Israel’s list of compromised officials suggests their guilt of war crimes
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | July 21, 2020
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has adjourned without issuing its ruling on whether Israeli officials will be tried for war crimes against the Palestinian people since 2014, when Gaza was destroyed during “Operation Protective Edge”. With an extended timeframe until the ruling is due, Israel now has additional time to prepare for any eventual action taken by The Hague. It has apparently already drawn up a list of officials who might be liable to be prosecuted for war crimes.
According to Haaretz, the list contains the names of 200-300 Israeli officials, most probably including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Benny Gantz. The list has been drawn up in utmost secrecy, not least because, as Haaretz points out, “The court is likely to view a list of names as an official Israeli admission of these officials’ involvement in the incidents under investigation.” The existence of the list alone is likely to be viewed as such.
However, what needs to change at an international level is the endorsement of Israel’s security narrative. The ICC’s clear mention of war crimes, as opposed to alleged war crimes – the latter being a phrase which many human rights organisations have used and through which Israeli impunity has also been cultivated – should prompt a new reckoning of Israel’s standing and its state violence.
During that 2014 military offensive against the Palestinians in Gaza, the international community was quick to promote “Israel’s right to defend itself” even as Palestinian civilians were being slaughtered. So far, the UN has never considered Palestinians as anything other than a statistical detail supporting its purported humanitarian endeavours.
The fact of the matter is that Israel is a colonial entity, but this has been eliminated from international diplomatic discourse, to the detriment of the Palestinian people. Hence the discrepancies when speaking of Israel’s perpetual violations against the Palestinians; by refusing to include the colonial-settler context, the international community eliminates the foundations of what have now been described clearly as war crimes by the ICC.
The list itself suggests guilt, admitted more or less openly by the very fact of its compilation. While the criminal investigations are down to the competence of the ICC, it rests with the international community to see them through to their conclusion, rather than simply parroting Israel’s excuses for its violence. The planned annexation of the occupied West Bank is a case in point. Israeli officials are concerned that implementing the annexation plans will be detrimental to Israel, especially given that settlement expansion is being considered as the strongest evidence of war crimes. The international community, however, has still failed to unite against the possibility of additional war crimes being committed against the Palestinian people, and limited its response to repeated statements that annexation is against international law.
Israel has never, ever, heeded such statements. The possibility of ICC investigations, however, is exposing the fact that Israel knows it has committed war crimes and is preparing to shield the perpetrators from international prosecution. If the UN is truly concerned with safeguarding human rights, it should seize the opportunity to refrain from further endorsement and dissemination of Israel’s security and “self-defence” narrative, which itself violates international law. It should adopt a strong stance against Israel and its annexation plan, and stand by the ICC’s clear admission that colonial expansion is a war crime. The UN, however, cannot do so without taking into account its own complicity in maintaining Israel’s colonial violence, hence the absence of a consistent human rights narrative which would support a possible criminal investigation at an international level.
Is Israel Uniquely Evil?
Many Palestinians in the camp lost their small businesses amid a dire economic crisis. Photo: Fawzi Mahmoud
By Irfan Chowdhury | Palestine Chronicle | July 18, 2020
Recently, political journalist Sunny Hundal tweeted in relation to the left’s alleged obsession with Israel:
“In isolation, Israel does a lot of bad things re: human rights.
Is it uniquely bad? Is it worse than others?
Not even close. So if you’re obsessed by actions of Jews, don’t be surprised if people suspect your motives.”
Similar sentiments have been expressed by LBC radio host Maajid Nawaz, who has declared that Israel is “the constant what-about excuse used by everyone who doesn’t want to address some real grave, serious issues in the Middle East but constantly wants to point fingers instead at the Middle East’s only secular, democratic and yes, very imperfect, country”.
Likewise, former Labour MP Ian Austin recently wrote an article for Express & Star in which he asserts that “many people on the left have become obsessed with Israel. This tiny country – the world’s only Jewish state and the Middle East’s only democracy – seems to attract more criticism than all the world’s other controversies combined… Of course, Israel’s not perfect. What country is? But where else in the Middle East would you find free and fair elections, a free and vibrant media; a robust and independent judiciary and strong trade unions?”
As a factual matter, it is untrue that the left is single-mindedly focused on Israel; when I was on the committee of my university’s Socialist Students Society a few years ago, we had meetings on the Israel-Palestine conflict, the economic crisis in Venezuela, protests in Iran, Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil, gun violence in the US and the prospect of reforming the EU, among other international issues.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is one of the most important left-wing figures in British political history, has been a life-long champion of the rights of not only Palestinians, but also Kurds, Western Saharans, West Papuans, hagossians, and numerous other oppressed peoples. Nevertheless, even if it were true that the left does focus on Israel more than other countries, this would not be unjustified because, contrary to the claims of the aforementioned commentators, there are certain respects in which Israel’s human rights violations are uniquely severe in the international arena.
For example, Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is the longest-running military occupation in modern history. It has been ongoing now for 53 years and has been characterized by systematic and egregious human rights violations such as home demolitions, torture, night raids, abduction and imprisonment of children, harassment at checkpoints, the killing of civilians, destruction of agriculture, and daily humiliation at the hands of soldiers and settlers (all of this is documented in great detail by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem).
