Senior UN officials have urged the Israeli government to “halt plans to transfer Palestinian Bedouins” in the central West Bank.
In a joint press release Wednesday, the Humanitarian Coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, James W. Rawley, and the Director of UNRWA Operations West Bank, Felipe Sanchez, expressed their “grave concern” about the proposed expulsions.
According to Rawley, “Israeli practices in Area C, including a marked increase of demolitions and confiscations of donor-funded structures in the first quarter of 2015, have compounded an already untenable situation for Bedouin communities.”
46 Palestinian Bedouin communities – some 7,000 people – are slated for transfer to three proposed “relocation” sites. In March, the UN Secretary-General expressed concern that the plans “may also be connected with settlement expansion”, and noted that “forcible transfer” is “a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
The UN agencies contextualise the threatened expulsions with a “backdrop of a discriminatory zoning and planning regime that facilitates the development of illegal Israeli settlements at the expense of Palestinians, for whom it is almost impossible to obtain permits for construction.”
Sanchez warned that “we are fast approaching the point of irreparable damage.”
As occupying power, Israel is obligated to ensure the wellbeing of these communities and to respect international law. I strongly urge the Israeli authorities to halt all plans and practices that will directly or indirectly lead to the forcible transfer of the Bedouin and call on the international community to support the Bedouins’ wish to remain where they are, pending their return to the Negev, and prevent this transfer from occurring.
May 20, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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MPCID and the Military Prosecution refuse to do the bare minimum required in the investigation of the death of a protester: find out where the shooters stood
This blog has dealt more than once with cases in which MPCID negligence and intentional delaying seemed so exceptional, that you had to wonder whether they involved negligence or a calculated attempt to disrupt the investigation. The case before us, that of Palestinian protester Bassem Abu Rahmeh, moves in the same trajectory.
The Abu Rahmeh case, discussed here previously, is really quite simple. On April 17th, 2009, Abu Rahmeh protested near the separation wall in his village, Bil’in, in the West Bank. (We note that at the time, the wall followed a route that in 2007 the HCJ ruled to change, but the IDF was in no hurry and changed it only in 2011.) Abu Rahmeh was unarmed, and did not employ any violence, and yet, at the moment he protested the security forces shooting another demonstrator, an Israeli security forces personnel in uniform fired an extended-range tear gas grenade (a grenade used to disperse demonstrators from a distance) directly at him. The grenade hit Abu Rahmeh in the chest, and quickly led to his death.
Note and this is important: these facts are not being disputed. Even so, six years and counting after Abu Rahmeh’s death, the IDF – through MPCID and the Military Prosecution – is still doing its best to avoid trying the man who shot him. To quote the appeal we submitted to the HCJ with B’Tselem in April 2015, “From the chain of events, it is evident that this is (at best) a case of severe negligence on part of the respondents, and contempt of a most severe case of killing an unarmed protester, who was protesting peacefully. Military and civil law enforcement entities have allowed the case of a killing of an innocent man to fall through the cracks time and again, requiring the court to intervene repeatedly… Abu Rahmeh was killed by IDF soldiers who – at best – shot him negligently, and the investigation of the responsibility for his death was smothered for years by the investigative and prosecutorial bodies’ inexcusable red-tape behavior”.
Here is the chain of events, in chronological order:
17.4.2009 – An Israeli security forces personnel in uniform shoots Abu Rahmeh. The shooting is documented by three separate video cameras.
Due to the investigation policy at the time – which was changed only in 2011 – MPCID does not automatically investigate in case of death, unless explicitly ordered to by the Military Prosecution. The latter refuses to order an investigation of this case.
28.3.10 – Ten months after Abu Rahmeh’s death, the Military Prosecution provides an unusual argument for its refusal to order an MPCID investigation: the possibility that the grenade hit the fence and then ricocheted at Abu Rahmeh; the chance that the fact that Abu Rahmeh was standing on a rock when he was shot caused him “to converge” with the grenade’s course.
A reasonable person might think this is precisely what an investigation is supposed to find, since an unarmed demonstrator was shot during a non-violent demonstration, but apparently reasonable persons need not apply for work at the Military Prosecution.
3.6.10 – In response to the Military Prosecution’s peculiar statement, human rights organizations Yesh Din and B’Tselem do their work for them, and send the prosecution an expert opinion based on forensic architecture. As noted, Abu Rahmeh’s death was documented by three separate cameras, and the experts used the three videos to build a simulation showing where the shooter stood. According to this expert opinion, we don’t know the shooter’s identity, but we know where he was standing.
11.7.10 – Based on the expert opinion – new evidence obtained 15 months after the shooting – the Prosecution orders an MPCID investigation.
28.6.11 – Nearly a year after an MPCID investigation it initiated and 26 months after the killing, the Chief of the IDF Ballistics Department informs MPCID that “the only way such ordnance reached the target is if it was fired directly”, rather than above or below the target. That is, MPCID’s expert contradicts the Military Prosecution’s position from March 2010. We learned this bit only after the investigation was closed.
3.2.13 – Chief of the IDF’s Photo Reconnaissance Department informs MPCID that IDF orders forbid shooting directly at persons with this ordnance, and recommends the MPCID reconstruct the scene to establish where each of the shooters stood at the time of the shooting. MPCID refrained from conducting this elementary investigation. The Chief’s opinion came almost four years after the killing of Abu Rahmeh and almost 20 months after the Chief of the IDF’s Ballistics Department rules that the tear gas canister was indisputably fired directly at Abu Rahmeh.
3.3.13 – Some three years after the beginning of the MPCID investigation, we petition (with B’Tselem) the HCJ, demanding the Military Prosecution conclude the unending investigation and serve indictments – at the very least for negligent manslaughter.
September 2013 – The Military Prosecution closes the investigation, claiming it is unable to determine who shot Abu Rahmeh.
29.10.13 – Given the Prosecution’s decision to close the case, the HCJ rules that our petition is no longer relevant, but rules that “we are of the opinion that if there is an appeal, it must be dealt with speedily, so as not to delay proceedings further”.
4.11.13 – We request the investigative materials for preparation of an appeal.
27.3.14 – Five months pass before we receive part of the materials – not all of it.
7.4.14 – We request the missing material. Ten days before the fifth anniversary of Abu Rahmeh’s death.
27.5.14 – The missing material arrives.
24.7.14 – We appeal, with B’Tselem, including an expert opinion responding to the IDF’s opinion.
Our demands in the appeal were fairly simple: there are three suspects who admitted to firing extended-range tear gas grenades, and we wanted MPCID to carry out a complimentary investigation and implement the Chief of the Photo Reconnaissance Department’s recommendation to reconstruct the scene of the shooting to determine where each suspect stood. According to the data we gave MPCID, this would be enough to determine the identity of the shooter who killed Bassem Abu Rahmeh.
Furthermore, during the investigation of one of the three soldiers, he said that he not only fired tear gas grenade but he also took photos of the incident, and since MPCID did not bother to locate those photos, we wanted them to make an effort to. Let’s consider this for a moment: the Military Police’s Criminal Investigative Division heard, during an investigation of a killing, about the existence of evidence – and made no effort to obtain it.
A third point made in the appeal is the commanders’ responsibility for Abu Rahmeh’s death. An extended-range gas grenade is to be used at range of 200 meters or more; the demonstrators were much closer. From the investigation files we received we learned that most of the soldiers suspected of firing tear gas grenades during the demonstration complained during the investigation that they did not receive proper training on using the weapons they used, and furthermore, that they complained about this to their commanders previously. MPCID did not bother to investigate the commanders about this matter. Given that the investigation meandered on for more than three years, it’s will to be difficult to claim it was for lack of time.
Although the HCJ ordered that in the event of an appeal against the decision to close the case “it must be dealt with speedily,” and although our appeal included rather simple and clear demands, eight months have passed without any response from the prosecution.
