Saudi tells Israel: No place for Hamas in Middle East
MEMO | June 6, 2017
A Saudi expert has for the first time been interviewed on Israeli television. Abdel Hamid Hakim, who heads the Jeddah-based Institute for Middle East Studies, told Israel’s Channel 2 via Skype that the decision by three Gulf countries to sever relations to Qatar “comes in the framework of a new policy in which there is no room for terrorism.”
Asked what the aim of the Saudi, Egyptian, Bahraini, Emirati step regarding Qatar was, Hakim replied:
“There is a political stance which Saudi, Egypt and the Emirates agreed to, especially after the Riyadh Summit which was the first visit by the new American administration to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that there is no place in the political arena of these countries for terrorism or for groups who use religion for political gains like Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad.”
“I believe these countries took a decision in a step towards peace, and achieving piece in the Middle East.”
He added:
“The first for this is to weed out terrorism. There is no place for any religious group, be it the [Muslim] Brotherhood or any other, which uses religion for political gain or commits terrorism in the name of religion, in the name of resistance or in the name of jihad.”
Question Deleted
By Rima Najjar | CounterPunch | June 5, 2017
For some time now, the discourse on Israel has been shifting from a place where Israeli “hasbara” disinformation had the upper hand no matter where one turned, to a place where Israeli criminal policies are more frankly discussed and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), is now championed by some academic associations, church groups and labor unions in the United States and elsewhere.
Jewish Voice for Peace and other activist groups have come out with statements not only advocating BDS, but also criticizing Zionism and its definition of Jewish nationalism as practiced by the Jewish state. In a letter protesting the cancellation of a hiring search for the ‘Edward Said Professor of Middle East Studies’ professorship at CSU Fresno, Jewish Voice for Peace states: “The Jewish people are not a monolith on this or any other issue.”
In response to these advances in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, one area remains taboo and that is to question (and thereby delegitimize) Israel by opposing its heart of darkness – i.e., its “right to exist” as a Jewish state (a partition of Mandate Palestine) belonging, not to its indigenous population, but to the “Jewish people” worldwide. This right to exist as a Zionist entity presupposes that Jewish communities around the world are a monolith Zionist “nation” in the way Israel defines Jewish identity, which in its corollary, denies the self-determination of Palestinian Arabs in their own homeland.
What’s appalling is that not only is it taboo to discuss the legality and legitimacy of Jewish self-determination, it is also taboo to even ask the question. The following is my answer to a question asked on the social media Q/A service called Quora, which was promptly thrown into the trash bin along with my answer and that of others posted there.
Because Israel’s creation is based on force of arms, Zionist terror and pre-planned ethnic cleansing, that is to say, the near-eradication of Arab Palestine, as well as violations of international law and is therefore an easy target of delegitimazation, it has relied heavily on the Balfour Declaration (1917), which supports the establishment in Palestine of a “Jewish national home” for the “Jewish people” to legitimize itself.
The Balfour Declaration was incorporated by the League of Nations in 1922 into the British Mandate of Palestine (with the caveat that the rights of the absurdly-phrased “non-Jewish communities,” then 90% of Palestine’s population, would be maintained). That document, however, does not translate into “self determination in the form of a Jewish state,” nor was it meant as such, despite its deceptive language .
Jewish identity politics and literature are rife with contradiction, controversy and confusion. But Israel, while denying the legal existence of Palestinian Arabs as “a people,” defines Jewishness through descent – supposedly unbroken bloodlines from antiquity to the present.
The following is quoted from the UNESCO document on Israel and Apartheid found here.
“The State of Israel enshrined the central importance of descent in its Law of Return of 1950 (amended in 1970), which states that: ‘For the purposes of this Law, ‘Jew’ means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.”
