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The Problem of Israel in the Modern World

By Michael Welton | CounterPunch | January 30, 2015

The mood of our uneasy times is incredibly bellicose, dark, apocalyptic and vengeful. The “war on terror” is like a virus that infects everything it touches. And it does seem to touch everything, from our popular television shows, to getting across borders, travelling overseas somewhere. You can’t read the Sunday paper without feeling queasy, a sense of dread tingling our nerves and spoiling our lovely morning coffee. Everyday brings a new jolt. And if terror doesn’t do the trick, fear of global warming, or running out of oil will spoil your day for sure.

I am particularly interested in probing the role that religious belief and mythological systems play in dividing us from one another, fuelling irrationality and hatred of others, and dampening any spirit of radical self-criticism. To illustrate the incendiary nature of religious belief, I will focus attention on the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the context of the Middle East. Perhaps no topic–Israel’s fate and role in the Middle East–is itself so incendiary and symptomatic of the failure of our global civilization to act justly.

The horrific Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006, the continuing assault on Palestinians in the Gaza strip, now virtually a prison, and the building of settlements in the West Bank, has revealed to the world the stark inadequacies of the old axiom, that “might is right”. I am fascinated with why Israel, particularly, believes that might is right, that war is the only message the Arabs understand and why Israel refuses to talk with their enemy. What belief system underpins the aggressions of Israel against the Palestinians and its Arab surroundings? Why is it so hard for us to criticize Israel in the west? Are there mythic underpinnings and reasons operating here, too?

September 11, 2001 set me on a pathway to understand what was behind this ghastly act of flying hijacked airplanes into the very heart of the American military-industrial complex. Why was it so easy for George W. Bush on a Sunday afternoon, Sept. 16, 2001, on the south lawn of the White House–to utter these words: “We need to be alert to the fact that these evil doers still exist. We haven’t seen this kind of barbarism in a long period of time. No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft–fly US aircraft into buildings full of innocent people–and show no remorse. This is a new kind of-a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take awhile.”

Commentators of the day observed that Bush’s remark about crusade had come in an off-the-cuff comment to a journalist. Actually, he had struggled hard to find the right word. This was the word that came from his gut. It signified the struggle between Good and Evil. On January 29, 2002, Bush announced that: “States like these (Iran, Iraq. N. Korea), and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” Unwittingly, Bush was dragged back to the century’s old world of malediction–cursing one’s enemies.

One of the deep reasons why the West is open-hearted to Israel and hard-hearted towards Palestinians (and increasingly all Arabs) is the pre-eminence of “Israel” in the western, Christian imagination. Let me tell a personal story to illustrate my point. The Diary of Anne Frank has taken its place in the western religious imagination from its publication after the war until the present day. I can remember reading an expurgated version of the diary when I was a teenager. The excruciating drama of her hiding from the Gestapo, and her family’s eventual murder, was cut into my youthful memory. I somehow took on her suffering as my own. In my twenties, I read Holocaust narratives by the likes of Elie Wiesel (Night) who captured the horror of trains carrying Jews to the death-camps, Jews who didn’t know what was in store for them as they shuddered down the rails. I read the works of Jewish theologians who taught me that The Holocaust was the most horrific form of human suffering.

When I gradually made the journey from pietistic evangelicalism to liberation theology, like so many others, I read Gustavo Gutierez’s Liberation Theology text with amazement. There, the Exodus narrative was claimed as a paradigm for the liberation struggles of the oppressed everywhere. The spirituals of Black slaves incorporated Old Testament, Jewish imagery as they longed for “Moses” to lead them to the promised land of freedom, away from Pharaoh’s crushing contempt. “Israel” existed as a powerful metaphor–the Jews appeared to be the paradigm of profound suffering. Those suffering from the depredations of South African apartheid, or sugar plantations or the brutality of Latin American dictatorships–could find comfort in the story of the Exodus.

But I didn’t think about the real state of Israel that was forged through violence and terrorism in the 1940s on the historic land of Palestine. Nor did I pay any attention to what actually happened when the ancient Hebrews ventured into the “promised land”, instructed by their tribal sky-god to eliminate the Amalekites. What happened to them? Didn’t Yahweh tell the Israelites to murder, plunder and rape its inhabitants? When I think about Israel now, and the Diary of Anne Frank, I realize the power of Edward Said’s remark that Israel’s “other”, the Palestinians, have never had permission to possess their own narrative. It is not that Anne Frank’s diary ought not to be read. But the fact that we keep telling, and re-telling this story and its variants, leaves little room for other narratives. It contributes to the idea, I think, that Jewish suffering is unique, different from other forms of suffering, mysterious and resistant to rational understanding.

A diary for our time would, perhaps, be entitled The diary of Asthma al-Mugghayr, a 16-year old Palestinian, an account of what happened to his fellow and sister kids and family and community members in and around Rafah. Scribbling among the ruins, would Asthma write of watching his brother, Ahmad, 13 years-old, shot with a single bullet through his head while taking clothes off the drying line and feeding pigeons? Apparently the shot came from a house nearby, which been taken over by Israeli soldiers shortly before. Would he write by candle late at night, amidst the rubble, about the thirteen year old girl who was shot while she was walking to school? What would this teenage boy think about the Israeli commander who emptied his gun into the school girl?

What would Asthma think about the Occupation–a system of military check-points splitting towns and villages into ghettoes, curfews, closures, raids, mass demolition and destruction of houses and land expropriations? How would he characterize daily life, and the grotesque wall, that, when completed will total 400 miles–four times longer than the Berlin wall. Would Asthma write youthful poetry about being caged or displaced? Would this young man be driven mad? Would he confess to a concealed desire to be a suicide bomber?

Maybe Asthma would keep a record of just how many children have been killed. Two-thirds of hundreds of children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of the cases to the head, neck and chest–the sniper’s wound. Would these young men wonder why the Palestinians are always terrorists? Would he have taken his own life?
Why is it almost unspeakable to speak of the suffering of the non-Jew in the west? Why is the suffering of Palestinian people of so little concern and interest to the western mind and politicians? One answer surely is that both Christians and Jews share a common mythology: that Yahweh created the world, that the Jews are a chosen people, that they have been promised a land. Christians and Jews obviously differ regarding the significance of Jesus. But those who embrace him become part of the universal “people of God” who will inherit the earth when the redeemer returns to Zion. Islam has no place in the great purposes of God.