Therefore, at the end of March, 2015 – nearly six years after Bassem Abu Rahmeh was killed – we were forced to petition the HCJ again, this time demanding a decision on the appeal.
During these six years, the Military Prosecution did its best not to investigate a relatively simple case of a man killed; six years in which human rights organizations had to provide the Prosecution with the evidence it itself did not bother to collect. During these six years, against the recommendation of IDF officers, MPCID did not reconstruct the scene of the crime to determine who stood where. In these six years, the IDF’s official investigative bodies did their negligent best to prevent the trial of a man who killed a non-violent protestor.
But when MPCID and the Prosecution carry out an investigation so unwillingly and so negligently it can barely be called an investigation, they put the soldiers at risk. To avoid a situation in which soldiers are tried outside their country, the investigation of the crime they carried out must be thorough and swift. No reasonable person would call the farce carried out by MPCID and the prosecution in the Abu Rahmeh case thorough or swift. If this is how they handle an investigation of a death, how do they investigate lesser offenses?
May 20, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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Omran Omar Abu Dheim, 41, from the Jabal al-Mukabbir neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem
JERUSALEM – Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian man in the Al-Tur neighborhood on the Mount of Olives east of the Old City of Jerusalem after he allegedly attempted to run over border guard police officers with his vehicle.
Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Ma’an the man tried to run over two police officers with his car, leaving them moderately injured. Witnesses told Ma’an that Israeli officers then opened fire at a young man in a grey Land Cruiser at the main crossroads of Al-Tur, critically injuring him.
The Israeli forces sealed the area, preventing locals from accessing the injured young man to give him first aid. The young man succumbed to his wounds shortly after he was shot.
The forces reportedly fired stun grenades at those who attempted to access the man after he was shot, head of a local follow-up committee of Al-Tur, Mufid Abu Ghannam, told Ma’an.
Locals identified him as Omran Omar Abu Dheim, 41, from the Jabal Al-Mukabbir neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem.
An eyewitness denied the Israeli claims that the driver was trying to run over Israeli border guard officers.
“He was trying to make a U-turn in the middle of the road,” the witness claimed.
Targeting witnesses
Israeli forces later raided several commercial stores in Al-Tur, confiscating surveillance cameras which held footage of the shooting of Abu Dheim by Israeli forces. Al-Tur committee head Abu Ghannam told Ma’an that Israeli forces, intelligence officers, and undercover officers were deployed in the neighborhood after the shooting and raided all shops near the scene of the crime. The officers confiscated all surveillance cameras “which documented the killing of Abu Dheim,” Abu Ghannam added. Abu Dheim’s vehicle was also confiscated. Palestinian shop owners have been targeted by Israeli forces in the past when private shop surveillance cameras capture incidents involving Israeli forces. The Israeli military ordered shop owner Fakher Zayed to dismantle his surveillance cameras after capturing footage of Israeli forces shooting and killing two Palestinian teenagers during a demonstration in May 2014. Zayed was interrogated, threatened and ordered to remove his security cameras in 24 hours, and had his ID withheld, Human Rights Watch reported at the time.
Abu Dheim’s death and alleged attack are currently under investigation, Israeli sources said.
May 20, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Video footage surfaced last week showing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) treating a wounded anti-Assad Syrian rebel, following a UN report at the end of last year which found that the IDF and the Syrian rebels (including ISIS) were in regular contact. The Times of Israel reported on this latest video in an article titled,IDF posts footage of medics saving Syrian rebel in Golan:
“The IDF on Saturday released rare footage of its medics performing a life-saving procedure on one of the most severely wounded Syrian combatants medical personnel have encountered in the Golan Heights… The man, a Syrian rebel who belongs to an unnamed organization fighting against the Assad regime and its allies, received treatment at the border and then inside Israel, and was ultimately able to return to Syria… Since the start of the civil war in 2011, the IDF has treated an estimated 1,600 non-combatants and anti-Assad rebels… Although Israel’s treatment of militants from Syria — many of whom are believed to belong to Islamist organizations such as the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front — may seem bizarre given the animosity these types of groups have expressed for the Jewish state in the past, Israel has approached the issue from a humanitarian point of view.”
The Times of Israel tries to spin Israel’s assistance to the Syrian rebels as purely “from a humanitarian point of view”, in reality however, Israel supports the Syrian opposition for its own geopolitical ends. Weakening the Syrian regime has been a geopolitical objective of the Israeli establishment for decades, with strategic papers dating back to the 1980’s detailing this goal. Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist who had close connections to the Foreign Ministry in Israel, wrote an article in 1982 which was published in a journal of the World Zionist Organisation titled: “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”. In it, Yinon outlines that the “dissolution of Syria and Iraq” are “Israel’s primary” objectives in the region:
“The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target.” (p.11.)
Israel’s strategic desire to weaken both Syria and Iraq was again reiterated in 1996 when a study group led by neocon Richard Perle prepared a policy document for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu titled:
‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’. The document states:
“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”
More recently, Israeli officials have publically revealed their desire to topple the regime in Damascus and break the alliance between Iran, Syria and Hezbollah. In an interview in 2013, the Israeli Ambassador to the US at the time Michael Oren publically expressed that Israel “always wanted Bashar Assad to go”, adding that“the greatest danger to Israel is the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut.”
Israel has been aiding the Syrian opposition with more than just medical assistance since the start of the Syrian proxy war however, as Tel Aviv has bombed Syrian territory repeatedly in addition to providing anti-Assad forces with arms. In August of last year, Sharif As-Safouri, the commander of the Free Syrian Army’s Al-Haramein Battalion at the time, revealed that he had “entered Israel five times to meet with Israeli officers who later provided him with Soviet anti-tank weapons and light arms”, as the Times of Israel reported.
Tel Aviv has also been accused of creating and facilitating the rise of ISIS itself. The chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, stated that ISIS was created and supported by Israel, Britain and the US in order to achieve these states own objectives. A report that seemed to emerge from Gulf News in 2014 also asserted that the leader of ISIS and the new so-called caliph, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, was trained by the Mossad, although some have questioned the validity of this report. It should also be noted that some news reports assert that Baghdadi was seriously injured or even killed by a US drone strike in April.
There is no question that Israel is playing a prominent role in the attempted destruction of the Syrian state, and is guilty of destroying the lives of millions of people through their support of anti-Assad mercenaries. Syrians are now the second largest refugee population on the planet according to a UN report (only second to Palestinians), all thanks to the NATO/Israeli/Saudi axis of evil which has funded and supported rebel armies in Syria.
May 20, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Wars for Israel | ISIS, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Zionism |
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Once again, The New York Times is taking up the issue of divestment debates on college campuses, subjecting readers to yet another discussion of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and how the boycott movement affects student feelings.
For the third time in as many months, the Times has published a prominently displayed article on the subject. The latest is titled “Campus Debates on Israel Drive a Wedge Between Jews and Minorities;” it appears on page 1 of the print edition and notes that many minority organizations are now supporting Palestinian rights and this “drives a wedge between many Jewish and minority students.”
It is difficult to understand why the Times gives such play to this story, which rehashes material from earlier ones centered on debates at UCLA and Stanford, but all the articles take aim at the divestment effort. The previous ones attempted to connect the boycott movement (known as BDS for boycott, divestment and sanctions) with anti-Semitism (see TimesWarp posts here and here); this one tells us that the movement is divisive.
Each of the stories is notable for avoiding the substance of the campus debates. In the latest article, for instance, we learn only that students are objecting to “what they see as Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians” and that “they have cast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a powerful force’s oppression of a displaced group.”
Readers would never know that students are motivated by the facts on the ground: the brutality of the occupation, the horrific attacks on Gaza, and a racist system that a South African jurist recently called “infinitely worse than those committed by the apartheid regime of South Africa.”