Descent is crucial to Jewish identity discourse in Israel because direct lineal descent from antiquity is the main reason given by political-Zionist philosophers for why Jews today hold the right to self-determination in the land of Palestine. In this view, all Jews retain a special relationship and rights to the land of Palestine, granted by covenant with God: some schools of Zionism hold that Israel is the successor State to the Jewish kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon. That claim is expressed, inter alia, in the Declaration of Independence of Israel, which affirms that Jews today trace their ancestry to an earlier national life in the geography of Palestine and therefore have an inalienable right to “return”, which is given precedence over positive law…. That claim to unbroken lineal descent from antiquity attributes collective rights to the “land of Israel” to an entire group on the basis of its (supposed) bloodlines. The incompatible claim that Jewishness is multiracial, by virtue of its character as a religion to which others have converted, is simply absent from this formula.
So where does that leave the Palestinians, the indigenous people of Palestine? Keep in mind that indigeneity is defined as:
… populations composed of the existing descendants of the peoples who inhabited the present territory of a country wholly or partially at the time when persons of a different culture or ethnic origin arrived there from other parts of the world, overcame them, by conquest, settlement or other means, reduced them to a non-dominant or colonial condition; who today live more in conformity with their particular social, economic and cultural customs and traditions than with the institutions of the country of which they now form part, under a state structure which incorporates mainly national, social and cultural characteristics of other segments of the population which are predominant.
(a) they are the descendants of groups, which were in the territory at the time when other groups of different cultures or ethnic origin arrived there;
(b) precisely because of their isolation from other segments of the country’s population they have almost preserved intact the customs and traditions of their ancestors which are similar to those characterised as indigenous;
(c) they are, even if only formally, placed under a state structure which incorporates national, social and cultural characteristics alien to their own.
In 1986, the following rather important line was added;
any individual who identified himself or herself as indigenous and was accepted by the group or the community as one of its members was to be regarded as an indigenous person.
Today, Israel pursues its claim to legitimacy primarily through discrediting Palestinians, the indigenous people, in a relentless, public relations, diplomatic and lawfare campaign, so successful, it has rendered the international community impotent in upholding international law as it applies to the Palestinian people, including the right of self-determination. Lawfare efforts, for example, are currently focused on criminalizing Boycott (BDS) activism.
The European Union Parliament Working Group on Antisemitism has accordingly included in its working definition of anti-Semitism as: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavour”.
In 2016, the United States passed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, in which the definition of anti-Semitism is that set forth by the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism of the Department of State in a fact sheet of June 8, 2010. Examples of anti-Semitism listed therein include: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist”.
In my opinion, Israel will be legitimized only when it stops obstructing the exercise of Palestinian right to self-determination, a right “authoritatively” recognized by international law:
“The status of the Palestinians as a people entitled to exercise the right of self-determination has been legally settled, most authoritatively by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its 2004 advisory opinion on Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
The counterarguments advanced by Israel and supporters to rationalize and legitimize policies that deny Palestinian rights and affirm the rights of “the Jewish people” include claims that the determination of Israel to remain a Jewish State is consistent with practices of other States, such as France; Israel does not owe Palestinian non-citizens equal treatment with Jews precisely because they are not citizens; and Israeli treatment of the Palestinians reflects no “purpose” or “intent” to dominate, but rather is a temporary state of affairs imposed on Israel by the realities of ongoing conflict and security requirements. … A further claim that Israel cannot be considered culpable for crimes of apartheid because Palestinian citizens of Israel have voting rights rests on two errors of legal interpretation: an overly literal comparison with South African apartheid policy and detachment of the question of voting rights from other laws, especially provisions of the Basic Law that prohibit political parties from challenging the Jewish, and hence racial, character of the State.
Yes, Palestine does exist and will continue to exist, because of Palestinians’ incredible steadfastness.
As Rabbi Brant Rosen expressed it:
“The choice we ultimately face is one between a Jewish state vs. international law, justice and human rights for all.”
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
Remembering the Naksa
Image of Israeli soldiers interrogating Palestinians during the 1967 Gaza war [Miren Edurne/facebook]
By Nasim Ahmed | MEMO | June 5, 2017
Fifty years ago this month, Israel launched a war against its neighbours and took control of the parts of Palestine which it had failed to capture during its 1948 “War of Independence”.
What: The Palestinian Naksa (“Setback”)
When: 5 June 1967
Where: Palestine
What Happened?