All military occupations are brutal and vicious; to have to endure one that is also predicated on deliberate displacement and dispossession for 53 years is simply unimaginable for most people. In the case of Gaza, the occupation has been compounded by an illegal siege that has been ongoing now for 13 years; in 2015, then UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl described Israel’s siege of Gaza as the “longest in history” and “a very extreme form [of] illegal collective punishment.”
The siege prevents anyone from leaving Gaza, apart from in exceptional cases; for example, sick children are sometimes allowed to receive medical treatment in the West Bank, but their parents aren’t allowed to accompany them – even when it means that the children are forced to die alone (as in the case of 5-year-old Aisha alLoulou). Anyone who tries to fish beyond the contaminated coastal waters of Gaza gets either shot at or kidnapped by the Israeli navy, and anyone who crosses the barbed-wire fence into Israel runs the risk of being murdered by the IDF (as in the case of 17-year-old Emad Khalil Ibrahim Shahin, who crossed over in 2018 and was returned to his family one year later in a body bag).
As a result of the siege, 97% of the water in Gaza is now unfit for human consumption; according to Sara Roy, Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Centre for Middle East Studies, this means that “Innocent human beings, most of them young, are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink and likely by the soil in which they plant”.
Thus, Israel has been carrying out the longest-running military occupation in modern history and the longest-running siege in modern history. These two facts alone render Israel unique in terms of the scope of its brutality and criminality.
There are other respects in which Israel stands out from other countries in its use of terror and violence; for example, it is one of the most aggressive countries in the world, having waged wars of aggression against Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006, and against Gaza in 2004, 2006, 2008/9, 2012 and 2014, killing huge numbers of civilians in the process (all while issuing threats and carrying out various covert attacks against Iran, which are all in violation of the UN Charter).
Furthermore, according to Amnesty International, Israel is “the only country in the world that automatically prosecutes children in military courts that lack fundamental fair rights and guarantees” (the military courts have a 99% conviction rate).
Children are routinely abused during interrogations (the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has reported that “Palestinian children arrested by [Israeli] military and police are systematically subject to degrading treatment, and often to acts of torture”), and in the overwhelming majority of cases, their parents are excluded from the entire ‘judicial’ process. It is worth noting that all of these human rights violations are directly enabled and facilitated by both the US and the UK.
These are all examples of how, in many ways, Israel is uniquely evil. The easiest way for Israel to stop being singled out for criticism – whether real or imagined – would be for it to stop singling itself out with its appalling human rights record.
– Irfan Chowdhury is a freelance writer who has previously been published in openDemocracy, The Iranian, Mondoweiss, Peace News and Hastings In Focus. He also runs a blog, where he mostly writes about British foreign policy, the Israel-Palestine conflict and civil liberties: https://irfanchowdhury98.com/
Inconclusive investigations and psychological trauma cultivate Israel’s impunity
![Palestinian protesters hold banners to show solidarity with the martyr Iyad Hallaq a disabled Palestinian man who was shot dead by Israeli police in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on 2 June 2020 [Abedalrahman Hassan/ApaImages]](https://i2.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Eyad-Hallaq.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
Protesters hold banners in solidarity with the martyr Iyad Hallaq an autistic Palestinian man shot dead by Israeli police in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on 2 June 2020 [Abedalrahman Hassan/ApaImages]
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | July 16, 2020
In May, Israeli security forces killed Eyad Al-Hallaq, a 32-year-old Palestinian man with special needs, on suspicion that he had a weapon. He was on his way to the special school in Jerusalem which he attended, when he was chased by Israeli security forces, cornered and shot, despite being accompanied by his teacher who repeatedly called out to the aggressors that he was autistic. No weapon was discovered on Hallaq after this unwarranted extrajudicial killing.
Less than two months after Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz issued a perfunctory, patronising apology in which he stated, “I am sure this subject will be investigated swiftly and conclusions will be reached,” recent reports attest to how rapidly Israel invokes its own impunity to cover up its crimes.
Eyad Al-Hallaq was killed in a heavily securitised area in Jerusalem’s Old City; security cameras monitoring the indigenous population are everywhere. However, Israel’s Justice Ministry has confirmed that there is no CCTV footage of the killing. It went on to assert that, despite the presence of cameras where the shooting took place, the cameras “were not connected at the relevant time and didn’t document” the incident.
This lacks even a shard of credibility, yet it is not unusual in Israel, which goes to great lengths to safeguard its own institutions and uniformed criminals from scrutiny and prosecution. The Hallaq family is now left with no recourse for justice, because Israel has created its own travesty of justice that is concerned solely with manufacturing impunity for those responsible for the 32-year-old’s death. The investigation is close to reaching a conclusion, according to a Haaretz report, and there is no doubt that the bereaved family will be left to face a multitude of questions on its own, with the additional psychological trauma of knowing that the exact circumstances of their son’s murder are unresolved and the perpetrators still roam free. In Israel’s typical style, it will be an inconclusive end to a concluded investigation. The family’s lawyer, meanwhile, is requesting an in-depth investigation because there is a “very strong suspicion” that the police are concealing evidence in this case.
