British private security giant G4S has announced plans to sell its entire Israeli business within the next 12 to 24 months. The news has been welcomed by activists in the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, for whom G4S has been a long-standing target.
The decision to leave Israel was revealed in the company’s full-year results released Wednesday, when the company reported a 40 per cent fall in its pre-tax profits.
The company said its plans to exit Israel were part of a “continuing portfolio management programme” designed to “materially improve our strategic focus.” The Israeli business employs 8,000 people with a turnover of £100 million.
According to the Financial Times, G4S “is extracting itself from reputationally damaging work, including its entire Israeli business”, noting that human rights campaigners and BDS activists “have repeatedly attacked G4S’s work in [Israel].”
G4S provides equipment and services to Israeli prisons and detention centres, in which thousands of Palestinian prisoners are tortured and held – including without charge or trial. Israel also violates international law by jailing Palestinians outside of the occupied territory.
The company also has contracts with the Israeli authorities to provide equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints in the Occupied West Bank that form part of illegal Apartheid Wall.
In 2012, Palestinian groups “called for action to hold G4S accountable for its role in Israel’s prisons”, and since then, the campaign has inflicted growing economic and PR damage on the company. Activists say that G4S has since lost contracts worth millions of dollars around the world, with lost clients including private businesses, universities, trade unions, and United Nations bodies.
In 2014, the Bill Gates Foundation divested its $170m stake in the company following international protests. In the UK, at least five student unions voted to cancel contracts with G4S, and students successfully pressured two other universities not to renew contracts with the company.
The United Methodist Church, the largest protestant church in the USA, divested from G4S after coalition campaigning brought the issue to a vote. Just recently, as reported by Middle East Monitor, G4S lost a major contract in Colombia and a contract with UNICEF in Jordan, in both cases following campaigns by BDS activists.
Responding to the news of G4S’s planned withdrawal from Israel, Palestinian BDS National Committee spokesperson Mahmoud Nawajaa compared the pressure being felt by Israel to the boycott of Apartheid South Africa, and stated that BDS “is making some of the world’s largest corporations realize that profiting from Israeli apartheid and colonialism is bad for business.”
He added: “investment fund managers are increasingly recognizing that their fiduciary responsibility obliges them to divest from Israeli banks and companies that are implicated in Israel’s serious human rights violations, such as G4S and HP, because of the high risk entailed. We are starting to notice a domino effect.”
Nawajaa said the BNC was grateful “to all of the dedicated grassroots organizers around the world who are working in solidarity with Palestinians seeking freedom, justice, and equality”, but noted that the boycott of G4S “will remain among the BDS movement’s top priorities until we actually see its back out of the door of Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.”
The caution is well-founded; G4S announced in 2013 that it would end its role in illegal Israeli settlements, checkpoints and one Israeli prison by 2015, but did not follow through. In 2014, G4S announced it “did not intend to renew” its contract with the Israeli Prison Service when it expired in 2017 but is yet to implement that decision.
In addition, Nawajaa claimed that owing to G4S’s involvement in the “racist mass incarceration business” in countries such as South Africa, UK, and USA, the BNC is “determined to work closely with partners to hold G4S to account for its participation in human rights abuses.”
In the last eight months, French multinationals Veolia and Orange and CRH, Ireland’s biggest company, have all exited the Israeli market. In January, the United Methodist Church put five Israeli banks from Israel on a “blacklist” due to their complicity in human rights violations, including the financing of illegal Israeli settlements.
Nawajaa said Israel is unable to “stop the impressive growth of BDS”, despite its efforts “to smear and delegitimize our nonviolent movement, including with anti-democratic laws in Europe and the US aimed at silencing dissent and suppressing our freedom of speech.”
“We believe strongly that our ethical approach and just cause will prevail, as this latest G4S announcement shows.”
Pluto-Zionism is the three-way marriage of plutocracy, right-wing Zionism and US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a serial war criminal, racist and servant of Wall Street. How did this deadly ménage-a-trois come about? The answer is that a stratospherically wealthy donor group, dedicated to promoting Israel’s dominance in the Middle East and deepening US military intervention in the region, has secured Clinton’s unconditional support for Tel Aviv’s ambitions and, in exchange, Hilary receives scores of millions to finance her Democratic Party foot soldiers and voters for her campaign.
Pluto-Zionism and Clinton
Pluto-Zionists comprise the leading financial backers of Clinton. Her million-dollar backers, among the most powerful financiers and media moguls in America, include: George Soros ($6 million), Marc Benioff, Roger Altman, Steven Spielberg, Haim and Cheryl Saban ($3 million and counting), Jeffrey Katzenberg, Donald Sussman, Herb Sandler, Jay and Mark Pritzker, S. Daniel Abraham ($1 million), Bernard Schwartz, Marc Lasry, Paul Singer, David Geffen, Fred Eychaner, Norman Braman and Bernie Marcus. Waiting in the wings are the Republican billionaire ‘king-makers’, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the Koch brothers as well as the ‘liberal’ multi-billionaire, Michael Bloomberg who had contributed $11 million in 2012 elections. These erstwhile Republican funders are increasing frightened by the anti-‘free trade and anti-intervention’ rhetoric of their party’s front-runner, Donald Trump, and are approaching the solidly pro-Israel, pro-war and pro-Wall Street candidate, Madame Clinton.
