Israel scores painful own goal in run-up to the World Cup
By James M. Dorsey | The Turbulent World of Mideast Soccer | June 6, 2018
Argentina’s cancellation of a friendly against Israel because of Israeli attempts to exploit the match politically is likely to reverberate far beyond the world of soccer and spotlights the risks of Israeli efforts to persuade the international community to recognize Jerusalem as its capital.
The Argentinian decision suggests that despite the fact several countries, including East European nations, are debating whether to follow US President Donald J. Trump’s decision earlier this year to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state and move the US embassy to the city, Israel is likely to find it difficult to capitalize on the US move in ways that convincingly project widespread international support.
Even worse, the decision illustrates that efforts to force recognition could backfire.
The Argentinian move has buoyed the grassroots Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign that seeks to isolate Israel in non-violent defense of Palestinian rights after Israel has made countering the movement one of its top foreign policy objectives.
“The cancellation of Israel’s ‘friendly’ match with Argentina is a boost to the Red Card Israel campaign, which has called on FIFA to expel Israel – as it expelled apartheid South Africa – due to its violations against Palestinian football and its disregard for FIFA statutes,” BDS said in a statement.
The cancellation is BDS’s greatest success to date. Before that, it had only persuaded a small number of artists and organizations to boycott Israel.
An online campaign late last year convinced New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde to cancel a planned concert in Israel. She followed other artists who have cancelled performances, including Elvis Costello, Lauryn Hill and Gorillaz.
The Argentinian decision has prompted concern that it could become the model for similar efforts in the future. One immediate target could be Israel’s scheduled hosting next year of the Eurovision song contest.
Argentina decided to cancel the match in the run-up to this month’s World Cup in Russia after Israel insisted on moving it from the Mediterranean port city of Haifa, home to Israel’s best stadium, to Jerusalem as part of the Jewish state’s 70th anniversary celebrations. Tickets for the Jerusalem match had sold out quickly.
The Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and Argentinian media said the decision was in response to a series of unidentified “threats and provocations” against star player Lionel Messi and his wife.
“Since they announced they would play against Israel, various terror groups have been sending messages and letters to players on the Argentina national team and their relatives, including clear threats to hurt them and their families. These included video clips of dead children,” said hard-line Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev, whom many hold responsible for Israel’s public relations fiasco.
Ms. Regev was referring to video clips that had been circulated by the Islamic State, including pictures of Mr. Messi in an orange jumpsuit and ones that insinuated his beheading. A Palestinian campaign against playing the match in Jerusalem involved images of Mr. Messi’s white and sky-blue striped jersey stained with red paint resembling blood and threats to burn Messi posters.
The Palestine Football Federation (PFF) had early called on its Argentinian counterpart to cancel the match because of the move to Jerusalem, which it described as a violation of world soccer body FIFA’s principle of a separation of sports and politics.
PFF president Jibril Rajoub also urged Palestinian fans to burn pictures of Messi and replicas of his shirt if he played in the match in Jerusalem.
“He’s a big symbol so we are going to target him personally, and we call on all to burn his picture and his shirt and to abandon him. We still hope that Messi will not come,” Mr Rajoub said after talks with Argentinian diplomats based in the West Bank city of Ramallah prior to the cancellation.
It was FIFA’s ban on political interference in soccer that persuaded Argentine President Mauricio Macri to reject a request by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to pre-empt the cancellation of the match.
The Israeli failure to have the match played in Jerusalem strengthens not only the BDS movement.
It also boosts Mr. Rajoub’s so far unsuccessful effort to persuade FIFA and the International Olympic Committee to impose sanctions against Israel because of the Israeli settlements in occupied territory and travel restrictions on Palestinian players and other allegedly security-related measures that hinder the development of Palestinian soccer.
Mr. Rajoub and a liberal Israeli newspaper put responsibility for the soccer fiasco at the doorstep of Ms. Regev.