This is not the first time that Israel has refused to release evidence that would provide both context and corroboration. A case that springs to mind is that of Ibrahim Abu Thurayyah, a double amputee killed by a shot to the head in December 2017 during the Great Return March protests in the Gaza Strip. Israeli investigations concluded there was no evidence that one of its snipers had directly targeted Thurayyah while he was in his wheelchair.
Concealing evidence is a clear indication of culpability. For Israel, however, the practice is dissociative and is reflective of how colonial violence against Palestinians sustains itself. There is no need to deny culpability if action is taken to prevent any discussion of the crime. Indeed, in this case it is easier for Israeli government officials to exploit the victim and the grieving family, since the evidence of the events leading up to Eyad Al-Hallaq’s killing has been eliminated.
For the Hallaq family, as it was for other families whose relatives have been murdered by Israeli occupation forces, the killing and subsequent cover-up is a personal rupture. Politically, Israel is replicating the impunity generated since the Nakba on a different scale, relying upon separate episodes of inflicted trauma to prevent a collective Palestinian narrative from emerging as a unified front against its colonial violence.
Biden will seek to extend the narrative that Israel is being ‘singled out’
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | July 16, 2020
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden may try to sustain the fable that he is an alternative to current US President Donald Trump, but for the Palestinians a Biden presidency will most probably normalise the human rights violations that have attracted wider endorsement as a result of US support for Israel. Any political differences from those promoted by the Trump administration that Biden might have will definitely not include a reversal of the Zionist colonial project.
Indeed, US support for Israel, according to Biden, is a “longstanding, moral commitment”. The former vice president has also criticised the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) for “singling out Israel”, a slogan made popular during Nikki Haley’s stint as US Ambassador to the UN, and he will almost certainly stick to it. According to his foreign policy adviser, Tony Blinken, Biden “opposes any effort to delegitimise or unfairly single out Israel, whether it’s at the United Nations or through the BDS movement.”
While it is worth pointing out the blindingly obvious yet again that there is no anti-Israel bias at an international level whatsoever, the “singling out Israel” narrative will undoubtedly resonate further given that Trump has embarked on a series of unilateral political decisions that legitimise Israel’s colonial violence and normalises its actions within the international community. Without a reversal of Trump’s decisions, however, a pro-Israel stance from [would-be] President Biden would inevitably increase the likelihood of the international community widening the scope of Israel’s ability to act with total impunity.
The concept of “singling out Israel” is unfounded and has nothing to do with advocacy and activism for Palestine at an international level. Time and again, these actions have met with definite limitations, due to the international community’s complicity in Israel’s colonial project. Activism for Palestine is recognised as a right in terms of free speech and human rights, but these criteria will not be sustained politically at an international level to any meaningful degree, and definitely not enough to change the pro-Israel bias at the UN. The international body is, bizarrely, content to sit back and watch as its own resolutions are treated with contempt and broken routinely by the Zionist state.
As annexation remains pending, the US-Israeli propaganda regarding “anti-Israel” allegations might take a different turn. The international community has played along with the distorted scenario that pits the deal of the century against the two-state compromise. If Biden is elected president and fails to reverse Trump’s decisions or take harsh actions against Israel if it goes ahead and formalises its colonisation of additional Palestinian territory, any opposition from the international community will continue to be framed as being “anti-Israel” and, in the current twisted logic of colonialism, “anti-Semitic”.
However, since 2019 the UN has been more vocal about blaming Palestinians for any Israeli violations. If the narrative that Israel is being singled out is allowed a platform at a time when Palestinians are being rendered invisible at an international level, Palestine risks further oblivion.
However, Israel is not at all concerned about Palestinians gaining a recognised platform, because the fake narrative that it has promoted with help from the US only seeks to extend its impunity. It knows that regardless of whether the periodic international criticism of Israel continues or not, Palestinians are not gaining any additional attention that can alter their political standing. This is what Biden is vying for. As long as the focus remains on Israel, the rogue state will be given every opportunity to normalise its human rights violations and colonisation at an international level.
Israel creates list of officials to prevent arrests for war crimes
MEMO | July 16, 2020
Israel is preparing a secret list of hundreds of its officials who are liable to be tried in The Hague on war crimes charges, it has been revealed. The government is warning them not to travel in case they are arrested.
According to Haaretz, the list has the names of between 200 and 300 military and intelligence officials who could be arrested and put on trial for war crimes committed against civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The report comes amid news of the International Criminal Court (ICC) possibly opening an investigation into war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas, starting from the Israeli military offensive on Gaza in 2014, known as “Operation Protective Edge”. The request for the trial was made by ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.
The list was supposed to be kept secret due to the danger it could pose to the officials whose names it contains. It could also be viewed by the ICC as an admission of guilt. Those on the list include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; former Defence Ministers Moshe Ya’alon, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett; former Chiefs of Staff Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, and current Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, as well as the former and current heads of the Shin Bet intelligence agency, Yoram Cohen and Nadav Argaman respectively.
It is suspected that the remainder could be more junior officers and officials, including those who approved the building of Jewish-only settlements within the occupied West Bank. Such settlements are illegal under international law and are one of the subjects of the ICC investigation.