But there is something else. The United States and Israel have fused into a single entity in global politics and world history. Both are uniquely chosen to be redeemer nations, a light unto the nations. They have special status in the cosmic story. Israel is the US, and the US is Israel. The early Puritans were the “new Israel” and America was the Promised Land. America has never forsaken its historical sense of specialness before God, to be a redeemer nation. And, as we will now see, Israel’s imagined destiny was not only to be a homeland for dispossessed Jews. It was to be beacon of civilization in savage Arab lands, a light unto the nations.

We cannot understand the current crisis in the Middle East without understanding the religious mythology and historical circumstances underpinning the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. I can only highlight these. All of us, if asked, probably immediately link The Holocaust perpetrated in Germany with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 in historic Palestine. Getting their own state was Europe’s payment for their suffering in the 1930s and 1940s. Now, they will be safe and less subject to anti-Semitic attacks or assaults. Many of us might even assume, without thinking too much about it, that God gave the land to the Jews. The Palestinians are Amalek. If they will not submit to Jewish rule they must, or will be, destroyed. The basis for this is the Old Testament, the shared sacred text of Christians and Jews. One cannot argue with sacred texts! Indeed, in 1971, Golda Meir told Le Monde that Israel existed as “the fulfilment of promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for is legitimacy.”

Yet those of secular mind might want to ask some questions and probe into history deeply. At the dawn of the twentieth century, historians tell us, Europe’s ‘subject peoples’ (Poles, Czechs, Armenians, Serbs) dreamed of forming their own ‘nation-states’. Places where they might live free from fear. These states privileged particular ethnic groups–defined by language, or religion or antiquity. The Zionist movement originated in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. The land of Zion, the ancient homeland (Israel actually existed for only 60 years in the thousands of years of life in historic Palestine) was an exultant space of hope for some Jews. Zionists dreamed of the restored ‘lost fatherland’. This was a powerful dream that turned into hard fact at the end of World War II.

Zionism coincided with the period of European imperialist expansion and acquisition of lands in Africa and Asia. Lands, including lands in Canada, were acquired and occupied in the name of a higher power, God, and a higher civilization. There is something very interesting here for our understanding of Israel and the crisis in the Middle East. Zionist ideologues like Moses Hess and Theodor Herzl (as did all Israeli leaders from Ben-Gurion onward) believed that they had a divine right to occupy the land that was plainly occupied by others. If they were soft on ‘divine right’, they simply accepted that they were going to lands that were empty. Not empty of real live people, but empty of civilization and proper cultivation. In other words, those who colonize, or steal, other peoples’ lands (be they in Africa, Asia or in the Nass River Valley in BC) carry ideas in their heads about their right to do so. They, the colonists, will cultivate the untended gardens and settle the savages in orderly, moral communities.

The Zionist project, Edward Said has argued, participated in the “great dispossessing movement of modern European colonialism, and with them all the schemes for redeeming the land, resettling the natives, civilizing them, taming their savage customs…” The natives are, to put it bluntly, irrelevant to begin with! They are inferior and marginal. Herzl admitted in his diary that “both the expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly.” He thought that they had to be spirited across the border and denied employment. They existed, but not as full human beings. These inferior beings could be put on reservations, on compounds, on native homelands. They could be taxed, counted and used profitably. Then, the new society could be built in the vacated space. Thus, ‘empty’ actually means ‘uncivilized’. Now we can understand the slogan of Israelis who saw Palestine as a “land without people, for a people without land.”

Those are Ben-Gurion’s words. In 1937 he had argued that “we must expel the Arabs and take their places. He acknowledged the presence of Arabs on the land, but denied the presence of Palestinians. In her famous statement to The Sunday Times in 1969, then Prime Minister Golda Meir said: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took over their country. They didn’t exist.” During that same year, Zionist leader Menachem Begin told Kibbutz members the importance of denying the existence of Palestinians. “My friend, take care. When you recognize the concept of ‘Palestine’, you demolish your right to live in Kibbutz Ein Haboresh. If this is Palestine and not the land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine, then it belongs to a people who lived here before you came.”

But the Palestinians were there, weren’t they? At least 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, and villages were destroyed or pillaged. Israeli propagandists used to push the story that the Palestinians just ran away, saying, “Here, Israel, take our homes, here’s the key, and don’t forget to look after our olive trees.” Contemporary Israeli historians like Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe have dispelled this farcical story. The Israeli armies and terror squads expelled the villagers through terror and massacre. This the Palestinians call the Nakba, “the original sin.” The process of ethnic cleansing began in the mid-1940s and has never ceased. Border raids, massacres, settlements, slaughter of 20,000 in Lebanon, expulsions, demolitions, arrests, torture, and assassinations, chicanery and all the tricks of road maps that never materialize. Israel is a big problem in the modern world. Perhaps even an anachronism.

Zionist strategy has always been to seize the moment when they can take-over all of Palestine. In 1947-8, under cover of conflict, 78% of historic Palestine was transformed into “Israel.” In 1967, Israel seized the opportunity to take-over the remaining 22% of Palestine. Israel justified the 1967 war as self-defence; thus they are blameless; just as they are in the recent disproportionate destruction of civilians in Palestine and Lebanon. Israel is the perpetual victim; the little David facing the Arab Goliath. Israel never initiates; it only responds.

There is little historic or contemporary evidence that the Israeli military, which runs the country and shapes its mental outlook, has a shred of commitment to a Palestinian state. Liberal critics who rail against the “occupation” of the West Bank or the Gaza and the settlements and the capture of Jerusalem are correct, but only from the Palestinian point of view. Israel is doing everything in its power, day after day, minute after minute, and one stone at a time, one olive grove, one goat at a time, to destroy the possibility of a Palestinian state. If it did exist, it would be tiny, fragmented, weak–an act of Palestinian surrender and humiliation.

Don’t we see through Israel and US games? Hamas was elected in democratic elections. US-Israel and the EU have done everything possible, short of utter starvation of the people, to destroy Hamas (and Hezbollah). They keep telling Hamas that they have to lay down their arms, and recognize Israel. But what are Israel’s borders to be recognized? Where are they drawn? Hamas might well agree to return to the 1967 borders with all settlements dismantled. This is just a wicked charade being played out on the international scene, and many fall for it, including Canada’s right-wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.