“She’s the main culprit for legitimizing Argentina’s decision not to come… Beyond squandering millions in taxpayer money, in forcing the game to move to Jerusalem, Regev displayed gross intervention… If the game had stayed in Haifa, it would have happened… There’s a saying that a thousand wise men can’t rescue a coin thrown into a well by a fool…. All it takes is one fool to burn down a forest,” said Haaretz reporter Uzi Dann in an article entitled, Who Needs BDS: Israel Scores Spectacular Own Goal in Argentina Soccer Fiasco.
“Instead of soccer, Miri Regev wanted politics and she got politics… It’s a great farce that gives immense momentum to the BDS campaign against Israel”, added Itzik Shmuli, a centre-left member of the Israeli parliament.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin appeared to echo the sentiment by saying that “the politicization of the Argentinean move worries me greatly” even if he blamed the Argentinians for involving politics by cancelling the match.
Assertions by Israeli officials that the Argentinian decision had handed a victory to terrorism may go down well with hard-line public opinion in Israel as well as supporters of Israel across the globe but is unlikely to help Israel forge bridges to opponents of its policies or facilitate its efforts to get a broader international buy-in of its insistence that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of the Jewish state.
Israeli opposition leader Avi Gabbay pinpointed the potential fall-out of the cancellation of the match when he warned on Twitter: “We just absorbed a shot in the face. This is not just sports. This, unfortunately, could start an international tsunami.”
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title as well as Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario, Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and the forthcoming China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom
Colombia, the death squads & the US’ human rights double standard
Dan Kovalik | RT | June 7, 2018
Nearly every day, we are bombarded with “news” about problems in Venezuela. And certainly, there are problems, such as food and medicine shortages and skyrocketing inflation. But there is something that is downplayed.
What the press downplays, if it mentions it at all, is the very real and significant ways that US sanctions have contributed to these problems facing Venezuela and how these sanctions are making it nearly impossible for Venezuela to solve these problems.
What the press also fails to mention is the even greater humanitarian issues confronting Venezuela’s next-door neighbor, Colombia – the US’ number one ally in the region and, quite bizarrely, the newest “global partner” of NATO from Latin America. And, the US is very much responsible for these issues as well, but in quite different ways.
The fact is that, by a number of measures, Colombia has one of the worst human rights situations on earth, but you would never know this from watching the nightly news.
First of all, Colombia has the largest number of people forcibly disappeared in all of the Americas – even more than all of the Southern Cone countries combined during the infamous ‘dirty war’ years – at over 60,000.
In addition, Colombia has one of the largest internally displaced populations on earth at well over 7 million – second only to Syria. And, a disproportionate number of these internally displaced are indigenous and Afro-descendants.
Moreover, Colombia ranks 5th in the world for the number of children internally displaced by conflict, with two million boys and girls internally displaced. Quite shockingly, Colombia ranks 3rd in the world for the number of children murdered, with 715 children murdered just last year. Such statistics have led Save The Children to conclude that Colombia is “one of the worst countries to be a child and adolescent in the world.”
Colombia is also one of the worst countries in the world to be a social leader, such as a human rights defender, union leader, indigenous or Afro-Colombian leader. Thus, even after the signing of a peace deal between the Colombian government and FARC guerrillas in 2016, social leaders are being murdered at an alarming rate. Indeed, over 200 social leaders have been killed just since January of 2017. Last year was in fact the worst year on record for human rights defenders in Colombia, with 120 killed in 2017.
Of course, the US has a large responsibility to bear for this awful situation in Colombia, as it has been the intellectual author behind Colombia’s brutal, decades-long war against its own people and has provided billions of dollars of material aid to this war effort. Indeed, since 2000, the US has given Colombia $10 billion in mostly military assistance as part of its counter-insurgency program known as ‘Plan Colombia.’ During the Plan Colombia years, the Colombian military attempted to boost US military assistance by murdering civilians in cold blood and passing them off as left-wing guerillas. It is now believed that the military killed 10,000 civilians in this grisly “false positive” operation.
But the US is also behind an even darker force than the Colombian military – that is, the Colombian paramilitary death squads. While those who live in the more remote parts of Colombia are painfully aware of the paramilitaries’ presence and brutality, the paramilitaries are now a well-kept secret in the more well-to-do parts of Colombia’s big cities and even more so outside of Colombia. Indeed, the Colombian and US governments deny the very existence of these paramilitary groups, and the compliant press is happy to oblige in keeping this dirty secret.