The future of the investigation is to be decided by Judges Peter Kovacs of Hungary, Marc Perrin de Brichambaut of France and Reine Adelaide Sophie Alapini-Gansou of Benin. It will also depend on whether the court has jurisdiction over the areas where the war crimes were committed, which include the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Israel insists that the ICC has no such authority or jurisdiction in those areas, as the Palestinian Authority (PA) is not a sovereign state.
This has led many observers to predict that Israel will refuse to cooperate with the ICC, which could result in the court ordering secret detention orders and warrants against the Israeli officials. This would limit their ability to travel and keep Israel unaware of the court proceedings.
If an investigation into alleged war crimes is opened, Israel’s illegal annexation plans for the West Bank could also have a serious impact on any defence that it might mount. Bensouda has included this factor in her preliminary investigation.
The threat of an ICC investigation into Israel’s and America’s alleged war crimes has been criticised by both countries. US President Donald Trump imposed sanctions on the court last month, a move praised by Israel. Nevertheless, the ICC has received further complaints about alleged Israeli and US war crimes over the past month, strengthening the case for a formal investigation.
Israeli duplicity about 2014 invasion ‘Operation Brothers Keeper’
Operation Brothers Keeper, an Israeli initiative supposedly launched to rescue three Jewish Israeli teenagers who had been kidnapped.
By Kathryn Shihadah | If Americans Knew | July 15, 2020
“Operation Brothers Keeper” has a nice ring to it, but the name represents months of duplicity by Israeli leaders, not only toward their own people, but toward the world, in order to perpetrate injustices on the people of Palestine.
The summer of 2014, when Operation Brothers Keeper emerged, was an exceptionally violent season in a decades-long stretch of violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories – a conflict defined by the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and against confiscation of their land; a conflict that has consistently seen many times more Palestinian casualties than Israelis.
Palestinians took to the streets that summer for much the same reason they always had: to struggle against oppression. The Israeli military came out to defend Israel’s status as oppressors.
Some context
Operation Brothers Keeper (OBK) was an invasion of the Palestinian West Bank, launched after the kidnapping of three Jewish Israeli teenagers. (This presaged its massive July invasion of Gaza, “Operation Protective Edge.”)
Perhaps, in the Israeli consciousness, the West Bank invasion was an isolated event – but for Palestinians, OBK was another in a long line of oppressive tactics within a framework of illegal occupation and injustice.
Maps show Palestinian loss of land from Israel’s 1948 creation through the present
In the early 20th century, massive Jewish immigration had caused concern among the indigenous Palestinians in the land; by 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and land, most to never return as it became part of a new Jewish state. 1967 saw the occupation of all remaining Palestinian territories; 2008-9 had witnessed Israel’s devastating invasion of Gaza that killed 1,400 Palestinians (and 9 Israelis). In between these events, Israel had kept the Palestinian people under constant oppression – and the Palestinian people had resisted.
In late 2012, Israel had invaded the Palestinian Gaza Strip in a conflict that lasted 8 days before a ceasefire was put in place.
At that time, Israel promised to end its attacks on Gaza by land, sea, and air, stop assassinations of Gazan officials, and lift its blockade of Gaza, then in its 5th year; Hamas leaders in Gaza vowed to end rocket fire toward Israel (rockets that had killed 21 Israelis in 12 years).
Gaza held up its end of the deal: throughout 2013, rockets from Gaza were few and far between, and just one Israeli was killed in the vicinity. (5 more Israelis were killed elsewhere.)
Israel did not keep its promises: its military invaded Gaza and shot at Palestinian farmers and fishermen; the blockade remained in place, keeping food, medicine, and other staples out of the hands of those who needed them desperately. (Read here about the “period of calm” during the first 3 months after the 2012 ceasefire, during which Israelis experienced calm, but Palestinians were attacked on a daily basis.)
Nine Gazans were killed in 2013, over 30 other Palestinians were killed elsewhere. In the first 5 months of 2014 – before the Israeli teens were kidnapped – dozens of Palestinians, some of them teens, and 2 Israelis, were killed.
The Israeli blockade of Gaza remained in place (it is still in place today).
Kidnapping
On June 12th, the three Israelis, aged 16 – 19, were kidnapped while hitchhiking.
All three were yeshiva (Jewish religious school) students, and would have almost certainly become soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Israel practices universal conscription of both males and females at age 18 – although it is possible to delay or even avoid military service by continuing religious education after high school, as was likely the case with the older kidnapping victim. (Go here to read about religious extremism in some Israeli yeshivot.)
One of the teens called an emergency number for help. Along with his voice, the call also recorded shouting in Arabic and several gunshots.
Several hours later, parents of one of the boys reported him missing, at which point the police began to make the connection with the emergency call, which they originally believed to be a prank.
Netanyahu at press conference with DM Moshe Ya’alon during Operation Brothers Keeper (AFP)
Deception and brutality
The Forward reports that the Israeli government “had known almost from the beginning that the boys were dead. It maintained the fiction that it hoped to find them alive as a pretext to dismantle Hamas’ West Bank operations.”
The prime suspects, Palestinians, were identified within hours of the incident, and known to be rogue, with “a reputation for attacking Israeli civilian targets” and regularly acting “counter to the policies being advocated by [Hamas].” Their family disclosed within a day of the kidnapping that the men had disappeared.