We in the west have a hard time seeing what is before our eyes. Another logical error, which we see committed all the time, is to talk of the “cycle of violence” in the Middle East. From our vantage point in Canada, we imagine both are to blame, tanks and F-16s on one side, suicide bombers on the other. Aren’t human beings violent creatures–we mutter to ourselves: just an endless cycle of violence. But the Israel/Palestine story is not one of moral equivalence. It is a story of brutal dispossession and oppression of one people by another; it is not simply a sort of Greek tragedy. The idea of a cycle of violence leaves Israel once again not guilty. Everyone is not an innocent victim.

At this point, one can see where the idea of enemies talking it out can be premature. You feel my pain, I will feel yours. If only we could listen. I’ve suffered, you’ve suffered. Let’s talk. But it is not true that Palestinians have not heard the Zionist story. They have heard it ad nauseum and have heard enough about Jewish suffering. Both sides do not need to listen. It is Israelis and Jews who need to listen. There is lots of evidence–from Jewish Israeli commentators–that most Israelis scarcely give two hoots about the sight of a white-scarfed women scrubbing through the rubble of a bombed out building for a trace of her child.

Can you imagine both sides in apartheid sitting down to talk and listen to one another? What form would the suffering of the white perpetrator of apartheid take? That’s the point, isn’t it–there is a perpetrator, there is a victim; there is an oppressor; there are the oppressed.

Funerals, observes the great Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, are an “integral part of the lives of Palestinians wherever they were, in the homeland or in exile, in the days of their calm and the days of their Intifada, in the days of their wars and the days of their peace punctuated by massacres.” Thus, when Yitzhak Rabin spoke so eloquently of Israelis as absolute victims, and the eyes of those in the White House and the whole world grew wet, Barghouti said that he “knew that [he] would forget for a long time his words that day: “ We are victims of war and violence. We have not known a year or month when mothers have not mourned their sons.”

Barghouti says that Rabin “knew how to demand that the world should respect Israeli blood, the blood of every Israeli individual without exception. He knew how to demand that the world should respect Israeli tears, and he was able to present Israel as the victim of a crime perpetrated by us. He changed facts, he altered the order of things, he presented us as the initiators of violence in the Middle East and said what he said with eloquence, with clarity and conviction.”

Rabin told his story of soldiers returning from war, covered in blood, and funerals where those in attendance could not look into the eyes of grieving mothers. In a remarkable passage in the brilliant book, I saw Ramallah, Barghouti argues compellingly that it is “easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from “Secondly.” Yes, this is what Rabin did. He simply neglected to speak of what happened first. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with “Secondly”, and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim….You only need to start your story with “Secondly”, and the burned Vietnamese will have wounded the humanity of the napalm, and Victor Jara’s songs will be the shameful thing and not Pinochet’s bullets, which killed so many thousands in the Santiago stadium. It is enough to start the story with “Secondly”, for my grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, to become the criminal and Ariel Sharon her victim” (pp. 177-78).

Zionism has been a beautiful dream for many Jews. But Zionism from the ‘standpoint of the victim’ is not a pretty picture. My conclusions may be troubling and disconcerting. But I think that the cause of global justice and world peace, and particularly peace in the Middle East, demands that we understand that the state of Israel is at the crossroads. Israel, the first modern ‘democracy’ to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, can continue towards an “ethnically cleansed” Greater Israel, or transform into a single, integrated, bi-national, multicultural state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. In my view, the ferocity unleashed in Lebanon and the Gaza—laying sieges, causing electricity blackouts, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding children and babies—can only be comprehended in terms of the Zionist project to eradicate any opposition to their goal of total domination in historic Palestine and the surrounding Middle East. Hezbollah was being taught the Zionist’s elementary lesson: we have the right to abduct, you do not.

Israel is an anachronism in our increasingly cosmopolitan world order in that Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privilege from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded. This is a “separatist project” in a world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law. Thus, in the Jewish state, one community, the Jews, is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.

The wall being erected between Israel and Palestinian occupied territories is a symbol of the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect. You cannot build pathways towards others if you believe they are inferior beings, or that you, and not they, are superior, chosen ones, with your suffering privileged above and beyond everyone else’s. Israel’s actions in the world towards and against the Palestinians—curfews, check points, bulldozers, public humiliations, home demolition, land seizures, shootings, targeted assassinations, and the separatist fence—indicate a state that appears to have lost is moral centre, and is possibly facing its own Nakba.

I believe that the United States’ unconditional support for Israel, and the adoption of an Israeli approach to foreign policy, is undermining the hopes and possibilities for peace in the Middle East and the rest of the world. The US’s catastrophic loss of international political influence and the degradation of its moral image has much to do with their bizarre approval of, and financial support for, Israel’s actions in the Middle East. Israel embraced the “war on terror” when the smoke was still rising from the Towers, immediately identifying the Palestinians as “terrorists” who had to be eliminated. Thus, Israel’s wars, now and in the past, are always presented to the world as wars of necessity, of self-defence.

The compelling question before Israel and the rest of the world is simply this: will Israel reinvent itself and dissolve the exhausted Zionist political project in favour of building a truly bi-national state in historic Palestine for everyone? We have reached a moral crossroads. In the new Middle East defined by the US, only Israel and the US may dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in the just world that lies on the other side of the crossroads, this is unacceptable.

Dr. Michael Welton is a professor at the University of Athabasca. He is the author of Designing the Just Learning Society: a Critical Inquiry.

January 30, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

EU appeals court ruling removing Hamas from terror list

MEMO | January 19, 2015

The European Union decided Monday to appeal a court ruling that says Hamas must be removed from the EU’s list of terrorist organisations, officials said.

The General Court of the European Union ruled Dec.17 that listing Hamas on the 2001 terrorist list was “not based on acts examined and confirmed in decisions of competent authorities, but on factual imputations derived from the press and the Internet.”

However, the European Council, composed of representatives of the 28 EU member states, decided to challenge the court’s ruling.

”This ruling was clearly based on procedural grounds and did not imply any assessment by the court of the merits of designating Hamas as a terrorist organisation,” EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said in a press release.