Recently, Colombia’s most prominent human rights defender, Father Javier Giraldo, S.J., spoke about the paramilitary phenomenon of which he is an expert. As he explains, “There are clandestine or semi-clandestine arms of the State, which are the paramilitary groups. Today, it is not tolerated that you refer to them as such, but I still call them paramilitaries, because that is the appropriate term.”
Father Giraldo describes the origin of the paramilitary death squads, a force developed by the United States before the left-wing guerrillas even came into existence in 1964. As Father Giraldo explains:
“In 1962, when Guillermo León Valencia was president, a mission of the North American army, of a special school of war in North Carolina, created after the Second World War to maintain the security of the United States, arrived in Colombia… They analyzed the situation in Colombia and left secret instructions, ordering the Colombian government to begin training mixed groups of civilians and the military, and preparing them for paramilitary terrorist activities to combat the sympathizers of communism.”
“… President Valencia, on Christmas day of the year 1965, issued Decree 3398 with which he changed the name of the Ministry of War to [the Ministry of] Defense, and authorized forming groups of civilians as auxiliaries of the armed forces, the legal basis of paramilitarism.”
“… The United States began to direct the entire security apparatus in Colombia and its agencies… first with 400 officers of the US Army; today there are at least 800. The paramilitarism that was created at that time, with all the legal support, has been reaffirmed.”
Of course, as Father Giraldo has explained on numerous occasions, the ostensible “sympathizers of communism” targeted by the paramilitaries are trade union leaders, human rights defenders, peasant leaders, and Catholic priests who advocate on behalf of the poor. As for Catholic priests, over 80 have been murdered since 1984 for the crime of advocating on behalf of the poor.
It is now becoming more evident than ever from the fact that there is now a rise in the murder of such social leaders, as well as mass forced displacement, after the disarming of the FARC guerrillas, that it, is the paramilitaries which are responsible for the lion’s share of such human rights abuses in Colombia. But again, you would have no idea about this from reading the newspapers or watching the nightly news. And, Colombians who are suffering at the hands of the paramilitaries are painfully aware of the conspiracy of silence around this issue.
Indeed, when I was recently in Colombia for the first round of the presidential elections, our delegation met with a number of residents of the small town of Suarez (Cauca Department) which had just lost three members of their community to paramilitary violence. One of the members of the community desperately asked us, “what can we do to let the world know of the continued existence of the paramilitaries?” I answered that we have been trying to do just that for many years, though few will hear us out on this issue.
While we were in Colombia, a campaign coordinator for Gustavo Petro, a Colombian presidential candidate, was murdered by paramilitaries the day before the election, and the paramilitary group known as ‘Aguilas Negras’ (Black Eagles) issued a general threat against the supporters of Petro for president just a few days before the May 27 vote.
© Dan Kovalik
If Colombia’s very real human rights and humanitarian crises were given nearly the attention that the problems in neighboring Venezuela receives, the US and Colombian government would at least have some incentive to improve the situation in Colombia and to go after the paramilitary groups which continue to haunt that country. The near complete silence about the staggering violence in Colombia is critical in allowing that violence to continue. Indeed, the paramilitaries have always depended upon being able to operate in the shadows, and the US press is more than happy to oblige them in this effort.
Dan Kovalik teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He is the author of ‘The Plot to Attack Iran.’
Medical Aid for Palestinians attacked by pro-Israel lawyers’ groups
MEMO | June 7, 2018
UK charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) has described allegations of anti-Semitism made by two pro-Israel advocacy groups as an “appalling smear”.
According to a report in the Jewish News, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) and the US-based Lawfare Project this week submitted a 17-page complaint against MAP to the Charity Commission.
The complaint claims that the respected humanitarian NGO is guilty of “racial hatred of Jews”, and claims MAP has “links to Palestinian terrorist groups”.
A MAP spokesperson told the paper: “This appalling smear appears to be part of a wider pattern of attacks on legitimate NGOs. Should the Charity Commission raise points with us, we would be pleased to respond.”