Israeli-First Ideologues and Clinton
In addition to the powerful Pluto-Zionists, a vast army of Israel-First ideologues is behind Clinton, including ‘veteran’ arm-chair war mongers like Victoria Nuland Kagan, Donald and Robert Kagan, Robert Zoellick, Michael Chertoff, Dov Zakheim among so many other promoters of Washington’s continuous wars on many fronts. Ms Nuland-Kagan, as US Undersecretary of State for East European Affairs, openly bragged about using hundreds of millions of dollars of US taxpayer money to finance the right-wing Ukrainian coup. Michael Chertoff, as head of Homeland Security after 9/11, jailed thousands of innocent Muslims while freeing five Israeli-Mossad agents arrested by the FBI for suspected involvement or pre-knowledge of the attacks in New York after they were seen filming the collapse of the towers and celebrating the event from a warehouse rooftop in New Jersey!).
Pluto-Zionists and the Israel-First ideologues support Ms Clinton as a reward for her extraordinary military and economic activities on behalf of Tel Aviv’s quest for regional dominance. Her accomplishments for the Jewish State include the promotion of full-scale wars, which have destroyed Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan; economic sanctions and blockade against Iran (she threatened to ‘obliterate Iran’ in 2007; and her own repeatedly stated unconditional support for Israel’s devastation against the people imprisoned in Gaza, which has cost thousands of civilian lives and rendered hundreds of thousands homeless. (In a letter to her ‘banker’, Haim Saban, Hillary stated: “Israel didn’t teach Hamas (the people of Gaza) a harsh enough lesson last year”).
Clinton versus Trump: ‘Moderation’ is in the Eyes of the Deceiver
The Pluto-Zionists, Israel-First ideologues, the US mass media and their acolytes on Wall Street and the Republican and Democratic Party elite are all on a rampage against the wildly popular Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, labeling him as ‘a danger to everything America stands for. (sic)’ Apart from savaging his persona, the anti-Trump chorus contrast his ‘extremism’ with warmonger Clinton’s ‘pragmatism’.
A careful examination of the facts reveals who is the ultra-extremist and who deals with reality:
Women
Madame Clinton’s much touted wars against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of women and children and uprooted millions of households. This bloody and undeniable record of mayhem was cited by Donald Trump when he argued that his policies would be much better for women than the Feminist Clinton’s had been.
So far, Trump’s worst offenses against women are his crude rhetorical misogynist quips, which pale before Hillary’s bloody record of devastation.
African-Americans
Clinton is backed by the leading black politicians who have long fed out of the Democratic Party patronage trough while selling the Clintons to the black electorate as ardent protectors of civil rights. In fact, as Steve Lendman has written, Hillary had referred to marginalized black youth as “super predators (with) no conscience, no empathy”. During her husband Bill’s presidency, she was on record supporting his draconian ‘three strikes’ crime laws, leading to the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of young blacks; and she backed his ‘welfare reform’ program, which shredded the social safety net for the poor and forced millions of impoverished mothers to work for sub-poverty wages, further eroding the stability of black female-headed households. On the African front, ‘Sister’ Secretary of State Hillary’s war on Libya led to the displacement, rape and murder of tens of thousands of black women of sub-Saharan origin at the hands of her jihadi war-lord allies. Millions of black sub-Saharan migrants had lived and worked in Gadhafi’s Libya for years, tens of thousands becoming Libyan citizens. They endured the horror of rampant ethnic cleansing in Clinton’s ‘liberated’ Libya.
Trump, at worst, has done nothing of direct harm to African Americans and remains an enigma on black issues. He opposes Clinton’s war on Libya and has vividly blamed her policies as responsible for the chaos and human misery in post-NATO bombing Libya.
Latinos
Under the Obama-Clinton administration almost 2 million Latino immigrants have been seized from their homes and workplaces, separated from their families and summarily expelled. As Madame Secretary of State, Clinton backed the Honduran military coup that overthrew the elected government of President Zelaya and led directly to assassination of over three hundred activists, including feminist, indigenous, human rights and environmental leaders, like Berta Caceres. Clinton actively backed unsuccessful coups against the democratically elected Bolivian and Venezuelan governments.
Trump has verbally threatened to extend and deepen the Obama-Clinton expulsion of whatever remains of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrant Latino workers after Obama’s expulsion of the 2 million and the hundreds of thousands who have voluntarily gone home. His ‘extremist’ vision is completely in line with that of his allegedly ‘pragmatic’ opponent whose State Department promoted the destruction of so many Latino families in the US.
Foreign Policy
Clinton has launched or promoted more simultaneous wars than any Secretary of State in US history. She was the leading force behind the US bombing of Libya and the brutal ‘regime change’ that has fractured that nation. She promoted the military escalation in Iraq, backed the violent seizure of power in Ukraine, ‘engineered’ the military build-up (pivot to Asia) against China and negotiated the continued presence of thousands of US troops in Afghanistan.
Clinton has repeatedly pledged to her supporter Haim Saban and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Victoria Nuland Kagan, Donald and Robert Kagan, Robert Zoellick, Michael Chertoff, Dov Zakheim that she will give Israel with “all the necessary military, diplomatic, economic and moral support it needs to vanquish Hamas” regardless of the many thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties. The ‘pragmatic feminist’ Hillary is a fervent supporter of the Saudi despotism and its genocide war against the popular forces in Yemen. Hillary tried to pressure President Obama to send US ground troops into Syria. She promotes the continuation of harsh trade sanctions against Russia.
