Rawabi does not tire of delegations and visitors. It is now on the map for international travelers, politicians, economists, even athletes. Al-Masri speaks proudly about his city, whether to Palestinian security officers or the United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki Moon.
The city is in harmony with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s rhetoric of building a state and its institutions. It is part of the hackneyed propaganda about “the Palestinians’ right and worthiness to live.”
In following the rhetoric of the PA and its supporters, the project owners attempt to create a fantasy completely detached from the bitter reality.
Al-Masri speaks of the city’s five gates, leading to Jerusalem, Yafa, Nablus, Gaza, and Qatar’s Capital, Doha. The latter is the location of Bayti Real Estate Investment Company, which is jointly owned by Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company and al-Masri’s Massar International.
The separation walls, the segregation, and the Green Line, along with a bitter history of 64 years of occupation, are nowhere to be seen in Rawabi’s advertising campaign. “It has a superb view of the Mediterranean,” they say.
From the onset, the PA wholeheartedly supported the project. In May 2008, it held the Palestine Investment Conference in Bethlehem in total collaboration with the Israeli army and government to finance two projects, Rawabi and the Rihan suburbs.
Thus, Rawabi is promoted as a solution to the deteriorating economic situation in language full of numbers: 10,000 new jobs in the city and the commercial activity of at least 40,000 residents.
But there is a deliberate disregard for the role of the occupation in the economic situation of Palestinians. Palestinian groups of all persuasions are either silent or complicit. This complicity is prevalent among the majority of elites and intellectuals who are afraid to challenge this “national” project and its unprecedented media juggernaut.
City planners say that Palestinian expertise has returned from outside the country to work on this city. But they fail to mention that the economic return is based on the occupier’s criteria and the time frame of the project.
Similarly, there is increased talk of the cultural and artistic life of Rawabi. We can now easily imagine the type of culture practiced in the city of “economic peace” so loved by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Israeli press also like to talk about Rawabi. Israelis seem very interested in learning about this “new settlement.” Al-Masri was exclusively interviewed several times in the city by Channel 10, the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, and others. The interviews were intended to put Israelis at ease and inform them that Rawabi is different from any other Palestinian city.
Israeli media is keen on comparing Rawabi, and some parts of Ramallah, with “Hariri’s Beirut.” There were open calls for Netanyahu and his defense minister Ehud Barak to participate in the inauguration. It is ultimately an outcome of Fayyad’s “silent revolution,” whose slogan is that Palestinians “are tired and weary of conflict and are looking for a new life.”
Al-Masri uses every occasion to insist that his company works under the regulations of the PA and its ministries, namely the Ministry of Local Government. It is expected to be transferred to a locally elected body following the delivery of apartments to the owners (the first batch will be delivered in 2013) and the markets to the investors.
The real estate firm, Bayti, will have an administrative and organizational function and will preserve the architectural style of the city and its neighborhoods. The exact scope of the private company’s authority is unknown. This will allow it to complete its spatial architecture with a social architecture consistent with neoliberalism, the socio-economic framework of General Dayton’s security plan.
One of the biggest ironies is that the only real opposition to the construction of the city came from Israelis living in nearby colonies. They started to attack the Palestinian workers until they were stopped through coordination with the Israeli army.
Israelis can enter the city as visitors, workers, and experts. Relationships with Israeli raw materials providers and experts are not even controversial. The Palestinian private sector, with all its factories and contractors, cannot provide even a third of what is required.
Knowing all of this, it seems that the settlement of Atiret, occupying the nearest hill, will be a friendly neighbor. Its residents could come to the more modern and opulent Rawabi for entertainment. The earlier misunderstanding will turn into mutual hospitality and neighborly relations.
Peace-mongers on both sides now have a model consisting of a new kind of Palestinian who gladly embraces the language of consumerism, malls, and international brands!
A few months ago, Rawabi was but a mere idea of a city for refugees who will be brought back based on strict selection criteria. Their return and residence in the city is promoted as a partial solution to the refugee question.
But such talk disappears beneath the haughty buildings of a durable city that goes against the temporary and impatient architecture of refugee camps. In Rawabi, glass will prevail, signifying the brittle and exposed nature of the setting. Its stones, “expensive and rare,” will not be fit to throw at an occupying soldier.
June 1, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Israeli Civil Administration, Palestine Investment Conference, Ramallah, Rawabi, United Arab Emirates |
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By Alan Hart | October 14, 2009
On Monday 12 October, Prime Minister Netanyahu opened the Knesset’s winter session by blasting the Goldstone Report that accuses Israel of committing war crimes and vowing that he would never allow Israelis be tried for them. But that was not his main message. It was an appeal, delivered I thought with a measure of desperation, to the “Palestinian leadership”, presumably the leadership of “President” Abbas and his Fatah cronies, leaders who are regarded by very many if not most Palestinians as American-and-Israeli stooges at best and traitors at worst.
Netanyahu again called on this leadership to agree to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, saying this was, and remains, the key to peace. And he went on and on and on about it.
