B'Tselem 21
July 2006
B'Tselem's initial investigation indicates that, during an incursion by Israeli forces into Beit Hanun, in the northern Gaza Strip, on 17 July 2006, soldiers seized control of two buildings in the town and used residents as human shields.
After seizing control of the buildings, the soldiers held six residents, two of them minors, on the staircases of the two buildings, at the entrance to rooms in which the soldiers positioned themselves, for some twelve hours. During this time, there were intense exchanges of gunfire between the soldiers and armed Palestinians. The soldiers also demanded that one of the occupants walk in front of them during a search of all the apartments in one of the buildings, after which they released her.
International humanitarian law forbids using civilians as human shields by placing them next to soldiers or next to military facilities, with the intention of gaining immunity from attack, or by forcing the civilians to carryout dangerous military assignments.
B'Tselem has demanded that the Judge Advocate General immediately order a Military Police investigation into the matter and prosecute the soldiers responsible for the action.
Chronology of the Events
In the IDF's Operation Summer Rains in the Gaza Strip following the abduction of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, engineer, artillery, and infantry forces made an incursion into Beit Hanun, a town of some 32,000 people in the northern Gaza Strip, early in the morning on 17 July. According to the IDF Spokesperson, during the incursion, "IDF struck approximately twenty armed terrorists." The announcement added that, "Forces also carried out engineering work to harm terror organizations' infrastructure and hamper their activity, and arrested a number of wanted men... During searches, forces discovered three Kalashnikov rifles, a carbine, a pistol, and ammunition."
Around 6:00 A.M., troops in armored personnel carriers and bulldozers drove up to two adjacent four-story buildings in the middle of the town, near the al-Nasser mosque. The bulldozers destroyed the concrete wall around each building and then destroyed one of the external walls on the ground floor of each of the buildings. The extended Kafarneh family lives on the bottom three floors of one of the buildings. On the fourth floor are the offices of the Ramatan Palestinian News Agency. The 'Ali family lives inthe other building.
Part of the force, twelve soldiers in the estimate of one of the witnesses, burst into the Kafarneh building through the area where the wall was destroyed, firing stun grenades as they entered. At the time, there were 25 people in the building, including 11 children. Some of those present were from the 'Ali family who left the adjacent building when the military entered Beit Hanun. The soldiers called all the residents to gather in the living room on the ground floor, and then searched them. Threatening the occupants with his weapon, one of the soldiers ordered 'Aza Kafarneh, a 43-year old woman, to accompany him to search each of the floors in the building and to open the doors of each of the rooms. At the end of the search, the soldiers ordered all the occupants, except for three, to leave the building. As they left, there was a heavy exchange of gunfire between IDF soldiers and Palestinians. In her testimony to B'Tselem, 'Aza Kafarneh related that, in light of the situation, she requested the soldier to let them remain in the building, but the soldiers refused. "We had to lay flat on the ground and crawl to the neighbor's house..."
The three who were kept in the building were two of her sons, Hazem, 14, and Qusay, 16, and her nephew, Khaled, 23. The three were taken to the staircase, at the entrance to the third-floor apartment, where the soldiers were located. The three sat there until around 8:00 P.M, about 45 minutes before the soldiers left the building. During this time, soldiers inside and outside the building were engaged in exchanges of gunfire with armed Palestinians. The staircase was not in the direct line of gunfire. Just before the end of the incident, the soldiers ordered the three to go downstairs, in front of them, to the entrance of the building.
At the same time (around 6:00 AM), other members of the military force had seized control of the building in which the 'Ali family lives. The only people in the building were the mother, 'Ayesha, 60, and her three sons, Hazem, 29, Tareq, 25, and 'Emad, 41. 'Ayesha 'Ali was taken into an interior room on the ground floor, where she stayed with her hands tied until the end of the events.
The soldiers ordered her three sons to undress and then searched them. The soldiers then cuffed their hands behind their back and blindfolded them. According to the testimony of Hazem, the soldiers tightened the cuffs intentionally so as to hurt them. One of the soldiers kicked him in the chest after he complained about the pain. However, when his hands began to swell and bleed from the cuffs, another soldier put a new pair of cuffs on his hands.
' Emad, who serves in the Palestinian police force, handed over his personal weapon at the beginning of the events, in response to the soldiers' demand. Another member of the family who also serves in a Palestinian police unit wasnot present at the time. Soldiers searched for his weapon, but they did not find it. During the search, the soldiers broke a lot of the family's furniture and caused great destruction in some of the apartments.
Following the search, one of the soldiers took Hazem's cell phone and called four persons whose numbers were in the phone's memory. The soldier told each of them: "If you want Hazem, Tareq, and 'Emad released, bring your weapons." According to Hazem's testimony, the four persons work with him at Ramatan and were selected at random; none of them have any weapons.
Around 8:00 A.M., the three men were taken to the staircase next to the third-floor apartment, where the soldiers were gathered. The three remained on the stairs, their hands cuffed behind their back and their eyes covered, until 8:45 P.M., when the soldiers left the building. At a certain point, one of the brothers, Tareq, moved a bit, and a soldier hit him in the chest and threatened to kill him. While they sat there, an intense exchange of gunfire took place between soldiers in the building and armed Palestinians outside. In contrast to the situation in the other building, many bullets entered the staircase area via the window and struck the wall, above the heads of the three occupants. One of the brothers, 'Emad, was taken by the soldiers at the end of the incident and remains in Israeli detention.
During the events, 'Aza Kafarneh was in contact with B'Tselem and asked the organization to help attain the release of her family members who were being held by the soldiers. A B'Tselem staff member, Najib Abu Rokaya, called the IDF's District Coordination Office in the Gaza Strip and warned them about the incident. The soldier on the other end of the phone referred Abu Rokaya to the DCO's legal advisor, Captain Haim Sharbit. After Abu Rokaya spoke with him, Sharbit said that he could do nothing about the matter because "we are not familiar with the incident."
Legal Background
The testimonies taken by B'Tselem indicate that the Israeli soldiers who took over the buildings used the occupants as human shields. They placed civilians on the staircase, next to the rooms where the soldiers were located, with the intention of deterring the armed Palestinians from attacking the building and/or so that the civilians would be located between the soldiers and the armed Palestinians, should the latter manage to penetrate the building and try to shoot them. The soldiers used one of the occupants to open the doors of the apartments, apparently out of fear that other persons were hiding there and would open fire when the door was opened.
International humanitarian law, which states the rules applying in armed conflicts, requires the sides to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and to protect the lives and dignity of civilians. The Fourth Geneva Convention, in Article 27, states that civilians who find themselves in the hands of one of the parties are "entitled, in all circumstances, to respect... They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof..."
Article 28 of the Convention expressly prohibits the use of civilians as human shields by placing them alongside soldiers or military facilities, with the hope of attaining immunity from attack. The official commentary of the Convention refers to this practice, which was common in the Second World War as "cruel and barbaric." The Convention, in Articles 31 and 51, also prohibits the use of physical or moral coercion on civilians or forcing them to carry out military tasks.
Despite these prohibitions, for a long period of time following the outbreak of the second intifada, particularly during Operation Defensive Shield, in April 2002, the IDF systematically used Palestinian civilians as human shields, forcing them to carry out military actions which threatened their lives. It was not until a High Court petition was filed by Israeli human rights organizations opposing such action, in May 2002, that the IDF issued a general order prohibiting the use ofPalestinians as "a means of 'human shield' against gunfire or attacks by the Palestinian side.'" Following this order, the use of this practice declined sharply. However, according to IDF interpretation, assistance by Palestinians, with their consent, in warning a wanted person hiding in a certain location is not deemed use of a human shield. However, this practice was also outlawed following the ruling of the Israeli High Court of Justice that this practice is inconsistent with the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Clearly, then, the IDF's treatment of the Palestinian occupants in the two Beit Hanun buildings flagrantly breached fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, as well as IDF regulations. B'Tselem wrote to the military's Judge Advocate General and demanded that he immediately order a Military Police investigation regarding this incident, and that he prosecute all those responsible for these illegal acts.
Monday, July 24, 2006
Sunday, July 23, 2006
The Middle East Debate
The Middle East debate
By Ali Abunimah
The Sunday Business Post (Ireland) 23 July 2006
Lacking in political and moral legitimacy, Israel existsonly due to the constant exercising of brute force and American-supplied weapons technology, writes Ali Abunimah.
Israel wants us to believe that its wholesale destruction of Lebanon and killing to date of nearly 400 civilians is about the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah.
This focus on the "latest incident" is designed to obscure what truly lies at the heart of this ongoing conflict: Israel's violent takeover of Palestine.
Palestinians, expelled from their country in 1948, hadcontinued their struggle against Israel from Lebanon. In1982, Israel invaded that country in an attempt to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organisation, killing tens of thousands of civilians. On that occasion, Israel's official pretext was a failed assassination attempt against its London ambassador.
Rather than ending resistance, Israel laid the seeds forwhat we see today.
The mostly Shia villagers in southern Lebanon who bore the brunt of Israel's 1982 invasion are the core constituency of Hezbollah, founded in 1983 to resist Israel's occupation.
The fighting in Lebanon, and to the south in Gaza, aredirectly related to Israel's origins, and the regional violence will only spiral until there is a just solution to the Palestine question.
Israel was established in 1948 as an explicitly ''Jewish state'' in a country whose overwhelming majority population at the time was not Jewish and had no desire to live under such a government. Such a project could only generate enormous resistance.
Because of this, Israel has never gained legitimacy among the people who paid the price for its creation.
Lacking such legitimacy, Israel exists only by the constant exercise of brute force - first to expel the majority of Palestinians, to prevent the return of refugees and, after 1967, to settle as many of its Jewish citizens as it could in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Zionist leaders hoped that the transformation of Palestine from a multicultural, multi-religious society into one ruled exclusively by and for Jews would have been completed by now, with the Palestinians merely a distant memory.
Instead, Israel created a catastrophe.
Today because of their determination not to be driven from what remains of their land, and due to their higher birthrate, Palestinians are once again becoming the majority population. Their struggle draws support across the Arab world, including from groups like Hezbollah.
For the first time since the 1948 expulsions accompanying Israel's foundation, Jews no longer form the absolute majority in the territory they control.
Israeli and Palestinian official statistics count 5.3million Jews living in Israel-Palestine and 5.6 million non-Jews (this does not include millions more Palestinian refugees outside the country).
Israeli leaders understand what this means. Prime minister Ehud Olmert said in 2003: "We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say 'There is no place for two states between the [River] Jordan and the[Mediterranean] sea. All we want is the right to vote'. The day they get it, we [Israeli Jews] will lose everything."
Olmert added: "I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organisations that shouldered the burden of struggle against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle against us."
The internationally-endorsed solution for the dilemma is a complete Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 so that Palestinians can establish a state in these areas, which amount to just 22 per cent of the original homeland.