Trump opposes any further direct US intervention in the Middle East. During his debate in South Carolina, he repeatedly denounced President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq – as based on ‘deliberate lies to the American people’, to the shock and horror of the Republican Party elite. He has rejected Pluto-Zionist financing, arguing that only as an independent ‘honest broker’, who doesn’t take the side of Israel in its conflict with Palestinians, can he be effective in brokering a ‘deal’. He opposes sending ground troops overseas to Europe or Asia, which imposes a huge financial burden on the US taxpayers. He has gone on to suggest that European and Asian powers can and should pay for their own defense. Trump argues that the US could work with Putin against radical Islamist terrorism and he regards Russia as a potential trading partner. His anti-interventionism has been labeled as ‘isolationist’ by the Pluto-Zionist ideologues and militarist warlords holed up in their Washington think tanks, but Trump’s ‘America First’ resonates profoundly with the war-weary and economically devastated US electorate.
Israel
Clinton has totally and unconditionally pledged to widen and deepen US subordination to Israel’s war aims in the Middle East and to defend Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinian people in the occupied territories and within apartheid Israel. As a result, Clinton has built a coalition made-up of unsavory mafia-linked, gambling, media and speculator billionaires, whose first loyalty is not to America but Israel. She denounces all critics of Israel as ‘anti-Semites’.
Trump has never been a critic of Israel but he has called for greater ‘evenhandedness’, which is anathema within Zionist circles. For that reason he has not secured a single Pluto-Zionist supporter. So far, he has not been labelled an anti-Semite…. perhaps because his own daughter converted to Judaism following her marriage, but his lack of effusive philo-Zionism has him marked as ‘unreliable’ to the Jewish State. As a subterfuge for his lack of servility to Tel Aviv, Democratic Party Zionist hacks emphasize his ‘racism’ and ‘fascist’ tendencies…
The Democratic Elections: The Real Muck
Clinton currently leads Sanders for the Democratic nomination mostly on the basis of non-elected delegates, the so-called ‘super delegates’, who are party loyalists appointed by the bosses and elite politicians. Sanders’ call for a “political revolution in America” has no traction unless there is first a political revolution within the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party is like the Augean Stable – a clean up requiring a Herculean effort and a loud pugnacious leader with a big broom. Senator Sanders is no Hercules.
As a positive beginning, Sanders has mobilized grass roots support, raised progressive health, education and tax policies that adversely affect Clinton’s billionaire Wall Street backers (Big financier Jaime Diamond called Sanders ‘the most dangerous man in America’), and secured millions of contributions from small donors. But he has failed to target and demand the exit of the Pluto-Zionists, the Wall Street bankers and speculators and venal black politicians controlling the Democratic Party. They run the elections of US presidents and will make sure Hillary Clinton secures the nomination by hook or (more likely) crook.
Clinton is backed by this formidable authoritarian (profoundly anti-democratic) electoral machine. She is totally embedded in the process. Clinton has a track record of enthusiastic support for the barbarism of torture – laughing at and cheering on the torture-death of the wounded Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. In the pursuit of wars and war crimes, Hillary Clinton knows no limit and has borne no accountability. What makes Hillary so terrifyingly dangerous is that she could be ‘Commander in Chief’ of a great military power. While Clinton may be no Hitler, the US is vastly more engaged in world politics than Weimer Germany ever was. Her dictate would bring on global destruction.
If the Democratic primaries are as profoundly undemocratic as they have been in the past, the Republicans and their plutocrat partners are openly planning and plotting to ‘Dump the Donald’ and prevent Trump from obtaining an electoral victory. They have been discussing ways to use convention procedures to undermine a majority vote, and set up a ‘brokered convention’, where the ‘big-wigs’ jigger the delegates, rules and voting procedures behind closed doors robbing the populist front-runner of his party candidacy.
Conclusion
The US presidential primaries reveal in all their facets the decay and corruption of democracy in an era of imperial decline. The ascendancy of a financial oligarchy in the Democratic Party, backing a psychopathic militarist, like Hillary, cannot disguise her track record by labeling their candidate a ‘pragmatist’; the majority of Sanders supporters have no illusions about Madame Clinton. Panic and hysteria among an unsavory elite in the Republican Party and its efforts to block a sui-generis conservative Republican isolationist speaks to the fragility of imperial rule.
If the psychopathic war-monger Clinton is crowned the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, there is no way she can be considered the pragmatic ‘lesser evil’ to Donald Trump or any Republican – their bosses decide to spew out. At best, she might be the ‘equal evil’. In this case, more than 50% of the electorate will not vote. If, after being robbed of his growing movement for the Democratic Party candidacy, ‘Bernie’ Sanders does not break out with an independent bid for the White House, I will join the minuscule 1% who vote for Green Party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein.
“We must remember that the plutocrats dominated by the Israeli supporters [have] been extremely generous in financing Hillary’s campaign for president,” Professor James Petras says.
An American scholar says that “the plutocrats dominated by the Israeli supporters” are financing Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president of the United States.
Professor James Petras, who has written dozens of books on the Latin America and Middle East, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Tuesday.
He was commenting on US Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel to discuss a new military aid package.
Washington and Tel Aviv are discussing details of a 10-year military aid package that will be larger than the $3.1 billion US package Israel received this year.
According to reports, Israeli officials have asked the US to increase its annual military assistance by 60 percent to an average of $5 billion a year over the 2018-2028 period.