The Times obscures these facts in its daily reports from Israel and in its discussions of BDS, focusing instead on abstractions and political maneuverings. It attempts to change the subject from the very real Israeli oppression of Palestinians to talk of campus strife over the issue.
Meanwhile, it ignores another, more pernicious, BDS debate unfolding in the legislative bodies from Congress to state assemblies and senates. In these halls, Israel supporters are promoting attempts to outlaw and rein in BDS.
The U.S. House and Senate recently passed amendments authorizing negotiators for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership bill to push for efforts that would normalize trade with Israeli settlements on Palestinian land (even though these have been declared illegal under international law), effectively erase the boundaries between the West Bank and Israel and punish companies that resist collaboration with the occupation.
The House amendment openly identifies BDS as a target, saying that negotiators should discourage “politically motivated efforts to boycott, divest from or sanction Israel.” One observer has noted that some of the language in the amendments is identical to that in an Israeli bill adopted in 2011.
State legislatures, such as those in Tennessee and Indiana, are taking aim at BDS, with bills declaring that the movement is anti-Semitic and requiring state pension funds to withdraw money from companies that boycott Israel. The Tennessee bill (and the Congressional amendment) includes passages taken directly from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2014 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
There is something askew here: The Times finds the BDS debate newsworthy when it takes place on college campuses but not worth mentioning when it shows up in legislative bodies, even at the federal level. It may be that such coverage would bring inconvenient facts to light—Israeli breaches of international law, for instance, and European restrictions on trade with settlements.
We can trace a link from Israel to lobbyists in the United States and from the lobbyists to the halls of Congress and state legislatures. It appears to connect also with The New York Times, where we find some of the familiar techniques for protecting Israel in play: avoidance and diversion.
Thus Times readers, uninformed about the full extent of Israeli atrocities in the occupied Palestinian territories (and within Israel proper), are directed away from the facts on the ground. They are sidetracked into discussions of anti-Semitism or divisiveness, all part of an effort to take the heat off Israel.
May 20, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Israel, New York Times, Palestine, Zionism |
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Haneen Al Zoubi in the US
Haneen Al Zoubi, champion of democracy and embattled Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, spoke in the northeastern US in late April. Al Zoubi is from Nazareth in the Galilee, northern Israel/Palestine, whose population stubbornly remains 50% Palestinian Arab despite nearly 70 years of intensive Judaization, to the consternation of Israel. She is an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state, and its oppression of the Palestinians, be they citizens, under occupation or in exile. She was aboard the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara in 2010 as it led a flotilla attempting to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Israeli commandos boarded it on the high seas and killed 9 activists; two days later she attempted to describe it to the Knesset and was vilified and physically attacked in a tumultuous session. Al Zoubi’s views and activism have made her an object of fear and loathing in Israel, the target of attempts to limit her parliamentary privileges, to prevent her from running in elections, to remove her citizenship; and the target of racist and sexist diatribes, death threats and physical attacks.
Israel’s antipathy toward its Palestinian citizens arises of course from its definition as the state of the Jewish people rather than of its citizens. The current radical antagonism has been building since the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Israel envisioned a “peace without Arabs,” as Israeli ex-patriate scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin put it.1 The Oslo Accords did not recognize the Palestinian Arabs as equal inhabitants of historic Palestine, and the injustice done them by the establishment of Israel. Rather they expressed the idea of “separation,” which would remove the Palestinian Arabs from Israel’s midst and let it continue its separate, Zionist, Jewish destiny. The principle of “separation” introduced “a new mood of intolerance towards the Arab minority inside Israel,” as veteran journalist Jonathan Cook observed.2 This led to increased repression, which escalated sharply with the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in September, 2000, and since, from the suppression of the al-Aqsa intifada, to the 2006 attack on Lebanon, to the massacres of Gaza in 2009, 2012 and 2014.
Al Zoubi spoke with great energy and conviction, to audiences in Boston, New York, New Jersey and Washington, on a tour organized by the Palestinian American Community Center in Clifton, NJ, an outpost of patriotism and culture in ultra-Zionist greater New York. The PACC’s web site features a stirring anthem about Jerusalem by Lebanese chanteuse Fairouz, and a wide variety of programs. New Jersey Palestinians raised the Palestinian flag at Paterson city hall on May 3, as the PACC raised $430,000 for a kidney dialysis center in Ramallah. The following remarks are from her address to the Palestine Center in Washington on April 27 (video and edited transcript, supplemented in a few spots by the author’s transcription).
Al Zoubi introduced herself as a representative of the “forgotten side of our people, of the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians.” She acknowledged Israel’s heinous crimes against the Palestinians under occupation since Israel’s conquests of the West Bank and Gaza in the June, 1967 war, but insisted that
we cannot talk about peace, talk about justice (which is the aim of peace) if we forget that it is a refugee issue starting in 1948. We are talking about a creation of a state at the expense of the Palestinian people. We cannot talk about justice or peace unless we talk about the reason for the occupation, the definition of the state and aim of Israel, and the way it treats Palestinians wherever they are.
Israel slaughters in Gaza, steals land in the West Bank and Judaizes Jerusalem, and claims “we are a democracy, and we defend ourselves from Hamas, from terrorists.” “I am a citizen—the 1.2 million who stayed in the homeland are the test of whether Israel is a democracy or not… in Israel there are 50 racist laws, I’m talking about the Israeli legal system, not the occupation, [not] Hamas… this is the test of democracy. So let’s for once talk about Israel itself.” The fifty racist laws are “apartheid laws which create two different systems toward two ethnicities/nationalities inside Israel, one for Jews, one for Palestinians.”
There is an Israeli law which prevents me from living in 700 communities which are built, of course, on my land. By law, [this means] I cannot live in over 60 percent of the land of Israel. It is a law that was not passed in 1948, or the 1950s or 60s when Israel felt weak and needed to control everything; this is a new law… it was passed in 2011! Of course the law doesn’t mention Palestinians; the law mentions that the [community’s] Acceptance Committee can reject anyone without the ability for me to appeal to the court. Before this law, I could appeal to the court. But now I can’t appeal and can be rejected—why? Because there is no social or cultural compatibility. Under social compatibility, we as Palestinians are rejected… What is this if not apartheid? Can you imagine the U.S. having a law like this for African Americans; an Acceptance Committee law regarding social ethnic groups that make up 20 percent of society? Can you imagine in Europe if a law were passed against Jews or another group?
Al Zoubi emphasized that “land is still the most conflicted issue between us and the state. Judaizing the land at the expense of the Palestinians, the slogan ‘the most amount of land with the least amount of Palestinians’—this is the summary of Zionism.” Thus the government plans to expel 30,000 (or more) Palestinian Bedouin who live in “unrecognized villages” in the Negev—half of Palestine. “You can build for Jews anywhere you want, but within these 12 million dunams [three million acres] they want to evacuate [Palestinians] and gather them in a small area to control the land.”
This is not even discrimination. Discrimination is to give “A” less than “B”. In Israel, to discriminate against us would mean to give us less than the Jews but no, [Israel] is taking from “A” and giving to “B”—[Israel is] stealing from us, everything. It is the treatment of not even the enemy—we are the obstacle of the Jewish state… We don’t exist. This is the real treatment. This is why we don’t accept the word “discrimination”—we don’t exist. [Israel] plans as if we are not there. Judaizing the Negev and using the word “develop” takes for granted that there are Palestinians. If they are there, [Israel] will throw them away—no problem.
Al Zoubi noted the brutal candor of Israeli officials.
In the Knesset they say “we are a Jewish state, and you are invaders.” You can find it in the protocol of the Knesset when a minister answered to me, “you are invaders, and the new crusaders,” a formal answer from an Israeli minister in 2013, yet Israel talks about how it is a democracy. Can any prime minister in the world talk like this to his citizens? “Invaders?” And still talk about itself as a democracy?
