Palestinian prisoners launch collective hunger strike to demand justice and dignity
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – April 8, 2019
Palestinian prisoners have announced the launch of a collective hunger strike in Israeli prisons on Monday, 8 April to demand an end to the ongoing and escalated repression inside the prisons. The strike is being led by a number of leaders from all of the Palestinian political parties and organizations inside Israeli prisons, with 120 prisoners launching the open hunger strike as a first step toward a collective hunger strike of all prisoners, in a declaration of a “second battle of dignity (Karameh).”
The Handala Center for Prisoners and Former Prisoners said that the strike was launched in response to the Israel Prison Service’s reneging on previously agreed-upon understandings to lessen the level of repression imposed on the prisoners. Specifically, Allam Kaabi said, the prison administration had previously agreed to make telephone calls available to all except for those classified by the occupation as “security matters,” but then disavowed that understanding. The prisoners are represented by a leadership group representing all political forces; Ahmad Sa’adat, Palestinian national leader and the imprisoned General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is part of this coordinating committee.
The strike comes one day before the Israeli elections, in which a slew of right-wing candidates have competed with one another to pledge harsher attacks against the Palestinian people, including Palestinians in Gaza and Palestinian political prisoners.
As part of his own campaign efforts, Gilad Erdan, Israeli Minister of Internal Security, has imposed even more harsh repressive measures on Palestinian prisoners alongside public announcements and displays in an attempt to boost support for the Likud. (It should be noted that Erdan is also head of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, responsible for global campaigns against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) and Palestine solidarity. In this context, Erdan has focused specific attacks on human rights organizations and solidarity groups supporting Palestinian prisoners, including Samidoun.)
These repressive attacks have included multiple invasions of prisoners’ cells, rooms and sections by heavily armed repressive units. Prisoners’ belongings have been searched and confiscated, while multiple prisoners have been transferred from section to section. Prisoners have been beaten by these forces, who have also fired tear gas within the confined space of prison sections, leading to multiple injuries. Thousands of books have been confiscated from the prisoners, while family visits have been banned for many prisoners, especially those associated with the Hamas movement. In addition, devices such as surveillance cameras and alleged mobile-phone jammers have been installed in the prisons, further elevating the level of surveillance faced by the prisoners.
These attacks have come under the banner of Erdan’s committee to “examine the conditions of the prisoners” in order to “impose a new reality” on Palestinian prisoners – precisely designed to roll back the rights that the prisoners have only won through years of struggle, including hunger strikes and other protests. The prisoners’ demands include: the installation of public telephones in the prisons to allow them to communicate with their families, the removal of the jamming devices, the return of family visits to normal and the abolition of all of the repressive measures, sanctions and penalties imposed on the prisoners.
According to breaking news reports from Palestine, key leaders of the prisoners’ movement and the Palestinian national liberation movement as a whole have joined the strike and hundreds are planning to join the strike in the coming days. The strike is planned to escalate on 17 April, marked in Palestine and internationally as Palestinian Prisoners’ Day. There are currently around 5,500 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, including 48 women, 230 children and nearly 500 held without charge or trial under indefinitely renewable administrative detention orders. … more at Samidoun
The One Jewish State Solution
By Gilad Atzmon | April 7, 2019
Some of the more advanced Israel/Palestine commentators have agreed amongst themselves that the ‘one-state solution’ amounts to empty talk for the simple reason that Palestine is ‘one-state’ already: It has natural borders, one electric grid and even one international pre-dial number (+972). But this beautiful and historic land, stretched from the river to the sea, is dominated by a foreign and hostile ideology that is racially supremacist and vile towards the indigenous people of the land.
Some of those perceptive analysts have been bewildered following a peculiar shift in Israeli politics: while the so-called Israeli ‘Left’ has been advocating racial and ethnic segregation between Jews and Palestinians by adopting the two-state solution, it is actually the Zionist ultra-right that has been pushing constantly for an integration of the ‘land’ by means of Israeli annexation.
While very few within the Israeli Left joined the call for a one-state solution, it seems as if PM Benjamin Netanyahu and the entire Israeli Right are thrilled by the idea.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Saturday to extend Israeli sovereignty to the settlements of the West Bank if he is re-elected in Tuesday’s poll.
Netanyahu’s declaration shouldn’t take us by surprise. Two weeks ago, a Haaretz poll revealed that 42% of Israelis back West Bank annexation. Apparently, 16% of those polled support annexing the entire West Bank without giving any political rights to the Palestinians who live there. I guess that it is hard not to see the political reasoning behind PM Netanyahu’s promise to annex settlements. Netanyahu, who is likely to form the next Israeli government, is attempting to appeal to the Israeli ultra-right voters. He wants them to vote Likud on Tuesday rather than ‘wasting’ their vote on a small ultra-right party or another.
There is obviously a big difference between the one-state call that has been pushed by Palestinian solidarity activists and Netanyahu’s politics of annexation. While Palestinian rights advocates are referring to one democratic state, Netanyahu is not committed to democracy at all. He is solely faithful to the Jewish population and what he offers in practice is a ‘One Jewish State Solution.’ After all, Israel defines itself as ‘the Jewish State’ and it is there to serve one people while denying others their most elementary rights. Israel, as we know, is not a state of its citizens, it is a state of its Jewish citizens. By the time Israel comes to term with its sin and transcends into a state of its citizens regardless of their race, ethnicity or religious belief it will be renamed. It may as well be called Palestine.
There’s Something Rotten in Virginia: Israel Is a Malignant Force in Local Politics
Mel Chaskin, Chairman of Virginia Israel Advisory Board. Credit: YouTube
By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | April 7, 2019
One of the more interesting aspects of the relentless march of the Israel Lobby in the United States is the extent to which it has expanded its reach down into the state and even local level. Previously, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the hundreds of other Jewish and Christian Zionist organization dedicated to promoting Israeli interests had concentrated on the federal government level and the media, believing correctly that those were the key players in benefiting Israel while also making sure that its public image was highly favorable. The media was the easy part as American Jews were already well placed in the industry and inclined to be helpful. It also turned out that many Congressmen and the political parties themselves had their hands out and were just waiting to be bought, so “Mission Accomplished” turned out to be a lot easier than had been anticipated.
But amidst all the success, the Israeli government and its diaspora supporters discovered that it was receiving a lot of unwelcome publicity from an essentially grassroots movement that went by the label “Boycott, Divest and Sanctions” or BDS. BDS was strong on American campuses and its appeal as a non-violent tool meant that it was growing, to include many young Jews disenchanted with the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu version of the Jewish state.
Israel works hard to influence the United States at all levels and is generally very successful, but it seemed a stretch to try to pass legislation banning a non-violent movement at a national level so it focused on the states, where legislators would presumably be less concerned over the Bill of Rights. It mobilized its diaspora resources to focus on elections at local and state government levels where Jewish constituents were active in interviewing candidates regarding their views on the Middle East. Candidates understood very well what was happening and also appreciated that their answers could determine what level of donations and the kind of press coverage they might receive in return.
Put together enough intimidated legislators in that fashion and you eventually will have a majority willing to pass legislation blocking or even criminalizing the BDS movement while also granting special benefits to Israel. As of this writing, there is anti-BDS legislation in 27 states, some of which denies state services or jobs to anyone who does not sign an agreement to not boycott Israel. Particularly draconian bills currently advancing in Florida equate any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, explicitly define Israel as a Jewish state and also enable anyone who says otherwise to be sued.
Another blatant propaganda program that is being used with congressmen, as well as state and local officials plus spouses, is the sponsorship of free “educational” trips to Israel. The trips are carefully coordinated with the Israeli government and many of them are both organized and paid for by an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee called the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF). There are also other trips sponsored by AIEF as well as by regional Jewish organizations that particularly focus on politicians at state and even local levels as well as journalists who write about foreign policy.
Everyone is expected to return from the carefully choreographed trips singing the praises of the wonderful little democracy in the Middle East, and many of the travelers do exactly that. The pro-Israel sentiment is buttressed by the activity of the state and local diaspora Jewish groups, which tend to be very politically active and generous with their political contributions.
This coziness often borders on corruption and inevitably leads to abuses that do not serve the public interest, particularly as American citizens are quite openly promoting the interests of a foreign nation. An interesting example of how this works and the abuse that it can produce has recently surfaced in Virginia, where a so-called Virginia-Israel Advisory Board (VIAB) has actually been funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia taxpayers to promote and even subsidize Israeli business in the state, business that currently runs an estimated $500 million per annum in favor of Israel.