On 5 June 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria. After knocking out the air defences of these countries, it occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Thus, it had taken control of the final 22 per cent of historic Palestine that it wasn’t able to occupy in 1948.
Nearly 400,000 Palestinians were added to the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced in 1948 and their homes and villages were razed to the ground by the Israelis. Around half were being displaced for the second time in less than 20 years. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine was ongoing (as it is to this day).
The number of Palestinian refugees in the camps operated by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon grew.
The Naksa commemorates this tragic setback in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination.
What Happened Next?
The outcome of the war launched by Israel was, for many of its citizens and supporters, the fulfilment of God’s promise. Adding 44 per cent of the territory allocated by the 1947 UN Partition Plan for a Palestinian state, to the 56 per cent set aside for a Jewish state, marked a new beginning for both Israel and stateless Palestinians.
Within 20 years of being recognised as an independent state, Israel began an occupation that would become the longest in modern history, at 50 years and counting. Palestinians in the “occupied Palestinian territories” were subjected to a brutal Israeli military occupation as well as the activities of armed, right-wing Jewish settlers, for whom Israel’s victory was God’s handiwork and a licence to colonise the land which they believed was promised to them and them alone.
Israel’s already repressive military rule over Palestinians living within its undeclared borders was transferred to the West Bank and Gaza. Very soon, a matrix of control and domination, that included checkpoints, permits and home demolitions, was imposed on the lives of millions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
For the Palestinians, the combination of the Arab defeat during the “Six-Day War”, the repeated failure of the international community to protect their human rights, and Israel’s total colonisation of Palestine, prompted a serious re-evaluation of their situation. Having witnessed the futility of relying on others to end the indignity from which they had suffered for decades, they began to organise politically in an attempt to reverse the losses of 1948 and end their misery and statelessness.
In the years following the Naksa, Palestinian communities in the refugee camps and diaspora began to organise themselves politically and socially. A number of setbacks against the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) did not deter them. Such civil society activities led to the formation of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the late eighties; the popular uprising now known as the First Intifada; and the PLO under the control of the secular Fatah movement gaining recognition by Israel and its allies as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people”. This phase of the political process ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, providing the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with “interim self-governing arrangements”.
Israel arrests hundreds of Palestinians over Facebook posts
MEMO | May 30, 2017
The Israeli occupation authorities have arrested and prosecuted hundreds of Palestinians since 2015 after analysing data on their Facebook pages and judging that they are potential terrorists, Haaretz revealed on Monday.
An investigation by the Israeli journalists Orr Hirschauge and Hagar Shezaf found that Israel has violated its own and international laws regarding the detention of Palestinian youths. The domestic intelligence agency Shabak, apparently, has decided that Palestinians are terrorists if they mention the world “martyr” on Facebook.
They cited the example of a 29-year-old Palestinian woman from Hebron, whose husband was killed in a car accident in Israel in 2010. She was arrested on 2 December, 2015 and said that the Israeli interrogators handed her a screenshot of a Facebook post in which there is a picture of her husband with a caption written by her, “May God unite us in heaven”.
The woman also said that she mentioned the word shahada — “martyrdom” — on Facebook, noting that this worried her interrogators. “I told them it is a word we use regularly,” she said. “The fact that I wrote it on Facebook does not mean I will do anything. Even when someone dies in a car accident we call him shahid (martyr).”
It seems that this was an unacceptable explanation for the Israelis as she was imprisoned under administrative detention for four months with neither charge nor trial. When this term ended, it was renewed. According to the Israeli journalists, when such interrogators fail to obtain the confessions they want from Palestinians over their Facebook posts, they keep them under administrative detention or turn them over to the military courts to be sentenced.
Prior to the launch of Facebook, Israel used to arrest Palestinians on other pretexts, such as contacting organisations hostile to Israel, without specifying the identities of the organisations in question. The Haaretz investigation noted that this woman was arrested in 2008 and spent time in prison over charges of contacting an organisation hostile to Israel.