Such a system is inherently violent and repressive.
Fifty-one Palestinians [citizens] have been killed since 2000—none were Hamas. I thought the problem was Hamas? From the fifty-one who were killed, just one Israeli police officer went to jail for twenty-four months. This is a violent system: it is legitimate to discriminate against us. . . We are not just like the African Americans who struggle for democracy, we are also the indigenous people. We cannot struggle for civil rights within the existing definition of the state as a Jewish state, while African Americans can. They can struggle for civil rights within the definition of the American state, because America is a state for the citizens. In Israel, the state is for part of the citizenry—it is not for me.
The violence is also psychological.
The whole idea of citizenship is something awful and something disempowering and a way of colonizing my identity. [Israel is] giving me my citizenship on one condition: to lose myself, to have nothing to do with my people or my history, and logically I must thank [Israel] every day because they did not expel me… I remember reading in fourth grade, [translated from Arabic] “we build your schools and we pave your streets” so I’m primitive, and Israel came to develop my country and I must be so grateful.
Her Israeli education naturally omitted the thriving Palestinian society that Israel destroyed, including Jaffa, the most important seaport between Alexandria and Antakya, with its orange exports, its seven daily Arabic newspapers and seven sports clubs, Umm Kulthum’s theater and festivals. Israel is “not just confiscating land, but they are confiscating my homeland’s history – renaming the geography, renaming the bridges, streets, cities, trying to change the landscape in order for us to not recognize our homeland, our history. [Israel] has deleted everything.”
Yet Israel still lacks one thing, “legitimacy from its victim. Israel needs to be recognized as a Jewish state in order to ignore everything I say… We must learn how primitive we were and internalize our inferiority,” beginning by denying history.
The education system has pulled every textbook which has the word “nakba” because this is the [Palestinian] “narrative,” not the fact, it’s a narrative, maybe an imagined narrative that we were expelled in 1948, and Netanyahu’s ministry two to three years ago gave the direction to omit it from textbooks…
And in Israel there is a special law to prevent me from commemorating the Nakba… every institution which took its budget from the government … if any institution commemorates the Nakba in any way, the Ministry of Finance can freeze the budget of this institution.
This is from power, not weakness. “These insane laws—the Acceptance Committee Laws, omitting the word ‘nakba’—took place over the last six to seven years, not the beginning of Israel when it was weak and needed to be aggressive.”
I’m not talking about the right wing or Lieberman. Lieberman has not contributed to these racist lawa at all. We are talking about the “left wing,” the Labor Party. These are the Labor Party and Likud’s laws, not the right wing, as if the problem is a few extremists. The problem is the system itself. The definition of the state itself!
Israel tolerates Al Zoubi and her colleagues in the Knesset because they are powerless. Israel “is giving us these positions because our scream makes no difference. [Israel] steals my land, doesn’t permit me to study my identity, express my identity, struggle for democracy, calls me a terrorist—and then says, ‘Okay, scream.”’ This is possible only in a herrenvolk democracy.
How is there even a majority? Ethnic cleansing. Democracy was forced by ethnic cleansing— the “majority rule” was reached by ethnic cleansing. During the forty-seven years of occupation in Jerusalem, Israel has withdrawn the identity of 176,000 Palestinians. Imagine these numbers. It is a continuous ethnic cleansing… stealing land, land confiscation, oppression, Judaizing every single region, and Israeli intelligence still appoints teachers in the education systems.
Israeli Jewish society simply doesn’t believe in democracy.
According to the Israel Democracy Institute in 2012 (which makes a democracy index every year), fifty-five percent of Israelis don’t agree with full equality with Palestinians. I’m not even talking about the national struggle for independence, just equality. How can this society claim she wants peace when she doesn’t even want equality for her citizens? To shock you more, thirty percent of society agrees to put Palestinian citizens into reservations if there is a war between Israel and the Arab world in order for Palestinians to not collaborate. It is like the Japanese internment camps in World War II—thirty percent. It is legitimate to be racist, it is a part of the definition and political culture.
Palestinians do not exist for Israeli Jewish society, and Israel acts with impunity.
In the history curriculum, we don’t exist. When we want to live in “this” area or “that” area, we don’t exist. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli culture does not view Palestinians as “behind the wall,” they are “behind the ocean.” Israel doesn’t pay the price, they are economic friends with the US and when we speak in the Knesset, and when we say, the Arab MKs, the world will punish you, the world will isolate you, then a minister will come, and say, be calm, no one will punish us, we have very good relations with everyone, better relations with the USA, and better relations with… and we sit and say, yes, he’s right, we are alone.
Change will not come from within Israel.
We cannot wait for the salvation inside Israel, and it is not related to internal dynamics. So when people ask, “what about the left wing,” we say “55% of the [Jewish] society doesn’t agree with equality.” No left wing. Meretz, even Meretz, has won four seats, and Meretz supported the war on Gaza for the first two weeks, the last war upon Gaza. Meretz! The most extremist left in the Knesset, supported the war on Gaza.
Absent external pressure, Israel has become more and more aggressive.
Since no Palestinian will accept our dictations and the maximum we give is less than the min- imum Palestinians will accept, [Israel] will solve it by ourselves. And they did. They did it by building the wall and the siege of Gaza we forget about. Israel says there is no occupation— when they control the sea, borders, travel, taxes, electricity, destroy schools, bomb everything, destroy society, put two million people in jail. Yet they say, “Israel is not occupying. There is no need to solve the struggle, just a need to maintain and manage it.” And they are managing it very well. Israel is able to strengthen its economy and everything is okay—they don’t pay the price.
Americans are responsible.
We need justice and we ask Americans not to be part of this racist policy. Because it’s your taxes. . . and this is your regime, and okay, you cannot be neutral, you cannot be neutral, so please be aware that you are part of this oppression. You are part of the oppression.
Al Zoubi eloquently inverted Israel’s moral ultima ratio.
And if anyone criticizes us [Israel] we will say anti-semitic. And we will mention the Holo- caust. But you cannot mention the Holocaust. Because you don’t represent the victims of the Holocaust. Because the whole lesson and the whole idea of the Holocaust is, don’t kill, and don’t be racist. And you kill, and you are racist. So we are the victims. We the Palestinians can represent the victims of the Holocaust, not you. And it is a humiliation of the victims of the Holocaust every time you mention them while you are racist. You are humiliating the Holocaust. You are humiliating the victims of the Holocaust. We are respecting the victims of the Holocaust as a tragedy. You are not, you are using them in order to justify your crimes against humanity and your war crimes and your oppression of the Palestinians.
Al Zoubi emphasized her progressive outlook. “I am a feminist, liberal woman. We want equality between men and women, not just Israelis and Palestinians or Jews and Arabs inside my homeland.” She concluded:
We are representing a vision of justice. To live together, in equality. We don’t want to throw the Jews, the Israelis, to the sea. We don’t. But there is no possibility with a racist definition. We demand right of return for the Palestinians to their homes. We demand total withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. We demand East Jerusalem, and we demand a state for all of its citizens. We cannot live in peace and justice with Zionism and Jewish state as a racist state.
Like the Palestinians, the classical European liberal traditions descended from the Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation rejected Zionism categorically. Classical Reform Judaism, Marxist internationalism and plain secularism, in their various ways, viewed Zionism as a reaction against liberal modernity, against the emancipation of Jews from pre-modern conditions and their assimilation and integration into gentile society. They found it reactionary and racist, the fraternal twin of the racialist anti-semitism that arose at the same time as Zionism.