Unfortunately, Israel used the years of the peace process, not to begin to end its occupation, but to entrench it -doubling the number of settlers in the West Bank. While it pulled 8,000 settlers out of Gaza last year, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres explained on the BBC in August: "We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography."
Israel hoped that, distracted by the pulling out of a few settlers, the world would not notice its continued military control of Gaza, as well as its annexation wall and the massive expansion of Jews-only colonies through out the West Bank.
Israel's full-scale assault on Lebanon and its round-the-clock bombardment of Gaza have nothing to do with the recent attacks on its army.
The indiscriminate killing of civilians can only be understood as an attempt to put fear back into the Arabs, in a desperate effort to maintain Israel as a Jewish-dominated garrison state surrounded by concrete walls.
But groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, which emerged as a direct response to the brutality of decades of Israeli occupation, and an absence of principled international intervention, represent a generation no longer cowed by Israel's US-supplied missiles and jets.
FW de Klerk, the last president of apartheid-era South Africa, calculated when he took office that the white government could retain power for many years, but only at the cost of inflicting enormous casualties.
Both he and Nelson Mandela concluded that nothing could be gained from further bloodshed and that the time had come to negotiate the peaceful end of apartheid.
Looking back on the apartheid regime's long history of violence, de Klerk wrote in his memoirs: "There is no evidence that the assassination of opponents had the slightest effect on the final outcome of the struggle, other than causing further personal suffering and bitterness."
It is only by ending their claims of superior rights and power that Israeli Jews, like white South Africans, will gain the legitimacy and acceptance from people in Lebanon, Palestine and across the Middle East that cannot be won with violence.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, and author of the forthcoming book One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
By Ali Abunimah
The Sunday Business Post (Ireland) 23 July 2006
Lacking in political and moral legitimacy, Israel existsonly due to the constant exercising of brute force and American-supplied weapons technology, writes Ali Abunimah.
Israel wants us to believe that its wholesale destruction of Lebanon and killing to date of nearly 400 civilians is about the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah.
This focus on the "latest incident" is designed to obscure what truly lies at the heart of this ongoing conflict: Israel's violent takeover of Palestine.
Palestinians, expelled from their country in 1948, hadcontinued their struggle against Israel from Lebanon. In1982, Israel invaded that country in an attempt to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organisation, killing tens of thousands of civilians. On that occasion, Israel's official pretext was a failed assassination attempt against its London ambassador.
Rather than ending resistance, Israel laid the seeds forwhat we see today.
The mostly Shia villagers in southern Lebanon who bore the brunt of Israel's 1982 invasion are the core constituency of Hezbollah, founded in 1983 to resist Israel's occupation.
The fighting in Lebanon, and to the south in Gaza, aredirectly related to Israel's origins, and the regional violence will only spiral until there is a just solution to the Palestine question.
Israel was established in 1948 as an explicitly ''Jewish state'' in a country whose overwhelming majority population at the time was not Jewish and had no desire to live under such a government. Such a project could only generate enormous resistance.
Because of this, Israel has never gained legitimacy among the people who paid the price for its creation.
Lacking such legitimacy, Israel exists only by the constant exercise of brute force - first to expel the majority of Palestinians, to prevent the return of refugees and, after 1967, to settle as many of its Jewish citizens as it could in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Zionist leaders hoped that the transformation of Palestine from a multicultural, multi-religious society into one ruled exclusively by and for Jews would have been completed by now, with the Palestinians merely a distant memory.
Instead, Israel created a catastrophe.
Today because of their determination not to be driven from what remains of their land, and due to their higher birthrate, Palestinians are once again becoming the majority population. Their struggle draws support across the Arab world, including from groups like Hezbollah.
For the first time since the 1948 expulsions accompanying Israel's foundation, Jews no longer form the absolute majority in the territory they control.
Israeli and Palestinian official statistics count 5.3million Jews living in Israel-Palestine and 5.6 million non-Jews (this does not include millions more Palestinian refugees outside the country).
Israeli leaders understand what this means. Prime minister Ehud Olmert said in 2003: "We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say 'There is no place for two states between the [River] Jordan and the[Mediterranean] sea. All we want is the right to vote'. The day they get it, we [Israeli Jews] will lose everything."
Olmert added: "I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organisations that shouldered the burden of struggle against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle against us."
The internationally-endorsed solution for the dilemma is a complete Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 so that Palestinians can establish a state in these areas, which amount to just 22 per cent of the original homeland.
Unfortunately, Israel used the years of the peace process, not to begin to end its occupation, but to entrench it -doubling the number of settlers in the West Bank. While it pulled 8,000 settlers out of Gaza last year, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres explained on the BBC in August: "We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography."
Israel hoped that, distracted by the pulling out of a few settlers, the world would not notice its continued military control of Gaza, as well as its annexation wall and the massive expansion of Jews-only colonies through out the West Bank.
Israel's full-scale assault on Lebanon and its round-the-clock bombardment of Gaza have nothing to do with the recent attacks on its army.
The indiscriminate killing of civilians can only be understood as an attempt to put fear back into the Arabs, in a desperate effort to maintain Israel as a Jewish-dominated garrison state surrounded by concrete walls.
But groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, which emerged as a direct response to the brutality of decades of Israeli occupation, and an absence of principled international intervention, represent a generation no longer cowed by Israel's US-supplied missiles and jets.
FW de Klerk, the last president of apartheid-era South Africa, calculated when he took office that the white government could retain power for many years, but only at the cost of inflicting enormous casualties.
Both he and Nelson Mandela concluded that nothing could be gained from further bloodshed and that the time had come to negotiate the peaceful end of apartheid.
Looking back on the apartheid regime's long history of violence, de Klerk wrote in his memoirs: "There is no evidence that the assassination of opponents had the slightest effect on the final outcome of the struggle, other than causing further personal suffering and bitterness."
It is only by ending their claims of superior rights and power that Israeli Jews, like white South Africans, will gain the legitimacy and acceptance from people in Lebanon, Palestine and across the Middle East that cannot be won with violence.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, and author of the forthcoming book One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
U.S. Arming of Israel: How U.S. Weapons Manufacturers Profit From Middle East Conflict
Much has been made of the Syrian and Iranian origin of weaponry used by Hezbollah but there has been little discussion of where Israel's weapons come from. A new report by the World Policy Institute examines how the United States provides billions of dollars of military aid to Israel each year and how their current arsenal is composed of U.S made equipment. The report is titled "U.S Military Assistance and Arms Transfers to Israel".
AMY GOODMAN: One of the authors of the report joins us now, Frida Berrigan. She’s Senior Research Associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. Welcome to Democracy Now!
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, tell us what are the weapons being used? Did you also look at where the weapons that Hezbollah is using comes from?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Sure. Almost all of the weapons used by Israel are from the United States. There might be a couple French fighter planes that they’re using, but its F-16s made in Fort Worth, Texas; its Apache helicopters; its Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles; it’s all from the United States. So you have this real disconnect between an overemphasis on the supply by Iran and Syria of Hezbollah's weapons and no discussion of the fact that all of the Israeli arsenal is from the United States, and that that is in contravention to U.S. law. to the Arms Export Control Act, which says that U.S.-origin weapons are only to be used for self-defense and for internal security.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And your report indicates that Israel has always been the largest recipient of military aid from the United States, but that that’s actually increased since 2001?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: We’re looking at incredible increases in U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel. Military aid stands at about $3 billion a year. That’s about $500 for every Israeli citizen that the United States provides on an annual basis. And then, weapons sales, most recently, since the Bush administration came into power, we’re looking at $6.3 billion worth of weaponry sold to Israel.
Israel's relationship with the United States is unique in a number of ways. And one of those ways is that essentially the United States provides 20% of the Israeli military budget on an annual basis, and then about 70% of that money that is given from the United States, from U.S. taxpayers, to Israel is then spent on weapons from Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Raytheon. Most other countries don't have that sort of cash relationship, where they go straight to U.S. corporations with U.S. money to buy weapons that are then used in the Occupied Territories and against Lebanon.
AMY GOODMAN: What kind of leverage does the U.S. money, the U.S. aid for Israel provide?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Well, when you’re talking about 20% of the Israeli military budget, you’re talking about a huge fulcrum of leverage, right? The United States could today say, you know, “This incursion into Lebanon, the killing of civilians, the bombing in Gaza, all of this is not internal security, all of this is not self-defense, and we’re cutting it off.” And they could cut it off tomorrow. And that would essentially not only send an incredibly strong message to the Israeli military, but it would remove the tools of the occupation, the tools of the bloodshed and the suffering that’s happening in Lebanon and in Gaza.
It was interesting to sort of place the very weak statements that have come from the administration -- “Oh, there should be” -- you know, they have said things, like “They should practice restraint,” and stuff like that. Meanwhile, just on the 14th, the United States decided to sell $120 million worth of jet fuel to the Israeli military. The little notice that announced the sale from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said, “This fuel will be used to promote peace and security in the region.” And then, meanwhile, you have jets strafing villages, bombing civilians, taking out bridges, destroying water treatment plants. So the United States could decide and would have a very strong case and a historic precedent for deciding to cut military aid.
AMY GOODMAN: What’s the precedent?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: In 1981, the last time there was a full-on invasion by the Israeli government into Lebanon, the Reagan administration cut military aid and froze weapons sales to Israel, while it did an investigation of whether or not the weapons were being used for self-defensive and internal security purposes. So for ten weeks in 1981, nothing went into Israel. Now, at the end of that ten weeks, they said, “Oh, well, you could argue ’til eternity about what constitutes defensive use of weapons.” But under the Reagan administration, while Alexander Hague was the Secretary of State, we did cut off weapons sales and military aid. And we certainly haven't done that since. And when we look at how the conflict and the war continues to unfold with so many civilians being killed and this bare use of force and power by the Israeli military, it seems like it’s time to explore that option again.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, one of the things that’s gotten a lot of attention in recent days have been the missiles fired by Hezbollah into Israel. But I see by your report that to some degree the Hezbollah missiles might also almost be seen as a self-defense measure, because you have here a thousand Redeye missiles that Israel has, surface-to-air missiles, 400 Stinger man-portable air defense missiles, 444 Harpoon missiles. So Israel has quite an extensive missile arsenal of its own.
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Right, we’re talking about one of the strongest militaries in the world going up against basically the defenseless Lebanese, and then a, you know, not very well armed Hezbollah. There was an article in the newspaper yesterday that quoted Israeli defense officials, who said, “Maybe 900 Hezbollah missiles have hit Israeli territory.” That’s 900 missiles, and probably 30 Israeli civilians have been killed. So they’re obviously not very effective weapons. They do get weapons from Syria, from Iran. They manufacture their own weapons. But --
AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about the New York Times quoting the Fajr-3 from Syria?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Right, yeah. There was an article in the Times, I think on Monday, about Iranian missiles being used by Hezbollah, and they pulled Syria in, too, because Syria was producing an Iranian model missile and then had transferred it to Hezbollah. So, but the missiles haven't been very effective, and they can’t -- the range is between 30 and 45 miles.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about, Frida Berrigan, the U.S. government supporting the Israeli government and military. But this kind of weapons relationship also is a great boon to the U.S. weapons manufacturers. Can you talk about the relationship the U.S. has with these weapons manufacturers and name them?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Sure. Well, the largest weapons manufacturer in this country is Lockheed Martin. It’s based in Texas. And it manufactures the F-16 fighter plane, all manner of missiles. It manufactures the C-130, which is a huge transport plane. It’s the biggest weapons manufacturer in the world.