”As a result of the appeal, the effects of the judgement are suspended until a final judgement is rendered by the Court of Justice,” Mogherini said.

In December 2001, the European Council adopted a terrorist list requiring the freezing of the funds of the people and entities listed.

January 19, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Haniyeh says Hamas committed to ceasefire as long as Israel is

Ma’an – December 26, 2014

310116_345x230GAZA CITY – Deputy head of the Hamas political bureau Ismail Haniyeh said on Friday that the group is committed to the ceasefire with Israel but called for international attention to ensure Israel abide by its terms.

“We are committed to what was agreed on in Cairo as long as the occupation is,” he said in a statement to the press.

He said that Hamas was contacting Egypt and other outside parties to ensure Israel uphold its side of the bargain, which includes a partial lifting of the seven-year-old siege of Gaza that has not come to pass.

Haniyeh also called on Egypt to permanently open the Rafah crossing, assuring the country’s authorities that “the security and stability of Egypt is our priority.”

Egypt has closed Rafah, the principal connection between Gaza and the outside world due to the Israeli siege, for the majority of the past two months, only opening it for a few days at a time for limited passage.

Egyptian authorities blame Hamas for supporting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and anti-government militants in the Sinai Peninsula, charges Hamas strenuously denies.

December 27, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hamas: PA draft resolution at the UN does not represent the Palestinians

Palestine Information Center – December 23, 2014

673487103GAZA – Hamas Movement announced on Tuesday that the Palestinian Authority’s draft resolution tabled with the UN Security Council did not represent the Palestinian people.

Official spokesman for Hamas Dr. Sami Abu Zuhri said in a press release that the resolution did not have any national backing.

He said that the resolution was widely refused by the Palestinian factions, and asked the PA to withdraw it.

A number of Palestinian factions including the peoples party, national initiative party along with both the popular and the democratic fronts for the liberation of Palestine had declared their rejection of the draft resolution’s wording.

December 23, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Khaled Meshaal speaks to MEMO about the EU’s decision to remove Hamas from terror list

Middle East Monitor | December 17, 2014

We, the leadership of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, welcome the decision of the General Court of the European Union to remove Hamas from the European Union’s terrorist list and we consider this to be a step in the right direction and a means of making right a position that was wrong. This past position was not based on objective facts. In addition to this, it was in violation of and contradictory to international law as well as legal and humanitarian norms that guarantee the right of nations to resist occupation. It would be in the European Union’s best interest to align itself with international law and with legal and humanitarian norms and to refrain from violating these laws under the misguided pressure of Israel and its exploitation of the international community.

In this regard I urge the leaders and governments in the EU states to accept and cooperate with the decision of the Court and to take measures to make a brave political decision to remove Hamas from the European Union’s terrorist list in coordination with the Court’s decision and with the values of justice and law, as well as out of respect of the people’s will and their rights. I also urge the leaders and governments in EU states to avoid stalling or wasting time by taking measures or making appeals attempting to circumvent international law and objective facts.

I also hope that all international forces, including the United States, take the initiative and right the wrong that has been made in the past, which, as everyone knows, is a result of Israeli pressure and not a result of the facts on the ground.

I would like to remind everyone that throughout its long history since its inception 27 years ago, Hamas has, and continues to confine its legitimate resistance and struggle to Palestine and exercises this against the Israeli occupation. This is a natural right for the movement and for all nations under foreign occupation and it is in accordance with our religious and international laws, just as the other nations in the East and the West resisted their occupying forces.

We believe that this step by the General Court of the European Union, along with the initiatives made last week by a number of EU states and the Swedish government to recognise a Palestinian state and the rights of the Palestinian people, are all considered important steps that must be followed through in the context of setting the record straight and making the historical mistake against the Palestinian people right again.

The Palestinian people, as well as other people who have suffered and continue to suffer from unjust occupation, are looking forward to the day, in the near future, when the international community and the global superpowers will call things by their true name and explicitly expose the true terrorist forces, countries, and parties that exercise real terrorism against humanity. Such parties work together to commit acts of terrorism in its ugliest forms, in the name of the state, before the eyes and ears of the world without any accountability or deterrence, starting with Israeli terrorism.

December 17, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Why Hamas should not heed calls to amend charter

By Ibrahim Al-Madhoun | Al Resalah | December 15, 2014

The Hamas Charter is considered by the movement’s supporters as a key and stand-alone historical document pertaining to Hamas’s political and social ideology. In the event that this document is altered or amended, it would cause a state of undue and untimely confusion and tension within the ranks of the Hamas supporters. It would also be seen as a concession to international and Israeli pressures, even if the changes made to the charter were not substantial or even if the new charter was more extreme in crucial issues such as the recognition of Israel or dealing with international proposals. As long as such amendments form part of international demand or foreign advice, then any response to these demands will be seen as a concession and a weakness in the eyes of both Hamas’s supporters and the movement’s political opposition. It will also send a message to international forces that soft pressure on the movement actually works.

In addition to this, no amendment to the charter would sufficiently please the international community beyond altering the core of the Hamas’s political thought. No changes to the charter would satisfy Western forces unless they explicitly recognise the two-state solution and clearly accept the legitimacy of the continued existence of the Israeli state on Palestinian territories, while shunning the Palestinian national struggle in all its forms. From a strategic regional and international perspective, unless making concessions to these specific points there is no point in changing the charter, as such change may ultimately crack the intellectual infrastructure of Hamas and cause severe repercussions affecting its survival.

Palestinians still remember Fatah’s ill-fated political acquiescence, particularly the amendment of the organisation’s charter under the supervision of Yasser Arafat in 1996 to appease Bill Clinton. Although Fatah changed the PLO Charter under US pressure, it did not reap the fruits of this change and it ultimately did not serve the Palestinian cause. Instead, it caused disappointment and decline; a fate which may well befall Hamas if it makes the same mistake.

Although it may be true that some of Hamas’s positions need to be clarified, the best way to do this would not be to change the existing charter but to issue a new document explaining the movement’s strategic vision over a specified period of time. However, this document must be clear and understandable, devoid of any extra words and without any dense literary jargon. It must be focused on the clear political matters at hand and keep pace with social and political developments in the Palestinian arena, allowing for changes over the next five to ten years.