Grant Smith’s Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP) has done considerable digging into digging into the affairs of VIAB, which was ostensibly “created to foster closer economic integration between the United States and Israel while supporting the Israeli government’s policy agenda” with a charter defining its role as “advis[ing] the Governor on ways to improve economic and cultural links between the Commonwealth and the State of Israel, with a focus on the areas of commerce and trade, art and education, and general government.” Smith has observed that “VIAB is a pilot for how Israel can quietly obtain taxpayer funding and official status for networked entities that advance Israel from within key state governments.”
Documents released under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act indicate that not only does VIAB not create opportunities for Virginians, it also is active in working against the BDS movement. According to the documents, VIAB, which avoids any public disclosure of its activities, is currently also being scrutinized by the state Attorney General over its handling of government funds.
VIAB was founded in 2001 but it grew significantly under governor Terry McAuliffe’s administration (2014-2018). McAuliffe, regarded by many as the Clintons’ “bag man,” received what were regarded as generous out-of-state campaign contributors from actively pro-Israeli billionaires Haim Saban and J.B. Pritzker, who were both affiliated with the Democratic Party. McAuliffe met regularly in off-the-record “no press allowed” sessions with Israel advocacy groups and spoke about “the Virginia Advisory Board and its successes.”
The Virginia Coalition for Human Rights (VCHR) reports that VIAB is “the only Israel business promotion entity in the United States embedded within a state government and funded entirely by the state’s taxpayers. In terms of the overall state budget, VIAB’s direct share is small ($209,068 for fiscal years 2017 and 2018). However, VIAB’s diversion of state, federal and private grants, as well as demands on state-funded entities like colleges and universities to collaborate in projects designed primarily to benefit Israel, run in the millions of dollars per year. VIAB’s main objective is to provide preferential and unconditional funding to oftentimes secretive Israeli business projects designed to entwine Israeli industries into Virginia industries and government. VIAB seeks to transcend warranted, growing and legitimate American grassroots concerns about human rights in Israel-Palestine by pressuring state lawmakers and the local business community into providing unconditional support and developing a long-term ‘stake’ in Israel.”
Per VCHR, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act found that VIAB, among other suspect practices, had “Provided reports of success that the office of the Governor found to be “inflated without merit.” VCHR concluded that “there should be no preferential and unconditional Commonwealth of Virginia support for Israeli business projects for four key concerns: moral, economic, good governance and state public opinion.” Moral was due to Israel’s “dismal human rights record,” economic because Virginia has a half-billion dollar trade deficit with Israel, good governance because VIAB’s board and leadership are drawn from the “Israel advocacy ecosystem,” and public opinion because opinion polls suggest that over one third of Virginians favor halting all funding for “Israeli business ventures.”
On a similar issue a shadowy group called the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS), which is actually a “partisan group with backing by state and local Israel advocacy organizations,” is seeking to change the information conveyed by the history and social studies textbooks used in K-12 classrooms across Virginia. ICS recommended changes include: “1. Emphasizing Arab culpability for crisis initiation leading to military action and failure of peace efforts—and never Israeli culpability, even when it is undisputed historic fact. 2. Replacing the commonly used words of “settlers” with “communities,” “occupation” with “control of,” “wall” with “security fence,” and “militant” with “terrorist.” 3. Referencing Israeli claims such as “Israel annexed East Jerusalem” and the Golan Heights as accepted facts without referencing lack of official recognition by the United Nations and most member nation states.”
The activity of the VIAB is little more than robbery of Virginia state resources being run by mostly local American Jews to benefit their co-religionists in Israel. What is significant is that the theft from the American taxpayer, having long occurred at the federal treasury level, now extends down to state and local jurisdictions. And the ICS is yet one more example of attempted Israeli brainwashing of the American public on behalf of the Jewish state to completely alter the narrative about what is going on in the Middle East. Will it ever end? Perhaps, but only when the American people finally wake up to what is being done to them and by whom.
Schumer, Pelosi, & Israeli billionaire Haim Saban at 2018 IAC conference
If Americans Knew | April 5, 2019
U.S. Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) tell Israeli billionaire campaign donor Haim Saban how devoted they are to Israel.
The panel is at the 2018 national convention of the Israeli American Council. Pelosi, who is Speaker of the House announces that she will name Israel partisans to chair top committees.
The crowd, composed of Israeli citizens, roars its approval at the two powerful American politicians.
The four-day conference was at the Diplomat Beach Resort in Hollywood, Florida. The next one is Dec. 5-8, 2019 at the same location.
Baseline of a Desecrated Land I: Food Supply
Part 1 of a 12 part series examining the ecological impacts of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
How Israel’s water and agricultural technologies don’t even work for Israel
By Dick Callahan | September 30, 2018
“California I hear has a big water problem. We in Israel don’t have a water problem. We use technology to solve it…” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to California Governor Jerry Brown in March 2014.
“If you were planning to grow a new strain of tomato—don’t do it, because there is no water. Stop planting. Stop sowing new seedlings. There’s no water.” Giora Shacham, Chairman of the Israeli Water Authority, to Jewish farmers at a December, 27, 2017 Israeli agriculture conference.
Introduction
A new mythology has it that Israel can save American agriculture and cities from drought. To accept this is to ignore the wilderness instructor’s maxim: “In a survival situation the first thing you need is recognition.”
Our situation is that we in America have 324 million people and our country exports more food every year than any country in the history of the planet. Israel has eight and a half million people, exports almost no food, is entirely dependent on imported food, and every indicator is screaming that the Jewish state ecosystem is a dying patient on the gurney.
We will mostly bypass what suffering Israeli water colonization has caused Palestinians. Instead, this piece looks at what fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly calls ‘Shifting Baselines,’ where some good thing is degraded over time and each successive generation adopts what is in front of them as their baseline reality. At some point an environment emerges that would terrify our ancestors. We Americans should look hard and honestly at Mother Earth groaning under Zionism in today’s Israel and ask, ‘Does America, or any country desiring a good future, want to follow that road?’
Before we start, it helps to know that Israel is 1,600 square miles smaller than the state of Vermont, the West Bank is smaller than St. Lawrence county in New York state, and the entire Gaza Strip is about the size of Bakersfield, California.
To evaluate Israeli land and water use technologies, these twelve recognitions might serve as jumping off points for discussion.
1) Israel cannot feed itself.
2) Israel pretends desalination impacts don’t exist.
3) Israel takes Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian water.
4) Israel’s one and only large, natural water body may be gone within twenty years.
5) Over half of the Jordan river valley’s biodiversity is already gone.
6) Israel and the Occupied Territories are awash in human sewage.
7) West Bank/Israeli streams and groundwater are over exploited and drying up so completely that centuries old trees in the nature reserves are dying of thirst.
8) Israel’s water, forestry, agricultural and military technologies have compromised agricultural land to the point where half of it is depleted and at risk, pesticide use is highest in the OECD, the land is absorbing more heat, and, in the long run, drip irrigation may do more harm than good.
9) Israel is the Flint, Michigan of the Middle East with a history of spectacular toxic spills, dumped military/industrial carcinogens, hundreds of contaminated wells, hundreds of millions of tons of contaminated ground water, millions of tons of oil stored right on the beach, massive unregulated hazardous waste sites built above aquifers, and the world’s oldest nuclear reactor, sitting 18 miles from the Syria-African fault line—with 1,537 documented defects in its aluminum core.
10) Wine, war, industrial tourism, and an unwinnable competition with the faster growing Arab population are the water marks on Israel’s self-portrait.
11) Israel is stuck with being the love-child of 1950’s American water engineers and 1800’s ‘make the desert bloom’ fundamentalism.
12) Israel is a cautionary tale.
Baseline Recognitions
Recognition I: Israel can’t feed itself
“Israel is almost completely dependent on imports to meet its grain and feed needs… Total grain, feedstuff and soybean supply will total about 5.06 million tons.” USDA Foreign Agricultural Service Report, Israel Grain and Feed Annual 02.18.2015 by Gilad Shachar & Orestes Vasquez
Humanity uses most of its fresh water to grow food. Current estimates for Israel’s total annual water consumption run between 2¼ and 2½ billion cubic meters per year. An item missing from that buoyant assessment is the fact that life in the Jewish state depends on importing four times as much, over ten billion metric tons, of virtual water every year via container ships. Virtual water is J.A. Allen’s elegant concept that, instead of trying to understand the value of agricultural commodities in terms of carrots, steaks, bushels of wheat, or how much money those bring in, we should view farm products as compact, transportable carriers embedded with all of the water it took to grow them.