Lockheed Martin and the Israeli military recently went into business together, co-producing a version of the F-16 fighter plane called the Sufa, which means “storm” in Hebrew. It’s built partially outside of Tel Aviv, and then the final work is done in Ft. Worth, Texas. It’s a $4 billion deal with the Israeli military. For the first time, an Israeli military company is contributing in its manufacturing the avionics of the plane. So there’s this -- it’s almost this supranational relationship between Lockheed Martin and the Israeli defense industry. It’s a kind of relationship that weapons corporations in this country would like to see with other countries, where they work directly with -- they sort of transcend government and work directly with the manufacturers of weapons in other countries.
Another major corporation -- you mentioned the missiles -- is Raytheon, which is based in Massachusetts. They manufacture the Tomahawk missile, the Sidewinder, a number of other high-tech missiles that Israel has in its arsenal. These missiles have very sophisticated targeting components -- heat-seeking, they’re interfaced with GPS for very targeted attacks.
Boeing is another major corporation. They manufacture all sorts of planes: the F-18 fighter plane, the F-14. So you have maybe ten weapons corporations in this country that have a stake in -- essentially in Israel using its military arsenal so that it can be replenished again. And the great thing about this relationship with Israel is, Israel doesn’t have to pay for it itself. It comes directly from U.S. taxpayers in the form of foreign military financing, which is transferred to Israel, and then turns right back around and goes to Lockheed Martin or Raytheon.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And as we can see by the votes in Congress this week, both in the House and Senate, supporting the current military actions of Israel, there doesn't seem to be much opposition in Congress to this kind of a continued arms support from the United States for Israel.
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Right, yeah. You have complete silence, and worse than silence from the U.S. Congress. So there's got to be some way to go around Congress and hold the defense corporations, these military corporations, directly responsible for what their hardware and software is doing in Lebanon and Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Frida Berrigan, I want to thank you for being with us, of the World Policy Institute, just out with its report.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the authors of the report joins us now, Frida Berrigan. She’s Senior Research Associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. Welcome to Democracy Now!
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, tell us what are the weapons being used? Did you also look at where the weapons that Hezbollah is using comes from?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Sure. Almost all of the weapons used by Israel are from the United States. There might be a couple French fighter planes that they’re using, but its F-16s made in Fort Worth, Texas; its Apache helicopters; its Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles; it’s all from the United States. So you have this real disconnect between an overemphasis on the supply by Iran and Syria of Hezbollah's weapons and no discussion of the fact that all of the Israeli arsenal is from the United States, and that that is in contravention to U.S. law. to the Arms Export Control Act, which says that U.S.-origin weapons are only to be used for self-defense and for internal security.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And your report indicates that Israel has always been the largest recipient of military aid from the United States, but that that’s actually increased since 2001?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: We’re looking at incredible increases in U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel. Military aid stands at about $3 billion a year. That’s about $500 for every Israeli citizen that the United States provides on an annual basis. And then, weapons sales, most recently, since the Bush administration came into power, we’re looking at $6.3 billion worth of weaponry sold to Israel.
Israel's relationship with the United States is unique in a number of ways. And one of those ways is that essentially the United States provides 20% of the Israeli military budget on an annual basis, and then about 70% of that money that is given from the United States, from U.S. taxpayers, to Israel is then spent on weapons from Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Raytheon. Most other countries don't have that sort of cash relationship, where they go straight to U.S. corporations with U.S. money to buy weapons that are then used in the Occupied Territories and against Lebanon.
AMY GOODMAN: What kind of leverage does the U.S. money, the U.S. aid for Israel provide?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Well, when you’re talking about 20% of the Israeli military budget, you’re talking about a huge fulcrum of leverage, right? The United States could today say, you know, “This incursion into Lebanon, the killing of civilians, the bombing in Gaza, all of this is not internal security, all of this is not self-defense, and we’re cutting it off.” And they could cut it off tomorrow. And that would essentially not only send an incredibly strong message to the Israeli military, but it would remove the tools of the occupation, the tools of the bloodshed and the suffering that’s happening in Lebanon and in Gaza.
It was interesting to sort of place the very weak statements that have come from the administration -- “Oh, there should be” -- you know, they have said things, like “They should practice restraint,” and stuff like that. Meanwhile, just on the 14th, the United States decided to sell $120 million worth of jet fuel to the Israeli military. The little notice that announced the sale from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said, “This fuel will be used to promote peace and security in the region.” And then, meanwhile, you have jets strafing villages, bombing civilians, taking out bridges, destroying water treatment plants. So the United States could decide and would have a very strong case and a historic precedent for deciding to cut military aid.
AMY GOODMAN: What’s the precedent?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: In 1981, the last time there was a full-on invasion by the Israeli government into Lebanon, the Reagan administration cut military aid and froze weapons sales to Israel, while it did an investigation of whether or not the weapons were being used for self-defensive and internal security purposes. So for ten weeks in 1981, nothing went into Israel. Now, at the end of that ten weeks, they said, “Oh, well, you could argue ’til eternity about what constitutes defensive use of weapons.” But under the Reagan administration, while Alexander Hague was the Secretary of State, we did cut off weapons sales and military aid. And we certainly haven't done that since. And when we look at how the conflict and the war continues to unfold with so many civilians being killed and this bare use of force and power by the Israeli military, it seems like it’s time to explore that option again.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, one of the things that’s gotten a lot of attention in recent days have been the missiles fired by Hezbollah into Israel. But I see by your report that to some degree the Hezbollah missiles might also almost be seen as a self-defense measure, because you have here a thousand Redeye missiles that Israel has, surface-to-air missiles, 400 Stinger man-portable air defense missiles, 444 Harpoon missiles. So Israel has quite an extensive missile arsenal of its own.
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Right, we’re talking about one of the strongest militaries in the world going up against basically the defenseless Lebanese, and then a, you know, not very well armed Hezbollah. There was an article in the newspaper yesterday that quoted Israeli defense officials, who said, “Maybe 900 Hezbollah missiles have hit Israeli territory.” That’s 900 missiles, and probably 30 Israeli civilians have been killed. So they’re obviously not very effective weapons. They do get weapons from Syria, from Iran. They manufacture their own weapons. But --
AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about the New York Times quoting the Fajr-3 from Syria?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Right, yeah. There was an article in the Times, I think on Monday, about Iranian missiles being used by Hezbollah, and they pulled Syria in, too, because Syria was producing an Iranian model missile and then had transferred it to Hezbollah. So, but the missiles haven't been very effective, and they can’t -- the range is between 30 and 45 miles.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about, Frida Berrigan, the U.S. government supporting the Israeli government and military. But this kind of weapons relationship also is a great boon to the U.S. weapons manufacturers. Can you talk about the relationship the U.S. has with these weapons manufacturers and name them?
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Sure. Well, the largest weapons manufacturer in this country is Lockheed Martin. It’s based in Texas. And it manufactures the F-16 fighter plane, all manner of missiles. It manufactures the C-130, which is a huge transport plane. It’s the biggest weapons manufacturer in the world.
Lockheed Martin and the Israeli military recently went into business together, co-producing a version of the F-16 fighter plane called the Sufa, which means “storm” in Hebrew. It’s built partially outside of Tel Aviv, and then the final work is done in Ft. Worth, Texas. It’s a $4 billion deal with the Israeli military. For the first time, an Israeli military company is contributing in its manufacturing the avionics of the plane. So there’s this -- it’s almost this supranational relationship between Lockheed Martin and the Israeli defense industry. It’s a kind of relationship that weapons corporations in this country would like to see with other countries, where they work directly with -- they sort of transcend government and work directly with the manufacturers of weapons in other countries.
Another major corporation -- you mentioned the missiles -- is Raytheon, which is based in Massachusetts. They manufacture the Tomahawk missile, the Sidewinder, a number of other high-tech missiles that Israel has in its arsenal. These missiles have very sophisticated targeting components -- heat-seeking, they’re interfaced with GPS for very targeted attacks.
Boeing is another major corporation. They manufacture all sorts of planes: the F-18 fighter plane, the F-14. So you have maybe ten weapons corporations in this country that have a stake in -- essentially in Israel using its military arsenal so that it can be replenished again. And the great thing about this relationship with Israel is, Israel doesn’t have to pay for it itself. It comes directly from U.S. taxpayers in the form of foreign military financing, which is transferred to Israel, and then turns right back around and goes to Lockheed Martin or Raytheon.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And as we can see by the votes in Congress this week, both in the House and Senate, supporting the current military actions of Israel, there doesn't seem to be much opposition in Congress to this kind of a continued arms support from the United States for Israel.
FRIDA BERRIGAN: Right, yeah. You have complete silence, and worse than silence from the U.S. Congress. So there's got to be some way to go around Congress and hold the defense corporations, these military corporations, directly responsible for what their hardware and software is doing in Lebanon and Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Frida Berrigan, I want to thank you for being with us, of the World Policy Institute, just out with its report.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Gaza Watch #4: With focus on Lebanon, Israelis keep hitting Gaza
Army threatens to hit homes used to store arms
The Daily Star 21 July 2006
Thursday pursued its air and ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, where it has killed nearly 100 people in three weeks, and warned civilians that every home storing weaponry was now a target. "The life of all those who are holding military equipment and ammunition in their homes is in danger and they should leave the premises for their safety and that of their families," warned Israeli leaflets dropped on the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Army "will strike and destroy all sites and buildings housing ammunition and military materiel." Though similar leaflets have been dropped on Gaza before, it was the most explicit warning that civilians' homes could be directly targeted. A spokeswoman said the army had "specific information some houses are storing weapons" in Gaza. "Palestinian terrorist organizations have been using the civilian population as human shields," she claimed. "We're warning the civilian population because we don't want them to get hurt ... to stay away from such houses and stay away from terrorists," she said.
An Israeli air strike killed one militant as he was preparing to launch an anti-tank rocket at Israeli troops in the Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, an army spokesman said. Israeli troops, who have been operating in the camp since Wednesday, earlier shot dead another Palestinian gunman.
On Wednesday, Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinians, including seven civilians, in clashes in Gaza and the occupied West Bank in one of the worst days of violence since Israel launched an offensive to free an abducted soldier.Troops also detained several Palestinian security men during Wednesday's operation in Nablus, an Israeli military source said.
Israeli bulldozers then tore down a building there used by the Hamas-led Interior Ministry. About 60 Palestinians, including 10 children, were also wounded in the clashes in densely populated central Gaza Wednesday, medics said.