The article says that the pro-Israel activists accuse MAP of giving a “false impression” about the health of Palestinians. UKLFI’s Jonathan Turner said: “Readers of its misleading website would no doubt be surprised to hear that life-expectancy in Gaza in fact compares favourably with Glasgow.”
Turner added that MAP was “abusing its position as a charity to spread false information about Israel”, and using “the halo of its status as a charity to disguise its racial hatred of Israelis and Jews.”
Lawfare Project direct Brooke Goldstein said “it is incumbent on the Charity Commission to take action against MAP’s sinister abuse of charitable funds”.
The timing of the attack on MAP is no coincidence, coming after an appeal by the charity raised more than £1 million following Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian protesters.
MAP medics have been on the ground in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, and the charity’s social media accounts have given vital insights into Israel’s brutal crackdown.
Palestinian MEMO cartoonist detained by Israel forces
MEMO | June 7, 2018
Tapestry narrative cartoon
Acclaimed Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh was detained by Israeli forces last week as he tried to return to his Ramallah home following a trip to Europe, according to his contracted publishing house Just World Books.
Sabaaneh, who regularly draws cartoons for MEMO, was returning from the international cartooning festival in Bastogne, Belgium, on 31 March when Israeli border-control forces held him for five hours at the Allenby Bridge, intimidated him, and confiscated one of his key works, a cartoon in the form of a tapestry narrative.
The cartoonist has used his talent to raise awareness of Israel’s ongoing and illegal occupation of the West Bank and is the Regional Representative in the Middle East for the Washington DC-based Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI).
Last year, Sabaaneh was also honoured as a special guest by the UN at a festival celebrating Palestinian culture, and earlier in 2017 conducted a 15-city speaking tour of America.
This was not the first time Sabaaneh has been detained. In 2013, when trying to return from a trip to Jordan, he was arrested at the border and imprisoned for five months. This particular experience informed a chapter of his recently published book “White and Black: Political cartoons in Palestine” which detailed the plight of Palestinians taken from their loved ones.
Sabaaneh is regularly harassed by both Israeli and Palestinian officials when attempting to cross the border. Israel uses arrest as a means of intimidation, often holding Palestinians for weeks without charge or access to a lawyer.
Israeli raids in Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps are also a daily occurrence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, during which many of the detentions occur.
Yesterday, human rights groups revealed that Israeli occupation forces arrested more than 600 Palestinians in the occupied territories and besieged Gaza Strip last month, including 94 children and nine women.
Read also:
Palestinian activist threatened with death for exposing Israel crimes
Israel seals Palestinian family’s home with them inside
Front door of the Zahida family home
Ma’an – June 7, 2018
HEBRON – A Palestinian family was trapped inside their home and forced to leave through a broken window after Israeli forces welded their front door shut and temporarily detained them inside their home in the southern occupied West Bank district of Hebron on Thursday morning.
The incident took place on the al-Shuhada street in the Old City of Hebron, one of the most heavily militarized streets in the occupied West Bank.
Samer Yusri Zahida told Ma’an that Israeli forces broke into his brother’s house at 8 a.m. on Thursday, forcing him and his three other family members into one room in the house.
After detaining the family for a brief period of time, Israeli forces broke one of the windows in the house and exited through it, allegedly telling the family that if they want to leave the house they must also exit through the window. Israeli forces then sealed the front door to the family’s home.
Zahida noted that the window that was broken did not lead to the main road, but to the neighbor’s house.
Coordinator of the Human Rights Defenders Association in Hebron, Imad Abu Shamsieh, told Ma’an that Israeli forces have been trying to force out the family since they moved in two weeks ago, in what he said was an “attempt to empty the al-Shuhada street of all Palestinian residents and provide it to Israeli settlers as a new residence.”
Palestinian residents of Hebron’s Old City face a large Israeli military presence on a daily basis, with at least 20 checkpoints set up at the entrances of many streets, as well as the entrance of the Ibrahimi Mosque itself.
Additionally, Palestinians are not allowed to drive on al-Shuhada street, have had their homes and shops on the street welded shut, and in some areas of the Old City, are not permitted to walk on certain roads.