Biden’s visit comes as the relationship between US President Barack Obama and Netanyahu took a new setback over the Israeli premier’s decision not to accept an invitation for talks in Washington later this month.
Netanyahu cancelled the meeting with Obama, US National Security Council spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement on Monday.
“This visit by Biden fits in with the Obama administration, which has at times had personal conflicts between Obama and Netanyahu, but on the substance of military and economic aid to Israel, [the US] has been exceedingly generous,” Professor Petras said.
“This despite the fact that Israel has been engaged in a war against the Palestinians, in particular the savage invasions of Gaza which seem not be of importance either to Biden, Obama or Hillary Clinton,” he added.
“We must remember that the plutocrats dominated by the Israeli supporters [have] been extremely generous in financing Hillary’s campaign for president and this new visit by Biden fits in with the attempt by the rightwing of the Democratic Party to undermine the challenge from Bernie Sanders,” the analyst stated.
Professor Petras said “an increase in military support for Israel is a destabilizing element not only because of Israel’s threat to the Palestinians and the land-grabbing but also because it could invite Israel to become more aggressive and threatening to Iran.”
“And I think it is a very foolish move by Obama and Biden and Clinton to destabilize the agreement that was reached with Iran regarding the nuclear understanding. I think it’s a very a bad omen for peace in the Middle East,” he concluded.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been a vocal critic of the P5+1 group’s nuclear deal with Iran and has focused on derailing it, causing great resentment within the White House.
Ties between Obama and Netanyahu have been further strained over the Israeli premier’s resistance to the creation of a Palestinian state, which has been a key element of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.
If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot. – Umberto Eco
Who knew what secret evils have threatened the beleaguered Jewish State?
Actually, a lot of people – or so it would seem. Here in the United States, the professional plot-hunters who can sniff out the faintest hint of honesty about Israel are so numerous, and so creative, that hardly a day goes by without the detection of one more nefarious scheme to treat Israel like any other country, or to hold it accountable to international law.
Theirs is no easy task; Israel’s crimes have swollen to such proportions that its critics are invulnerable to anything resembling truthful debate. But no matter. Each day the plot-hunters roll up their sleeves and do what they must: attacking democracy, subverting American foreign policy, even encouraging anti-Semitism – all to save Israel.
Take President Barack Obama – yes, the same Barack Obama who egged Israel on in its murderous assault against Gaza in 2014. Late last month, Obama announced that his administration is “aggressively opposed” to any and all boycotts of Israel by U.S. trading partners, even if such boycotts are mandated by democratically enacted law.
Or take the ranking legislators from Obama’s own Democratic Party, who joined with their Republican opponents (you know, the fellows who are incubating Donald Trump as a presidential nominee) to insist that the President must punish not only boycotts of Israel but boycotts of products issuing from Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank. Those Democratic senators went so far as to stigmatize such attempts to enforce international law as “anti-Semitic.”
You’ve got to admire the zeal of a political culture that can sacrifice so many principles to the Jewish State. If a boycott of Israeli settlement products were enacted by, say, France or Germany, it would be the product of a democratic process – which means the new anti-boycott bill, championed by both major U.S. parties, runs counter to democracy. Official U.S. policy opposes Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory; that pits Congress’ initiative against the President’s constitutionally-mandated power to conduct foreign affairs. And if the bill condemns as anti-Semitic any attempt to enforce international law against Israel’s illegal settlements, then the law has the effect of making anti-Semitism respectable – thus encouraging bigotry while purporting to fight it.
But what’s democracy, or the U.S. Constitution, against a witch hunt?
And it isn’t only American lawmakers who are tearing down their ideals to silence any discussion of Israeli crimes. American rabbis have done the same. In June 2014, the Rabbinical Alliance of America – described in the Orthodox Jewish Press as “a major American mainstream rabbinic organization” – declared that anyone who supports the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement against Israel is an accessory to Biblically-defined theft and murder.
Here the logic of witch-hunting trumps reason itself: it’s not Israel’s occupying army that is stealing other people’s land and regularly killing off civilians, including children – no, it only looks that way. The real trouble is those cunning BDSers who seem to be defending two great values of Jewish law by exposing Israeli theft and murder. But the obvious can’t be true, so the rabbis obligingly turn Jewish law on its head: BDS is condemned, and the sins of the Holy State are abetted. Judaism goes the way of the Constitution under Israeli tank treads.
The witch-hunters’ intellectual gymnastics can be as breathtaking as their moral absurdities. When Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti was about to deliver a keynote address at a BDS conference in Nazareth, Israeli legislator Nava Boker called on Israel’s Interior Minister to boot him from the country. After all, claimed schlock-Jewish-writer-turned-plagiarist Naomi Ragen in Boker’s support, Barghouti can’t really be Palestinian in the first place, because his parents were expelled from their West Bank home and he himself was born in Qatar. Well, Ragen should know: she was born in New York City, of Eastern European extraction – but somehow she manages to qualify as Israeli. Barghouti’s long family history in Palestine (not to mention his truth-telling) makes him a troublemaker who deserves to be expelled. Ragen’s virulent Islamophobia makes her – well, just one of the gang.