The Israeli campaign in the impoverished Gaza Strip has already killed 97 Palestinians. But one of the militant groups involved in the raid that seized the Israeli solidier said the Jewish state's campaign was a failure. "The soldier is still missing ... And the rockets are continuing to strike. They [Israel] will pay a dear price for killing our civilians and fighters," said Abu Mujahed, a Popular Resistance Committees spokesman.
Israeli tanks Thursday were still positioned on the edge of Maghazi camp, said local Palestinian security sources. Two make shift rockets fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip exploded in Israel's southern desert town of Sderot Thursday, causing some material damage but no casualties, the army said.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyya has accused Israel of trying to "completely reshape" the Middle East through its offensives. But appeals for Israeli restraint have fallen on deaf ears and the US, Israel's main ally, vetoed a UN resolution urging Israel to stop the offensive.
The humanitarian situation of the 1.4 million people living in Gaza has badly deteriorated since the West suspended direct aid to the democratically-elected government, plunging the territory deeper into financial crisis. - Agencies
The Daily Star 21 July 2006
Thursday pursued its air and ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, where it has killed nearly 100 people in three weeks, and warned civilians that every home storing weaponry was now a target. "The life of all those who are holding military equipment and ammunition in their homes is in danger and they should leave the premises for their safety and that of their families," warned Israeli leaflets dropped on the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Army "will strike and destroy all sites and buildings housing ammunition and military materiel." Though similar leaflets have been dropped on Gaza before, it was the most explicit warning that civilians' homes could be directly targeted. A spokeswoman said the army had "specific information some houses are storing weapons" in Gaza. "Palestinian terrorist organizations have been using the civilian population as human shields," she claimed. "We're warning the civilian population because we don't want them to get hurt ... to stay away from such houses and stay away from terrorists," she said.
An Israeli air strike killed one militant as he was preparing to launch an anti-tank rocket at Israeli troops in the Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, an army spokesman said. Israeli troops, who have been operating in the camp since Wednesday, earlier shot dead another Palestinian gunman.
On Wednesday, Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinians, including seven civilians, in clashes in Gaza and the occupied West Bank in one of the worst days of violence since Israel launched an offensive to free an abducted soldier.Troops also detained several Palestinian security men during Wednesday's operation in Nablus, an Israeli military source said.
Israeli bulldozers then tore down a building there used by the Hamas-led Interior Ministry. About 60 Palestinians, including 10 children, were also wounded in the clashes in densely populated central Gaza Wednesday, medics said.
The Israeli campaign in the impoverished Gaza Strip has already killed 97 Palestinians. But one of the militant groups involved in the raid that seized the Israeli solidier said the Jewish state's campaign was a failure. "The soldier is still missing ... And the rockets are continuing to strike. They [Israel] will pay a dear price for killing our civilians and fighters," said Abu Mujahed, a Popular Resistance Committees spokesman.
Israeli tanks Thursday were still positioned on the edge of Maghazi camp, said local Palestinian security sources. Two make shift rockets fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip exploded in Israel's southern desert town of Sderot Thursday, causing some material damage but no casualties, the army said.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyya has accused Israel of trying to "completely reshape" the Middle East through its offensives. But appeals for Israeli restraint have fallen on deaf ears and the US, Israel's main ally, vetoed a UN resolution urging Israel to stop the offensive.
The humanitarian situation of the 1.4 million people living in Gaza has badly deteriorated since the West suspended direct aid to the democratically-elected government, plunging the territory deeper into financial crisis. - Agencies
Thursday, July 20, 2006
A message to Black folk
Note: From time to time I have posted about the need for Black folk to get active in the issue of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. This is still an active part of my life. Below is a commentary by Bruce Dixon, editor of The Black Commentator. Please diseminate to all of your friends, but in particular people of color who need to have their voices heard to build opposition against the occupation and the coflict in Lebanon.
Imagine, if you will, a modern apartheid state with first, second and eleventh class citizens, all required to carry identification specifying their ethnic origin. First class citizens are obliged to serve in the armed forces, kept on ready reserve status until in their forties, and accorded an impressive array of housing, medical, social security, educational and related benefits denied all others.
Second class citizens are exempted from military service and from a number of the benefits accorded citizens of the first class. They are issued identity documents and license plates that allow them to be profiled by police at a distance. Second class citizens may not own land in much of the country and marriages between them and first class citizens are not recognized by the state. Second class citizens are sometimes arrested without trial and police torture, while frowned upon and occasionally apologized for, commonly occurs.
Citizens of the eleventh class, really not citizens at all, have no rights citizens of the first class or their government are bound to respect. Their residence is forbidden in nearly nine-tenths of the country, all of which they used to own. The areas left to them are cut up into smaller and smaller portions weekly, by high walls, free fire zones and hundreds of checkpoints manned by the army of the first class citizens, so that none can travel a dozen miles in any direction to work, school, shopping, a job, a farm, a business or a hospital without several long waits, humiliating searches and often arbitrary denials of the right to pass or to return. Posh residential settlements for the first class citizens with protecting gun towers and military bases are built with government funds and foreign aid on what used to be the villages and farms and pastures of the eleventh class citizens. The settlers are allotted generous additional housing and other subsidies, allowed to carry weapons and use deadly force with impunity against the former inhabitants, and are connected with the rest of first class territory by a network of of first-class citizen only roads.
Citizens of the eleventh class are routinely arrested, tortured, and held indefinitely without trial. Political activism among them is equated to “terrorism” and the state discourages such activity by means including but not limited to the kidnapping of suspects and relatives of suspects, demolition of their family homes, and extralegal assassination, sometimes at the hands of a death squad, or at others times by lobbing missiles or five hundred pound bombs into sleeping apartment blocks or noonday traffic. Passports are not issued to these citizens, and those who take advantage of scarce opportunities to study or work abroad are denied re-entry.
The apartheid state in question is, of course, Israel. Its first class citizens are Israeli Jews, the majority of them of European or sometimes American origin. The second class citizens are Israeli Arabs, who enjoy significant but limited rights under the law including token representation in the Knesset. The eleventh class citizens are not citizens at all. They are Palestinians. One expects to be able to say that Palestinians live in Palestine and are governed by Palestinians, but the truth is something different. The areas in which Palestinians may inhabit have shrunk nearly every year since the Nakba, their name for the wave of mass deportations, murders, the dispossession, destruction and exile of whole Arab towns, cities and regions that attended the 1948 founding of the state of Israel. As the whole world, except for the US public knows, Palestinians have lived under military occupation, without land, without rights, without hope, for nearly sixty years now.
The difference between life inside and outside the US corporate media bubble is extraordinarily clear on this question. US authorities subsidize the state of Israel to the tune of at least six billion per year, and corporate media take great pains to protect US citizens from news of actual human and legal conditions their tax dollars pay for. The ugly and racist realities of Israeli society and life under Israeli occupation are rarely discussed anywhere most consumers of media might find them. It is nearly taboo in mainstream US print and broadcast media to apply the words racist or apartheid to the state of Israel or its policies, or to call its control at the point of a gun of millions of non-citizens what it is, namely the longest standing military occupation in the world today. In the US media, and on the lips of every administration since Harry Truman's Israel is “a democracy”, whatever that word has come to mean.
Though news stories in the US talk about autonomous “Palestinian areas” allegedly controlled by Palestinian authorities, often referring to Gaza and the West Bank by name, actual maps displaying the geographic boundaries of the so-called Palestinian controlled areas are rarely seen by American viewers, let alone maps comparing the size of Palestinian areas year to year, or showing the steady encroachment upon Arab land and water resources year to year by Israeli settlements, military outposts, Israeli-only roads, free fire zones and Israel's wall. The massive and militarized apartheid wall, as the rest of the world calls it, is termed a “separation barrier” or a “separation fence” in the US media, an understandable precaution against hordes of terroristic former owners of the land who lurk just outside.
Still, when you Google the terms Israel + apartheid, you get 5.5 million hits. A lot of somebodies somewhere are making the connection without the help of CNN, ABC or Fox News.
The parallels with apartheid South Africa are many and striking. Like its earlier apartheid cousin, Israel menaces all its neighbors with an impressive array of nukes and the largest military establishment in the region. As Noam Chomsky observed back in 2004:
”Not discussed, in the US at least, is the threat from West Asia. Israel's nuclear capacities, supplemented with other WMD, are regarded as "dangerous in the extreme" by the former head of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Gen. Lee Butler, not only because of the threat they pose but also because they stimulate proliferation in response. The Bush administration is now enhancing that threat. Israeli military analysts allege that its air and armored forces are larger and technologically more advanced than those of any NATO power (apart from the US), not because this small country is powerful in itself, but because it serves virtually as an offshore US military base and high tech center. The US is now sending Israel over 100 of its most advanced jet bombers, F16I's, advertised very clearly as capable of flying to Iran and back, and as an updated version of the F16s that Israel used to bomb Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981....”
The old South Africa bombed, strafed and invaded all its neighbors with some regularity, crippling their commerce and extracting horrific death tolls from refugee camps and other civilian targets. The last time Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon, it left 30,000 corpses.
White South Africans rightly fretted at the fact that they were a minority ruling over an unhappy majority, and concocted schemes to exile the country's black population to isolated rural reservations it called bantustans. Israeli pundits calmly discuss the demographic bomb, their name for the fact that second and eleventh class citizens, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians will soon outnumber them within the borders of their supposed “Jewish state” while Israeli politicians sit in Knesset and hold ministries in successive governments openly calling for mass deportations and ethnic cleansing.
White South Africans constructed for themselves a bogus scriptural narrative in which the God of Abraham promised them somebody else's land, and brought it into modern history with the embellishment that they were holding the line for the free world against godless communism and the black menace. How similar is Israel's line that European Jews are promised the land of Muslim and Christian Arabs, and that they now hold the line for the free world against radical Islam and those ungrateful brown people?
We at BC have to believe that if the American people knew the truth about what their tax dollars pay for in Israel and what is left of Palestine, there would be a deep and widespread revulsion, similar to that occasioned by US support for apartheid in South Africa. But there are important differences between that time and this one. Though unspeakably odious, racist South African was only marginally important to US interests. By contrast, the maintenance of Israel's apartheid regime, essentially a white hi-tech and military outpost in the middle of all those brown people sitting atop a large share of the world's proven oil reserves is absolutely central to US foreign policy for the foreseeable future. The US is Israel's banker, its arms depot, and its principal diplomatic sponsor. The US is far more complicit in the crimes of the Israeli state than it ever was in South Africa.
Racism and apartheid being what they are, and our historical experience in America being what it is, African Americans have a crucial role to play. African Americans have seldom supported US imperial adventures overseas as readily as whites. Our American experience inclines us to a skeptical appraisal of our government's means and motives at home and abroad. Even though we live as much within the media bubble as white America, where images of the broken and mangled families, the incinerated homes and bombed hospitals are hard to come by, our skepticism leads us to sympathize with those who live at the sharp end of US foreign policy far more often than do our white neighbors.