In contrast, for nearly fifty years, US criticism of Israel has been limited to minimal and/or misleading terms: anti-occupation; international law and human rights; progressive Zionism; Israel as US strategic asset; Jewish identity politics; and anti-anti-Semitism. At most, criticism admits that Zionism is a form of colonial settler ideology and practice. It is that, but it is much more, a reaction against modernity. The fundamental opposition of Zionism is not Jewish settler vs. Arab indigene in Palestine, but Jew vs. gentile everywhere. On the Jewish left, this opposition gives us the minimal critique noted, a form of Zionism which dominates US criticism of Israel as completely as the “Israel lobby” does the mainstream.
Al Zoubi and her Palestinian colleagues are horribly correct; they are alone, and the first among the culpable are the left, the gatekeepers of criticism, who refuse to oppose Zionism, in the US and Palestine. The Palestinians will remain alone unless we can recover the basic liberal concepts and vocabulary which hegemonic Zionism has buried. In the words of Count Clermont-Tonnerre, in the debates over emancipation in the French National Assembly in December, 1789: “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.”3 Today this is perhaps the most scandalous statement one can make, but the real scandal is that it is necessary, that the left has not been making it, and advancing such politics and analysis, as Zionism has come to genocidal fruition.
May 20, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Haneen Al Zoubi, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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A high-profile group of former European political leaders and diplomats has called for the urgent reassessment of EU policy on the question of a Palestinian state and insisted Israel must be held to account for its actions in the occupied territories.
In a letter to the EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, the group, known as the European Eminent Persons Group, also questioned the ability of the US to lead the negotiations between Palestine and Israel.
In a damning assessment of EU policy, the letter reads: “Europe has yet to find an effective way of holding Israel to account for the way it maintains the occupation. It is time now to demonstrate to both parties how seriously European public opinion takes contraventions of international law, the perpetration of atrocities and the denial of established rights.”
Signatories to the letter include Hubert Védrine and Roland Dumas, former foreign ministers of France, Andreas van Agt, former prime minister of the Netherlands, John Bruton, a former prime minister of Ireland, Michel Rocard, former prime minister of France, Javier Solana, former Nato secretary general and Sir Jeremy Greenstock, former UK ambassador to the UN.
On Friday, the European United Left group of MEPs demanded an abolition of partnership agreements with Israeldemanded an abolition of partnership agreements with Israel.
May 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | European Union, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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By Robert Fantina | Aletho News | May 13, 2015
World leaders have long known that in order to stay in power, scaring the populace is a vital ingredient in any campaign. Look to the March, 2015 victory of Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu, who fanned the fears of his racist population, claiming that ‘Arabs’ were going to the polls in droves. In the United States, for decades whichever candidate was more successful at stoking the flaming fear of communism glided to easy victory. And as Canada and the U.S. approach election season, with Canada’s election five months away, and the long, drawn out campaign for the White House a tortuous eighteen months away, it is now, apparently, time to begin fanning the fears of what is generally called ‘radical Islam’.
A CNN report of May 11 is headlined thusly: ‘Retired Generals: Be Afraid of ISIS’. The article refers to President Barack Obama as “naïve”; discusses “the ever-growing numbers of victims of radical Islam in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia”, and condemns “the frightfully slow pace America’s commander-in-chief is currently allowing our military and intelligence community to take action against both ISIS and its progenitor, al Qaeda….”
It is interesting that people who make their living from war are called upon to comment on whether war should continue or not. The writers of the CNN article are Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; retired Maj. Gen. James E. Livingston, USMC, and congressional counterterrorism adviser Michael S. Smith II. Interestingly, these gentleman are co-founders of a ‘strategic advisory firm’ called Kronos Advisory. A small quotation from their website puts their fear-mongering into perspective:
“Increased global economic competition among rising powers could also exacerbate issues such as these. Indeed, as lucrative opportunities lure companies from nations with limited defense and intelligence resources into ungoverned areas and failed states the potential flashpoints for conflict will multiply.
“To manage increasingly complex international affairs, security officials require more robust decision-support solutions that leverage high-level subject matter expertise and innovative thought leadership in the areas of irregular warfare, geostrategy, and associated policy development. And history tells us human intelligence will be central to any successful programs that seek to advance American and allied interests in this volatile environment.
“From subject matter expertise with transnational extremist networks, to predictive analytic capabilities that can help officials identify and understand future challenges before they materialize, to strong relationships with lawmakers committed to helping defense and intelligence organizations achieve their missions, Kronos Advisory’s global network can deliver a range of vital resources national security managers require to more fully understand their operational environment — and define it.”
And as long as there is war, there can be little doubt that the costly services of Kronos Advisory will be in demand.
While the words from the Kronos Advisory website are self-explanatory, there is one small area that requires particular focus: “relationships with lawmakers committed to helping defense and intelligence organizations achieve their missions”. And now we get to the crux of the matter. Messrs. Flynn, Livingston and Smith all had prominent roles in the government, and now are capitalizing on the ‘strong relationships’ with those members of Congress who rely on the so-called defense industry to fund their campaigns. These members of Congress will keep the war machine working, thus keeping the military lobby happy, providing endless perquisites for the government officials, and keeping businesses such as Kronos Advisory very busy. Where in this is there anything about what’s best for the people?
Let us take just a moment to look at the three ‘frightening’ expressions quoted above. Mr. Obama, these august businessmen say, is naïve. Perhaps he has, naively, not yet sought out their services and expertise, which may have had a lot to do with their motivation for writing for CNN. Secondly, they state with alarm “the ever-growing numbers of victims of radical Islam in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia”, not mentioning that most of those victims die as a result of U.S.-provided bombs. Lastly, they bemoan “the frightfully slow pace America’s commander-in-chief is currently allowing our military and intelligence community to take action against both ISIS and its progenitor, al Qaeda…”, hoping, perhaps, for a wider, more comprehensive war which will require their services to a far greater extent, thus increasing their bottom line, at the expense of the blood of people around the world.
Meanwhile, north of the border, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a short time ago considered vulnerable in this year’s election, said this during a visit to Canadian troops in Kuwait: “Make no mistake: by fighting this enemy here you are protecting Canadians at home. Because this evil knows no borders”. One is reminded of a statement made on September 12, 2008 by then Alaska Governor and Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, when bidding an official farewell to soldiers on their way to Iraq. She said that their mission was to “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.” Any connect between Iraq and the September 11 attacks against the U.S. had long since been debunked, but what is this to Mrs. Palin? When the flag can be waved in a patriotic display, what do facts have to do with anything?
The same is true with Mr. Harper’s bizarre statement. The indiscriminate killing of Muslims doesn’t protect ‘Canadians at home’. It has, indeed, the opposite effect. A ‘Tweet’ sent in 2012 by a lawyer in Yemen to Mr. Obama applies as well to Mr. Harper: “Dear Mr. Obama, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda.” So Canada, continuing to disgrace itself on the world stage, follows along with U.S. mass murder in the Middle East.
But jingoism sells, whether the original, U.S. version, or the copy that has now apparently been successfully exported to Canada. ‘They’ are bad; ‘we’ are good, and the only thing the ‘good’ people can do is kill the ‘bad’ people. Mr. Harper is positioning himself for victory by framing his campaign in the tried and true ‘us vs. them’ model that has long been successful in the U.S. As the U.S. election campaigning ramps up, with more and more clowns entering the two-ring circus known as the Democratic and Republican primaries, we can watch the candidates from both parties fall all over themselves to prove that they want to kill more of the ‘bad’ people, and will do it longer and more effectively, than any of their opponents. No doubt they will be assisted by Kronos Advisory.
What will future generations say? Will they look upon the current world situation as today we might look upon Neanderthal society, observing the way primitive man lived? Will they comment intellectually on the little value that human life had for twenty-first century society, and the way that society worked hard to develop more effective ways to eradicate it? Will they marvel at how close the population came to extinction through war?