All political entities have their literatures and philosophies that serve to carry and propagate their core values and that cannot be altered; they must remain as a foundation stone and intellectual inheritance for all new recruits. Such entities can later be developed through practice, conflict, and building relationships, but their core values always remain the same. No one truly believes that changes to Hamas’s charter would bring respect, acceptance and understanding from the international community. This community only understands the language of power and force through the ability to raise some voices and silence others. And Hamas must not allow itself to be covertly silenced in such a way.

Translated by MEMO, 15 December, 2014

December 16, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Islamic Jihad slams PA-Israel security coordination as unity gov’t expires

Al-Akhbar | November 30, 2014

The national consensus government declared by Hamas and Fatah this summer has finished its interim term, Hamas spokesman said Sunday, as the Islamic Jihad movement urged the Palestinian Authority (PA) to stop security coordination with Israel.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a press conference in Gaza City that the unity government’s six-month term had expired, and that dialogue should be resumed on a national level to discuss the future of the government.

“Any decision on whether the government should be disbanded or continued or be reshuffled must be made only through national dialogue and consensus,” Abu Zuhri said, adding that Hamas “isn’t interested in incitement, but rather seeks to maintain national unity.”

The Palestinian national unity government was formed following a reconciliation deal signed by Palestinian political rivals Hamas and Fatah in April.

The deal sought to end years of bitter and sometimes bloody rivalry between Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, which dominates the West Bank-based PA.

Palestinian parties agreed in September that the unity government would assume immediate authority over Gaza, however the government has so far failed to make any real changes on the ground in Gaza.

Abu Zuhri went on to criticize the PA for making what he called “politically motivated arrests.”

So far in November, 80 Palestinians have been detained in the West Bank for their political affiliation, he said, adding that 70 of them were still in PA custody.

“Hamas denounces the escalating violations and criminal acts by the PA security services against supporters of Hamas and the Palestinian resistance,” he added, calling on PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah to stop the detention campaign.

Similarly, the Islamic Jihad movement urged Abbas on Sunday to release all political detainees and refrain from detaining any Palestinian over their political affiliation.

Besides the recent wave of detentions, the movement said the security coordination between the PA and Israel has become a “real danger” to the Palestinian national unity.

Islamic Jihad spokesman Yousef al-Hasayna said in a statement that the appreciation expressed by the Israeli authorities regarding the PA’s readiness to continue coordinating with the occupation forces on the security level “is a strike to the nationalistic values of the Palestinian security services” and “is in contrast with the values and beliefs of the Palestinian people.”

“Israel is using this coordination to oppress the Palestinians and make sure no uprising will erupt in the West Bank and Jerusalem,” al-Hasayna said.

“The only one benefiting from this coordination is the Israeli occupation.”

Gaza reconstruction

Ongoing differences between Hamas and the PA have kept tensions high in Gaza.

Earlier this month, a senior United Nations official warned that another conflict will engulf Gaza unless stability in the territory is achieved rapidly.

“I do not see the national consensus government effectively governing Gaza,” Robert Turner, director of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, said.

“If we do not have political stability, a national Palestinian government, and at least an easing of the blockade, yes there will be another war,” Turner told reporters.

For 51 days this summer, Israel pounded the Gaza Strip by air, land and sea.

More than 2,160 Gazans, mostly civilians, were killed and 11,000 injured during seven weeks of unrelenting Israeli attacks in July and August.

The assault ended with an Egypt-brokered ceasefire agreement that calls for reopening Gaza’s border crossings with Israel, which, if implemented, would effectively end the latter’s years-long blockade of the embattled territory.

However, the Zionist entity had repeatedly blocked the entry of building material, prompting the UN in September to broker another deal. The reconstruction of Gaza has yet to begin.

The Palestinian Authority has estimated that the rebuilding Gaza will cost $7.8 billion.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon said during a visit to the Gaza Strip in October that the devastation he had seen was “beyond description” and “far worse” than that caused in the previous Israel-Gaza conflict of winter 2008-2009.

According to the UN, as many as 80,000 Palestinians homes were damaged or destroyed during the days of hostilities, a higher figure than was previously thought, and over 106,000 of Gaza’s 1.8 million residents have been displaced to UN shelters and host families.

Israel routinely bars the entry of building materials into the embattled coastal enclave on grounds that Palestinian resistance faction Hamas could use them to build underground tunnels or fortifications.

For years, the Gaza Strip has depended on construction materials smuggled into the territory through a network of tunnels linking it to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

However, a crackdown on the tunnels by the Egyptian army after it overthrew then-President Mohammed Mursi has effectively neutralized hundreds of tunnels, severely affecting Gaza’s construction sector.

Economists in Gaza have estimated that as many as 400 trucks of equipment – from concrete to building materials and machinery – are needed every day for the next six months to meet the demand, but so far only around 75 trucks have made deliveries.

“I know there is frustration at the pace of reconstruction,” Turner said, adding that efforts were underway to fully implement a mechanism negotiated by the UN’s special coordinator in the Middle East, Robert Serry, to speed up the flow of goods.

Alaa Radwan, head of the Popular Committee for Monitoring the Reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, made a simple calculation: “Given the pace at which construction materials are currently entering Gaza, it will be at least 20 years” before the damage caused by this summer’s war is repaired.

While Hamas and people in Gaza have lamented the slow flow of goods, Turner was optimistic that the volume could be greatly increased if political stability could be brought to bear and if Egypt and Israel fully lifted their combined blockade.

“I do not believe the crossings are a problem,” Turnor said. “All the technical problems can be addressed. The question for me is that the political choke points be addressed.”

“If the political will exists… expanding the crossing to 800 trucks a day is just a matter of paying for the expansion.”

The crisis between Hamas and Fatah has been delaying the flow of reconstruction material into war-battered Gaza because the opening of border crossings, both under Israeli and Egyptian control, is conditional on PA personnel being stationed there.

According to the UN-brokered deal, all materials going into Gaza should be extremely monitored, including GPS tracking and video surveillance of their storage, to ensure nothing goes missing and ends up being used for “military purposes.”

On top of the slow pace of reconstruction and the bureaucracy, Fatah’s failure to pay employees of Gaza’s former Hamas government has further escalated tensions between the two rivals.