Meanwhile, some 800 notoriously violent Israeli settlers in Hebron move freely on the street, drive cars, and carry machine guns.
US using ‘ethnic cleansing’ to set up compliant state in Syria – Vanessa Beeley to RT
RT | June 6, 2018
The US is trying to ethnically cleanse Syria in order to kill off Syrian nationalism and create an obedient state, journalist Vanessa Beeley told RT following a damning report on the US coalition’s military activities in Raqqa.
Beeley, an independent journalist who has covered the war in Syria extensively, told RT that the US, UK and French coalition is using proxy forces to cleanse certain areas of land in the war-torn country in an effort “to replace them with a proxy that will essentially create a US controlled state.”
She was responding to a new Amnesty International report that strongly criticizes the actions of the US-led coalition in its campaign to liberate the previously Islamic State (IS, ISIS/ISIL)-controlled city of Raqqa.
The Amnesty report accused the coalition and its Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Force (SDF) proxies of creating “a level of destruction comparable to anything we’ve seen in decades of covering the impact of wars,” and it says that the coalition’s claims that the bombings were “precise” and caused few civilian casualties do not stand up to scrutiny.
Beeley said that the Amnesty report put “meat on the bones” of previous analysis from on-the-ground journalists and some Russian analysts and commentators. She said that despite the US-led campaign ostensibly being about ridding the area of IS terrorists, it was the terrorists “who were evacuated as priority over the civilians.”
“Civilian property and infrastructure, essential infrastructure like water taps, like water supply units that were keeping civilians alive during the campaign were also being targeted,” she said, adding that it was the SDF forces designating the targets for the US coalition.
“So there’s a degree of collusion here between the US coalition and its proxies forces on the ground,” she said.
Beeley also criticized the reluctance of the British government, in particular, to admit to causing civilian deaths during its military campaign. The UK Ministry of Defense, she said, “did not even admit one civilian death as a result of their “precision” bombing — and then they only reluctantly admitted that they believe one civilian was killed by one of their drone strikes.”
Comparing the American-led military campaign in Raqqa to the Russian and Syrian-led military campaign to liberate east Aleppo, Beeley said that there were different standards set and attempts were made to protect Aleppo civilians.
“What we saw there were the provision of humanitarian corridors for civilians to be able to leave under the cover of the Syrian Arab Army and with the help of the Russian reconciliation teams negotiating with the terrorist and militant extremist factions to allow civilians to leave,” Beeley said. “What we’ve seen in Raqqa is civilians paying smugglers to try and leave during the military campaign, having to cross minefields, being unable to afford the cost of those smuggling groups.”
Beeley also said that Syrian civilians were being forced to return to buildings and areas of Raqqa that had not yet been cleared of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), booby traps and mines left by IS militants.
In contrast, the journalist said that Russian forces “cleared thousands of hectares of those IEDs and booby traps” following their campaigns to liberate Aleppo and Ghouta from IS.
“What we’re seeing here is a disgusting despicable disregard for human life both during the military campaign and even more importantly after the military campaign by the US coalition,” Beeley said.
Watch Vanessa Beeley’s full interview with RT.
‘Yemen killings may be even bigger’
In a separate interview, Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle-East studies at the University of Oklahoma, told RT that the Amnesty report made it clear that there were “massive violations of human rights.” An investigation was unlikely given that the US, Britain and France sit on the UN Security Council, he said.
Landis said he believed the US did make efforts to avoid killing civilians, but that, ultimately, the US-led coalition was “in a hurry.”
“The UN asked them [US coalition] multiple times to give breaks so civilians could get out, but they didn’t want to negotiate with IS, they said they were gonna kill them on the battlefield. They didn’t want them as prisoners in another Guantanamo and this led to a situation where the US was eager to finish it off, did not want to allow a break, did not want UN workers to go into Raqqa because they were going to see the devastation,” he said.
Landis compared the destruction to that caused by the US-supported, Saudi-led coalition in Yemen: “What’s taking place in Yemen may be even bigger, but we don’t even know because reporters aren’t being allowed in there – but an entire population is being starved.”