This is the legacy we are leaving; this is what our descendants will say about us.
Sadly, with the media corporate-owned, and the U.S. education system only deteriorating, there seems to be little hope for any significant change in the near future.
May 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | Canada, Israel, United States |
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In summer 1980, Iraq’s wily president Saddam Hussein saw opportunities in the chaos sweeping the Persian Gulf. Iran’s Islamic revolution had terrified the Saudi princes and other Arab royalty who feared uprisings against their own corrupt life styles. Saddam’s help was sought, too, by CIA-backed Iranian exiles who wanted a base to challenge the fundamentalist regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. And as always, the Western powers were worried about the Middle East oil fields.
So because of geography and his formidable Soviet-supplied army, Saddam was suddenly a popular fellow.
On Aug. 5, 1980, the Saudi rulers welcomed Saddam to Riyadh for his first state visit to Saudi Arabia, the first for any Iraqi president. The Saudis, of course, wanted something. At those fateful meetings, amid the luxury of the ornate palaces, the Saudis would encourage Saddam to invade Iran. The Saudis also would claim to pass on a secret message about President Jimmy Carter’s geo-political desires.
During that summer of 1980, President Carter was facing his own crisis. His failure to free 52 American hostages held in Iran was threatening his political survival. As he wrote in his memoirs, Keeping Faith, “The election might also be riding on their freedom.” Equally alarming, President Carter had begun receiving reports that the Republicans were making back-channel contacts with Iran about the hostage crisis, as he would state in a letter to a journalist nearly a decade later.
Though it was unclear then, this multi-sided political intrigue would shape the history from 1980 to the present day. Iraq’s invasion of Iran in September 1980 would deteriorate into eight years of bloody trench warfare that did little more than kill and maim an estimated one million people. What little more the war did was to generate billions of dollars in profits for well-connected arms merchants — and spawn a series of national security scandals.
In 1986-87, the Iran-Contra Affair peeled back some of the layers of secrecy, but bipartisan investigations dumped the blame mostly on White House aide Oliver North and a few low-level “men of zeal.” Later inquiries into Iraqgate allegations of secret U.S. military support for Saddam Hussein also ended inconclusively. The missing billions from the sleazy Bank of Credit and Commerce International disappeared into the mist of complex charge and counter-charge, too. So did evidence implicating the CIA and Nicaraguan Contra rebels in cocaine trafficking.
A similar fate befell the October Surprise story and President Carter’s old suspicion of Republican interference in the 1980 hostage crisis. A special House task force concluded in 1993 that it could find “no credible evidence” to support the October Surprise charges.
Haig’s Talking Points
Still, I gained access to documents from that investigation, including papers marked “secret” and “top secret” which apparently had been left behind by accident in a remote Capitol Hill storage room. Those papers filled in a number of the era’s missing pieces and established that there was more to the reports that President Carter heard in 1980 than the task force publicly acknowledged.
But besides undermining the task force’s October Surprise debunking, the papers clarified President Reagan’s early strategy for a clandestine foreign policy hidden from Congress and the American people. One such document was a two-page “Talking Points” prepared by Secretary of State Alexander Haig for a briefing of President Reagan. Marked “top secret/sensitive,” the paper recounted Haig’s first trip to the Middle East in April 1981.
In the report, Haig wrote that he was impressed with “bits of useful intelligence” that he had learned. “Both [Egypt’s Anwar] Sadat and [Saudi Prince] Fahd [explained that] Iran is receiving military spares for U.S. equipment from Israel.” This fact might have been less surprising to President Reagan, whose intermediaries allegedly collaborated with Israeli officials in 1980 to smuggle weapons to Iran behind President Carter’s back.
But Haig followed that comment with another stunning assertion: “It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd.” In other words, according to Haig’s information, Saudi Prince Fahd (later King Fahd) claimed that President Carter, apparently hoping to strengthen the U.S. hand in the Middle East and desperate to pressure Iran over the stalled hostage talks, gave clearance to Saddam’s invasion of Iran. If true, Jimmy Carter, the peacemaker, had encouraged a war.
Haig’s written report contained no other details about the “green light,” and Haig declined my request for an interview about the Talking Points. But the paper represented the first documented corroboration of Iran’s long-held belief that the United States backed Iraq’s 1980 invasion.
In 1980, President Carter termed Iranian charges of U.S. complicity “patently false.” He mentioned Iraq’s invasion only briefly in his memoirs, in the context of an unexpected mid-September hostage initiative from a Khomeini in-law, Sadeq Tabatabai.
“Exploratory conversations [in Germany] were quite encouraging,” President Carter wrote about that approach, but he added: “As fate would have it, the Iraqis chose the day of [Tabatabai’s] scheduled arrival in Iran, September 22, to invade Iran and to bomb the Tehran airport. Typically, the Iranians accused me of planning and supporting the invasion.”
The Iraqi invasion did make Iran more desperate to get U.S. spare parts for its air and ground forces. Yet the Carter administration continued to demand that the American hostages be freed before military shipments could resume. But according to House task force documents that I found in the storage room, the Republicans were more accommodating.
Secret FBI wiretaps revealed that an Iranian banker, the late Cyrus Hashemi, who supposedly was helping President Carter on the hostage talks, was assisting Republicans with arms shipments to Iran and peculiar money transfers in fall 1980. Hashemi’s older brother, Jamshid, testified that the Iran arms shipments, via Israel, resulted from secret meetings in Madrid between the GOP campaign director, William J. Casey, and a radical Islamic mullah named Mehdi Karrubi.
For whatever reasons, on Election Day 1980, President Carter still had failed to free the hostages and Ronald Reagan won in a landslide.
A ‘Private Channel’
Within minutes of President Reagan’s Inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, the hostages finally were freed. In the following weeks, the new administration put in place discreet channels to Middle East powers, as Haig flew to the region for a round of high-level consultations.
The trim silver-haired former four-star general met with Iraq’s chief allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and with Israel, which was continuing to support Iran as a counter-weight to Iraq and the Arab states.
On April 8, 1981, Haig ended his first round of meetings in Riyadh and issued a diplomatic statement lauding Saudi Arabia’s “dedication to building a better world and the wisdom of your leaders.” More to the point, he announced that “the foundation has been laid during this trip for the strengthening of U.S.-Saudi relations.”
After Haig’s return to Washington, his top secret Talking Points fleshed out for President Reagan the actual agreements that were reached at the private sessions in Saudi Arabia, as well as at other meetings in Egypt and Israel.
“As we discussed before my Middle East trip,” Haig explained to President Reagan, “I proposed to President Sadat, [Israel’s] Prime Minister [Menachem] Begin and Crown Prince Fahd that we establish a private channel for the consideration of particularly sensitive matters of concern to you. Each of the three picked up on the proposal and asked for early meetings.”
Haig wrote that on his return, he immediately dispatched his counselor, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, to Cairo and Riyadh to formalize those channels. “He held extremely useful meetings with both Sadat and Fahd,” Haig boasted. “In fact, Sadat kept Ed Muskie [President Carter’s secretary of state] waiting for an hour and a half while he [Sadat] extended the meeting.”
These early contacts with Fahd, Sadat and Begin solidified their three countries as the cornerstones of the administration’s clandestine foreign policy of the 1980s: the Saudis as the moneymen, the Israelis as the middlemen, and the Egyptians as a ready source for Soviet-made equipment.
Although President Carter had brokered a historic peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Sadat, Begin and Fahd had all been alarmed at signs of U.S. weakness, especially Washington’s inability to protect the Shah of Iran from ouster in 1979. Haig’s Talking Points captured that relief at President Carter’s removal from office.
“It is clear that your policies of firmness toward the Soviets has restored Saudi and Egyptian confidence in the leadership of the U.S.,” Haig wrote for the presentation to his boss. “Both [Fahd and Sadat] went much further than ever before in offering to be supportive.”