If we include the embedded water footprint of millions of tons of grains/feed/soybeans (GFS) as well as meat, dairy, fruit and other commodities to the equation, Israel’s total annual water requirement quintuples.
The agricultural water footprint for a given commodity includes green water (rainfall that ends up in the root zone), blue water (irrigation from surface and ground water), and grey water (water it takes to dilute agricultural runoff). Below are water footprints of some mainstay Israeli food imports for Market Year 2016.
(commodity in 1,000’s metric tons-Mt) X (tons water to grow a ton)=Water footprint
Corn 1,515 1,222 1,851,330
Wheat 1,758 1,827 3,211,866
Barley 376 1,977 743,352
Soybean Meal 135 2,145 289,575
Rice, milled 115 2,172 249,780
Sorghum 30 3,048 91,440
Rye 4 1,544 6,176
Rape seed meal 140 1,115 156,100
Sunflower meal 240 3,366 807,840
oil, rape seed 44 4,301 189,244
oil, soy bean 374 4,190 1,567,060
sugar, centrifugal 518 865 448,070
total 9,611,833
sources: USDA Foreign Agriculture Service Database. and The Green, Blue and Grey Water Footprint of Crops and Derived Crop Products. UNESCO-IHE, Institute of water education, Volume 1: Main Report. Value of Water Research Report Series No. 47.
- This 9,701,833 Mt water footprint of foodstuffs multiplied by 1,000 tons—because the commodities in the first column are in units of one thousand tons—gives 9,701,833,000 Mt of water.
Now add Israeli beef imports which average over 75,000 metric tons/year. This is in carcass weight equivalent (CWE) which means the cow after it has been gutted and skinned, with the head, tail, hooves removed. About 70 percent of the CWE is red meat. To find the amount of water in 75,000 Mt of red meat we multiply CWE by 0.7, which gives 52,500 Mt of meat. Global average to raise one Mt of red meat is 15,400 Mt of water. Multiplying 52,500 Mt of meat by the 15,400 Mt of water it took to grow them, we get 808,500,000 metric tons of water sent to Israel every year in the form of red meat. That by itself is a third above Israel’s entire annual desalination production.
Add other agricultural imports like 46,000 tons of various protein powders, soup stock, cheese, fresh fruits, 80 million eggs per year, etc and we’re looking at a total virtual reservoir of over 10.5 billion tons of water that Israel does not have to draw from its own resources.
How much is 10.5 billion metric tons of water?
*It’s enough to drain the Sea of Galilee dry more than 2½ times. (when the SoG is full—which it isn’t and hasn’t been for years.)
* It’s around 4 times larger than the entire annual national water consumption of Israel: the whole enchilada including domestic, industrial, meeting Israel’s agreements with Jordan and the Palestinians, etc.
* It’s enough to flood the entire Gaza Strip 28.8 meters (94.5 feet) deep. — [given that Gaza Strip is 365 square km and each square km = one million square meters] 10,500,000,000 cubic meters of water divided by 365,000,000 square meters] = 28.8 meters. 28.8 meters rounds to 94.5 feet.
*And it’s not enough. Israel’s population is growing at a rate of 1.58 percent per year. Grain imports are growing accordingly. By 2021 the country is predicted to require about 5.5 million tons of GFS alone. As the Mideast droughts continue import numbers will only increase.
The Food Security Index
At this juncture the alert Israel supporter might point with satisfaction to the Economist’s 2017 Global Food Security Index which placed Israel at 19th highest of 113 countries. Future factors, like global warming impacts, dropped Israel down to 24th place in the same report, but still, if the index is correct, either 19th or 24th would imply Israel is doing pretty well, wouldn’t it?
Or maybe not counting millions of Palestinians living there shifts the tally. A follow-up 2017 Economist report written with Italy’s Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, on the Food Security Index, gives an Israeli population of 8.5 million. That number implies Israeli Jewish colonists in the occupied territories (where Israel gets a third of its water and grows a lot of food) are included but the report doesn’t count 2.5 million food-insecure Palestinians who live on that same parcel of land, and also doesn’t include 2 million extremely food-insecure Palestinians in Gaza.
Alternatively, Israel’s place on the index may be artificially high because the index doesn’t adequately survey factors in the Jewish state like the scale of water pollution, erosion, and exhausted agricultural lands.
Then again, the list may just reflect the catastrophic condition of the rest of the world’s food supply. Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Argentina, Hungary, Germany, Brazil and the United States supply most of Israel’s food imports. The index places four of these lower in food security than Israel, raising the question, ‘When your food security depends on distant places that are less food secure than you are, how secure is that?’
Israel’s food suppliers have weathered record breaking droughts on multiple years during the past decade. Their aquifers are dropping. Population stress, economic and political upheavals, and armed conflicts like those between Russia and Ukraine, can be expected to adversely impact grain production and distribution.
Another threat, peculiar to Israeli food security, is the growing worldwide boycott (BDS) of the country because of Israel’s 50+ years-long occupation of the Palestinian territories. If one or more of Israel’s food suppliers joins the boycott it will be a serious loss of calories with few, if any, other nations willing or able to take up the slack.
Before leaving this section, it’s fair to say that America imports agricultural products too, a lot of them, but according the USDA, they’re mostly from nearby Canada and Mexico, and mostly things we could get along without like coffee, spices, cut flowers, nursery stock, etc. rather than food we need to keep from starving.
Whatever happened to the early 1900’s Zionist agricultural model?
A good, simple measure of how well a country’s farming methods work is how well the farmers are doing. How many citizens work in agriculture? Do they earn a decent living? Are they viable? Are they happy with their choice of livelihood?
A hundred-twenty years ago when European Zionists began moving enmasse to Palestine to build their dream of a Jewish cooperative agricultural utopia, optimism was in the air. Most people, young to old, worked on the land. Their collaborative farms, kibbutsim and moshavim, were Jews-only community collectives. Other than the racist aspect it was a progressive experiment in many ways.
That social landscape has changed. In 2016 Yaron Solomon, Agricultural Union Settlement Department Director, pointed out that only 15,000 Israelis still live by farming and 20 percent of those are part-time.
That’s less than a third as many farmers as there were in the 1980’s. The average Israeli farmer now is 62-years-old. Young people are leaving the land for better prospects. Says Solomon, “While the Israeli government is crowing about Israeli farmers in order to attract foreign investment, so that doors will be opened to them overseas, in Israel they are being trampled. Israel is using agricultural knowledge to promote its diplomatic relations and foreign relations, but its policy in recent years has a price, and in the future, Israel will have nothing to offer the world… The Government’s policy is slowly eliminating the small growers, and when there is no renewal of fields, there is a shortage of produce and the land becomes arid.”
Israeli farmers hold lively (for farmers) protests where they do things like smash tomatoes on the road out in front of the Knesset (Israeli parliament). Or, a bunch of them drive tractors through the streets of Jerusalem. Or, they hold up traffic at intersections. Their main complaints are inevitably water costs and water allotments.
Israel depends on other countries to grow its food even on farms inside Israel
If most Israelis are getting out of farming, who is working the remaining farms? Heavy, dangerous agricultural grunt labor, like planting, weeding, spraying pesticides, herbicides (commonly with no protective gear), setting up irrigation equipment, harvesting, and loading trucks, is accomplished by some 25,000 ‘guest workers’ from Thailand, who come to Israel on five-year contracts.
They work through extreme summer heat—greenhouses can be over 120 degrees Fahrenheit—and winter cold, especially at night, which the Thais aren’t adapted to. One hundred twenty-two Thai workers died in the five years between 2008 and 2013. Of those, 22 died for unknown causes because no autopsy was done. Five committed suicide. Forty-three formerly healthy, young Thai males died from something Israelis call, “sudden nocturnal death syndrome.” During the same period only 32 Israeli occupation troops died in military conflicts. Chances of dying at work, then, were about four times higher for Thai farm workers than Israeli soldiers.
Noa Shuer from the worker’s rights group Kav LaOved, said her organization did a survey of 500 Thai workers. None of them was being paid minimum wage. Instead Thai workers are told to sign a time sheet they can’t read because it’s in Hebrew. Almost none of them get a copy. They work up to seventeen hours a day, seven days a week with four days a year off. Workers have to pay a fee, sometimes over $10,000, to brokers to work in Israel. Room, board, income taxes, and national health care fees come out of their wages. Living conditions are often squalid with workers being packed into former animal sheds or sheds where farmers keep pesticides and other chemicals.