Instead of broadcasting photos of the suspects and preparing the country for the inevitable locating of bodies rather than hostages, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu immediately imposed a gag order on the media.
Even the parents of the kidnapped teens were led to believe that the boys were still alive.
Publicly, Netanyahu consistently claimed that he knew “for a fact” that Hamas was behind the kidnapping – in fact, at no point did any evidence point to Hamas’ participation in the incident; its leaders consistently denied involvement.
Meanwhile, ironically, the Israeli police cautioned the public against “spreading rumors on social media.”
On June 15th, Netanyahu launched Operation Brothers Keeper, characterizing it as a “hostage rescue operation.” Behind the scenes, however, he commissioned 2,500 Israeli soldiers, plus special forces, on a rampage through the West Bank in search not of hostages, but of Hamas members. According to The Nation :
Israel arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings.
The operation kept 300,000 Palestinians under curfew; movement was restricted for another 600,000 – a form of illegal collective punishment.
A Palestinian woman cries in her home after a raid by Israeli troops as part of Operation Brothers Keeper, Sunday, June 22,2014. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh)
As far as Israeli citizens knew, the killers could be anyone, anywhere; the vast majority were therefore supportive of whatever measures their leaders chose to take. All over Israel, and in Jewish communities around the world, rallies and prayer meetings sought – in vain – the boys’ safe return – even while the Israeli government knew they were already dead.
In Gaza – where Hamas is the duly elected governing party – Hamas leaders watched as Israel used them as a pretext for the spate of arrests. Hamas had restrained itself and other resistance factions since the end of the 2012 conflict, waiting for Israel to fulfill its promise to end the blockade. But now, Israel was blaming Hamas for the kidnappings, re-arresting Hamas prisoners who had been freed, and maintaining the blockade. Hamas began allowing rockets to fly out of Gaza again.
United Nations
On June 17th, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, spoke to the Security Council. In his speech, he blamed Hamas for the kidnapping (without proof) and demanded international pressure on Hamas to release the boys. Prosor displayed the hashtag that Israel and its partisans all over the world were using to draw attention to the fabricated crisis: #BringBackOurBoys.
On June 21st, Netanyahu repeated his canard to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: “the information in Israel’s hands unequivocally indicates that Hamas is responsible for the abduction of the youths”; Netanyahu went on to falsely link the Palestinian resistance with ISIS when he said “we are witnessing the unrestrained brutality of Islamic terrorism, both in Israel and around us.”
On June 23rd, the U.N. Security Council attempted unsuccessfully to pass a resolution condemning the kidnapping of the Israeli teens: some countries wanted to add strong language condemning Israel’s violent security sweep; the US insisted that it would not sign any statement that included a reference to Israeli actions.
On June 24th, the mother of one of the kidnapped boys addressed the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), pleading for international assistance in bringing the boys back. (Her trip was paid for by UN Watch, a group that monitors what it calls “the continuing discriminatory treatment of Israel in the UN system” and pushes for “the removal of UN personnel who are considered critical of Israel.”)
In the same UNHRC session, many delegates and representatives from human rights organizations criticized Israel’s human rights record, especially its recent crackdown.
Then IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz visits soldiers as they take part in Operation Brothers Keeper to locate three kidnapped Israeli teens, June 24, 2014. (IDF Spokesperson/Flash90)
Kidnapped boys’ bodies found
On June 30th, 15 days after the Israeli leadership started its deceptive “campaign” to bring the boys back alive, the bodies were located ten minutes away from where they had last been seen.
The discovery was made not by the thousands of Israeli military or police – they were as much as 130 miles away, still ransacking Palestinian homes and arresting Palestinians – but by a volunteer search party.
The shallow grave was on the property of one of the suspects, whose identity had also been known for weeks, and whose property should have been considered suspect.
Within hours, Israeli forces demolished the family homes of the two suspects, an illegal but common practice in Israel.
The next day, July 1st, a funeral was held for the three teens. PM Netanyahu eulogized,
A deep and wide moral abyss separates us from our enemies. They sanctify death while we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion. This is the secret of our strength; it is the foundation of our unity.
This fraudulent profession of Israeli innocence flew in the face of facts that Mr. Netanyahu surely knew: the Israeli army had killed 19 Palestinians in the first quarter of 2014, and more in May and June. (Before the deaths of the three teens, two Israelis had been killed in 2014.)
Netanyahu’s eulogy also ignored the fact that Palestinians – specifically, Hamas – had been relatively subdued since 2012. As The Forward stated in “How Politics and Lies Triggered an Unintended War,” “The staged agony of the kidnap search created, probably unintentionally, what amounts to a mass, worldwide attack of post-traumatic stress flashback.”
Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) reported that late on July 1st, after the bodies were found, several Palestinians were killed. Israeli settlers also started constructing two new illegal outposts. Some settlers (and politicians) believe “the settlement enterprise is the most appropriate response to Palestinian terror… Our enemies will incite and we will establish” – not making the connection that building on stolen Palestinian land is incitement itself.