Haig said “Sadat offered to host a forward headquarters for the Rapid Deployment Force, including a full-time presence of U.S military personnel.” Sadat also outlined his strategy for invading Libya to disrupt Moammar Khadafy’s intervention in Chad. “Frankly,” observed Haig, “I believe he [Sadat] could easily get overextended in such an undertaking and [I] will try to moderate his ambitions on this score.”
‘Special Status,’ Money and Guns
Haig reported that Prince Fahd was “also very enthusiastic” about President Reagan’s foreign policy. Fahd had agreed “in principle to fund arms sales to the Pakistanis and other states in the region,” Haig wrote. The Saudi leader was promising, too, to help the U.S. economy by committing his oil-rich nation to a position of “no drop in production” of petroleum.
“These channels promise to be extremely useful in forging compatible policies with the Saudis and Egyptians,” Haig continued. “Both men value the ‘special status’ you have conferred on them and both value confidentiality. I will follow up with [Defense Secretary] Cap Weinberger and [CIA Director] Bill Casey. …The larger message emerging from these exchanges, however, is that your policies are correct and are already eliciting the enthusiastic support of important leaders abroad.”
In the following years, the Reagan administration would exploit the “special status” with all three countries to skirt Constitutional restrictions on Executive war-making powers. Secretly, the administration would tilt back and forth in the Iran-Iraq war, between aiding the Iranians with missiles and spare parts and helping the Iraqis with intelligence and indirect military shipments.
When the Soviets shot down an Israeli-leased Argentine plane carrying U.S. military supplies to Iran on July 18, 1981, the State Department showed it, too, valued confidentiality. At the time, State denied U.S. knowledge. But in a later interview, Assistant Secretary of State Nicholas Veliotes said “it was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment.”
According to a sworn affidavit by former Reagan national security staffer Howard Teicher, the administration enlisted the Egyptians in a secret “Bear Spares” program that gave the United States access to Soviet-designed military equipment. Teicher asserted that the Reagan administration funneled some of those weapons to Iraq and also arranged other shipments of devastating cluster bombs that Saddam’s air force dropped on Iranians troops.
In 1984, facing congressional rejection of continued CIA funding of the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, President Reagan exploited the “special status” again. He tapped into the Saudi slush funds for money to support the Nicaraguan Contra rebels in their war in Central America. The President also authorized secret weapons shipments to Iran in another arms-for-hostages scheme, with the profits going to “off-the-shelf” intelligence operations. That gambit, like the others, was protected by walls of “deniability” and outright lies.
Some of those lies collapsed in the Iran-Contra scandal, but the administration quickly constructed new stonewalls that were never breached. Republicans fiercely defended the secrets and Democrats lacked the nerve to fight for the truth. The Washington media also lost interest because the scandals were complex and official sources steered the press in other directions.
‘Read Machiavelli’
When I interviewed Haig several years ago, I asked him if he was troubled by the pattern of deceit that had become the norm among international players in the 1980s. “Oh, no, no, no, no,” he boomed, shaking his head. “On that kind of thing? No. Come on. Jesus! God! You know, you’d better get out and read Machiavelli or somebody else because I think you’re living in a dream world! People do what their national interest tells them to do and if it means lying to a friendly nation, they’re going to lie through their teeth.”
But sometimes the game-playing did have unintended consequences. In 1990, a decade after Iraq’s messy invasion of Iran, an embittered Saddam Hussein was looking for pay-back from the sheikhdoms that he felt had egged him into war. Saddam was especially furious with Kuwait for slant drilling into Iraq’s oil fields and refusing to extend more credit. Again, Saddam was looking for a signal from the U.S. president, this time George H.W. Bush.
When Saddam explained his confrontation with Kuwait to U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie, he received an ambiguous reply, a reaction he apparently perceived as another “green light.” Eight days later, Saddam unleashed his army into Kuwait, an invasion that required 500,000 U.S. troops and thousands more dead to reverse.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
May 12, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Alexander Haig, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Iran, Iran-Contra, Iraq, Israel, United States, William J. Casey |
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By recently releasing a redacted version of top secret “talking points” that Secretary of State Alexander Haig used to brief President Ronald Reagan about Mideast developments in spring 1981, the U.S. government has inadvertently revealed what it still wants to hide from the public some 34 years later – because I found the full version in congressional files in late 1994 and first wrote about it in early 1996.
The key points that the U.S. government still doesn’t want you to know include that in early 1981 Israel already was supplying U.S. military equipment to Iran for its war with Iraq; that the Saudis had conveyed a “green light” supposedly from President Jimmy Carter to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980; and that the Saudis agreed to finance arms sales to Pakistan and other states in the region.
All three points have relevance today because they reveal the early seeds of policies that have grown over the past three decades into the twisted vines of today’s bloody conflicts. The still-hidden sections of Haig’s “talking points” also could cause some embarrassment to the nations mentioned.
For instance, the Israelis like to present their current hostility toward Iran as derived from a principled opposition to the supposed extremism of the Islamic state, so the revelation that they were supplying U.S. military hardware to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s government, which had held 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days, suggests that less noble motivations were driving Israel’s decisions.
Though ex-President Carter has denied encouraging Iraq to invade Iran in September 1980 – at the height of the hostage crisis which was destroying his reelection bid – the Saudis’ “green light” assertion at least indicates that they led Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to believe that his invasion had U.S. backing.
Whether the Saudis deceived Hussein about the “green light” or not, their instigation of the war exposes the origins of the modern Sunni-Shiite conflict, though now the Saudis are accusing the Iranians of regional aggression. The Haig “talking points” reveal that the first blow in the revival of this ancient fight was thrown not by the Shiites of Iran but by the Sunnis of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime with Saudi backing and encouragement.
The Saudi agreement to pay for arms purchases by Pakistan and other regional government sheds light on another aspect of today’s Mideast crisis. Saudi financial help to Pakistan in the 1980s became a key element in the expansion of a radical Sunni jihadist movement that coalesced along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to carry on the CIA-backed war against the Soviet army and secular Afghan forces.
That war – with the United States and Saudi Arabia each eventually pouring in $500 million a year – led to the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the collapse of the modernist, leftist regime in Kabul to be replaced by the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban which, in turn, gave sanctuary to Al-Qaeda led by a wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Laden.
Thus, the outlines of today’s violent chaos across the Middle East were sketched in those years, albeit with many subsequent twists and turns.
The Persian Gulf War
After the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988 – with both countries financially drained – Saddam Hussein turned on his suddenly stingy Sunni benefactors who began refusing further credit and demanding repayment of wartime loans. In reaction, Hussein – after consulting with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie and thinking he had another “green light” – invaded Kuwait. That, in turn, prompted a U.S.-led deployment to both defend Saudi Arabia and drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.
Although Hussein soon signaled a readiness to withdraw his troops, President George H.W. Bush rebuffed those overtures and insisted on a bloody ground war both to demonstrate the qualitative superiority of the modern U.S. military and to excite the American people about a military victory – and thus to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome.” [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
Bush’s military offensive succeeded in those goals but also provoked bin Laden’s outrage over the placement of U.S. troops near Islamic holy sites. The United States became the new target of Al-Qaeda’s terrorist revenge. And, for Official Washington’s emerging neoconservatives, the need to finally and completely destroy Saddam Hussein – then Israel’s bête noire – became an article of faith.
The Persian Gulf War’s demonstration of U.S. military prowess – combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – also encouraged the neocons to envision a strategy of “regime changes” for any government that showed hostility toward Israel. Iraq was listed as target number one, but Syria also was high on the hit list.