Jewish farm owners have tremendous power over Thai workers because they know the workers have to pay back broker fees and don’t want to go home with no money. Someone who makes trouble, like asking to be paid what he or she is supposed to get, can be sent packing back to Thailand with no way to collect what they’re owed. Workers might be assigned other duties besides farming. There are many allegations of dangerous living situations and abuse, including sexual abuse. Some workers had no toilet and were told to use the field out back. In one case there was a single female living among forty male workers with a shared shower. Another woman was awarded $53,000 after she proved the farmer she worked for used her as a sex slave.
Clearly the Thais aren’t counted in the 15,000 Israeli farm workers statistic. Neither are thousands of Palestinian workers who, bereft of their own lands, are forced by economic necessity to work on farms in Israel and the occupied territories. The Palestinians also work under bad conditions for lower pay, plus they have to wait at Israeli checkpoints, both going to the fields and returning home, some rise at 3 in the morning to get in line. Palestinians working for Israelis are supposed to have Israeli-issued permits. Those without permits can be paid less money and they can’t complain because they’re working illegally and they might get carted off to jail. For the most part the Israeli government looks the other way.
Hydro diplomacy
Israel’s water technology media stream flows across the digital landscape like the Amazon River. Its headwaters are a combination of hyperbole, wishful thinking, and putting a new hat on old technologies. Headlines like, “… Israel overcomes an old foe, drought’, ‘Israeli innovation could feed the world…’ ‘12 top ways Israel feeds the world’ are the sort of nonsense Americans expected from the National Enquirer back in the 1970’s but people still buy it. So much so that it would be no surprise to read, “Israeli scientists invent fish that can breathe underwater.” or “Israeli scientists discover a plant that makes its own food from sunshine.” AIPAC leader, turned pro-Israel water author, Seth Siegel provides a simple explanation for the media stream. An interviewer asked Mr. Siegel,
Q: “Do you think Israel’s use of water saving technology can help its relationship to the outside world?”
Siegel replied: “Absolutely. I make that point in the book. There are countries that vote against Israel in the UN but when it comes to water, they invite Israel in. It is hydro-diplomacy.”
This is pretty much what the Agricultural Union’s Yaron Solomon quoted Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel saying, “Israeli agriculture is among the most advanced in the world, and we are taking steps to leverage this, both economically and politically…”
How realistic are claims that Israel has solved its water problems with technology? We need look no further than Israeli Agricultural Minister Uri Arial in December, 2017, when he called on the Israeli public to assemble at the Western Wall to PRAY FOR RAIN! Yes, as the fifth straight year of drought came knocking at the Damascus Gate, the country’s agricultural front-man was out there channeling Steve Martin in Leap of Faith. Nothing wrong with a good prayer, but ten thousand years of agriculture has shown we don’t want to bet the farm on it.
And yet here comes undaunted Israel with the audacity, the chutzpah, to claim that they can bail us out of water shortage at the very same time we are shipping them billions of tons of embedded water. American water infrastructure, especially in the West, is heavily subsidized by American taxpayers. The time approaches when we’ll have to evaluate the growing harm of sending Colorado River water, what’s left of the Ogallala Aquifer, and other precious dwindling water resources overseas.
Baseline 1 Selected Sources:
10.2018 Tony Allen. Bio. King’s College, London, website. Good thumbnail description of the virtual water concept and the good Professor, who was awarded the Stockholm World Water Prize (2008), the Florence Monito Water Prize (2013), and the Monaco Water Prize (2013).
03/05/2014 Netanyahu Offers to Help Brown Manage California Drought Bloomberg News by JonathanFerziger https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-05/netanyahu-offers-to-help-brown-manage-california-drought
02.18.2015 USDA Foreign Agricultural Service: Israel Grain and Feed Annual: Prepared by Gilad Shachar & Orestes Vasquez. Approved by Ron Verdonk, Minister-Counselor [From the Executive Summary: “Israel is almost completely dependent on imports to meet its grain and feed needs…Total grain, feedstuff and soybean supply will total about 5.06 million tons.”] *Note that Gilad Shachar did excellent work and his graphs and charts were clear and concise. After 2015 another author took over. [I found subsequent reports are not as clear or complete on imports and, in 2016, contain odd biblical references that I’ve never seen in technical writing.] As a work-around, you can access import/export data for most commodities from any country at USDA Foreign Agricultural Service’s amazing database here: https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/app/index.html#/app/home There’s a row of blue bars across the screen. Choose ‘Custom Query’. There are four boxes on the new screen: Commodities, Attributes, Countries, Market Years. Click on the commodity you want to see in the first box, that brings up the Attributes menu in the next box over. Click on ‘Imports’, for Country click on ‘Israel, then select the year you want. Click the green Run Query button on lower right of screen. When you want to search for other commodities, there is a red Back to Query button to click on the upper right screen.
02.12.2016 Will beef export volume increase in 2016? Beef Magazine, by Joe Schuele,(75,000 tonnes beef.)
The National Water Carrier (Ha’ Movil Ha’ Artsi) Shmeil Kantor Formern Chief Engineer and Head of Planning Dep. Mekorot Water Co.
http://research.haifa.ac.il/~eshkol/kantorb.html
Also see: Fanak water: Israel Dr. Clive Lipchin, Director of Transboundry Water Management, Arava Institute for Environmental studies, Israel.
The Green, Blue and Grey Water Footprint of Crops and Derived Crop Products. UNESCO-IHE, Institute of water education, Volume 1: Main Report. Value of Water Research Report Series No. 47.wfn.project-platforms.com/Reports/Report47-WaterFootprintCrops-Vol1.pdf
2017 Global Security Index: Measuring food security and the impact of resource risk The Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Dupont. Countries lower on the list than Israel, that supply food to Israel: Hungary-30, Brazil-38, Russia-41, Ukraine-63.
2017 Fixing Food: The Mediterranean Region The Economist/Intelligence Unit with Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition.
11.20.2014 Exporter Guide USDA Foreign Agricultural Service—GAIN Report. Prepared by Gilad Shachar, Approved by Orestes Vasquez, Sr. Agricultural Attaché’. damage to Israeli crops from Protective Edge.
2015 data from USDA Economic Research Service Agricultural Trade page https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/agricultural-trade/
10.18.2012 Israel to label all egg imports Green Prophet: sustainable news from the Middle East Israel imports around 80 million eggs/year from Turkey.
12.24.2017 Israeli Agriculture Minister’s solution to drought: mass western wall prayers for rain. Haaretz by Zafrir Rinat.
01.21.2015 A raw deal: abuse of Thai workers in Israel’s agricultural sector. Human Rights Watch Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director Middle East and North Africa Division.
Israeli Casualties of War Wikipedia is the source of 32 combat casualties.
11.22.2016 Israel’s farmers: an endangered species Globes: Israel’s Business Arena. by Yaron Solomon, Agricultural Union Settlement Department Director. Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel quote, “Israeli agriculture is among the most advanced in the world, and we are taking steps to leverage this, both economically and politically…”
08.12.2015 How Israel will save the world: (sic) an interview with Seth Siegel. Orthodox Union by OR staff. Hydro-diplomacy quote and assertions about drip irrigation.
01.19.2018 Dry, dry, again: After several wet years, big drought is back again in Israel Haaretz by Hagal Amit. This article has the Gioria Shacham quote about don’t grow new tomatoes.
Candidate Pete Buttigieg: Israel’s Security Policy Offers “Important Lessons” for the US
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | April 4, 2019
WASHINGTON — Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, whose candidacy is currently being heavily promoted by corporate media, was one of the many 2020 contenders for the Democratic Party who declined to attend the recent annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in apparent response to calls from prominent “progressive” organizations to boycott the event and a growing shift among Democratic voters in favor of Palestinian rights.
However, despite his absence from the AIPAC conference, Buttigieg’s past public statements on the Israel/Palestine conflict echo those of pro-Israel stalwarts in the Democratic Party. Indeed, Buttigieg, in a trip to Israel last year that was funded by the pro-Israel lobby, praised Israel’s security response to protests by Palestinians on the Gaza-Israel border just four days after the slaughter of Gazan protesters by Israeli military snipers — repeating many of the same one-sided talking points about the conflict that define centrists in both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Impressed by Israeli security policy
Last May, Buttigieg traveled to Israel as part of a trip for U.S. mayors organized by Project Interchange, an affiliate of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of the oldest and most influential Israel lobby organizations in the United States. The AJC regularly conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and has even accused progressive American Jews of anti-Semitism for their critiques of Israeli government policy.