Our first duty is to tell the truth to each other. We must combat among ourselves the bogus historical narratives which permit indifference to US policy in the Middle East in general, and support of Israeli apartheid in particular. The churchgoers among us urgently, publicly and repeatedly must confront and debunk the nonsense which holds that “wars and rumors of wars” are something predestined to happen in the biblical holy land for what they are – bad scripture and fake history. We need to interrupt, correct and school everyone who talks to us about a “cycle of violence” in the Holy Land, as though some raggedy fool with a suicide belt, or a few hundred fighters with small arms are or ever have been equivalent to the devastation wrought by the established gulags, checkpoints, airborne firepower, economic strangulation, house demolitions and nuclear armed might of the Israeli state. The two sides do not have access to anything like equal means of inflicting violence, and so cannot be equally culpable or equally responsible for stopping that violence.
We need to catch up with the rest of the civilized world, and talk about what we can do to emphatically withdraw our support from the apartheid state of Israel and its immoral and illegal occupation regime. The Presbyterian church, for example, has in the past considered selective divestiture from Israel and from US companies who profit from the occupation, as have the Anglicans. Both might do so again. What can our churches, our unions, our local elected officials, our young people do? What will we do?
Apartheid in South Africa eventually bit the dust mostly because the inhabitants of that country, black, brown and white resisted it, putting their bodies and lives on the line. Their resistance was aided and abetted materially, financially, politically and spiritually by people of good will the world over. Someday the sun will rise on a post-apartheid Jerusalem, one that belongs to all the people who live there of whatever origin. This is bound to happen because Palestinians as well as substantial numbers of Israeli Jews do and will continue to resist the regime. They will do what they can. What will we do?
Bruce Dixon can be contacted at bruce.dixon@blackcommentator.com.
Imagine, if you will, a modern apartheid state with first, second and eleventh class citizens, all required to carry identification specifying their ethnic origin. First class citizens are obliged to serve in the armed forces, kept on ready reserve status until in their forties, and accorded an impressive array of housing, medical, social security, educational and related benefits denied all others.
Second class citizens are exempted from military service and from a number of the benefits accorded citizens of the first class. They are issued identity documents and license plates that allow them to be profiled by police at a distance. Second class citizens may not own land in much of the country and marriages between them and first class citizens are not recognized by the state. Second class citizens are sometimes arrested without trial and police torture, while frowned upon and occasionally apologized for, commonly occurs.
Citizens of the eleventh class, really not citizens at all, have no rights citizens of the first class or their government are bound to respect. Their residence is forbidden in nearly nine-tenths of the country, all of which they used to own. The areas left to them are cut up into smaller and smaller portions weekly, by high walls, free fire zones and hundreds of checkpoints manned by the army of the first class citizens, so that none can travel a dozen miles in any direction to work, school, shopping, a job, a farm, a business or a hospital without several long waits, humiliating searches and often arbitrary denials of the right to pass or to return. Posh residential settlements for the first class citizens with protecting gun towers and military bases are built with government funds and foreign aid on what used to be the villages and farms and pastures of the eleventh class citizens. The settlers are allotted generous additional housing and other subsidies, allowed to carry weapons and use deadly force with impunity against the former inhabitants, and are connected with the rest of first class territory by a network of of first-class citizen only roads.
Citizens of the eleventh class are routinely arrested, tortured, and held indefinitely without trial. Political activism among them is equated to “terrorism” and the state discourages such activity by means including but not limited to the kidnapping of suspects and relatives of suspects, demolition of their family homes, and extralegal assassination, sometimes at the hands of a death squad, or at others times by lobbing missiles or five hundred pound bombs into sleeping apartment blocks or noonday traffic. Passports are not issued to these citizens, and those who take advantage of scarce opportunities to study or work abroad are denied re-entry.
The apartheid state in question is, of course, Israel. Its first class citizens are Israeli Jews, the majority of them of European or sometimes American origin. The second class citizens are Israeli Arabs, who enjoy significant but limited rights under the law including token representation in the Knesset. The eleventh class citizens are not citizens at all. They are Palestinians. One expects to be able to say that Palestinians live in Palestine and are governed by Palestinians, but the truth is something different. The areas in which Palestinians may inhabit have shrunk nearly every year since the Nakba, their name for the wave of mass deportations, murders, the dispossession, destruction and exile of whole Arab towns, cities and regions that attended the 1948 founding of the state of Israel. As the whole world, except for the US public knows, Palestinians have lived under military occupation, without land, without rights, without hope, for nearly sixty years now.
The difference between life inside and outside the US corporate media bubble is extraordinarily clear on this question. US authorities subsidize the state of Israel to the tune of at least six billion per year, and corporate media take great pains to protect US citizens from news of actual human and legal conditions their tax dollars pay for. The ugly and racist realities of Israeli society and life under Israeli occupation are rarely discussed anywhere most consumers of media might find them. It is nearly taboo in mainstream US print and broadcast media to apply the words racist or apartheid to the state of Israel or its policies, or to call its control at the point of a gun of millions of non-citizens what it is, namely the longest standing military occupation in the world today. In the US media, and on the lips of every administration since Harry Truman's Israel is “a democracy”, whatever that word has come to mean.
Though news stories in the US talk about autonomous “Palestinian areas” allegedly controlled by Palestinian authorities, often referring to Gaza and the West Bank by name, actual maps displaying the geographic boundaries of the so-called Palestinian controlled areas are rarely seen by American viewers, let alone maps comparing the size of Palestinian areas year to year, or showing the steady encroachment upon Arab land and water resources year to year by Israeli settlements, military outposts, Israeli-only roads, free fire zones and Israel's wall. The massive and militarized apartheid wall, as the rest of the world calls it, is termed a “separation barrier” or a “separation fence” in the US media, an understandable precaution against hordes of terroristic former owners of the land who lurk just outside.
Still, when you Google the terms Israel + apartheid, you get 5.5 million hits. A lot of somebodies somewhere are making the connection without the help of CNN, ABC or Fox News.
The parallels with apartheid South Africa are many and striking. Like its earlier apartheid cousin, Israel menaces all its neighbors with an impressive array of nukes and the largest military establishment in the region. As Noam Chomsky observed back in 2004:
”Not discussed, in the US at least, is the threat from West Asia. Israel's nuclear capacities, supplemented with other WMD, are regarded as "dangerous in the extreme" by the former head of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Gen. Lee Butler, not only because of the threat they pose but also because they stimulate proliferation in response. The Bush administration is now enhancing that threat. Israeli military analysts allege that its air and armored forces are larger and technologically more advanced than those of any NATO power (apart from the US), not because this small country is powerful in itself, but because it serves virtually as an offshore US military base and high tech center. The US is now sending Israel over 100 of its most advanced jet bombers, F16I's, advertised very clearly as capable of flying to Iran and back, and as an updated version of the F16s that Israel used to bomb Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981....”
The old South Africa bombed, strafed and invaded all its neighbors with some regularity, crippling their commerce and extracting horrific death tolls from refugee camps and other civilian targets. The last time Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon, it left 30,000 corpses.
White South Africans rightly fretted at the fact that they were a minority ruling over an unhappy majority, and concocted schemes to exile the country's black population to isolated rural reservations it called bantustans. Israeli pundits calmly discuss the demographic bomb, their name for the fact that second and eleventh class citizens, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians will soon outnumber them within the borders of their supposed “Jewish state” while Israeli politicians sit in Knesset and hold ministries in successive governments openly calling for mass deportations and ethnic cleansing.
White South Africans constructed for themselves a bogus scriptural narrative in which the God of Abraham promised them somebody else's land, and brought it into modern history with the embellishment that they were holding the line for the free world against godless communism and the black menace. How similar is Israel's line that European Jews are promised the land of Muslim and Christian Arabs, and that they now hold the line for the free world against radical Islam and those ungrateful brown people?
We at BC have to believe that if the American people knew the truth about what their tax dollars pay for in Israel and what is left of Palestine, there would be a deep and widespread revulsion, similar to that occasioned by US support for apartheid in South Africa. But there are important differences between that time and this one. Though unspeakably odious, racist South African was only marginally important to US interests. By contrast, the maintenance of Israel's apartheid regime, essentially a white hi-tech and military outpost in the middle of all those brown people sitting atop a large share of the world's proven oil reserves is absolutely central to US foreign policy for the foreseeable future. The US is Israel's banker, its arms depot, and its principal diplomatic sponsor. The US is far more complicit in the crimes of the Israeli state than it ever was in South Africa.
Racism and apartheid being what they are, and our historical experience in America being what it is, African Americans have a crucial role to play. African Americans have seldom supported US imperial adventures overseas as readily as whites. Our American experience inclines us to a skeptical appraisal of our government's means and motives at home and abroad. Even though we live as much within the media bubble as white America, where images of the broken and mangled families, the incinerated homes and bombed hospitals are hard to come by, our skepticism leads us to sympathize with those who live at the sharp end of US foreign policy far more often than do our white neighbors.
Our first duty is to tell the truth to each other. We must combat among ourselves the bogus historical narratives which permit indifference to US policy in the Middle East in general, and support of Israeli apartheid in particular. The churchgoers among us urgently, publicly and repeatedly must confront and debunk the nonsense which holds that “wars and rumors of wars” are something predestined to happen in the biblical holy land for what they are – bad scripture and fake history. We need to interrupt, correct and school everyone who talks to us about a “cycle of violence” in the Holy Land, as though some raggedy fool with a suicide belt, or a few hundred fighters with small arms are or ever have been equivalent to the devastation wrought by the established gulags, checkpoints, airborne firepower, economic strangulation, house demolitions and nuclear armed might of the Israeli state. The two sides do not have access to anything like equal means of inflicting violence, and so cannot be equally culpable or equally responsible for stopping that violence.
We need to catch up with the rest of the civilized world, and talk about what we can do to emphatically withdraw our support from the apartheid state of Israel and its immoral and illegal occupation regime. The Presbyterian church, for example, has in the past considered selective divestiture from Israel and from US companies who profit from the occupation, as have the Anglicans. Both might do so again. What can our churches, our unions, our local elected officials, our young people do? What will we do?
Apartheid in South Africa eventually bit the dust mostly because the inhabitants of that country, black, brown and white resisted it, putting their bodies and lives on the line. Their resistance was aided and abetted materially, financially, politically and spiritually by people of good will the world over. Someday the sun will rise on a post-apartheid Jerusalem, one that belongs to all the people who live there of whatever origin. This is bound to happen because Palestinians as well as substantial numbers of Israeli Jews do and will continue to resist the regime. They will do what they can. What will we do?
Bruce Dixon can be contacted at bruce.dixon@blackcommentator.com.