By the early 1990s, Israel had grown alienated from cash-strapped Iran, which had withdrawn from the lucrative arms bazaar that Israel had been running for that Shiite government through the 1980s. Gradually, Israel began to realign itself with the Sunnis bankrolled by Saudi Arabia.
The 9/11 attacks in 2001 were an expression of the anti-U.S. outrage among Sunni fundamentalists, who were funded by the Saudis and other Persian Gulf oil states, but the intricate realities of the Middle East were then little known to the American people who didn’t much know the difference between Sunni and Shiite and who lacked knowledge about the hostilities between secularists like Hussein and fundamentalists like bin Laden.
President George W. Bush and his administration exploited that ignorance to rally the public behind an invasion of Iraq in 2003 out of unrealistic fears that Saddam Hussein would share weapons of mass destruction with Osama bin Laden. Beyond the false claims about Iraq having WMDs and about a connection between Hussein and bin Laden, there was little appreciation even within the higher levels of the Bush administration about how the ouster and killing of Hussein would shatter the fragile equilibrium between Sunnis and Shiites.
With Hussein removed, the Shiite majority gained control of Iraq, distressing the Saudis who had, in many ways, launched the modern Sunni-Shiite war by pushing Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 but who now saw Iran’s allies gaining control of Iraq. The Saudis and other Gulf sheiks began financing Sunni extremists who flooded into Iraq to fight the Shiites and their enablers, the U.S. military.
The Saudis also built a behind-the-scenes alliance with Israel, which saw its financial and geopolitical interests advanced by this secret collaboration. Soon, the Israelis were identifying their old arms-trading partners, the Iranians, as an “existential threat” to Israel and pushing the United States into a more direct confrontation with Iran. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Did Money Seal Israel-Saudi Alliance?”]
Expanding Conflicts
The battlefront in the Sunni-Shiite conflict moved to Syria, where Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other Sunni states joined in supporting a rebellion to oust the government of President Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. As that conflict grew bloodier and bloodier, Assad’s relatively secular regime became the protector of Christians, Shiites, Alawites and other minorities against the Sunni forces led by al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the hyper-brutal Islamic State.
In 2014, pressed by President Barack Obama, the Saudis joined an alliance against the Islamic State, although Saudi participation was tepid at best. Saudi Arabia’s true enthusiasm was to push a series of regional proxy wars against Iran and any Shiite-related movements, such as the Houthis in Yemen and the Alawites in Syria. If that helped Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, so be it, was the Saudi view.
Though the two redacted paragraphs from Haig’s “talking points” from 34 years ago might seem to be ancient history no longer worthy of the secrecy stamp, the U.S. government still insists on shielding that information from the American people, not letting them know too much about how these entangling alliances took shape and who was responsible for them.
The primary sources for Haig were Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Saudi Prince Fahd (later King Fahd), both of whom are dead, as are several other principals in these events, including Reagan, Hussein and Haig. The two redacted paragraphs – that Haig used in his presentation to Reagan – read as follows, with underlined sections in the original “talking points”:
”Fahd was also very enthusiastic toward your policies. As a measure of his good faith, he intends to insist on a common oil policy at a forthcoming meeting of his Arab colleagues which will include a single price and a commitment to no drop in production. Also of importance was Fahd’s agreement in principle to fund arms sales to the Pakistanis and other states in the area.
“Both Sadat and Fahd provided other bits of useful intelligence (e.g. Iran is receiving military spares for U.S. equipment from Israel). It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd.”
The redacted version – with those two paragraphs blacked out – was released by the George H.W. Bush presidential library after the “talking points” went through a declassification process. The release was in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that I had filed in connection with the so-called October Surprise affair, in which the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 was alleged to have conspired with Iranian officials and Israeli intelligence officers to delay the release of the 52 American hostages held in Iran to ensure President Carter’s reelection defeat.
In 1991, Congress began an investigation into the 1980 issue, suspecting that it may have been a prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal which had involved Reagan’s secret arms-for-hostage deals with Iran in 1985-86 (also with Israeli help). The George H.W. Bush administration collected documents possibly related to the 1980 events and shared some with the congressional investigation, including the Haig “talking points.”
But Bush’s operatives – trying to protect his reelection chances in 1991-92 – engaged in delays and obstructions of the congressional inquiry, which finally agreed after Bush’s defeat by Bill Clinton in November 1992 to say that it could find “no credible evidence” that Reagan and Bush had orchestrated a delay in Iran’s release of the hostages. The hostages were finally freed on Jan. 20, 1981, immediately after Reagan was sworn in as president.
Subsequent disclosures of evidence, however, buttressed the long-held suspicions of a Republican-Iranian deal, including documents that the Bush-41 White House had withheld from Congress as well as other documents that the congressional investigation possessed but ignored. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Second Thoughts on October Surprise” or, for more details, Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]
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Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
May 12, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Afghanistan, Dual Containment strategy, Iran, Iran-Contra, Iran-Iraq War, Israel, Pakistan, Persian Gulf War, Saudi Arabia |
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Leading actors, directors and other figures from the theatre world have condemned efforts by pro-Israel groups to silence a Palestinian production set to tour Britain.
‘The Siege’, by the Jenin-based Freedom Theatre, was attacked in the Mail on Sunday last week, after organisations such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews expressed concern about whether the Arts Council-funded project “promoted terrorism.”
Now, in response to what they describe as the “demonization” of Palestinian theatre, a letter signed by Wolf Hall star Mark Rylance, Young Vic artistic director David Lan and playwright Caryl Churchill among others, expresses support for the Freedom Theatre.
Neither the Daily Mail nor the Board of Deputies has seen Freedom Theatre’s play The Siege, yet both somehow feel qualified to suggest that it is “promoting terrorism”. Not for the first time, Palestinian voices are in danger of being drowned out by a vociferous pro-Israel lobby that smears all Palestinians as terrorists and antisemites. This lobby wants us to believe that theatre-goers in the UK cannot be trusted to hear these voices and make their own judgements.
The letter, an initiative of Artists for Palestine UK, comes as the Freedom Theatre prepares to embark on a 10-city tour of Britain over May-June, including dates in Manchester, London, Leeds, Birmingham, Nottingham, and Glasgow.
Writer and performer Mark Thomas, a signatory to the letter, noted that “free speech for Palestinian artists is increasingly threatened, more often than not by supporters of Israel’s apartheid occupation. Palestinian voices not only have a right to be heard, we have duty to listen to them.”
The piece in the Mail by Sunday claimed that the play, based on dramatic events in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity in 2002, would be “an unashamedly one-sided drama” based on the testimonies of “men with blood on their hands.”
None of those smearing the play have seen the production, as they have admitted.
May 11, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism |
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The European United Left group of MEPs has demanded the abolition of partnership agreements with Israel due to its indiscriminate aggression against the Palestinians, Arabs48.com reported on Friday. The demand was made in the wake of the acknowledgement by dozens of Israeli soldiers who took part in the last summer’s Israeli offensive in Gaza that they targeted civilians intentionally; some claimed that they targeted Palestinians “for fun“.
In a statement issued on Friday, a spokesperson for the EU group, Angel Vaina, demanded that Europe’s Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini answer several questions regarding the Israeli human rights abuses. Beside the witness statements of the Israeli soldiers, he noted, there is a UN report which proves that Israel killed 44 civilians and wounded 227 others in UN shelters during the Israeli war against Palestinian civilians.
Vaina said that the Geneva Conventions ban aggression against the offices of humanitarian organisations. “As such, we demand an end to economic preferences and dealing with this aggressive state.”
He pointed out that Israel signed an agreement in 2000 that guarantees human rights, but violates it repetitively. As an example, he cited Israeli violations in respect of 26 foreign activists on 3 May, when police cracked down on a peaceful demonstration in Tel Aviv against institutional violence and racial discrimination targeting Ethiopian Jews.
May 10, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | European Union, Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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