Or how about National Lawyer’s Guild attorney Jordan Kushner, who faces criminal charges in Minneapolis for questioning a police officer who arbitrarily expelled a woman from a lecture given by an Israeli apologist, Moshe Halbertal? Kushner – who was bound, jailed until 2 in the morning, and now charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct and obstruction of the legal process – is being called an enemy of “free speech” by officials at the University of Minnesota Law School, where Halbertal’s lecture took place.
And Halbertal? Although he is a co-author of the IDF’s most recent “ethics” code, and a defender of Israel’s vicious assaults on Gaza, he’s just an “outstanding scholar,” according to the law school’s dean. It takes real mental discipline to find a threat to “free speech” in an arbitrarily jailed civil rights lawyer, while an apologist for mass murder stands undisturbed at the speaker’s dais. But the witch-hunters can manage even that.
In fact, their hypocrisy can border on the delusional. When I posted a few words on a Jewish newspaper’s website to mention Israel’s 2014 slaughter of some 1,600 civilians in Gaza, a woman reproached me for ignoring “The REAL victims, JEWISH innocent men, women & children.” And to prove Jewish superiority to Palestinian barbarism, she offered me a piece of practical advice: “please cut off your fingers.”
Umberto Eco had it right. When you’ve got a guilty conscience, you need to invent a plot. The guiltier Israel’s conscience, the more witches its apologists will have to find – until they finally look at themselves in a mirror.
Israeli forces, on Tuesday night, have kidnapped iconic activist against the apartheid wall and settlements, and mother of six, Manal Tamimi, aged 43, from her home in Al-Nabi Saleh village, near Ramallah.
On International Women’s Day, 8th of March, at 1:30 AM, dozens of soldiers stormed Manal’s home, raided it and detained her family in one room, while female Israeli soldiers have taken Manal to another room in the house, thoroughly inspected her, then abducted her.
Manal’s husband, Bilal Tamimi, 50, said that, a few hours following the arrest, the family knew that Manal was taken to Benyamin Israeli police center near Ramallah, calling it “the Israeli gift to the Palestinian women on women’s day.”
Manal’s lawyer, Gabi Lasky, said, according to the PNN, that Tamimi underwent interrogation at the police center, and he has asked for a hearing session to take place as soon as possible, to know the charges held against her.
Manal and her family have maintained a high-profile in nonviolent popular resistance.
She was also part of Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, which presents community-based resistance rooted in a belief in the power of nonviolent struggle, taking various forms, such as strikes, protests, and legal campaigns, as well as supporting the call to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
Coordinator of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC), Munther Amira strongly denounced the kidnapping, calling it a new Israeli crime against women, especially taking place on international women’s day.
Amira said that this act displays the Israeli brutality against all values of freedom and democracy, and against all women, and Palestinian women in particular.
PSCC demanded all women’s associations and human rights organizations to expose Israeli crimes against women and focus on Manal’s case, at the moment.
Two close relatives from the family, Ahed and Wa’ad Al-Tamimi have repeatedly stood up for Israeli soldiers during demonstrations.
In September of 2015, a story about an Israeli soldier that attacked Mohammad Tamimi, brother of Ahed and Wa’ad, while his arm was broken and in a cast, went viral. Manal’s close relative, Nariman, and her daughters saved the child from the soldier and defended him.
For the past six years, the village of Al-Nabi Saleh held a peaceful demonstration every week, against the Israeli wall and settlements that are engorging the village.
Bilal Tamimi said that Manal was unable to participate in the demonstrations during the past three weeks, because she developed a bad allergy towards teargas, which was fired intensely during protests.
Manal was shot and injured in her legs twice before, in 2013 and 2015.
An Israeli intelligence officer with the Shin Bet covert intelligence service of the Israeli armed forces was killed on Tuesday by other Israeli troops while carrying out an operation in the Gaza Strip.
The man was apparently ‘undercover’ and pretending to be a Palestinian when his fellow soldiers saw him near the border fence and opened fire on him.
Israeli authorities report that the incident is under investigation, but have not released any details, including the name of the officer who was killed.
Israeli forces stationed on the Gaza border are instructed by their superior officers to fire live ammunition at any person they see near the border fence. Israel has established a ‘kill zone’ of hundreds of meters along the fence, effectively seizing that land from the Palestinians who owned it and ‘shooting to kill’ anyone who enters the zone.
It is not yet known what Israeli Shin Bet agents were doing in Gaza, and what kind of ‘operation’ they were attempting to carry out.
The agency has faced international condemnation in recent months when surveillance videos showed Shin Bet officers infiltrating hospitals disguised as patients – even one dressed as a pregnant Palestinian woman – in order to carry out extrajudicial assassinations of Palestinian hospital patients, in direct contravention of international law.
Over half the Jews in Israel support the expulsion of Arabs from the country, a new survey has revealed.
Conducted by the Pew Research Centre between October 2014 and May 2015, the study included 5,601 Israeli citizens, including Arabs, and showed that 48 per cent of Jews and 71 per cent of religious Jews support the expulsion of Arabs from the country. With regards to secular Jews, 58 per cent opposed the idea of expelling Arabs, with one-third in favour of the idea.
Seventy-nine per cent of Arabs asserted that there is “a lot of discrimination in Israeli society”, while 74 per cent of Jews claimed that they do not see such discrimination.
The vast majority of Jews said they saw Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state, while 89 per cent of secular Jews said that there should be a preference for democratic principles over religious laws. But 89 per cent of ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews believe religious laws should take precedence.
The majority of secular Jews said that they identify as Israelis first and as Jews second, while Haredi and religious people identify thought the opposite.