Soon after the Israel lobby-sponsored trip, which the Times of Israel referred to as a “learning experience trip,” Buttigieg appeared on AJC’s Passport podcast, hosted by Seffi Kogen. Buttigieg, during the 22-minute discussion, stated that Israel’s security policy is “on the one hand very intentional, very serious and very effective when it comes to security and on the other hand not allowing concerns about security to dominate your consciousness.” He then added that his trip to Israel showed him that Israel’s security policy offers “a very important lesson that hopefully, Americans can look to [when] we think about how to navigate a world that unfortunately has become smaller and more dangerous for all of us.”
This statement is troubling for several reasons. First, it suggests that Israel’s security policy does not “dominate” Israeli political consciousness even though nearly every discriminatory policy targeting Palestinians — from the blockade of Gaza to the military occupation of the West Bank to the separation barrier — are all justified by the Israeli state’s claim that it is responding to “existential threats” relating to Israel’s security. Second, Buttigieg calls Israel’s draconian security policies “very effective,” yet does not mention their human costs, such as Israel’s regular imprisonment of Palestinians without charge or its arrest of children for allegedly “throwing stones.” Third, his claim that Israel’s security policy offers a “very important lesson” to the United States suggests that Israel’s apartheid, police-state security policies are a model for homeland security policy in the U.S., a suggestion that concerns the “progressive” voters to whom Buttigieg is currently attempting to appeal.
During the podcast, Buttigieg also claimed that support for Israel “is not a left vs. right issue — at least it shouldn’t be” and stated that “the security and intelligence cooperation [between the U.S. and Israel] is obviously vital, certainly something that is as important for American interests as much as Israeli interests.” This is a drastic over-simplification of the U.S.-Israel relationship and makes no mention of the fact that the U.S. now provides $3.8 billion to Israel annually as part of this “security and intelligence cooperation” and also ignores Israel’s documented espionage efforts targeting U.S. state secrets that have occurred under the guise of this “cooperation.” Notably, former U.S. intelligence officials have claimed that the CIA considers Israel “the Mideast’s biggest spy threat.”
Buttigieg also blamed Hamas, the Islamist group that won Gaza’s elections in 2007 and still governs the enclave, for the “misery” present in the strip. At no point does he mention the air, land and sea blockade — imposed by Israel and Egypt — as having a role in creating “misery” for Gazan residents. Particularly telling is the fact that he blamed Hamas for the situation in the Strip during the Great Return March, when Israeli forces massacred scores of unarmed protestors. Just days after Buttigieg’s visit to Israel and not long before his appearance on the AJC podcast, the IDF shot and killed 60 unarmed Gazans, among them seven minors and a paramedic. During his 22-minute discussion with AJC, Buttigieg never spoke of the Gaza protests directly.
A separate point Buttigieg made in the podcast is related to the exchange of fire between Syrian/Iranian forces and Israeli forces in the contested Golan Heights, which Israel annexed in 1981 but is internationally considered (aside from by the United States) as Syrian territory. In speaking of the attack by allegedly Iranian forces on the Golan Heights and the exchange of fire between Israel and Syria that followed, Buttigieg stated:
“It didn’t stop people from living their lives and I actually think there’s a lesson to be learned from that for America … to prevent terrorists from succeeding in their goal of becoming our top priority.”
It is notable that Buttigieg chose the word “terrorist” to describe the attack, given that it had been launched by a foreign government, not a terrorist group, and also given the fact that the area had long been overrun by actual terrorist groups that were supported by the state of Israel.
McKinsey and Israel
While Buttigieg’s admiration for Israeli security policy and support for continued U.S.-Israel “security and intelligence cooperation” may simply be an indication of his support for Democratic centrist policies, there may be other reasons for Buttigieg’s apparent support of Israel’s apartheid-like policies. For instance, Buttigieg’s past position as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. — recently called “the world’s most prestigious consulting firm” by the New York Times — may have also informed his views.
Buttigieg worked at McKinsey prior to enlisting in the military and jumpstarting his political career. Buttigieg has called his time at the firm his most “intellectually informing experience” and described it neutrally as simply “a place to learn.” Other previous McKinsey consultants have come away with a very different view of the controversial company, with one recently writing:
Working for all sides, McKinsey’s only allegiance is to capital. As capital’s most effective messenger, McKinsey has done direct harm to the world in ways that, thanks to its lack of final decision-making power, are hard to measure and, thanks to its intense secrecy, are hard to know.
The firm’s willingness to work with despotic governments and corrupt business empires is the logical conclusion of seeking profit at all costs. Its advocacy of the primacy of the market has made governments more like businesses and businesses more like vampires. By claiming that they solve the world’s hardest problems, McKinsey shrinks the solution space to only those that preserve the status quo.”
In addition to working with “despotic governments” like Saudi Arabia, McKinsey also regularly works for Israel’s government and military. For instance, McKinsey was given $27 million in 2011 to help “streamline” the Israeli military. McKinsey claimed that it had offered its services to Israel at a steep 36 percent discount. Then, a year later, McKinsey was tasked with reviewing Israel’s police force and determined that Israel did not have enough police patrolling its streets and “lagged” behind other countries in terms of police deployment. Furthermore, the company itself has a large presence in Israel, where it “works across all major sectors of Israel’s economy.”
Buttigieg’s connection to McKinsey, and his decidedly neutral view of the firm, have been largely glossed over in the coverage of his candidacy, despite the controversial nature of the company, which was recently revealed to have advised a leading pharmaceutical company on how to “turbocharge” the sales of opioids to Americans, despite the country’s severe opioid addiction and overdose crisis.
More “hope” and “change”
Buttigieg, like several other 2020 contenders for the Democratic nomination, has thus far built his campaign on platitudes and progressive “values” without providing policy plans that back them up. Indeed, Buttigieg is routinely evasive when pressed on any specific policies he champions. When recently asked to specify policies he supports by VICE, the former South Bend, Indiana mayor stated that “Right now I think we need to articulate the values, lay out our philosophical commitments and then develop policies off of that. And I’m working very hard not to put the cart before the horse.”
This same tactic, of promoting “values” and platitudes and failing to run on any policy, has become common in the 2020 field as other candidates who have received fawning media coverage — like Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke — have also built their campaign on platitudes and varying degrees of identity politics. It should come as no surprise, then, that Buttigieg has recently been compared to Barack Obama in several mainstream profiles. After all, Obama built much of his campaign on platitudes (i.e., “hope” and “change”) and vague policy positions as opposed to specific, detailed policy proposals.
Buttigieg’s decision to not promote any specific policy has allowed him to become a policy chameleon, and his stance on foreign policy, including Israel and Palestine, is no exception. As an example, Buttigieg has claimed that the Trump administration’s minimal efforts to reduce the number and intensity of “forever wars” has been “largely good,” even though he opposes Trump’s recent calls for a withdrawal of U.S. troops in Syria. Yet the epitome of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce “forever wars” has been its calls for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria.
Buttigieg’s evasiveness and contradictory statements on foreign policy are all the more telling because such evasiveness is not due to a lack of knowledge on the subject. Indeed, Buttigieg wrote his undergraduate thesis on U.S. foreign policy. This suggests that his evasiveness on these issues since becoming a candidate for the presidency is instead based on political expediency.
Buttigieg’s past comments on Israel and Syria are compounded by a recent statement he made via Twitter that reads: “I did not carry an assault weapon around a foreign country so I could come home and see them used to massacre my countrymen.” The tweet was heavily criticized by anti-war voices on social media for its implication that it is perfectly fine to carry assault weapons as part of an occupying force in a foreign country, but not OK to carry those assault weapons domestically.
This troubling double standard suggests that Buttigieg, despite being a veteran, supports U.S. military adventurism abroad. This is further supported by his past position at the Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, a “moderate Republican” who oversaw the U.S.’ role in the NATO bombing of Kosovo.
In a crowded 2020 field and with mainstream media heavily promoting his candidacy, it is essential that all Americans take the time to research the past statements and positions of a candidate like Buttigieg, as opposed to merely relying on media-generated hype and statements made only after the establishment of one’s candidacy. The U.S., a country undeniably at a crossroads, cannot afford any candidate who cloaks his or her actual opinions and policies in platitudes and evasive or even contradictory language. Thus, a candidate’s past and track record are increasingly important, yet overlooked, aspects in a 2020 race that will have important implications for the country moving forward.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
“The Essence of Being Palestinian”: What the Great March of Return is Really About
By Ramzy Baroud | Dissident Voice | April 2, 2019
The aims of the Great March of Return protests, which began in Gaza on March 30, 2018 are to put an end to the suffocating Israeli siege and implementing the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees who were expelled from their homes and towns in historic Palestine 70 years earlier.