“Half a million Yemenis have gotten cholera and there isn’t the proper medicine to fix them and heal them and this is a terrible, devastating war crime because it’s voluntary. It doesn’t have to happen. People don’t have to be starved. There’s a blockade going on,” he said.
“We know that US special forces are helping the Saudis now in Yemen. Is the killing in Yemen more clean than the killing in Syria? It’s hard to believe it is – and we’ll find out the ultimate body count, I guess in the end,” Landis added.
Poll: 61% of Israel support military response to Gaza protests
MEMO | June 6, 2018
The majority of Israelis support Israel’s military response against the Great Marches of Return, a new poll revealed.
The poll was conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University between 28-30 May and included a sample of 600 people.
According to the monthly Peace Index a majority of respondents believed the Israeli military’s use of force against unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza was “proportionate”.
The poll revealed that 61 per cent of Israeli Jews believe “the Israeli army’s handling of the Palestinian protests near the border fence is correct, and that the force used against the demonstrators is also correct” however, 92 per cent of Arabs in Israel believe the Israeli army used excessive force.
A majority of Israelis, 68 per cent, believe the demonstrations were planned by Hamas, while 62 per cent of Arabs believe the protests resulted from “despair”.
Asked about the living conditions in the Gaza Strip, the index showed that half of Israelis believe the authorities should work to alleviate the hardship in Gaza by facilitating the freedom of movement and the entry of goods.
Of those surveyed, 43 per cent believe there is a possibility of a full-scale war with Iran, while more than half think Israel is ready to protect its citizens if such unrest broke out.
Israeli occupation forces ‘execute’ 21-year-old Palestinian ‘wanted for stone throwing’
Palestine Information Center – June 6, 2018
RAMALLAH – The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) on Wednesday morning shot and killed a Palestinian youth in Nabi Saleh village, northwest of Ramallah.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health, quoting the Palestinian Civil Liaison, announced in a brief statement the death of a Palestinian youth who was shot by IOF soldiers in Nabi Saleh.
Local sources said that the IOF soldiers opened fire at Izz al-Tamimi, 21, injuring him with three live bullets, one of which to the head.
Al-Tamimi has been long chased by the IOF before he was killed during a raid into Nabi Saleh, Quds Press reported.
According to locals, the IOF left al-Tamimi to bleed for more than half an hour and threatened to shoot anyone who would provide him medical treatment or take him to the hospital.
Al-Tamimi’s family said in a statement that the IOF opened fire at their son at very close range, stressing that what happened was a “deliberate execution”.
They affirmed that the Israeli Intelligence had repeatedly threatened to kill their son on several occasions.
Palestinian sources said that the IOF handed over al-Tamimi’s body to the Palestinian Civil Liaison before it was transferred to Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah in preparation for the funeral later in the day.
Ma’an :
… According to locals, Tamimi has been wanted by Israeli forces for alleged stone throwing, and soldiers have allegedly attempted to detain him on several occasions.
Another Palestinian whose identity remained unknown was also reportedly wounded with live ammunition on Wednesday morning in the village.
An Israeli army spokesperson told Ma’an that the killing took place during “riots” in Nabi Saleh, during which 10 youth threw stones at soldiers who were conducting “detention operations.”
“During the riot, one Palestinian flanked the troops and hurled a rock at a soldier, hitting him in the head. The soldier then responded with live fire, injuring the Palestinian, who was was injured and treated by Israeli forces at the scene, but later died,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added that they would look into reports of a second Palestinian being injured with live ammunition during the clashes.
IMEMC :
… Palestinian medics were called to the scene, but the soldiers also attacked them, preventing them from approaching the seriously wounded young man, who succumbed to his injuries.
Eyewitnesses said the soldiers assassinated the Palestinian, directly and repeatedly firing at him, in addition to attacking dozens of Palestinians.
The soldiers also shot another Palestinian with a live round and caused many others to suffer the effects of teargas inhalation, during protests that took place after the soldiers killed Tamimi.
The Palestinian worked as a car mechanic, and was chased and wanted by the army for 18 months, in which he managed to escape numerous attempts to arrest him.
He was also shot and injured by Israeli army fire several times when the soldiers were trying to abduct him, and the army abducted his brother to pressure him into turning himself in to the army.