Diplomats may have a reputation for grayness, obfuscation, even hypocrisy, but few have found themselves compared to a serial killer, let alone one who devours human flesh.
That honour befell Laars Faaborg-Andersen, the European Union’s ambassador to Israel, last week when Jewish settlers launched a social media campaign casting him as Hannibal Lecter, the terrifying character from the film Silence of the Lambs.
An image of the Danish diplomat wearing Lecter’s prison face-mask was supposed to suggest that Europe needs similar muzzling.
The settlers’ grievance relates to European aid, which has provided temporary shelter to Palestinian Bedouin families after the Israeli army demolished their homes in the occupied territories near Jerusalem. The emergency housing has helped them remain on land coveted by Israel and the settlers.
European officials, outraged by the Lecter comparison, have reminded Tel Aviv that, were it to abide by international law, Israel – not the EU – would be taking responsibility for these families’ welfare.
While Europe may think of itself as part of an enlightened West, using aid to defend Palestinians’ rights, the reality is less reassuring. The aid may actually be making things significantly worse.
Shir Hever, an Israeli economist who has spent years piecing together the murky economics of the occupation, recently published a report that makes shocking reading.
Like others, he believes international aid has allowed Israel to avoid footing the bill for its decades-old occupation. But he goes further.
His astonishing conclusion – one that may surprise Israel’s settlers – is that at least 78 per cent of humanitarian aid intended for Palestinians ends up in Israel’s coffers.
The sums involved are huge. The Palestinians under occupation are among the most aid-dependent in the world, receiving more than $2bn from the international community a year. According to Hever, donors could be directly subsidising up to a third of the occupation’s costs.
Other forms of Israeli profiteering have been identified in previous studies.
In 2013 the World Bank very conservatively estimated that the Palestinians lose at least $3.4bn a year in resources plundered by Israel.
Further, Israel’s refusal to make peace with the Palestinians, and as a consequence the rest of the region, is used to justify Washington’s annual $3bn in military aid.
Israel also uses the occupied territories as laboratories for testing weapons and surveillance systems on Palestinians – and then exports its expertise. Israel’s military and cyber industries are hugely profitable, generating many billions of dollars of income each year.
A survey published last week found tiny Israel to be the eighth most powerful country in the world.
But whereas these income streams are a recognisable, if troubling, windfall from Israel’s occupation, western humanitarian aid to the Palestinians is clearly intended for the victims, not the victors.
So how is Israel creaming off so much?
The problem, says Hever, is Israel’s self-imposed role as mediator. To reach the Palestinians, donors have no choice but to go through Israel. This provides ripe opportunities for what he terms “aid subversion” and “aid diversion”.
The first results from the Palestinians being a captive market. They have access to few goods and services that are not Israeli.
Who Profits?, an Israeli organisation monitoring the economic benefits for Israel in the occupation, assesses that dairy firm Tnuva enjoys a monopoly in the West Bank worth $60 million annually.
Aid diversion, meanwhile, occurs because Israel controls all movement of people and goods. Israeli restrictions mean it gets to charge for transportation and storage, and levy “security” fees.
Other studies have identified additional profits from “aid destruction”. When Israel wrecks foreign-funded aid projects, Palestinians lose – but Israel often benefits.
Cement-maker Nesher, for example, is reported to control 85 per cent of all construction by Israelis and Palestinians, including the supplies for rebuilding efforts in Gaza after Israel’s repeated rampages.
Significant segments of Israeli society, aside from those in the security industries, are lining their pockets from the occupation. Paradoxically, the label “the most aid-dependent people in the world” – usually affixed to the Palestinians – might be better used to describe Israelis.
What can be done? International law expert Richard Falk notes that Israel is exploiting an aid oversight vacuum: there are no requirements on donors to ensure their money reaches the intended recipients.
What the international community has done over the past 20 years of the Oslo process – inadvertently or otherwise – is offer Israel financial incentives to stabilise and entrench its rule over the Palestinians. It can do so relatively cost-free.
While Europe and Washington have tried to beat Israel with a small diplomatic stick to release its hold on the occupied territories, at the same time they dangle juicy financial carrots to encourage Israel to tighten its grip.
There is a small ray of hope. Western aid policy does not have to be self-sabotaging. Hever’s study indicates that Israel has grown as reliant on Palestinian aid as the Palestinians themselves.
The EU noted last week that Israel not Brussels should be caring for the Bedouin it has left homeless. Europe could take its own advice to heart and start shifting the true costs of the occupation back on to Israel.
That may happen soon enough whatever the west decides, if – as even Israel is predicting will occur soon – the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas collapses.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jkcook.net.
The Israeli Central Court in occupied Jerusalem, sentenced on Monday lawyer Shireen al-Eesawy, to four years imprisonment, and her brother to eight.
Amjad Abu Assab, head of the Jerusalem Detainees Parents Committee, said the lawyer and her brother, were convicted of “communicating with the detainees,” and providing funds to them.”
Shireen was taken prisoner on March 7, 2014, as part of an Israeli arrest campaign targeting many Palestinian lawyers in occupied Jerusalem. Her brother Midhat al-Eesawy was kidnapped in March 13, 2014.
Shireen has been repeatedly kidnapped and imprisoned by Israel and was previously held under house arrests for several months.
Her brother has also been repeatedly imprisoned, spending more than 20 years in detention, in addition to being frequently placed under house arrest.