'Because This Is the Middle East'
CBS' Schieffer ignores context in Mideast crisis July 19, 2006
On July 16, CBS Face the Nation host (and CBS Evening News anchor) Bob Schieffer dedicated the entire Sunday morning news show to the Middle East conflict. In his closing editorial, he adapted a well-known fable in an attempt to explain the causes of the current conflict—or rather, the lack of causes:
"Finally today, when the war broke out in the Middle East, the first thing I thought about was the old story of the frog and the scorpion who were trying to cross a river there. The scorpion couldn't swim, the frog was lost. So the scorpion proposed a deal, 'Give me a ride on your back, and I'll show you the way.' The frog agreed, and the trip went fine until they got to the middle of the river, and then suddenly the scorpion just stung the frog. As they were sinking, the frog asked, in his dying breath, 'Why would you do that?' To which the scorpion replied, 'Because this is theMiddle East."
Lest there be any doubt about who is the frog and who is the scorpion in that parable, Schieffer went on to spell it out: "It is worth noting that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip did not kidnap that Israeli soldier and provoke all of this because the Israelis were invading Gaza. No, all this happened in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal, which was what the Palestinians supposedly wanted. But this is the Middle East. Why would fundamentalists in Gaza and Lebanon choose to provoke this war at this time? There is no real answer except this is the Middle East."
Schieffer was echoing the media’s conventional wisdom in portraying the Palestinian raid that captured the Israeli soldier as an inexplicable provocation. The New York Times, in a June 29 editorial headlined "Hamas Provokes a Fight," declared that "the responsibility for this latest escalation rests squarely with Hamas," adding that" an Israeli military response was inevitable."
The media assumption is that in withdrawing from Gaza in September 2005, Israel ended its conflict with at least that portion of Palestine and gave up, as Schieffer put it, "what the Palestinians supposedly wanted."
In reality, however, since the pullout and before the recent escalation of violence, at least 144 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed by Israeli forces, often by helicopter gunships, according to a list compiled by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem. Only 31 percent of the people killed were engaged in hostile actions at the time of their deaths, and 25 percent of all those killed were minors.
From the time of the pullout until the recent upsurge in violence, according to B’tselem’s lists, no Israelis were killed by violence emanating from Gaza. Although during this period Palestinian militants launched some 1,000 crude Kasam missiles from Gaza into Israel, no fatalities resulted; at the same time, Israel fired 7,000 to 9,000 heavy artillery shells into Gaza. On June 9, just two weeks before the Hamas raid that killed two Israeli soldiers and captured a third, an apparent Israeli missile strike killed seven members of a Palestinian family picnicking on a Gaza beach, which prompted Hamas to end its 16-month-old informal ceasefire with Israel. (Though Israel has denied responsibility for the killings, a Human Rights Watch investigation strongly challenged the denial, calling the likelihood of Israel not being responsible "remote"; Human Rights Watch, 6/15/06.)
Hamas has repeatedly pointed to the Gaza beach incident as one of the central events that prompted its cross-border raid—indeed, Schieffer's own CBS Evening News has reported that claim (CBS Evening News, 6/25/06).
Even so, Schieffer seems unable to recall this recentevent (see Action Alert, 6/30/06; http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2913). Hamas also points to the capture of some of its leaders by Israel as the provocation for its raid. If Israelis had every right, as Schieffer said, to respond with force to the capture of one soldier by Hamas, then how are Palestinians expected to feel about the more than 9,000 prisoners captured and held by Israel—including 342 juveniles and over 700 held without trial (Mandela Center for Human Rights,4/30/06)?
Moreover, Israel's withdrawal did not remotely give Palestinians "what they wanted. "In addition to its continued deadly attacks on Gaza, Israel has continued to control Gaza’s borders and has withheld tens of millions of dollars of tax revenue in response to Hamas' victory in democratic elections in January 2006. Israel's actions crippled the Gaza economy and prompting warnings from the U.N. of a looming humanitarian disaster (UNRWA, 7/8/06).
None of this is to say that Hamas, which has regularly ignored the distinction between military and civilian targets, does not share part of the blame for the current crisis. But to act as though Israel had been behaving as a peace-loving neighbor to Gaza until the soldier's capture is a willful rewriting of very recent history. The most Schieffer can bring himself to say about Israel is this: "Israel had every right to respond, and it did. But again, this is the Middle East, so perhaps a response may have made it all worse by giving moderate Arabs in the region an excuse to distance themselves from Israel."
Israel’s "response" has resulted in the deaths to date of at least 103 Palestinians,while no Israelis have died other than one soldier killed by friendly fire (New YorkTimes, 7/19/06). Meanwhile, Israel has also destroyed Gaza's main power plant and its water system, leaving tens of thousands of Gaza families without access to food, water and medical care (Oxfam, 7/19/06).
In Lebanon, Israel has killed over 300 people, the vast majority of them civilians, wounded over 1000 and displaced half a million (MSNBC, 7/19/06). To call such devastation an "excuse" for Arabs to "distance themselves from Israel" is a trivialization of real human suffering. Why is Bob Schieffer allowed to get away with such shallow, dismissive coverage of complicated and tragic events? Because it's the Middle East.
ACTION: Please ask Bob Schieffer to accurately report the history and currentreality of the conflict in the Middle East.
CONTACT:Bob SchiefferCBS Face the Nation202-457-4481ftn@cbsnews.com
You can also contact CBS's "Public Eye" ombudsman:publiceye@cbs.com
On July 16, CBS Face the Nation host (and CBS Evening News anchor) Bob Schieffer dedicated the entire Sunday morning news show to the Middle East conflict. In his closing editorial, he adapted a well-known fable in an attempt to explain the causes of the current conflict—or rather, the lack of causes:
"Finally today, when the war broke out in the Middle East, the first thing I thought about was the old story of the frog and the scorpion who were trying to cross a river there. The scorpion couldn't swim, the frog was lost. So the scorpion proposed a deal, 'Give me a ride on your back, and I'll show you the way.' The frog agreed, and the trip went fine until they got to the middle of the river, and then suddenly the scorpion just stung the frog. As they were sinking, the frog asked, in his dying breath, 'Why would you do that?' To which the scorpion replied, 'Because this is theMiddle East."
Lest there be any doubt about who is the frog and who is the scorpion in that parable, Schieffer went on to spell it out: "It is worth noting that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip did not kidnap that Israeli soldier and provoke all of this because the Israelis were invading Gaza. No, all this happened in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal, which was what the Palestinians supposedly wanted. But this is the Middle East. Why would fundamentalists in Gaza and Lebanon choose to provoke this war at this time? There is no real answer except this is the Middle East."
Schieffer was echoing the media’s conventional wisdom in portraying the Palestinian raid that captured the Israeli soldier as an inexplicable provocation. The New York Times, in a June 29 editorial headlined "Hamas Provokes a Fight," declared that "the responsibility for this latest escalation rests squarely with Hamas," adding that" an Israeli military response was inevitable."
The media assumption is that in withdrawing from Gaza in September 2005, Israel ended its conflict with at least that portion of Palestine and gave up, as Schieffer put it, "what the Palestinians supposedly wanted."
In reality, however, since the pullout and before the recent escalation of violence, at least 144 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed by Israeli forces, often by helicopter gunships, according to a list compiled by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem. Only 31 percent of the people killed were engaged in hostile actions at the time of their deaths, and 25 percent of all those killed were minors.
From the time of the pullout until the recent upsurge in violence, according to B’tselem’s lists, no Israelis were killed by violence emanating from Gaza. Although during this period Palestinian militants launched some 1,000 crude Kasam missiles from Gaza into Israel, no fatalities resulted; at the same time, Israel fired 7,000 to 9,000 heavy artillery shells into Gaza. On June 9, just two weeks before the Hamas raid that killed two Israeli soldiers and captured a third, an apparent Israeli missile strike killed seven members of a Palestinian family picnicking on a Gaza beach, which prompted Hamas to end its 16-month-old informal ceasefire with Israel. (Though Israel has denied responsibility for the killings, a Human Rights Watch investigation strongly challenged the denial, calling the likelihood of Israel not being responsible "remote"; Human Rights Watch, 6/15/06.)
Hamas has repeatedly pointed to the Gaza beach incident as one of the central events that prompted its cross-border raid—indeed, Schieffer's own CBS Evening News has reported that claim (CBS Evening News, 6/25/06).
Even so, Schieffer seems unable to recall this recentevent (see Action Alert, 6/30/06; http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2913). Hamas also points to the capture of some of its leaders by Israel as the provocation for its raid. If Israelis had every right, as Schieffer said, to respond with force to the capture of one soldier by Hamas, then how are Palestinians expected to feel about the more than 9,000 prisoners captured and held by Israel—including 342 juveniles and over 700 held without trial (Mandela Center for Human Rights,4/30/06)?
Moreover, Israel's withdrawal did not remotely give Palestinians "what they wanted. "In addition to its continued deadly attacks on Gaza, Israel has continued to control Gaza’s borders and has withheld tens of millions of dollars of tax revenue in response to Hamas' victory in democratic elections in January 2006. Israel's actions crippled the Gaza economy and prompting warnings from the U.N. of a looming humanitarian disaster (UNRWA, 7/8/06).
None of this is to say that Hamas, which has regularly ignored the distinction between military and civilian targets, does not share part of the blame for the current crisis. But to act as though Israel had been behaving as a peace-loving neighbor to Gaza until the soldier's capture is a willful rewriting of very recent history. The most Schieffer can bring himself to say about Israel is this: "Israel had every right to respond, and it did. But again, this is the Middle East, so perhaps a response may have made it all worse by giving moderate Arabs in the region an excuse to distance themselves from Israel."
Israel’s "response" has resulted in the deaths to date of at least 103 Palestinians,while no Israelis have died other than one soldier killed by friendly fire (New YorkTimes, 7/19/06). Meanwhile, Israel has also destroyed Gaza's main power plant and its water system, leaving tens of thousands of Gaza families without access to food, water and medical care (Oxfam, 7/19/06).
In Lebanon, Israel has killed over 300 people, the vast majority of them civilians, wounded over 1000 and displaced half a million (MSNBC, 7/19/06). To call such devastation an "excuse" for Arabs to "distance themselves from Israel" is a trivialization of real human suffering. Why is Bob Schieffer allowed to get away with such shallow, dismissive coverage of complicated and tragic events? Because it's the Middle East.
ACTION: Please ask Bob Schieffer to accurately report the history and currentreality of the conflict in the Middle East.
CONTACT:Bob SchiefferCBS Face the Nation202-457-4481ftn@cbsnews.com
You can also contact CBS's "Public Eye" ombudsman:publiceye@cbs.com
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Gaza Watch #3: Gaza under darkness
By Rami Almeghari 17 July 2006
"I have lost a total of $1,000 US dollars since the power supply has been cut, the number of my customers has decreased to minimum, I stay idle at my shop for long hours; what shall I do?" asked 31-year-old Alaa' Salahat, a local vendor of frozen foods from the central Gaza Strip refugee camp of Maghazi. He spoke of his experience while sitting in the darkness with only a kerosene lamp illuminating the worry lines in his face.