But there is much more to the March of Return than a few demands, especially bearing in mind the high human cost associated with it.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, over 250 people have been killed and 6,500 wounded, including children, medics and journalists.
Aside from the disproportionately covered ‘flaming kites’ and youth symbolically cutting through the metal fences that have besieged them for many years, the March has been largely non-violent. Despite this, Israel has killed and maimed protesters with impunity.
A UN human rights commission of inquiry found last month that Israel may have committed war crimes against protesters, resulting in the killing of 189 Palestinians within the period March 30 and December 31, 2018.
The inquiry found “reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli snipers shot at children, medics and journalists, even though they were clearly recognizable as such,” the investigators concluded as reported by BBC online.
Many in the media, however, still do not understand what the Great March of Return really means for Palestinians.
A cynically titled report in the Washington Post attempted to offer an answer. The article, “Gazans have paid in blood for a year of protests. Now many wonder what it was for,” selectively quoted wounded Palestinians who, supposedly, feel that their sacrifices were in vain.
Aside from providing the Israeli military with a platform to blame the Hamas Movement for the year-long march, the long report ended with these two quotes:
The March of Return “achieved nothing,” according to one injured Palestinian.
“The only thing I can find is that it made people pay attention,” said another.
If the Washington Post paid attention, it would have realized that the mood among Palestinians is neither cynical nor despairing.
The Post should have wondered: if the march ‘achieved nothing’, why were Gazans still protesting, and the popular and inclusive nature of the March has not been compromised?
“The Right of Return is more than a political position,” said Sabreen al-Najjar, the mother of young Palestinian medic, Razan, who, on June 1, 2018, was fatally shot by the Israeli army while trying to help wounded Palestinian protesters. It is “more than a principle: wrapped up in it, and reflected in literature and art and music, is the essence of what it means to be Palestinian. It is in our blood.”
Indeed, what is the ‘Great March of Return’ but a people attempting to reclaim their role, and be recognized and heard in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine?
What is largely missing from the discussion on Gaza is the collective psychology behind this kind of mobilization, and why it is essential for hundreds of thousands of besieged people to rediscover their power and understand their true position, not as hapless victims, but as agents of change in their society.
The narrow reading, or the misrepresentation of the March of Return, speaks volumes about the overall underestimation of the role of the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom, justice and national liberation, extending for a century.
The story of Palestine is the story of the Palestinian people, for they are the victims of oppression and the main channel of resistance, starting with the Nakba – the creation of Israel on the ruins of Palestinian towns and villages in 1948. Had Palestinians not resisted, their story would have concluded then, and they, too, would have disappeared.
Those who admonish Palestinian resistance or, like the Post, fail to understand the underlying value of popular movement and sacrifices, have little understanding of the psychological ramifications of resistance – the sense of collective empowerment and hope which spreads amongst the people. In his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre describes resistance, as it was passionately vindicated by Fanon, as a process through which “a man is re-creating himself.”
For 70 years, Palestinians have embarked on that journey of the re-creation of the self. They have resisted, and their resistance in all of its forms has molded a sense of collective unity, despite the numerous divisions that were erected amongst the people.
The March of Return is the latest manifestation of the ongoing Palestinian resistance.
It is obvious that elitist interpretations of Palestine have failed – Oslo proved a worthless exercise in empty clichés, aimed at sustaining American political dominance in Palestine as well as in the rest of the Middle East.
But the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993 shattered the relative cohesiveness of the Palestinian discourse, thus weakening and dividing the Palestinian people.
In the Israeli Zionist narrative, Palestinians are depicted as drifting lunatics, an inconvenience that hinders the path of progress – a description that regularly defined the relationship between every western colonial power and the colonized, resisting natives.
Within some Israeli political and academic circles, Palestinians merely ‘existed’ to be ‘cleansed’, to make room for a different, more deserving people. From the Zionist perspective, the ‘existence’ of the natives is meant to be temporary. “We must expel Arabs and take their place,” wrote Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion.
Assigning the roles of dislocated, disinherited and nomadic to the Palestinian people, without consideration for the ethical and political implications of such a perception, has erroneously presented Palestinians as a docile and submissive collective.
Hence, it is imperative that we develop a clearer understanding of the layered meanings behind the Great March of Return. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza did not risk life and limb over the last year simply because they required urgent medicine and food supplies.
Palestinians did so because they understand their centrality in their struggle. Their protests are a collective statement, a cry for justice, an ultimate reclamation of their narrative as a people – still standing, still powerful and still hopeful after 70 years of Nakba, 50 years of military occupation and 12 years of unrelenting siege.
How Israel is Working to Remove Palestinians from Jerusalem
By Jonathan Cook | The National | April 1, 2019
The 350,000 Palestinian inhabitants of occupied East Jerusalem are caught between a rock and hard place, as Israel works ever harder to remove them from the holy city in which they were born, analysts and residents warn.
That process, they say, has only accelerated in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s decision a year ago to relocate the American embassy to Jerusalem, effectively endorsing the city as Israel’s exclusive capital.
“Israel wants Palestinians in Jerusalem to understand that they are trapped, that they are being strangled, in the hope they will conclude that life is better outside the city,” said Amneh Badran, a politics professor at Jerusalem’s Al Quds university.
Since Israel seized the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967 and then illegally annexed it in 1981, it has intentionally left the status of its Palestinian population unresolved.
Israeli officials have made Palestinians there “permanent residents,” though, in practice, their residency is easily revoked. According to Israel’s own figures, more than 14,500 Palestinians have been expelled from the city of their birth since 1967, often compelling their families to join them in exile.
Further, Israel finished its concrete wall slicing through East Jerusalem three years ago, cutting some 140,000 Palestinian residents off from the rest of the city.
A raft of well-documented policies – including house demolitions, a chronic shortage of classrooms, lack of public services, municipal underfunding, land seizures, home evictions by Jewish settlers, denial of family unification, and police and settler violence – have intensified over the years.
At the same time, Israel has denied the Palestinian Authority, a supposed government-in-waiting in the West Bank, any role in East Jerusalem, leaving the city’s Palestinians even more isolated and weak.
All of these factors are designed to pressure Palestinians to leave, usually to areas outside the wall or to nearby West Bank cities like Ramallah or Bethlehem.
“In Jerusalem, Israel’s overriding aim is at its most transparent: to take control of the land but without its Palestinian inhabitants,” said Daoud Alg’ol, a researcher on Jerusalem.
Like others, Mr Alg’ol noted that Israel had stepped up its ‘Judaisation’ policies in Jerusalem since the US relocated its embassy. “Israel is working more quickly, more confidently and more intensively because it believes Trump has given his blessing,” he said.
Demographic concerns dominated Israel’s thinking from the moment it occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, and subordinated it to the control of Jewish officials in West Jerusalem – in what Israel termed its newly “united capital”.
City boundaries were expanded eastwards to attach additional Palestinian lands to Jerusalem and then fill in the empty spaces with a ring of large Jewish settlements, said Aviv Tartasky, a researcher with Ir Amim, an organisation that campaigns for equal rights in Jerusalem.
The goal, he added, was to shore up a permanent three-quarters Jewish majority – to ensure Palestinians could not stake a claim to the city and to allay Israeli fears that one day the Palestinians might gain control of the municipality through elections.
Israel has nonetheless faced a shrinking Jewish majority because of higher Palestinian birth rates. Today, Palestinians comprise about 40 per cent of the total population of this artificially enlarged Jerusalem.
Israel has therefore been aggressively pursuing a twin-pronged approach, according to analysts.
On one side, wide-ranging discriminatory policies – that harm Palestinians and favour Jewish settlers – have been designed to erode Palestinians’ connection to Jerusalem, encouraging them to leave. And, on the other, revocation of residency rights and the gradual redrawing of municipal boundaries have forcibly placed Palestinians outside the city – in what some experts term a “silent transfer” or administrative ethnic cleansing.
Israel’s efforts to disconnect Palestinians from Jerusalem are most visibly expressed in the change of Arabic script on road signs. The city’s Arabic name, Al Quds (the Holy), has been gradually replaced by the Israeli name, Urshalim, transliterated into Arabic.
The lack of services and municipal funding and high unemployment mean that three-quarters of Palestinians in East Jerusalem live below the poverty line. That compares to only 15 per cent for Israeli Jews nationally.
Despite these abysmal figures, the municipality has provided four social services offices in the city for Palestinians, compared to 19 for Israeli Jews.