Shireen is also the sister of Samer al-‘Eesawy, who was kidnapped in June of 2014, just two years after his release under the “Shalit Prisoner Swap Agreement.”
In May of 2015, an Israeli judge reinstated Samer’s 30-year imprisonment term, for what he called “violating the terms of his release.”
Samer also went on hunger strike for nine months, demanding his release. On December 23, 2013, Israel released him, and the Israeli army rearrested him in June of 2014.
It is worth mentioning that al-‘Eesawy’s grandmother was killed by the Israeli army in the First Intifada of 1987 while their parents were repeatedly imprisoned by Israel in the 1970’s. In 1994, the army killed their brother during the uprising that followed the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre. Every member of the al-Eesawy family has previously been kidnapped and imprisoned by Israel.
NEGEV – An Israeli court on Sunday ruled that the Bedouin community of Um al-Hiran in the Negev in southern Israel is illegal, on the grounds that the community settled on state lands, Israeli media reported.
“The state is the owner of the lands in dispute,” Israeli daily Haaretz quoted Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein as writing. “The residents have acquired no rights to the land but have settled them [without any authorization], which the state cancelled legally.”
Israeli planning authorities intend to build a “new town for Jewish residents in its place,” Haaretz reported.
On Monday, Israeli authorities reportedly entered farm lands used by Um al-Hiran residents with the intentions of destroying crops, but residents were able to prevent forces from beginning the demolition.
Raed Abu al-Qian, a well-known activist in the area, said the move “came to increase pressure on the residents and to make home demolitions easy in the village,” following the Israeli court ruling.
Said al-Khroumi, a member of the Higher Guidance Committee of Arab Residents of Negev, said Israeli forces’ presence at the village was “a heinous and barbarian aggression against the village and its residents.”
He also called for anyone able to travel to Um al-Hiran to visit the village “show solidarity.”
Bedouin member of the Israeli Knesset Talab Abu Arar accused Israeli Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel of creating “a secret government committee” aimed at destroying the crops of Palestinian villages in Israel.
According to Abu Arar, the “secret committee” recommended that Palestinian villages in the Negev be emptied, and residents removed.
“This is a special Israeli form of ethnic cleansing,” Abu Arar continued.
Abu Arar highlighted that Israeli authorities destroyed crops in the villages of Attir, Hurah and Saawah during the past several days.
Residents of Um al-Hiran and nearby villages are among tens of thousands of Bedouins living in the Negev face ongoing displacement.
While a plan to forcibly resettle the area’s Bedouin population — the Prawer Plan — was shelved in 2014, Israel’s Habayit Hayehudi party joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau’s coalition last year on the condition the plan was reinstated.
The Um al-Hiran community — around 700 strong — was never recognized by the Israeli government and residents’ lands were claimed by the state in 2013 in order to make way for the expansion of the Beersheba metropolitan area.
A delegation of seven lawmakers from the European Parliament arrived in Israel last month to visit Gaza, but one day before they were due to enter the enclave, Israeli authorities refused to give them access. Officials gave no reason for this ban, and The New York Times was equally silent, making no mention of the event in its pages.
This past week a group of six Belgian members of parliament, representing a range of political parties, also traveled to Israel, planning to meet with representatives of non-governmental organizations in Gaza. Israeli authorities blocked their entry to the coastal strip, sparking an outraged reaction from the MPs. Once again, the Times had nothing to say.
Three days later, however, the Times ran a story on page 3, informing us that India has denied visas to a group monitoring religious conflicts. The story, “India Denies Visas to Group Monitoring Religious Freedom,” appears online and in print, and it tells us that the delegates had hoped to assess the state of religious liberties in India and were “deeply disappointed” in the outcome.
And then there was Iran and the matter of inspecting its nuclear facilities, all very much part of the lengthy negotiations that led to an historic agreement and the lifting of sanctions. The concern over inspections took up many column inches in the Times. Would Iran allow access? How much and when?
Meanwhile, the newspaper had nothing to say about Israel’s nuclear weapons program and its refusal to allow entry to inspectors. (See TimesWarp 6-2-15.)
With the India visa story last week, the newspaper reveals once again that such affairs are fit to print—if the offending state is not Israel—and that the Times continues to maintain a double standard. This policy has left its readers ignorant of Israel’s lengthy record of denying entry to monitoring groups and international officials.
Less than two weeks ago, Israeli officials refused to allow Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta to visit Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. The request was made too late, the officials said. Kenyatta was on a three-day state visit, the first from a Kenyan president since 1994. No mention was made in the Times.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, also on a three-day visit to Israel in December of 2014, did manage to meet with Abbas, but he was denied entry to Gaza. Adams, who had been instrumental in reaching a peace agreement in Ireland, said the refusal to allow him access ran “contrary to the needs of the peace process.” Israel (and the Times) made no comment.
During and after the attacks on Gaza in the summer of 2014 Israel denied repeated requests from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to enter the enclave and investigate charges of war crimes against both sides. Two months later Israeli officials also denied representatives of the United Nations Human Rights Council the right to enter Gaza for the same purpose.
The Times failed to run stories on either of these occasions, but it was forced to reveal the fact that the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur in the Palestinian territories, Makarim Wibisono, resigned over just this issue, saying that despite repeated requests, Israel denied him entry to the West Bank and Gaza.