Incitement
From the moment the bodies of the missing teens were discovered, Israeli leaders incited their people to revenge, as described by Electronic Intifada :
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led the pack, calling the killers of the youths “human animals” and stating “Hamas is responsible. Hamas will pay.”
Former Israeli lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari posted a video and a statement…”We are living in a “jungle,” Ben-Ari said, calling Palestinian children “little terrorists”…
(Elsewhere, Ben-Ari called on Israel to “kill terrorists in public hangings.”)
Housing minister Uri Ariel called for the extrajudicial executions of leaders of Hamas and for Israel to “start a wave of construction in the settlements in response to the murder of the abductees”…
Tzipi Hotovely, another Likud lawmaker and deputy minister, wrote that “Israel must declare a war of annihilation of Hamas, which is responsible for the murder, and return to the assassination policy.”
Economy minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the ultra-anti-Palestinian Jewish Home party, declared “Murderers of children and those who direct them cannot be forgiven. Now is a time for actions, not words.”
With this highly visible incitement, it came as no surprise that after the funeral, crowds of Israelis – including young children – chanted “Death to the Arabs.” Mobs marched through the streets, attacking Palestinians as they went.
Mohammad Abukhdeir was killed by Jewish Israelis on July 2, 2014. (Facebook)
Revenge killing
On July 2nd, a Palestinian teenager named Mohammad Abukhdeir was kidnapped and burned alive near Jerusalem.
At first, Israel’s leaders imposed another gag order; meanwhile, Israeli police started rumors that Abukhdeir had been killed by his own family for being gay.
It wasn’t long before the truth had to come out: the torture/murder had been committed by three Jewish Israelis – two of them teenagers themselves. They eventually faced trial and in 2016 received sentences from 21 years to life. Their family homes were not demolished.
PM Netanyahu’s condolences to the Abukhdeir family condemned the murder and promised justice; then he went on to address his constituents, again claiming Israeli innocence:
I know that in our society, the society of Israel, there is no place for such murderers. And that’s the difference between us and our neighbors. They consider murderers to be heroes. They name public squares after them. We don’t. [editor’s note: this is false.] We condemn them and we put them on trial and we’ll put them in prison.
Al Jazeera reminded its readers that Abukhdeir’s abduction was not an isolated incident: “for Palestinians, the detention of their children, running into thousands, is experienced as kidnapping at an Israeli-state level.” The vast majority of these events – which frequently include torture – go unpunished.
In 2014, Israel’s military kidnapped 6,059 Palestinians. A spokesman for the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees stated on December 29th, 2014,
“There hasn’t been a single day that did not witness the abduction of Palestinians. On average, the army has kidnapped 505 Palestinians each month; approximately 17 a day.”
Since 1967, Israel has detained more than 50,000 Palestinian children; the Palestinian government has never detained an Israeli child. Additionally, a total of over 2,400 Palestinian children and 139 Israeli children have been killed since 2000.
Israeli teens’ killers tracked down
On August 5th, one suspect in the kidnapping and killing of the Israeli teens was arrested.
On September 23rd, the primary suspects were surrounded by Israeli military forces in a building in Hebron. An IDF spokesperson later stated, “We opened fire, they returned fire and they were killed in the exchange.”
At that point, Operation Brothers Keeper was officially closed.
Stay tuned for “war”
On July 8th, the Israel launched an incursion into Gaza, which in 50 days would bring about the deaths of 73 Israelis (9% civilians) and 2,250 Palestinians (65% civilians, 501 children). This travesty will be discussed in an upcoming post.
RELATED READING:
Blinken reveals how Obama & Biden helped Israel’s 2014 Gaza massacre
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Remembering Mohammad Abukhdeir, 6 years on
The Staggering Cost of Israel to Americans: The Facts
Israeli airstrikes vs Palestinian rockets: Facts & Stats on air attacks
Trump-Kushner “Peace” Plan ignores elephants in the room: Israel created this mess
Chile Senate approves resolution to adopt law boycotting settlement goods
MEMO | July 10, 2020
The Chilean Senate last week approved a resolution calling on President Sebastian Pinera Echenique to adopt a law boycotting settlement goods and banning commercial activity with companies that operate in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The motion passed on 30 June with 29 votes in favour and six abstentions, no votes were cast against the move.
The resolution also called on the government to promote legislation that would ban all Israeli settlement products; prohibit any company involved in the Israeli occupation from benefiting from any agreement or bid signed by Chile; apply tourism guidelines for Israel and Palestine that would not allow the promotion of trips to Israel using pictures of East Jerusalem or Bethlehem “among other Palestinian cities”; forbid any kind of cooperation, including monetary, with the Israeli colonisation of occupied Palestine; and ensure that no tax benefits will be afforded to any organisation operating in Chile if it is involved in the occupation of Palestine.
Yesterday, President of the Palestinian National Council Salim Al-Zanoun thanked the Senate for its decision which he said constitutes a victory for the right of “our people to establish an independent state with its capital, Jerusalem, on the borders of June 4, 1967”, and affirming the international consensus regarding the application of international law and the terms of reference of the peace process.