Only half of Palestinian residents are provided with access to the water grid. There are similar deficiencies in postal services, road infrastructure, pavements and cultural centres.
Meanwhile, human rights groups have noted that East Jerusalem lacks at least 2,000 classrooms for Palestinian children, and that the condition of 43 per cent of existing rooms is inadequate. A third of pupils fail to complete basic schooling.
But the biggest pressure on Palestinian residents has been inflicted through grossly discriminatory planning rules, said Mr Tartasky.
In the areas outside the wall, Palestinians have been abandoned by the municipality – and receive no services or policing at all.
Israel’s long-term aim, said Mr Tartasky, had been exposed in a leak of private comments made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015. He had proposed revoking the residency of the 140,000 Palestinians outside the wall.
“At the moment, the government is discussing putting these residents under the responsibility of the army,” Mr Tartasky said.
That would make them equivalent to Palestinians living in Israeli-controlled areas of the West Bank and sever their last connections to Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, on the inner side of the wall, Palestinian neighbourhoods have been tightly constrained, with much of the land declared either “scenic areas” or national parks, in which construction is illegal, or reserved for Jewish settlements. The inevitable result has been extreme overcrowding.
In addition, Israel has denied most Palestinian neighbourhoods’ masterplans, making it all but impossible to get building permits.
“The advantage for Israel is that planning regulations don’t look brutal – in fact, they can be presented as simple law enforcement,” said Mr Tartasky. “But if you have no place to live in Jerusalem, in the end you’ll have to move out of the city.”
An estimated 20,000 houses – about 40 per cent of the city’s Palestinian housing stock – are illegal and under threat of demolition. More than 800 homes, some housing several families, have been razed since 2004.
As well as the large purpose-built Jewish settlements located on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, several thousand extremist settlers have taken over properties inside Palestinian neighbourhoods, often with the backing of the Israeli courts.
Mr Tartasky noted that Israel has been accelerating legal efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes over the past year, with close to 200 families in and around the Old City currently facing court battles.
When settlers move in following such evictions, Ms Badran said, the character of the Palestinian neighbourhoods rapidly changes.
“The settlers arrive, and then so do the police, the army, private security guards and municipal inspectors. The settlers have a machine behind them whose role is to make life as uncomfortable as possible for Palestinians. The message is: ‘You either accept your subjugation or leave’.”
In Silwan, where settler groups have established a touristic archaeological park in the midst of a densely populated Palestinian community just outside the Old City walls, life has been especially tough.
Mr Alg’ol, who lives in Silwan, noted that fortified settler compounds had been established throughout the area, many dozens more Palestinian families were facing evictions, excavations were taking place under Palestinian homes, closed-circuit TV watched residents 24 hours a day, and the security services were a constant presence. Many hundreds of children had been arrested in recent years, usually accused of stone throwing.
Israel’s newest move is the announcement of a cable car to bring tourists from West Jerusalem through Palestinian neighbourhoods like Silwan to the holy sites of the Old City.
Mr Tartasky said touristic initiatives had become another planning weapon against Palestinians. “These projects, from the cable car to a series of promenades, are ways to connect one settlement to the next, bisecting Palestinian space. They strengthen the settlements and break apart Palestinian neighbourhoods.”
Mr Alg’ol’s family was one of many in Silwan that had been told their lands were being confiscated for the cable car and a new police station.
“They want to turn our community into an archaeological Disneyland,” he said. “And we are in the way. They plan to keep going until we are all removed.”
UN body demands Israel address discrimination against non-Jewish citizens
MEMO | April 2, 2019
The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) “released late last week a list of key issues relating to Bedouin citizens of Israel in the Negev/Naqab region and discrimination against non-Jewish citizens” to which Israel is obliged to respond.
According to Adalah, the Committee asked Israel to provide information on a variety of issues pertaining to institutionalised discrimination, including “steps taken to fully respect rights of the Arab-Bedouin people to their traditional and ancestral lands”.
The Committee is also concerned to find out what “assessments, if any, which Israel carried out on impact of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People on the non-Jewish population and on their enjoyment of the Covenant rights, particularly the right to self-determination, right to non-discrimination and cultural rights.”
The UN Committee is also demanding answers from Israeli authorities regarding “concerns raised regarding the Law that it may exacerbate the existing ethnic segregation and lead to policies and budget allocation that may further disadvantage the non-Jewish population.”
Adalah Attorney Myssana Morany stated: “We are happy to have convinced the Committee to focus on the forced displacement of the Bedouin community as one of the key concerns requiring further clarification from Israel.”
“Although the Prawer Plan for mass displacement of the Bedouin was frozen in 2013, Israel is now using other mechanisms to forcefully displace Bedouin communities. The past two years, for example, have seen a huge increase in Israeli demolitions of Bedouin homes”, she added.
“Israel has also just revealed a plan to forcefully displace 36,000 Bedouin citizens to make way for massive ‘development’ projects to be built on top of their homes and villages. All these practices are expected to receive backing from the Jewish Nation-State Law.”
Jewish Power Rolls Over Washington
AIPAC gathering is full of lies and liars
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • April 2, 2019
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has just completed its annual summit in Washington. It claims that 18,000 supporters attended the event, which concluded with a day of lobbying Congress by the attendees. Numerous American politicians addressed the gathering and it is completely reasonable to observe that the meeting constituted the most powerful gathering of people dedicated to promoting the interests of a foreign nation ever witnessed in any country in the history of the world.
There are a number of things that one should understand about the Jewish state of Israel and its powerful American domestic lobby. First of all, the charge that the actions of The Lobby (referred to with capital letters because of its uniqueness and power) inevitably involves dual or even singular allegiance based on religion or tribe to a country where the lobbyist does not actually reside is completely correct by definition of what AIPAC is and why it exists. It claims to work to “ensure that the Jewish state is safe, strong and secure” through “foreign aid, government partnerships, [and] joint anti-terrorism efforts…,” all of which involve the U.S. as the donor and Israel as the recipient.
Being a citizen of a country is not just an accident of birth. It requires loyalty to the interests of that country and to one’s fellow citizens. No two countries have identical interests, something that is particularly true when one is considering Israel, an ethno-religious autocracy, and the United States, where The Lobby works assiduously to compel the American government at all levels to adopt positions that are beneficial to Israel and almost invariably harmful to U.S. interests. Asserting that the two nations have nearly identical interests is little more than a fraud.
Second, there is the claim that Israel benefits American security. That is also a lie. Washington’s relationship with Israel, which is now more subservient than it ever has been, is a major liability that is and always has been damaging to both American regional and global interests. The recent decisions to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights were ill-conceived and have been condemned by the world community, including by nearly all of America’s genuine close allies.
The harm done by the Israeli connection to policy formulation in Washington and to U.S. troops based in the Middle East has been noted both by Admiral Thomas Moorer and General David Petraeus, with Moorer decrying how “If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don’t have any idea what goes on.” Petraeus complained to a Senate Committee that U.S. favoritism towards Israel puts American soldiers based in the Middle East at risk. He was quickly forced to recant, however.
Former CIA Deputy Director Admiral Bobby Inman has also rejected the claim that Israel is a security asset by observing that “Israeli spies have done more harm and have damaged the United States more than the intelligence agents of all other countries on earth combined… They are the gravest threat to our national security.” Inman was referring to American Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard, who stole for Israel an entire roomful of the most highly classified defense information. Israeli spies, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan, also participated in the systematic theft of weapons grade uranium and nuclear triggers in the 1960s so Israel could secretly create a nuclear weapons arsenal. The FBI, for its part, in its annual counterintelligence report, consistently identifies Israel as the “friendly” country that spies most persistently against the U.S. FBI Agents have testified that there are very few prosecutions of the swarms of Israeli spies due to “political pressure.”
Third, there is the myth that the United States and Israel have “shared values,” which is meant to imply that both are liberal democracies where freedom and human rights prevail, beacons of light offering enlightened leadership in a world where tyranny threatens at every turn. This was stressed in the opening remarks last weekend by AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr, who described Israel as “A nation always striving to be better, more just and true to the message of its founders, a nation dedicated to freedom of religion for people of all faiths. We do our work for all to see. What unites our pro-Israel movement is the passion for bringing American and Israel closer for the benefit of both and the benefit of all. We look like America because we are America.”