A few weeks ago, the army called one of his brothers, and told him that “Ezzeddin will face the same fate of Ahmad Nasr Jarrar, who was killed by the soldiers on February 06, 2018, if he does not surrender.
After the soldiers killed Ezzeddin, they invaded many homes, including his home, and occupied their rooftops.
Palestinians thank Argentina for cancelling match with Israel
MEMO | June 6, 2018
Palestinians have thanked the Argentinian football team and star forward Lionel Messi for cancelling their friendly match with Israel scheduled for Saturday, according to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
Football fans and Palestinian human rights supporters had urged the Argentinian team to cancel the match, set to take place in an Israeli stadium built on the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Al-Maliha in response to Israel’s violent response to peaceful protesters on the Gaza border that left over 120 dead.
Initially set to be held in Haifa, the Israeli government moved the match to the Jerusalem village, offering the organisers $760,000 in compensation. Israel was reportedly already paying Argentina $3 million to play the match as part of its celebrations to mark 70 years of its independence, when it forcibly expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes.
“This was all part of the Israeli apartheid regime’s sports-washing policy to use international sporting events to cover up its war crimes and egregious human rights violations against Palestinians. The fact that Argentina fans and human rights activists around the world succeeded in thwarting it gives us a lot of hope,” Omar Barghouti of PACBI said.
In a video message, the football team from the Palestinian town of Nabi Saleh, in the occupied West Bank, thanked Argentina and Lionel Messi. Nabi Saleh is home to Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian minor serving months in an Israeli prison for slapping a heavily-armed Israeli occupation soldier invading her property.
“You scored a goal for freedom, justice and equality,” the video states.
Palestine is not occupied, it is colonised
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | June 5, 2018
June 5 2018 marks the 51st anniversary of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
But, unlike the massive popular mobilisation that preceded the anniversary of the Nakba – the catastrophic destruction of Palestine in 1948 – on 15 May the anniversary of the occupation is hardly generating equal mobilisation.
The unsurprising death of the ‘peace process’ and the inevitable demise of the ‘two-state solution’ has shifted the focus from ending the occupation per se to the larger, and more encompassing, problem of Israel’s colonialism throughout Palestine.
Grassroots mobilisation in Gaza and the West Bank, and among Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Naqab Desert, are, once more, widening the Palestinian people’s sense of national aspirations. Thanks to the limited vision of the Palestinian leadership those aspirations have, for decades, been confined to Gaza and the West Bank.
In some sense the ‘Israeli occupation’ is no longer an occupation as per international standards and definitions. It is merely a phase of the Zionist colonisation of historic Palestine, a process that began over a 100 years ago, and carries on to this day.
“The law of occupation is primarily motivated by humanitarian consideration; it is solely the facts on the ground that determine its application”, states the International Committee of the Red Cross website.
It is for practical purposes that we often utilise the term ‘occupation’ with reference to Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land, occupied after 5 June 1967. The term allows for the constant emphasis on humanitarian rules that are meant to govern Israel’s behavior as the occupying power.
However, Israel has already, and repeatedly, violated most conditions of what constitute an ‘occupation’ from an international law perspective, as articulated in the 1907 Hague Regulations (articles 42-56) and the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention.
According to these definitions, an ‘occupation’ is a provisional phase, a temporary situation that is meant to end with the implementation of international law regarding that particular situation.
‘Military occupation’ is not the sovereignty of the occupier over the occupied; it cannot include the transfer of citizens from the territories of the occupying power to occupied land; it cannot include ethnic cleansing; destruction of properties; collective punishment and annexation.
It is often argued that Israel is an occupier that has violated the rules of occupation as stated in international law.
This would have been the case a year, two or five years after the original occupation had taken place, but not 51 years later. Since then, the occupation has turned into long-term colonisation.
An obvious proof is Israel’s annexation of occupied land, including the Syrian Golan Heights and Palestinian East Jerusalem in 1981. That decision had no regard for international law, humanitarian law or any other law.
Israeli politicians have, for years, openly debated the annexation of the West Bank, especially areas that are populated with illegal Jewish settlements, which are built contrary to international law.