Moreover, the situation in Gaza was thrown into doubt early November after bombs targeted the houses of some 10 senior Fatah officials in Gaza.

Even though Hamas leaders rushed to denounce the attacks and called upon security services in Gaza to investigate into the attacks and bring those responsible for it to justice, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority security services accused Hamas of having knowledge of the blasts before they happened.

Hamas top member, Khalil al-Hayya, however, slammed the accusations as “groundless” and “baseless,” saying whoever was behind the blasts was trying to thwart reconciliation and ensure the Palestinian Authority did not re-extend its control over Gaza.

Hayya also warned against using the incident as an excuse to avoid reconciliation, calling on all sides to uphold their responsibilities towards the national good.

(Al-Akhbar, AFP, Ma’an)

December 1, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Hamas official denies group’s involvement in Sinai attacks

MEMO | October 27, 2014

mousa-abu-marzouk-2Mousa Abu-Marzouk, deputy of the Hamas political bureau, offered his condolences to the families who lost members in the terrorist attack in Abu Zeid, Sinai, on Friday.

Abu-Marzouk said: “We regret hearing about any drop of blood spilt in Egypt or anywhere in the Arab world as such news is very painful.”

In a telephone interview on Egyptian TV show Lazem Nafham, Abu-Marzouk stressed that linking Hamas to the attack in Sinai is an unwarranted claim that lacks any evidence. He said Hamas is a resistance movement that focuses its efforts toward the Israeli occupation and not its brothers in Egypt.

Abu-Marzouk went on to clarify that Hamas’ forces inside the Gaza Strip have increased their security measures to ensure that no activity takes place in Sinai and he asked the Egyptian government to avoid blaming the Palestinian people for actions and events that they have nothing to do with.

Emphasising that Palestinian have no reason to interfere in internal Egyptian affairs, he stressed that no party should accuse Hamas of anything without clear evidence and pointed out that the Palestinians have done nothing short of ensuring Egyptian national security.

“My statements regarding the kidnapping of Egyptian soldiers in Sinai are verified by a trustworthy source,” Abu-Marzouk said. He went on to emphasise that Gaza is the least extremist area in the entire Arab region.

October 27, 2014 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Is Hamas really like ISIS, as Netanyahu claims?

benjamin-netanyahu

By Ibrahim Al-Madhoun | MEMO | October 8, 2014

In his heart of hearts, Netanyahu is aware of the major and fundamental differences between the Palestinian Hamas movement and the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) that is not limited to a specific state or nationality. However, for some reason, he is trying to link the two. In doing so, he ignores what is even more dangerous than his erroneous comparison; the significant similarity between ISIS and Israel’s ideology, policies and practices.

Israel calls itself the “Jewish State”, just as Al-Baghdadi calls his group the Islamic State. From the time of its “independence” in 1948, Israel has never declared it borders; in fact, they expand and contract, just as the territory controlled by ISIS does (it rejects the ideas of borders and does not recognise nation states). Indeed, ISIS considers its borders to be wherever its forces have reached. Israel was established on the basis of colonial-settlement and mass immigration of Zionist Jews from all over the world; ISIS is also encouraging immigrants who believe in the ideology of the group, regardless of their ethnicity and nationality.

It is no wonder that the Palestinian resistance is surprised when it captures or kills Israeli soldiers only to find that they are French, British, Polish, German or Russian individuals brought in to fight on Palestinian land and join the ranks of the “Jewish State”. In addition, the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel throughout its occupation of Palestine far surpass those committed by ISIS; the Israelis kill women and children and commit massacres deliberately, with apparent impunity, and then boast about it.

I do not mean that this comparison should offend ISIS, nor am I very concerned with talking about an organisation being fought by the world. It is undoubtedly a serious phenomenon that requires further reflection and study. What I am really concerned about is revealing Netanyahu’s manipulation and his attempt to divert attention from the real nature of the conflict in Palestine. When he fights Hamas, he is fighting the rightful owners of the land, the Palestinians. He is also following terrorist logic and using unimaginably extreme methods thanks to the world overlooking the Zionist project’s excesses in the region.

The international community is applying blatant double standards in its reaction to Israel and ISIS. Alliances have been formed to fight ISIS but the world turns a blind eye to the Israeli occupation that commits war crimes witnessed by all who wish to see. Over the summer, and not for the first time, Israel bombed hospitals, schools and safe houses while they were still inhabited and Israel also used internationally-banned weapons.

Netanyahu’s repeated attempts to link Hamas to ISIS is just more proof of Israel’s defeat and failure in its latest attack on the movement. It is also a cry for help by Israel to the countries of the world after its army failed to progress more than a few metres into Gaza. This is a desperate attempt to discredit and ruin the reputation of the Palestinian resistance and link it to a terrorist organisation reviled across the world. Netanyahu still hasn’t realised that the world is no longer held hostage to Israeli propaganda, and that such links and comparisons do not harm Hamas or change the fact that occupation is terrorism in every sense of the word. There is only one state occupying someone else’s land in the Middle East, and it isn’t the “Islamic State”.

October 9, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

UN plan to ensure reconstruction materials not diverted to Hamas

Palestine Information Center – 22/09/2014

GAZA – The United Nations’ top Mideast envoy, Robert Serry, wants to station hundreds of international monitors in the Gaza Strip to supervise the reconstruction process in Gaza Strip, the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz learned from European diplomats and senior Israeli officials.

The newspaper pointed out that Robert Serry has agreed upon the proposal along with Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamallah and Coordinator of the Israeli government in Palestinian territories Yoav Mordechai.

Serry is liaising with the PA and Israel to bring between 250 and 500 UN monitors into the Strip, the sources added.

50 UN monitors are currently in Ramallah and ready to head to Gaza Strip to participate in supervising rebuilding work in the Strip. The monitors’ mission is mainly to supervise big reconstruction projects and safeguard materials and to ensure that nothing would be diverted to Hamas Movement for tunnels digging.

Hamas has yet to comment on the proposal, the Hebrew newspaper said, adding that the Islamic movement realizes that Israel only allows construction materials’ access to the Strip in the presence of UN monitors.

The proposal is expected to be addressed during the Israeli-Palestinian indirect talks on Wednesday.