“For 62 years the Palestinians have been saying ‘No’ to the Jewish state. I am once again calling upon our Palestinian neighbours – say ‘Yes’ to the Jewish state. Without recognition of the Israel as the state of the Jews we shall not be able to attain peace… Such recognition is a step which requires courage and the Palestinian leadership should tell its people the truth – that without this recognition there can be no peace… There is no alternative to Palestinian leaders showing courage by recognising the Jewish state. This has been and remains the true key to peace.”
As Ha’aretz noted in its report, Netanyahu’s demand for Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state is for him “a way on ensuring recognition of Israel’s right to exist as opposed to merely recognising Israel” (my emphasis). This, as Ha’aretz added, is the recognition which Netanyahu and many other Israelis see as the real core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In the name of pragmatism, willingness to “merely to recognise” Israel – meaning to accept and live in peace with an Israel inside its pre-June ’67 borders – has long been the formal Palestinian and all-Arab position. Why does it stop short of recognising Israel’s “right to exist”, and why, really, does it matter so much to Zionism that Palestinians recognise this right?
The answer is in the following.
According to history as written by the winner, Zionism, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This is propaganda nonsense.
- In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.
- Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal – meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council.
- The truth is that the General Assembly’s partition proposal never went to the Security Council for consideration. Why not? Because the U.S. knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force given the extent of Arab and other Muslim opposition to it; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.
- So the partition plan was vitiated (became invalid) and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine – after Britain had made a mess of it and walked away, effectively surrendering to Zionist terrorism – was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the U.S. was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence – actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.
The truth of the time was that the Zionist state, which came into being mainly as a consequence of pre-planned ethnic cleansing, had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist UNLESS … Unless it was recognised and legitimized by those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during the creation of the Zionist state. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved.
And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not and cannot take from the Palestinians by force.
No wonder Prime Minister Netanyahu is more than a little concerned on this account.
Israel’s leaders have always known the truth summarised above. It’s time for the rest of the world to know it.
June 1, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Jewish State, Palestine, Right To Exist, Zionism, Zionist |
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Recent atrocities in Syria which have included the murder of more than a hundred civilians, many of who were children, and, in a later incident, some thirteen civilian workers executed, has led to calls from the West for ‘intervention’ – which is shorthand for supporting the Syrian opposition in ousting President Bashar al-Assad who has been accused of committing these crimes.
Assad, of course, has denied responsibility and has blamed the killings on al Qaeda elements operating with the opposition forces while the West has blamed Assad’s thuggish militias, the Shabiha, for the crimes.
In just a few days the rhetoric has become hysterical but still no one really knows who did these terrible deeds. The West would really like to see Assad get the blame for obvious reasons – they want him gone.
But, if one steps back for a moment away from the hysteria and the calls for intervention, and asks ‘who would have most to gain from these killings’, one can see an entirely different picture.
Clearly, Assad would gain nothing from committing such cold and callous crimes against civilians in this way. He knows the eyes of the world are already upon him. Why would he want to draw attention to himself so negatively any further knowing that the West is just itching for an excuse to ‘intervene’? And, as for the Shabiha, even they would know that crimes like this, especially against children, will achieve nothing whatsoever and serve no purpose other than to enrage the people further.
The hard evidence suggesting government troops or militias were responsible is far from overwhelming. The video of a child said to have been a survivor of the massacres and made by the opposition forces is not convincing; indeed, if anything, it merely reinforces the idea that there is something seriously wrong with the allegations. The boy talks of a Syrian army tank being used and with men dressed in various clothes, both uniforms and civilian clothing yet in this war the men could have been from anywhere and using a captured tank.
The Assad regime and its supporters would have nothing at all to gain by these atrocities. On the other hand, the opposition forces and, more to the point, their international backers in the West, would.
It wouldn’t be the first time in history that killings have been committed by one side and made to look like it had been committed by the other in order to widen a conflict or attract international rage and, again as history has shown us, there have always been men around who are cold-hearted enough to do such deeds.
The men of Special Forces are the most likely perpetrators in this instance; though in this case, not Assad’s Special Forces for reasons explained, but someone else’s. US Special Forces have always been happy to kill unarmed people in the past as have Israeli forces. And, since it’s Israel and the US who are the international actors keen to support the Syrian opposition forces to oust Assad, it would be they that would be more likely to commit these crimes for propaganda purposes. It is also well known that both US contractors (Blackwater) and Israeli operatives (Mossad) are working with Syria’s opposition groups. Both of these groups are capable of these criminal acts.
Of course, there’s no real proof that Blackwater or Mossad committed these crimes – but then, nor is there any real evidence proving that Assad’s men did the deed. But when one examines the reasons why anyone would want to commit such a crime, then the finger is pointing in a direction that makes far more sense.
It’s all very well for the self-righteous West to stand back and say ‘we would never do such a thing’, but the reality is; ‘Yes, we would! And have done many times before for various reasons’.
My Lai, Haditha, Sabra and Shatila, Mavi Marmara…
June 1, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Shabiha, Syria |
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