On 2 July, Chile, the country with the largest population of Palestinians in Latin America, lit up its Telephone Tower with the Palestinian kufiyeh in support of the Palestinian people and rejection of Israel’s plans to annex some 30 per cent of the occupied West Bank
Israel detains two Hamas officials in the occupied West Bank
![The national and Islamic forces and factions in Gaza, including Hamas and Fatah, reach an agreement on a unified national plan of action to confront the US' 'deal of the century' and Israel's annexation plans on June 28, 2020 [Mohammad Asad / Middle East Monitor]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/6Z8A2999-scaled-e1593443758857.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
Factions, including Hamas and Fatah, reach agreement on a unified national plan of action to confront the ‘deal of the century’ and Israel’s annexation plans on June 28, 2020 [Mohammad Asad / MEMO]
MEMO | July 10, 2020
The Israeli occupation forces detained two officials of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, on Thursday during raids in the occupied West Bank. According to Anadolu, eyewitnesses said that soldiers raided properties in Ramallah and Al-Bireh.
Clashes erupted between dozens of Palestinian youths and the troops who arrested Jamal Al-Tawil from Al-Bireh, and Hussein Abu Kweik from Beitunia in Ramallah. The soldiers are said to have used live ammunition and rubber bullets, as well as sound bombs and tear gas against the demonstrators.
Hamas condemned the arrests. “This was a miserable and failed attempt to stop our resistance to all Israeli projects intended to liquidate Palestinian cause, especially the colonial annexation plan,” said spokesman Hazem Kassem. “The arrest of these officials is an effort to block the path of joint national action to challenge the occupation’s plans.”
Kassem added that, despite the arrests, “Hamas will continue our struggle against the [Israeli] occupation and its projects, and we will continue to develop the path of unity with all sections of our people to reach a strategy of joint struggle to confront the annexation plan.”
Arrest and detention campaigns are common in the occupied West Bank. Israel claims that those detained are “wanted” by its security services.
READ: Israel fears meetings between senior Fatah and Hamas representatives
Danon has exposed the fact that the UN has abandoned Palestine and the Palestinians
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | July 9, 2020
Israel’s outgoing Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, is not leaving the arena without his usual, unfounded claim that the international community is subservient to the Palestinian narrative. In a recent item in the Jerusalem Post, Danon cautioned against calling Israel’s plan to formalise its land theft “annexation”. To substantiate his claim, he quoted former Israeli Prime Minister and wanted terrorist Menachem Begin: “You can annex foreign territory. You can’t annex your own country.”
Mixing Biblical narratives with politics, Danon stated that it was British policy to establish “a Jewish national home in Palestine”, thus proving the Zionist colonial trajectory, rather than any claims to the land. The European colonial ideology which set up a settler-colonial entity in Palestine has no roots in indigenous territory and erasing Palestinians from their land does not make the European colonisers in Palestine in any way indigenous.
According to Danon, “Those who decry it as ‘annexation’ are doing nothing more than appeasing the Palestinian narrative and making peace ever more elusive. This puts them, to use their words, on the wrong side of history.”
In another article for the Jewish Insider, Danon echoed the America Israel Public Affairs Committee’s recommendations to criticise Israel but not issue “threats”, with direct reference to a letter by Democratic lawmakers to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, which recommended the conditioning and withholding of US financial aid for Israel if annexation is implemented.
The ongoing efforts to justify Israeli violations of international law clearly indicate the seriousness of annexation. Danon claims that history and international law are on Israel’s side. They aren’t; unfortunately, though, the international community is. The UN is to blame for the way that Palestinian history and narratives have been relegated to annual commemorations, thus communicating overtly that as far as the international body is concerned, Palestinians are just a trophy item on its agenda. With such silent diplomacy, and one with which the Palestinian Authority is in completely concordance, it is an easy task for Israeli representatives to manipulate history and international law based upon collective inaction when it comes to Palestinian rights.
History has documented Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine; it is a fact, as is its normalisation by the international community. Danon has had enough experience at the UN to know that any purported support for Palestinians’ political rights is meaningless, and that Israel can get away with anything, including war crimes, because the international community allows it to determine by itself what constitutes a violation of international law. Israel, though, believes that it is incapable of violating international law, because the colonial state’s own legislation justifies crimes which international laws and conventions prohibit.
Moreover, Israel’s depiction as a democracy within the international arena ensures that the UN will never consider the realities of its colonial violence, let alone recognise the fact that Palestinians are within their rights to resist occupation as part of an anti-colonial struggle. Undoubtedly, Danon would prefer to have a debate about whether the land theft should be called annexation or reclamation, the latter being another example of Zionist sophistry. This would eliminate any scrutiny of the fact that Israel is formalising annexation without so much as a collective warning from the international community, despite the UN’s posturing and pontificating about international law. Danon and his fallacious claims have exposed the fact that the organisation has effectively abandoned Palestine and the Palestinians.
A Jewish Zionist Tent Is No Place For Palestinians
Peter Beinart (left); Bella Hadid (right)
By Rima Nijjar | Medium | July 9, 2020
This morning I woke up to two pieces of news that were circulating on social media. One was an article, a proclamation of sorts, by Peter Beinart, a Jewish-American columnist, journalist, and liberal political commentator. It was causing a buzz and being touted as “groundbreaking”. The other was a much more common incident, only notable because it had happened to an international supermodel, Bella Hadid. To me the two stories merged into one, as I explain below.