The story, however, was relegated to the World Briefing section and the author, Isabel Kershner, took care to give the Israeli pretext for its refusal: that the UN Human Rights Council is “biased” and “hostile” to Israel’s interests.
The Times would rather not take up such stories, it seems. To do so might create doubts in the minds of readers, upsetting the carefully cultivated impression that Israel and Palestine are two equal parties at the negotiating table and on the ground.
Such news would make it uncomfortably clear that Israel is in full charge of the borders and that there is nothing equal about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It also raises the question, which an Irish delegate raised in reacting to the recent ban on EU parliament members travel to Gaza: “What does the Israeli government aim to hide?”
The Times is willing to raise this question—even if by implication—in regards to India or China or Iran, but it has no interest in prompting such doubts when it comes to Israel. Readers, therefore, might want to ask the Times a similar question: In censoring numerous stories of Israeli bans on travel to the occupied territories, just what is the newspaper trying to conceal?
Hebron, occupied Palestine – Since the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre, the majority of Shuhada Street – once the thriving Palestinian market and main thoroughfare connecting north and south al-Khalil (Hebron) – has been closed to Palestinians. They are completely barred from accessing it, except for a small stretch in the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood.
Photos of the same portion of Shuhada street – a thriving market before 1994, now an empty street where no Palestinians are allowed to enter (published by B’Tselem)
This tiny strip that is legally still accessible for Palestinians is restricted by the recently ‘renovated’ Shuhada checkpoint at the beginning of the street and ends where the street begins to border the illegal settlement of Beit Hadassah, beyond which Israeli forces assure that no Palestinians exist. Further down Shuhada street, clearly marked with yet another military post barring anyone who might attempt to enter the street, are even more Israeli settlements – all illegal under international law – located directly in the city center of al-Khalil.
The settlements on Shuhada Street are connected via a settler-only road to the much larger settlement of Kiryat Arba on the outskirts of al-Khalil; settlers can also reach the illegal Tel Rumeida settlement easily by traversing the tiny stretch of Shuhada Street still open to some Palestinians and the road leading up into Tel Rumeida from Shuhada checkpoint, now encompassed within the closed military zone. While Palestinians are allowed to walk on this part of Shuhada Street, Palestinian vehicles, including ambulances, are forbidden from driving there. Since Israeli authorities declared the area part of a closed military zone on 1st November 2015, the already barely existent access has been further restricted – Isreali forces only allow entry to Palestinians registered with them residents, while any Israeli settler, regardless of whether they are residents or not, can pass freely and without ever being harassed, stopped, detained, arrested, or threatened by the ever-present military forces.
Map of the city center of al-Khalil including Shuhada Street (the longest street marked in red) by B’Tselem
At the line demarcated by Daboya checkpoint (Checkpoint 55), where the illegal settlements on the street begin and Palestinians are no longer allowed, a steep flight of stairs leads up to Qurtuba school and into the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood. These stairs, the only way for Palestinians to continue traveling in the same direction above the street as they are not allowed to continue down Shuhada Street itself, have been closed by the Israeli forces with a metal gate since November 2015.
Stairs with the closed gate leading down to Shuhada Street
Even though this gate is currently not locked, Israeli forces deny any Palestinian, except for the students and teachers of Qurtuba school during school-time, to use these stairs. As a result Palestinian residents of this neighbourhood, once they have passed Shuhada checkpoint – an ordeal that can take several hours – have been denied to reach their homes by walking down Shuhada Street and the stairs leading up to Qurtuba school, forcing them instead to take a much longer detour around. With yet another way denied for Palestinans, navigating the maze of Israeli military-enforced checkpoints, complete bans on travel, roads where Palestinians cannot drive, settler-only roads, closed military zones and new arbitrary closures has become even more arduous.
Israeli forces are thereby also clearly working to minimise the number of Palestinians who will actually use this last portion of Shuhada Street – now a complete dead-end – as they bar Palestinians not only from going farther down the closed street but also declare the stairs, formerly an alternate route, yet another closed zone. This illustrates the Israeli attempts to rid Shuhada Street entirely of Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing in al-Khalil, and all across Israeli-occupied Palestinian lands is not a sudden, headline-grabbing event; it progresses gradually as Palestinians are restricted in certain areas, barred from driving there, prohibited from even being there, forced out to facilitate the expansion of the illegal settlements. Ethnic cleansing happens slowly, by erecting new and ‘fortifying’ existing checkpoints, advancing one more closure at a time.
Just after midnight of June 6, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in a backroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just been celebrating his victory at the California primaries, which made him the most likely Democratic nominee for the presidential election. His popularity was so great that Richard Nixon, on the Republican side, stood little chance. At the age of 43, Robert would have become the youngest American president ever, after being the youngest Attorney General in his brother’s government. His death opened the way for Nixon, who could finally become president eight years after having been defeated by John F. Kennedy in 1960.
John had been assassinated four and a half years before Robert. Had he survived, he would certainly have been president until 1968. Instead, his vice-president Lyndon Johnson took over the White House in 1963, and became so unpopular that he retired in 1968. Interestingly, Johnson became president the very day of John’s death, and ended his term a few months after Robert’s death. He was in power at the time of both investigations.
And both investigations are widely regarded as cover-ups. In both cases, the official conclusion is rife with contradictions. We are going to sum them up here. But we will do more: we will show that the key to solving both cases resides in the link between them. And we will solve them beyond a reasonable doubt. … continue
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