Kohr is, of course, preaching to an audience that wants desperately to believe what he says in spite of what they have been able to see with their own eyes in the media when it dares to publish a story criticizing Israel. Jewish hypocrisy about one standard for Israel and Jews plus another standard for everyone else operates pretty much out in the open if one knows where to look. Zionist Organization of America’s Morton Klein, who once tweeted regarding a “filthy Arab,” was interviewed by journalist Nathan Thrall and asked why he believed it was “utterly racist and despicable” to support a “white nationalist” ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do the same. He responded “Israel is a unique situation. This is really a Jewish state given to us by God. God did not create a state for white people or for black people.” Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, who calls himself the Senate’s “shomer” or guardian for American Jews, had a slightly different take on it: “Of course, we say it’s our land, the Torah says it, but they don’t believe in the Torah. So that’s the reason there is not peace.”
But Kohr, Klein and Schumer all know as well as anyone that Israeli Jews, fortified by their conceit of being a “Chosen people,” are not interchangeable with contemporary Americans, or at least not “like” the Americans who still care about their country. There are hundreds of mostly Jewish pro-Israel organizations in America, having a combined endowment of $16 billion, that are actively propagandizing and promoting Israeli interests by ignoring or lying about the downside of the relationship. The University of Michigan affiliate of the Hillel International campus organization alone has a multistory headquarters supported by a budget of $2 million and a staff of 15. It hosts an emissary of the Jewish Agency for Israel, an Israeli government supported promotional enterprise.
So, what is the meaning of the “American” in AIPAC? Requiring a religious-ethnic litmus test for full citizenship and rights is Israeli, not American. Having local government admissions committees that can bar Israeli-Palestinian citizens based on “social suitability” would not be acceptable to most Americans. Demanding a unique Israeli right to exist while denying it to Israel’s neighbors; demolishing homes while poisoning Palestinian livestock and destroying orchards; shooting children for throwing stones; and inflicting death, terror and deprivation upon the imprisoned people of Gaza are all everyday common practice for the Israeli government.
Israel and AIPAC have relentlessly pursued their agenda while also corrupting the Congress of the United States to support the Israeli government with money and political cover. Israel and friends like Kohr routinely make baseless charges of anti-Semitism against critics while also legislating against free-speech to eliminate any and all criticism. This drive to make Israel uniquely free from any critique has become the norm in the United States, but it is a norm driven by Israeli interests and Israel’s friends, most of whom are Jewish billionaires or Jewish organizations that meet regularly and discuss what they might do to benefit the Jewish state.
And the fourth big lie is that the American people support Israel on religious as well as cultural grounds, not because mostly Jewish money has corrupted our political system and media. Indeed, many Christian fundamentalists have various takes on what Israel means, but their influence is limited. The Israel-thing is Jewish in all ways that matter and its sanitized Exodus-version that has been sold to the public is essentially a complete fraud nurtured by the media, also Jewish controlled, by Hollywood, and by the Establishment.
Mondoweiss reported recently that
“This weekend the New York Times breaks one of the biggest taboos, describing the responsibility of Jewish donors for the Democratic Party’s slavish support for Israel. Nathan Thrall’s groundbreaking piece repeats a lot of data we’ve reported here and says in essence that it really is about the Benjamins, as Rep. Ilhan Omar said so famously. The donor class of the party is overwhelmingly Jewish, and Jews are still largely wed to Zionism– that’s the nut.” Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser to ex-President Barack Obama recounted in the article how “a more assertive policy toward Israel” never evolved “The Washington view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the [Jewish] donor class.”
And the support for Israel goes beyond money. The Times article included an October 2018
“Survey of 800 American voters who identify as Jewish, conducted by the Mellman Group on behalf of the Jewish Electoral Institute, 92 percent said that they are ‘generally pro-Israel.’ In the same poll — conducted after the United States closed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, appointed a fund-raiser for the settlements as U.S. ambassador and cut humanitarian aid to Palestinians — roughly half of American Jews said they approved of President Trump’s handling of relations with Israel. On what is considered the most divisive issue in U.S.-Israel relations, the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a November 2018 post-midterm election poll of more than 1,000 American Jews that was commissioned by J Street, the pro-Israel lobby aligned with Democrats, found that roughly half said the expansion of settlements had no impact on how they felt about Israel. According to a 2013 Pew survey, 44 percent of Americans and 40 percent of American Jews believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, [a] fact that Jews believe they have rights in historic Palestine that non-Jews do not.”
And one only has to listen to the AIPAC speeches made by leading members of the U.S. government establishment to appreciate the essential hypocrisy over the U.S. wag-the-dog relationship with the Jewish state of Israel. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer led the parade of Democrats on the first evening of AIPAC, thundering “When someone accuses American supporters of Israel of dual loyalty, I say: Accuse me, I am part of a large, bipartisan coalition in Congress supporting Israel—an overwhelming majority of the United States Congress. I tell Israel’s accusers and detractors: Accuse me.”
Well, Steny there is a certain irony in your request and to be sure you should be accused over betrayal of your oath to uphold the constitution against all enemies “domestic and foreign.” Hoyer is a product of the heavily Jewish Maryland Democratic Party machine that has also produced Pelosi and Senator Ben Cardin. Pelosi told the AIPAC audience about her father in Baltimore, a so-called Shabbos goy who would perform services for Jews on the sabbath and who would also speak Yiddish while at home with his Italian family. Cardin meanwhile has been the sponsor of legislation to make criticism or boycotting of Israel illegal, up to and including heavy fines and prison time.
Hoyer, widely regarded as one of the most pro-Israel non-Jewish congressman, also boasted to AIPAC about the 15 official trips to Israel he’s made in forty years in Congress, accompanied by more than 150 fellow Democrats. “This August, I will travel with what I expect will be our largest delegation ever—probably more than 30 Democratic members of Congress, including many freshmen.”
Steny Hoyer will be on an AIPAC affiliate sponsored trip in which any contact with Palestinians will be both incidental and carefully managed. He also clearly has no problem in spending the taxpayer’s dime to go to Israel on additional “codels” to get further propagandized. He is flat out wrong about Israel in general, but don’t expect him to be convinced otherwise, which may be somehow related to the $317,525 in pro-Israel PAC contributions he has received.
There was much more at the AIPAC Summit. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced “the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance” while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, fresh from selling out U.S. interests on a visit to Israel, declared that “We live in dangerous times. We have to speak the truth. Anti-Semitism should and must be rejected by all decent people. Anti-Semitism – anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and any nation that espouses anti-Zionism, like Iran, must be confronted. We must defend the rightful homeland of the Jewish people.”
Vice President Mike Pence, like Pompeo an evangelical Christian, piled on in his Monday prime time speech, declaring that “Anyone who aspires to the highest office of the land should not be afraid to stand with the strongest supporters of Israel in America. It is wrong to boycott Israel. It is wrong to boycott AIPAC. Anti-Semitism has no place in the Congress of the United States of America. Anyone who slanders this historic alliance between the United States and Israel should never have a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
Clearly, there is considerable evidence to support the theory that one has to be completely ignorant to hold high office in the United States. Rejecting Zionism and/or questioning Israeli policies is not anti-Semitism and the Jewish state is in fact no actual ally of the United States. Nor is there any mandate to defend it in its questionable “rightful homeland.” Furthermore, dual-loyalty is what the relationship with Israel is all about and it is Jewish money and political power that makes the whole thing work to Israel’s benefit.
But the good news is that all the lying blather from the likes of Steny Hoyer and Howard Kohr reveals their desperation. They are running scared because “the times they are a changing.” Sure, Congressmen will continue to be bought and sold and Jewish money and the access to power that it buys will be able to prevail in the short term in a conspiratorial fashion. But, in the long run, everyone knows deep down that loyalty to Israel is not loyalty to the United States. And what Israel is doing is evil, as is becoming increasingly clear. It is trying to convince Washington to make war on Iran, a country that does not threaten the U.S., while the willingness of the American people to continue to look the other way as Benjamin Netanyahu uses army snipers to shoot down unarmed demonstrators who are starving will not continue indefinitely. It must not continue and we Americans should do whatever it takes to stop it.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
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A low-fat, high-carb diet has been the largest public health experiment in history. It’s past time for a rethink.
By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | November 25, 2020
New research suggests that four billion people globally will be overweight in 2050. This trend can be traced back to the ‘low-fat, high-carb’ guidelines first issued in the 70s, and should prompt a major U-turn on dietary advice.
A recent report from the Potsdam Institute predicts that by 2050 there will be four billion overweight people in the world, with one-and-a-half billion of them obese. This is not entirely surprising. The world has been getting fatter for years, and things do not seem to be slowing down.
Why is this happening? … continue
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