September 22, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Abbas’ spurious charges

By Nicola Nasser | Al-Ahram | September 11, 2014

President Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah movement, which he commands, have unleashed a media campaign against Hamas and the resistance. If pressure from the Palestinian public fails to stop the campaign, Abbas may achieve politically what Israel failed to achieve militarily: forcing the Palestinian presidency to choose “peace with Israel” over national reconciliation.

It appears that President Abbas has, indeed, prioritised “peace with Israel.” He has devised plans for resuming negotiations, and is still banking on American support for such talks. This is the only explanation for the current anti-Hamas media campaign.

Abbas sent his negotiators — Saeb Erekat, Majed Faraj and Maen Erekat — to Washington, where they met with US Secretary of State John Kerry a week ago last Wednesday. US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki described the more than two-hour meeting as “constructive”. Abbas then prepared to obtain an Arab mandate, which seems guaranteed in advance, for his plans from the 142nd session of the Arab foreign ministers conference, held in Cairo this week.

However, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power poured cold water over the Palestinian Authority (PA) president’s bid to obtain US backing for his plan, which he intends to put before the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly. The proposal would end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza within three years, during which period negotiations would resume within three months with the occupying power over its borders with the Palestinian state.

“We don’t think there are shortcuts or unilateral measures that can be taken at the United Nations or anyplace else that will bring about the outcome that the Palestinian people most seek,” Power said in a press conference last week. “To think that you can come to New York and secure what needs to be worked out on the ground is not realistic.”

This clearly translates into an unequivocal US “No.” The Palestinian president’s new plan has run up against the same American wall that Palestinian negotiators have faced since negotiations were adopted as a strategic approach. The Zionist route remains the only way these negotiators can access the White House and the UN Security Council.

There can be only one explanation for this plan. It is in fulfilment of a Palestinian promise not to resist the occupation and to offer the occupying power the opportunity to agree to yet another futile round of negotiations. Such negotiations will give Israel the time it needs to turn the Givaot colony into a major settler city on the 4,000 dunams of Palestinian land that it has just seized by declaring it “state land”.

The purpose of this appropriation is to separate the Hebron and South Bethlehem governorates in the West Bank. It is also a means to deflect international humanitarian pressure in reaction to Israeli war crimes in Gaza, to evade Israel’s obligations to the truce agreement with the resistance in Gaza, and to fuel internal Palestinian tensions until they reignite once more.

It was not Hamas or the resistance that described Abbas’s new plan as a “spurious process”. It was independent Palestinian figures who expressed their views in a statement read out by Mamdouh Al-Akr, general commissioner of the Independent Organisation of Human Rights, on 2 September in Ramallah. They called for an urgent meeting of the unified leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), in accordance with the Cairo agreement of 2011, so that it can serve as a frame of reference for the Palestinian will and take critical national decisions.

Activating the unified leadership framework of the PLO will put President Abbas’s call for a “single Palestinian central authority”, uniquely empowered to “determine matters of war and peace”, into its concrete national context. Only this context can confer legitimacy on a Palestinian leadership that does not derive its authority from resisting the occupation in all forms.

Moreover, the currently missing “electoral legitimacy” is no longer sufficient in and of itself to allow Palestinian decisions on war and peace to remain in the hands of a leadership that is the product of elections that were held with the approval of the occupation power and in the framework of agreements signed with it.

The Palestinian presidency has dropped the available option of resistance from the lexicon of its negotiating strategy, let alone the option of war, which is not available. The PA, in coordination with the occupation’s security apparatus, has become “the security proxy for the occupying power, rather than an instrument to end the occupation and establish the state,” as Palestinian analyst Hani Al-Masri wrote on 26 August.

As a result, the occupying power, alone, holds the keys to the decision of war, which it continues to repeat, and to the decision of peace, which it still refuses to take.

It appears that President Abbas is working against the tide of Palestinian public opinion, as voiced in a recent survey conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) in Ramallah. According to this poll, only 22 per cent of respondents supported a resumption of negotiations, while 53 per cent said they regarded resistance as “the more effective way” to realise the creation of a Palestinian state.

The results of the PCPSR poll contradict all the charges levelled by the president and Fatah against the resistance and Hamas. Of those polled, 79 per cent believe that the resistance emerged victorious from the recent war, while 86 per cent support the defensive use of rockets.

Respondents gave very low ratings to the performance of the Palestinian president, the PA, the national unity government and the PLO, while the approval rating for Hamas was 88 per cent.

What is the substance of this media campaign against Hamas? It ranges from blaming Hamas for prolonging the war and for the consequent loss of lives and material damage, to adopting the Israeli narrative regarding a Hamas-engineered “coup attempt” against the president in the West Bank and the existence of a “shadow government” in Gaza that prevents the national unity government from functioning.

Then there are the charges of keeping Fatah members under “house arrest”, of “opening fire on civilians”, and of “selling emergency relief on the black market.” On top of these come the accusation that Hamas has violated “the law that defines the colours and dimensions of the flag.”

President Abbas’s instructions to create a “committee to hold a dialogue” with Hamas to discuss the “fate of the national unity government,” as announced by Amin Maqboul, secretary of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, does little to encourage optimism. The national unity government, national reconciliation, the Cairo agreement of 2011, the unified leadership framework that it stipulated, and the reactivation of the PLO, all stand at a crossroads.

This is because of the confrontation stirred by the systematic smear campaign that President Abbas and the Fatah movement are waging against Hamas and the resistance. The campaign has created a media smokescreen behind which the occupation authority can conceal its foot-dragging in carrying out its obligations under the truce agreement, which will probably be echoed in Israeli procrastination on continuing with truce talks due to be held in Cairo.

It should also be stressed that to accuse the resistance and Hamas of prolonging the war is to exonerate the occupation power of responsibility. The Israeli media was quick to capitalise on this, further proof of the extensive coverage the campaign has received.

Indeed, Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev virtually reiterated it verbatim when he said that the Egyptian initiative was on the table from 15 July and that while the Arab League and Israel had approved the initiative, Hamas rejected it, only to turn around and agree to it a month later. “If [Hamas] had agreed then to what it agrees to now” it would have been possible “to avoid all that bloodshed,” he said.