Those hundreds of settlements that Israel has been building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not meant as temporary structures.
Dividing the West Bank into three zones, areas A, B and C, each governed according to different political diktats and military roles, has little precedent in international law.
Israel argues that, contrary to international law, it is no longer an occupying power in Gaza; however, an Israel land, maritime and aerial siege has been imposed on the Strip for over 11 years. From successive Israeli wars that have killed thousands, to a hermetic blockade that has pushed the Palestinian population to the brink of starvation, Gaza subsists in isolation.
Gaza is an ‘occupied territory’ by name only, without any of the humanitarian rules applied. In the last 10 weeks alone, over 120 unarmed protesters, journalists and medics were killed and 13,000 wounded, yet the international community and law remain inept, unable to face or challenge Israeli leaders or to overpower equally cold-hearted American vetoes.
The Palestinian Occupied Territories have, long ago, crossed the line from being occupied to being colonised. But there are reasons that we are trapped in old definitions, leading amongst them is American political hegemony over the legal and political discourses pertaining to Palestine.
One of the main political and legal achievements of the Israeli war – which was carried out with full US support – on several Arab countries in June 1967 is the redefining of the legal and political language on Palestine.
Prior to that war, the discussion was mostly dominated by such urgent issues as the ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinian refugees to go back to their homes and properties in historic Palestine.
The June war shifted the balance of power completely, and cemented America’s role as Israel’s main backer on the international stage.
Several UN Security Council resolutions were passed to delegitimise the Israeli occupation: UNSCR 242, UNSCR 338, and the less talked about but equally significant UNSCR 497.
Resolution 242 of 1967 demanded “withdrawal of Israel armed forces” from the territories it occupied in the June war. Resolution 338, which followed the war of 1973, accentuated and clarified that demand. Resolution 497 of 1981 was a response to Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. It rendered such a move “null and void and without international and legal affect”.
The same applied to the annexation of Jerusalem as to any colonial constructions or any Israeli attempts aimed at changing the legal status of the West Bank.
But Israel is operating with an entirely different mindset.
Considering that anywhere between 600,000 to 750,000 Israeli Jews now live in the ‘Occupied Territories’, and that the largest settlement of Modi’in Illit houses more than 64,000 Israeli Jews, one has to wonder what form of military occupation blue-print Israel is implementing, anyway?
Israel is a settler colonial project, which began when the Zionist movement aspired to build an exclusive homeland for Jews in Palestine, at the expense of the native inhabitants of that land in the late 19th century.
Nothing has changed since. Only facades, legal definitions and political discourse. The truth is that Palestinians continue to suffer the consequences of Zionist colonialism and they will continue to carry that burden until that original sin is boldly confronted and justly remedied.
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From the Archives
Neocons confess: “We did 9/11-anthrax”
By Kevin Barrett | Press TV | September 6, 2014
As the 13th anniversary of the crimes of September, 2001 approaches, the neoconservatives are shrieking from the rooftops – and effectively confessing that they were the real perpetrators of the 9/11-Anthrax false flag operation. (The neocons, you may recall, openly called for a “new Pearl Harbor” in September, 2000 – and got one exactly one year later.)
Every year at this time, the neocons orchestrate and hype a series of public relations stunts designed to magnify fears of “radical Islam” and reinforce their crumbling 9/11-Anthrax cover story. But this year’s propaganda campaign is so extreme that it represents a tacit confession: The neocons know that the truth about the 9/11-Anthrax operation is slowly closing in on them; so they are over-reacting by desperately trying to stoke the dying embers of the so-called War on Terror, in order to maintain the myth that Muslims (rather than neoconservative Zionists) attacked America in the autumn of 2001.
When a hysterical person exhibits guilty demeanor by trying too hard to blame a crime on someone else, that person is almost certainly the real perpetrator. As the neocons try much too hard to blame Islam for 9/11 and “terrorism” in general, their hysteria inadvertently reveals their own culpability. Like Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, the neoconservative movement has blood on its hands and “doth protest too much.” … continue
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Aletho News- MIT Professsor Ted Postol: Patriot Missile Capabilties
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