Israeli military test-fires undisclosed type of missile
RT | May 29, 2017
Israel has conducted a test-launch of a rocket propulsion system of an undisclosed missile type, according to the Israeli Air Force.
The launch took place in the early hours of Monday at a military base in central Israel, the military said on Twitter.
The Air Force didn’t specify what system was tested, only saying that the scheduled launch was “carried out as planned.”
The rocket’s flight was seen by a number of residents, who posted videos of the launch on social media.
It is the first missile firing in the country since January, when the military successfully tested its Magic Wand missile interception system, which it said was close to going into service.
Israel currently uses three different systems of air defense. The Iron Dome system intercepts short-range rockets, the Arrow system deals with ballistic missiles outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, and the David’s Sling system shoots down tactical ballistic missiles, medium- to long-range rockets and cruise missiles.
According to Western media reports, Israel is also in possession of its own Jericho 3 surface-to-surface intercontinental ballistic missile, which is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
The Jericho 3 propulsion system reportedly had a range of 4,000 kilometers in 2013, which has since been increased to over 10,000 kilometers.
Trump’s visit to Israel: How Palestine disappeared from US media coverage
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | May 28, 2017
As if he has, overnight, been transformed into a master politician, Donald Trump’s 27-hour trip to Israel has left many analysts mystified.
Quoting former Israeli political adviser, Mitchell Barack, the New York Times referred to Trump as the “Liberace of world leaders”, in reference to flamboyant, piano player, Wladziu Valantino Liberace. The latter, known as “Mr. Showmanship”, was, at times, the highest paid entertainer in the world and his successful career lasted over four decades.
New York Magazine Online quoted former US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, too, trying to decipher the supposedly complicated persona of Trump.
“Either Trump’s visit was substance-free – or he ‘is being uncharacteristically subtle’ in planting the seeds for new round of peace negotiations,” NYmag quoted and paraphrased Shapiro’s tweets.
“Liberal” US media, which has stooped to many lows in its attacks on Trump – including his family, his mannerism, his choice of words, even mere body language – became much more sober and quite respectful in the way they attempted to analyze his short trip to Israel, and the very brief detour to Bethlehem, where he met with Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas.
“Mr. Trump’s speech at the Israeli Museum was so friendly and considerate of Israeli emotions,” reported the New Your Times, “that one right-wing Israeli legislator described it as deeply expressive of the ‘Zionist narrative’.”
Palestinian emotions, however, were of no consequence, neither to the Trump entourage, nor, of course, to the New York Times or others in mainstream media.
The Washington Post, on the other hand, still found faults, but, certainly not because of Trump’s lack of balance and his failure to deride the Israeli occupation and Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians.
Despite the fact that Trump has, indeed, fully embraced a “Zionist narrative”, and a rightwing version of it (for example, he made no reference to a Palestinian state), he still fell short. His performance at Israel’s national Holocaust Memorial (Yad Vashem) did not impress.
Max Bearak wrote in the Post : “Trump’s entry in the guest book at Israel’s National Holocaust Memorial was strangely upbeat, self-referential and written in his signature all caps: ‘IT IS A GREAT HONOR TO BE HERE WITH ALL OF MY FRIENDS — SO AMAZING & WILL NEVER FORGET!’”
Bearak found such choice of words and the style in which it was written sort of offensive, especially if compared with the supposed thoughtfulness of former President Barack Obama.
In contrast, Obama wrote a significantly longer note, which partly read: “At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man’s potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world.”
Neither then, nor now, did the Washington Post bother to examine the historical context in which this particular sentence was written and find the hypocrisy of the whole endeavour.
If they bothered to ask Palestinians, they would have found a whole different interpretation of Obama’s words.
Indeed, wherever occupied Palestinians look, they find “man’s potential for great evil”: a 400-mile Israeli Wall being mostly built over their land; hundreds of military checkpoints dotting their landscape; a suffocating military occupation, controlling every aspect of their lives. They see the holiest of their cities, Bethlehem and Al-Quds – occupied East Jerusalem – subdued by a massive military force; thousands of their leaders thrown into prison, many without charge or trial. They see siege; an endless war; daily deaths and senseless destruction.