The investigatory commission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council will most likely cite the president’s charges to strengthen the claims of the occupying power, as these charges would be regarded as “testimony of a witness from the other side.”

Abbas says that while the “final toll” from the most recent war in Gaza was 2,140 dead, “if added to the number of dead in previous wars, and those who died during the period of the Shalit problem, the number would be 10,000 dead and wounded, in addition to the 35,000 homes that were totally or partially destroyed.”

When Abbas says that “it would have been possible” to avert the human and material losses of the recent conflict he is effectively blaming the resistance, not the occupation, for the last war on Gaza and the two wars since 2008 that preceded it.

The spectre of discord once again hovers over Palestinian unity, with Palestinian opinion divided over a programme of negotiations versus a programme of resistance. This is the breach through which Arab and non-Arab “axes” penetrate into the Palestinian interior, deepening rather than mending Palestinian rifts.

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories

September 16, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

US-Israeli grip looming over regional banking system

By Nizar Abboud | Al-Akhbar | September 6, 2014

Even though the Arab Bank, considered one of the oldest and largest Arab banks with assets in the tens of billions of dollars, left New York nine years ago because it was investigated on account of its Palestinian connection, US authorities continue to go after the bank threatening it with total bankruptcy. The case is not a new one but its developments demonstrate how far Israeli groups will go to destroy the Palestinian financial sector and even Jordanian and Lebanese banks with the assistance of the US legal system. The trial began in August and it is still going on amid fears of the negative repercussions on the Arab Bank in particular and the Arab banking system in general.

The issue began when lawsuits were filed against the Arab Bank in US courts 10 years ago by 297 Israelis demanding compensation for damages suffered as a result of attacks by Palestinians against Israeli targets in the first half of the last decade. The plaintiffs claim that the bank was responsible for transferring funds to Hamas. The Arab Bank asked the US Supreme Court to review an order issued by a federal court imposing stiff sanctions on the bank for its failure to turn over secret records belonging to its depositors and clients.

The order to impose sanctions on the Arab Bank was issued by U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon. The bank argued that it cannot meet the demands of US authorities without violating Jordan’s banking secrecy laws which will subject it to criminal fines. It argued that Judge Gershon’s ruling means that all foreign banks are subject to the same destructive pattern of indictments. The prosecutor can ask any foreign bank to hand over all their clients’ statements and if the bank refuses, it will be sanctioned.

The Arab Bank appealed the sanctions order to the Supreme Court, but the court refused to hear the appeal in early July. Jordan asked for President Barack Obama’s help by recommending that the Supreme Court order Judge Gershon to reconsider her ruling and the State Department supported the appeal. But the Justice Department found Gershon’s decision useful in ending bank secrecy worldwide.

The Arab Bank is being tried in a court in Brooklyn, New York under the Anti-Terrorism Act issued in 1990. The charges against the bank include aiding Hamas on three levels.

One, by transferring funds provided by the Saudi Committee to 55 Palestinian families of suicide bombers. Two, by having accounts for dozens of charitable organizations that the Israeli plaintiffs say were a mere front for Hamas. Three, the bank had personal accounts for 30 Hamas leaders, including the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin who had been placed on the US terrorism list since 1995 and the late leader Salah Shehadeh, founder of Hamas’ military wing. According to the prosecutors, the bank knew these people’s relationship to Hamas, designated as a terrorist organization by the US.

The Arab Bank denied the charges saying that no account was opened for a person that was on a US terrorism list. The only exception was one transfer to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s account which was the result of a mistake by an employee. The transfers from the Saudi Committee were part of thousands of transfers that the group made to families in need and therefore for humanitarian purposes. US courts have refused any defense stating that the Arab Bank merely followed local laws in the countries where it operates or that the attacks were part of a historical context of violence in the region that the bank does not bear responsibility for.

The Israeli side had dozens of witnesses including a former official in the Israeli military who told the US District Court in Manhattan that the Jordanian bank transferred millions of dollars to the families of those he described as “suicide terrorists” from Hamas. The money came from Saudi Arabia and Hezbollah-affiliated al-Shahid Foundation during the period between 1998 and 2004, with evidence focused on the period between 2001 and 2004. There were monthly payments from the Saudi Committee at a rate of $140 per family.

The Arab Bank’s defense lawyer said there is no evidence that links the transfers to anti-Israel attacks, warning of the danger of this case that puts the responsibility on the shoulder of every bank employee anywhere in the world to investigate every little thing before completing any transaction or transfer. The bank said in a statement that the case raises very important issues for the international finance system which processes trillions of dollars in transfers each day. Most of these transfers are automated and the plaintiff’s theory, “if adopted by the Court, would undermine the automated compliance systems that regulators around the world require banks to employ, and create vast uncertainty and risk in the international finance system.”

Lawsuit developments

Israeli witness Ronnie Shaked said that Hamas was responsible for every one of the 24 attacks before the court. According to the Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post, this witness is a journalist who had previously served as an Israeli intelligence officer.

Another prosecution witness called Arieh Dan Spitzen said that 18 Hamas members were known by the staff at the Gaza branch of the Arab Bank and it is highly likely that they received thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars through the Arab Bank’s transfers.

The prosecution stressed that the burden of proof is on the bank which is refusing to hand over documents of accounts for individuals who are Hamas members to the court.

The bank’s defense lawyer argued that the prosecution is using Israeli laws and evidence in its suit while the bank is not allowed to rely in its defense on relevant laws in the areas where it operates in Jordan and Lebanon which have bank secrecy rules, concluding that the trial is based on double standards.

The court heard 24 testimonies by Israeli witnesses. The Arab Bank is expected to put on 21 witnesses including the bank’s director general. The defense is expected to challenge the impartiality of Judge Brian Cogan, who described an objection raised by the defense as absurd only to accept it later on without going back to the jury.

If the US lawsuit against the Arab Bank is successful, it will inevitably lead to the bank’s bankruptcy, as it might be forced to pay billions of dollars. It also means trouble for the Jordanian and Palestinian economies, as Israelis are expected to file thousands of lawsuits. The outcome might also force Arab countries to disclose all their bank secrets to the US justice system out of fear that they might be liable to similar lawsuits. This could mean capital flight and bankruptcy for these banks. The Swiss example is not encouraging in withstanding US and even European pressure.

September 6, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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