Why such darkness? Because three weeks ago, Israeli aircrafts bombarded Gaza's power plant. "This is really a very terrible situation; we are civilians - what does Israel want? This is really a collective punishment against an entire people," said Alaa'. "When I get back home each day having earned only a few shekels [Israeli currency - 5 shekels = $1 US] in my pocket, I rush to find candles to light the house for my wife. We stay idle, until our turn for electricity current comes. This 'luxury' happens no more than three nights a week," he continued. "This is a really unbearable situation that nobody on this earth can tolerate. What do the Israelis want us to do? To die, to give up, or what? However, we are steadfast. You know why we are steadfast? Because we know we have the same right to exist as the Israelis. These are our ancestors' lands, and we will remain living here - even if it is difficult, even if we don't want to stay. Because this is our land."
At this last sentence, Alaa' emphasized each word, to make sure I understood what he meant. In the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, where the same problem exists, a Palestinian mother, Taraji Qdaih, 32, said, "For a very long time, we have been calling on the world to help us get rid of the Israeli occupation,but all our appeals fall on deaf ears. The Israelis are committing massacres; from the girl Huda Ghalia's family, massacred on Beit Lahia beach a few weeks ago, to the missiles fired at us from the air by night and day. And there is not any condemnation from the world at all. Yet when an Israeli soldier has been held, all the countries want to intervene to free him without any concessions. We are always the ones blamed, we are always the ones blamed.
"Visiting the ruins of the bombed power plant brings to light the reality of Israeli shelling." Dr. Derar Abu Sasi, the plant's operations director said during a visit to his wrecked office at the base of the plant, "We only have one power plant in Gaza. Now that Israel has destroyed it, we can't produce a single megawatt, or even a kilowatt for our customers. The Israeli bombs destroyed all four main transformers, the only transformers that feed Gaza residents with electricity."
Israeli war planes have been bombarding and destroying major infrastructure in the Gaza Strip such as governmental buildings for three weeks straight - the latest was the foreign affairs ministry, hit early in the morning of Monday, July 17, for the second time in a week. Water treatment plants and greenhouses, bridges and homes, have also been the major targets of Israeli bombs in 'Operation Summer Rain,' the code name for the Israeli military invasion of Gaza that began 27 June. Israeli leaders claim that their actions across Gaza are intended at freeing an Israeli soldier who has been held by some Palestinian resistance groups for the past three weeks after he was captured in an unprecedented resistance attack on an Israeli army base south of the Gaza Strip. The United States, Israel's strategic ally, has considered Israel's ongoing attacks on Gaza Strip as 'self defense,' while the death toll amongst Palestinians since then has risen to nearly 100, with over 300 others wounded, some of them are very critical. Some of the injured have lost limbs or have been paralyzed for life.
In contrast, a sole Israeli soldier was killed in the Gaza invasion, and although Israeli forces at first blamed Palestinian resistance fighters, they later determined that the soldier had been shot by 'friendly fire.'
Rami Almeghari is currently a Senior Translator at theTranslation Department of the Gaza-based State InformationService (SIS) and former Editor in Chief of the SIS-linkedInternational Press Center's English site. He can becontacted at rami_almeghari@hotmail.com
"I have lost a total of $1,000 US dollars since the power supply has been cut, the number of my customers has decreased to minimum, I stay idle at my shop for long hours; what shall I do?" asked 31-year-old Alaa' Salahat, a local vendor of frozen foods from the central Gaza Strip refugee camp of Maghazi. He spoke of his experience while sitting in the darkness with only a kerosene lamp illuminating the worry lines in his face.
Why such darkness? Because three weeks ago, Israeli aircrafts bombarded Gaza's power plant. "This is really a very terrible situation; we are civilians - what does Israel want? This is really a collective punishment against an entire people," said Alaa'. "When I get back home each day having earned only a few shekels [Israeli currency - 5 shekels = $1 US] in my pocket, I rush to find candles to light the house for my wife. We stay idle, until our turn for electricity current comes. This 'luxury' happens no more than three nights a week," he continued. "This is a really unbearable situation that nobody on this earth can tolerate. What do the Israelis want us to do? To die, to give up, or what? However, we are steadfast. You know why we are steadfast? Because we know we have the same right to exist as the Israelis. These are our ancestors' lands, and we will remain living here - even if it is difficult, even if we don't want to stay. Because this is our land."
At this last sentence, Alaa' emphasized each word, to make sure I understood what he meant. In the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, where the same problem exists, a Palestinian mother, Taraji Qdaih, 32, said, "For a very long time, we have been calling on the world to help us get rid of the Israeli occupation,but all our appeals fall on deaf ears. The Israelis are committing massacres; from the girl Huda Ghalia's family, massacred on Beit Lahia beach a few weeks ago, to the missiles fired at us from the air by night and day. And there is not any condemnation from the world at all. Yet when an Israeli soldier has been held, all the countries want to intervene to free him without any concessions. We are always the ones blamed, we are always the ones blamed.
"Visiting the ruins of the bombed power plant brings to light the reality of Israeli shelling." Dr. Derar Abu Sasi, the plant's operations director said during a visit to his wrecked office at the base of the plant, "We only have one power plant in Gaza. Now that Israel has destroyed it, we can't produce a single megawatt, or even a kilowatt for our customers. The Israeli bombs destroyed all four main transformers, the only transformers that feed Gaza residents with electricity."
Israeli war planes have been bombarding and destroying major infrastructure in the Gaza Strip such as governmental buildings for three weeks straight - the latest was the foreign affairs ministry, hit early in the morning of Monday, July 17, for the second time in a week. Water treatment plants and greenhouses, bridges and homes, have also been the major targets of Israeli bombs in 'Operation Summer Rain,' the code name for the Israeli military invasion of Gaza that began 27 June. Israeli leaders claim that their actions across Gaza are intended at freeing an Israeli soldier who has been held by some Palestinian resistance groups for the past three weeks after he was captured in an unprecedented resistance attack on an Israeli army base south of the Gaza Strip. The United States, Israel's strategic ally, has considered Israel's ongoing attacks on Gaza Strip as 'self defense,' while the death toll amongst Palestinians since then has risen to nearly 100, with over 300 others wounded, some of them are very critical. Some of the injured have lost limbs or have been paralyzed for life.
In contrast, a sole Israeli soldier was killed in the Gaza invasion, and although Israeli forces at first blamed Palestinian resistance fighters, they later determined that the soldier had been shot by 'friendly fire.'
Rami Almeghari is currently a Senior Translator at theTranslation Department of the Gaza-based State InformationService (SIS) and former Editor in Chief of the SIS-linkedInternational Press Center's English site. He can becontacted at rami_almeghari@hotmail.com
Friday, July 14, 2006
Gaza Watch #2: U.S. vetoes U.N. condemnation of Israel
By NICK WADHAMS
Associated Press13 July 2006
UNITED NATIONS -- The United States blocked an Arab-backed resolution Thursday that would have demanded Israel halt its military offensive in the Gaza Strip, the first U.N. Security Council veto in nearly two years.
The draft, sponsored by Qatar on behalf of other Arab nations, accused Israel of a "disproportionate use offorce" that endangered Palestinian civilians, and demanded Israel withdraw its troops from Gaza.
The United States was alone in voting against the resolution. Ten of the 15 Security Council nations voted in favor, while Britain, Denmark, Peru and Slovakia abstained.The U.S. has periodically used its veto to block resolutions critical of Israel.
The last council veto, in October 2004, was cast when the United States blocked a resolution condemning another Israeli operation in Gaza.The draft was reworked repeatedly to address concerns that it was too biased against Israel.
Language was added calling for the release of an abducted soldier and urging the Palestinians to stop firing rockets at Israel. Nonetheless, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said it was still unacceptable because it had been overtaken by events in the region _ including the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah militants on Wednesday _ and was"unbalanced." "It placed demands on one side in the Middle East conflict but not the other," Bolton said. "This draft resolution would have exacerbated tensions in the region." Israel launched the operation two weeks ago in response to the June 25 capture of an Israeli soldier, 19-year-old Cpl. Gilad Shalit.
The resolution called on Israel and the Palestinians to "take immediate steps to create the necessary condition for the resumption of negotiation and restarting the peace process." It urged all parties to help alleviate the "dire humanitarian situation" faced by Palestinians.The United States sought a text that said the Israeli actions were in direct response to rocket attacks against Israel and Shalit's capture.
Bolton said the United States remains "gravely concerned"at the escalation of the conflict and believes the best way to calm the situation is for Hamas to release Shalit. The draft also demanded Israel release the Palestinian officials it has arrested. The Palestinian observer to the U.N., Riyad Mansour, said he was disappointed with the council's "continued inability to act while innocent Palestinian civilians continue to be brutally killed by the Israeli occupying forces."Referring to past U.S. practice of vetoing similar resolutions, Mansour said the council is failing thePalestinians.
In Gaza, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Taher al-Nunu, said the United States must bear some responsibility for Israel's attacks."The veto is a political cover for the crimes of the occupation, and regrettably, instead of putting war criminals of this government that lost its mind on trial, they are giving a political cover to carry out more of these crimes," al-Nunu said.
In a speech to the council immediately following Mansour,Israel's U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman thanked the U.S. for its "bold stand." He defended Israel's actions and put the blame for attacks against Israel squarely on Iran and Syria."What we are seeing are the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah, but they are merely the fingers of the bloodstained hands and the executioners of the twisted minds of the leaders of the world's most ominous axis of terror, Syria and Iran," he said. Eight of the last nine vetoes in the council have been cast by the United States. Of those, seven concerned the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Associated Press13 July 2006
UNITED NATIONS -- The United States blocked an Arab-backed resolution Thursday that would have demanded Israel halt its military offensive in the Gaza Strip, the first U.N. Security Council veto in nearly two years.
The draft, sponsored by Qatar on behalf of other Arab nations, accused Israel of a "disproportionate use offorce" that endangered Palestinian civilians, and demanded Israel withdraw its troops from Gaza.
The United States was alone in voting against the resolution. Ten of the 15 Security Council nations voted in favor, while Britain, Denmark, Peru and Slovakia abstained.The U.S. has periodically used its veto to block resolutions critical of Israel.
The last council veto, in October 2004, was cast when the United States blocked a resolution condemning another Israeli operation in Gaza.The draft was reworked repeatedly to address concerns that it was too biased against Israel.
Language was added calling for the release of an abducted soldier and urging the Palestinians to stop firing rockets at Israel. Nonetheless, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said it was still unacceptable because it had been overtaken by events in the region _ including the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah militants on Wednesday _ and was"unbalanced." "It placed demands on one side in the Middle East conflict but not the other," Bolton said. "This draft resolution would have exacerbated tensions in the region." Israel launched the operation two weeks ago in response to the June 25 capture of an Israeli soldier, 19-year-old Cpl. Gilad Shalit.
The resolution called on Israel and the Palestinians to "take immediate steps to create the necessary condition for the resumption of negotiation and restarting the peace process." It urged all parties to help alleviate the "dire humanitarian situation" faced by Palestinians.The United States sought a text that said the Israeli actions were in direct response to rocket attacks against Israel and Shalit's capture.