I’ll begin my post with the groundbreaking news.
By “questioning Israel’s existence as a Jewish state”, Peter Beinart, who is, in some people’s view, “the only liberal Zionist worth taking seriously”, has generated a lot of excitement on social media, and jubilation among some progressive anti-Zionists who have long butted heads with Beinart and like-minded people on this issue.
Writing for Jewish Currents, Beinart explores the wrenching angst so many other Jews typically testify to publicly. First, he asks the question, what makes someone a Jew? He answers it referencing “the broad center of Jewish life — where power and respectability lie” as, above all “supporting the existence of a Jewish state.”
Beinart then rejects this world view, a rejection that feels to him “akin to spitting in the face of people I love and betraying institutions that give my life meaning and joy. Besides, Jewish statehood has long been precious to me, too. So I’ve respected certain red lines.”
Next he puts forth the rationale that caused him to cross a “red line”: As a result of the annexation plans, he has come to realize that Jewish statehood means permanent Israeli control of the West Bank, and so, for the first time in his life, he began to wonder “whether the price of a state that favors Jews over Palestinians is too high.” He announces: “It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality.”
And then he says, “This doesn’t require abandoning Zionism … [Israel] is a Jewish home in the land of Israel.”
What? That broke the spell for me — a Palestinian, listening in on a Jewish conversation. I didn’t bother to read the rest (it’s a rather long article). To me, it wasn’t going to feel “like the dam(n) wall is bursting”, as someone cleverly put it. It felt like Palestine was still being falsely labeled as “the land of Israel”!
What Palestinians are demanding is decolonization, to be followed by reconciliation, which means first and foremost, an admission by people like Beinart that Palestine is and will always be Palestine, not “The land of Israel — the traditional Jewish name for an area of indefinite geographical extension in the Southern Levant.”
Moving on to Bella Hadid’s story, it read: ‘On Tuesday, the model shared a photo of her father Mohamed Hadid’s passport on her Instagram Story, showing his place of birth listed as Palestine, with the caption, “I am proud to be Palestinian.” The Victoria’s Secret model, who is of Palestinian and Dutch descent, then asked, “Are we not allowed to be Palestinian on Instagram? This, to me, is bullying.”’
Bella Hadid’s Instagram post: “I am proud to be Palestinian”
By the end of the day, Instagram apologized to Bella Hadid for removing the picture of her dad’s passport. “A spokesperson for Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, told Page Six in response, “To protect the privacy of our community, we don’t allow people to post personal information, such as passport numbers, on Instagram. In this case the passport number was blurred out, so this content shouldn’t have been removed. We’ve restored the content and apologized to Bella for the mistake.”
This incident is a manifestation of the power and reach of the ideology of political Zionism, notwithstanding Instagram’s apology, which no one really believes (Check out: YouTube censors video, produced by If Americans Knew, about daily life for Palestinians). This ideology necessitates the erasure of Palestine and Palestinians from recorded memory.
Zionism is the idea that Jews, for various reasons, cannot coexist comfortably with other peoples in the world and therefore need a “homeland” somewhere, anywhere, to “ingather”.
Such an idea is unacceptable to anyone whose own country is that coveted “homeland”. It is unacceptable as long as the concept involves a supremacist settler-colonial state and it is similarly unacceptable, even if it involves “equality” and a single state, but remains within the same Jewish settler-colonial paradigm.
About Beinart’s “conversion”, Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss writes: “Beinart’s endorsement of Ali Abunimah shows that the Palestinian narrative of Zionism is now in the Jewish tent, and it’s never leaving.”
“The Palestinian narrative of Zionism” sees little moral authority or legitimacy in any of Israel’s leaders beginning with the country’s pre-state machinations on the world stage. When Beinart writes a sentence such as, “A struggle for equality could elevate Palestinian leaders who possess the moral authority that Abbas and Hamas lack” (referring to Ayman Odeh, a Knesset member), I wonder if such a struggle could “elevate” Israeli leaders (past and present) who possess no moral authority or legitimacy whatsoever in Palestinian eyes.
In 2015, Alice Rothchild, American obstetrician, filmmaker, and social-justice activist, wrote in Mondoweiss : “Let liberal Jews weep for their dream of Israel, and move on.” Beinart needs to move on to another tent.
Palestinians have no place in a Zionist Jewish tent (entity) of any shape or form. But Israelis could have a place in our tent.
___________________
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 and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.
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From the Archives
How 1960’s French Nuclear Tests Are Still Claiming Lives in Algeria
Sputnik – 15.02.2018
On February 13, 1960, France carried out its first nuclear test in Algeria’s southern Reggane region. According to official statistics, 17 nuclear tests were carried out in total over the next 6 years. The area remains affected, and local scientists say that radioactive contamination has caused genetic mutations and irreversibly changed the region.
There are no official statistics on the number of victims. The only figures can be found in the records kept by the French representative of the local church, which lists 42,000 victims of nuclear tests. Three years ago, the French Ministry of Defense issued a statement, putting the number at 27,000 people. The victims include French soldiers as well as local Algerians who lived in the surrounding areas. … continue
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