But since none of this matters to the “Zionist narrative”, it subsequently matters so very little to mainstream American media, as well.
Trump’s trip to Israel, however short, was, indeed, a master stroke by the ever-unpredictable Liberace of world politics, although, it takes no particular genius to figure out why.
From an American mainstream media perspective, to be judged “presidential” enough, all US presidents would have to commit to three main policies. They are, in no particular order: privileging the economic business elites, war at will and unconditionally supporting Israel.
So far, US media, which has been otherwise polarized based on political allegiances, has taken a break from its raging conflict over Trump’s presidency, and rallied behind him on two separate occasions: when he randomly bombed Syria and during his visit to Israel.
Ironically, the man has been often judged for lacking substance on numerous occasions in the past. In fact, his trip to Israel was the most lacking and most divisive. However, the fact that he, time and again, reiterated Israeli priorities was all that the media needed to give the man a chance. Their collective verdict seems to rebrand his lack of substance as his unique “subtle” way of making politics.
Israeli media, which is often more critical of the Israeli government than US media ever dare, needed to keep up with its “democratic” tradition. But Trump’s groveling also gave them little room for criticism. The often-impulsive Trump, this time stuck to the script and followed his repeatedly rehearsed speech and media comments to the letter.
But Josefin Dolsten insisted on finding a way to nitpick, composing for the Times of Israel the “7 awkward moments from Trump’s Israel trip.”
One of these awkward moments, Dolsten wrote was “a White House statement listing Trump’s goals for the trip included a hilarious (and juicy!) typo: ‘Promote the possibility of lasting peach’ between Israel and the Palestinians. Yes, we get it — it meant to say peace, but who’s to say the two sides can’t bond over some delicious fruit?”
For Palestinians, it must not be easy to find the humour in these tough times. Hundreds of their prisoners, including their most popular leader, Marwan Barghouthi, were enduring a prolonged and life-threatening hunger strike in which they were making the most basic demands for better treatment, longer visitation hours with their families and ending of arbitrary detentions.
More telling, on the day Trump, along with rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, lectured Palestinians on peace, a 17-year-old Tuqua Hammad was shot for allegedly throwing stones at Israeli military vehicles at the entrance of her village of Silwad, near Ramallah.
Tuqua “was shot in the lower extremities and Israeli troops prevented a Palestinian ambulance from accessing the victim to treat her,” Ma’an news agency reported.
Merely a few miles away, Trump was writing his remarks after visiting Israel’s Holocaust Museum. Regrettably, he failed to meet the expectations of the Washington Post, for unlike Obama, he was not poignant enough in his language and style.
The irony of the whole story is inescapable; but American media cannot see this, for it, too, seems to follow a script, in which Palestinian rights, dignity and freedom are hardly ever mentioned.
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Book Review & Summary
Calling of an Angel: The True Story of Rene Caisse and an Indian Herbal Medicine Called Essiac (1988)
Dr. Gary L. Glum – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary
Lies are Unbekoming | October 17, 2026
On June 10, 1975, Dr. Chester Stock, a vice president at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, wrote to a Canadian nurse named Rene Caisse: “Enclosed are test data in two experiments indicating some regressions in sarcoma 180 of mice treated with Essiac.” The sentence sat in a letter from one of the world’s largest private cancer research centers, concerning an herbal tea an elderly English woman had learned from an Ojibwa medicine man at a northern Ontario mining camp in the 1890s. The tests were terminated the following year after Sloan-Kettering admitted, in sworn affidavit three years later, that they had prepared the injectable solution improperly from the dried material supplied — freezing and thawing the herb rather than boiling it as Rene had instructed. By the time Calling of an Angel was published in 1988, Rene Caisse had been dead for a decade, having treated thousands of cancer patients across fifty-six years in her Bracebridge, Ontario kitchen, never charging a fee, and refusing every offer — from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the National Cancer Institute, Merck, Parke Davis, and private corporations dangling contracts up to $1 million — to release her formula before the medical establishment admitted her remedy had merit. … continue
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