Bolton said the United States remains "gravely concerned"at the escalation of the conflict and believes the best way to calm the situation is for Hamas to release Shalit. The draft also demanded Israel release the Palestinian officials it has arrested. The Palestinian observer to the U.N., Riyad Mansour, said he was disappointed with the council's "continued inability to act while innocent Palestinian civilians continue to be brutally killed by the Israeli occupying forces."Referring to past U.S. practice of vetoing similar resolutions, Mansour said the council is failing thePalestinians.
In Gaza, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Taher al-Nunu, said the United States must bear some responsibility for Israel's attacks."The veto is a political cover for the crimes of the occupation, and regrettably, instead of putting war criminals of this government that lost its mind on trial, they are giving a political cover to carry out more of these crimes," al-Nunu said.
In a speech to the council immediately following Mansour,Israel's U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman thanked the U.S. for its "bold stand." He defended Israel's actions and put the blame for attacks against Israel squarely on Iran and Syria."What we are seeing are the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah, but they are merely the fingers of the bloodstained hands and the executioners of the twisted minds of the leaders of the world's most ominous axis of terror, Syria and Iran," he said. Eight of the last nine vetoes in the council have been cast by the United States. Of those, seven concerned the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
It's not all fantasy
Not long ago I went down to my local video store to check out a movie. It was a lazy Saturday and there wasn't much else to do. As I strode through the lanes of DVDs that lined the shelves I came across an action flick that caught my eye.
The movie was entitled; SOLDIER. It starred Kurt Russell and was an action flick. 'Why not' I thought to myself. I was in the mood to see senseless violence and this movie seemed to be as senseless as any other.
I popped the DVD in my machine and was soon locked into the whole plot. Not that it was any better than any other action movie out there, but because the premise really hit home.
Kurt Russell's character is a soldier in a futuristic US army. Since birth, he and others were taken from their parents (drafted I guess) and trained to be an elite fighting unit; They feel no pain, have no fear and show no emotions.
The movie shows a montage of the boys learning how to fight with knives, bare-hands, and guns. They are put through punishing physical tests; thousands of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and long runs on hot dusty roads. Those who cannot keep up are immediately executed.
In one particular telling part of the film, we witness Russell's character and his colleagues practice shooting at enemy targets. All the men are accurately and un-hesitatingly hitting their marks. The quick decision making of the men is most interesting. In one sequence, we see Russell and another soldier firing on mannequins dressed up as the enemy; at times they are hiding behind rocks, walls, and buildings trying to take cover.
Russell and the other soldiers quickly find angles and kill them with their keen target eyesight. But then, we see an enemy combatant hiding behind a civilian, the man next to Russell freezes and does not shoot; Russell, however, takes aim and shoots straight through the civilian mannequin and we see the bullets penetrate through her and hit the combatant.
The movie goes on to show these same soldiers graduating and moving on to fight in various futuristic wars; THE WAR OF THE SIX CITIES, THE RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE etc. In all these wars we see the soldiers being highly successful in dispatching the enemy. In one incident we see an enemy combatant holding a machine gun to the head of a civilian. Russell looks on coldly, aims his weapon and shoots her and the combatant as he did in the drills. The two are killed instantly and Russell moves on seeking out other targets with so much as a blink of an eye for what he has just done.
I watched this movie in worried fascination.
Why?
Well, to be honest stories like this are not that far-fetched anymore. The futuristic things that Hollywood thought up only ten or twenty years ago are now coming to pass. To be more specific, I can't help but think of what is going through the minds of commanders of the Israeli forces that allow bombs to be dropped on apartment buildings that house 'suspected' militants, but also innocent civilians, killing both in the process.
The army often makes the calim that they were unaware that civilians were in the buildings or that the millitants often hide in areas where civillian populations are. But whether or not the millitants hide behind civillians does this make what the army is doing right?
At the moment I see Gaza fitting in quite easily to the movie that I described above starring Kurt Russell. Is this what it has come down to? Are we now relying on the movies to determine what is right and wrong and who is good or bad?
I'm sure I'll get heat from some readers over my comparisons of the movie and the Israeli army, but I've lived in Palestine long enough to see the facts on the ground.
Thankfully, in the end of the film Russell's character realized that human life was worth valuing. I hope for the sake of the Gaza residents, the Israeli army will see the same thing.
The movie was entitled; SOLDIER. It starred Kurt Russell and was an action flick. 'Why not' I thought to myself. I was in the mood to see senseless violence and this movie seemed to be as senseless as any other.
I popped the DVD in my machine and was soon locked into the whole plot. Not that it was any better than any other action movie out there, but because the premise really hit home.
Kurt Russell's character is a soldier in a futuristic US army. Since birth, he and others were taken from their parents (drafted I guess) and trained to be an elite fighting unit; They feel no pain, have no fear and show no emotions.
The movie shows a montage of the boys learning how to fight with knives, bare-hands, and guns. They are put through punishing physical tests; thousands of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and long runs on hot dusty roads. Those who cannot keep up are immediately executed.
In one particular telling part of the film, we witness Russell's character and his colleagues practice shooting at enemy targets. All the men are accurately and un-hesitatingly hitting their marks. The quick decision making of the men is most interesting. In one sequence, we see Russell and another soldier firing on mannequins dressed up as the enemy; at times they are hiding behind rocks, walls, and buildings trying to take cover.
Russell and the other soldiers quickly find angles and kill them with their keen target eyesight. But then, we see an enemy combatant hiding behind a civilian, the man next to Russell freezes and does not shoot; Russell, however, takes aim and shoots straight through the civilian mannequin and we see the bullets penetrate through her and hit the combatant.
The movie goes on to show these same soldiers graduating and moving on to fight in various futuristic wars; THE WAR OF THE SIX CITIES, THE RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE etc. In all these wars we see the soldiers being highly successful in dispatching the enemy. In one incident we see an enemy combatant holding a machine gun to the head of a civilian. Russell looks on coldly, aims his weapon and shoots her and the combatant as he did in the drills. The two are killed instantly and Russell moves on seeking out other targets with so much as a blink of an eye for what he has just done.
I watched this movie in worried fascination.
Why?
Well, to be honest stories like this are not that far-fetched anymore. The futuristic things that Hollywood thought up only ten or twenty years ago are now coming to pass. To be more specific, I can't help but think of what is going through the minds of commanders of the Israeli forces that allow bombs to be dropped on apartment buildings that house 'suspected' militants, but also innocent civilians, killing both in the process.
The army often makes the calim that they were unaware that civilians were in the buildings or that the millitants often hide in areas where civillian populations are. But whether or not the millitants hide behind civillians does this make what the army is doing right?
At the moment I see Gaza fitting in quite easily to the movie that I described above starring Kurt Russell. Is this what it has come down to? Are we now relying on the movies to determine what is right and wrong and who is good or bad?
I'm sure I'll get heat from some readers over my comparisons of the movie and the Israeli army, but I've lived in Palestine long enough to see the facts on the ground.
Thankfully, in the end of the film Russell's character realized that human life was worth valuing. I hope for the sake of the Gaza residents, the Israeli army will see the same thing.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
ENTRY DENIED: DEPORTING WITNESSES OF ISRAELI
Maureen Clare Murphy,
The Electronic Intifada, 11 July 2006
In another Israeli move designed to further isolatePalestinians from the rest of the world community, itis being reported that the Israeli army will be declaring the West Bank closed to foreign nationals.
The Gaza Strip has already been made virtually inaccessible to foreign nationals; those who wish to enter must apply to the Israeli authorities, weeks in advance, to receive elusive permits.
The effect is that the plight of the Palestinian civilian population living under Israeli occupation becomes all the more invisible to the international community.The recent trend of deportation of foreign nationals (including foreign passport-holding Palestinians) working in Palestinian civil society, studying at Palestinian universities, and those living withPalestinian family gives further cause for concern that West Bank Palestinians will no longer be allowed visitors to their open-air prison. Of course, this policy of isolation is being justified under the guise of "security."
The rightist Israeli daily Maariv reports, "According to the plan, the IDF will declare the Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] closed to foreign nationals. Denying entry to ... activists has been defined as prevention of political subversion and involvement of members of the movement in acts of terrorism, and limitation of friction with Jewish settlers."However, Israel has long been denying entry to scores of internationals whether they are activists or not --a policy that has been intensified in recent months. During April, after having lived in Ramallah for a year and a half and staying on a tourist visa that I would renew every three months, I was denied entry to the West Bank from Jordan via the Israeli-controlled Allenby Bridge land crossing, and given no documentation to indicate why I was being turned away. On the Jordanian side of the bridge, security officials there told me that scores of international passport-holders -- Palestinian-Americans in particular-- were being denied entry into the West Bank.
I eventually managed to get back in with a one-month visa after having been issued a new passport by the US Embassy in Jordan, but was deported from the airport in Tel Aviv a month and a half later. There, I was informed that I was declared "persona non grata" as it was believed that I was trying to "illegally settle in Israel," despite that I informed them that I was living in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
In any other country, staying too long on a tourist visa would be an understandable reason for deportation. However, the Palestinians have no control over their borders, and the former system that allowed foreign passport-holders working and living in the West Bank and Gaza to obtain a work permit or other special visa so they would be able to stay a prolonged time has been terminated by Israel.
Denied a hearing and any further legal recourse, I was merely given a very unofficial-looking piece of paper from the Israeli authorities as they shoved me on a plane back to Toronto. However, the document was in Hebrew, a language neither I -- nor the Canadian immigration officer I had to explain myself to once I landed -- could read.
CONTROL OF ALL MOVEMENT
The threat of Israeli deportation is the great existential fear that hangs over all expatriates' heads in the occupied Palestinian territories. Conversations with other expats would always lead to the recounting of recent "visa run" experiences, when we would dash to nearby Jordan or another country for a visit and then return to obtain a new three-month B-2 tourist visa.
Those working with UN agencies or major international organizations often held work permits; but for those of us recently working in Palestinian civil society, there was no known mechanism for acquiring such a permit without the backing of a major organization. And for those few brave souls who did try to forge new ground and apply for a permit as individuals, not even hiring the best of lawyers would guarantee that this would occur.In the post-Oslo Accords era, it used to be that internationals working in Palestinian civil society would be able to apply for a work permit from the Israeli civil administration in the West Bank via the Palestinian Authority as a matter of course. But this has not been the case for some time. A European friend working for a Palestinian civil society organization recently rang the Beit El/DCO checkpoint, which houses an Israeli West Bank civil administration office. She was told that to cross the checkpoint, she would need a work permit from Israel and that she should apply for one from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs. However, the Israeli official added, "I will tell you now that it will be impossible because they will refuse you once they know you are working for an organization that is working in the territories."
Internationals working with Palestinian organizations are left with little options for entering the Israeli-controlled borders in a "legitimate" manner. Some choose to lie about what they do when asked their purpose of visit, knowing that mere mention of the word"Palestinian" would cause them to be red-flagged in the Israeli system. Optimists like myself think that when in doubt, err on the side of truth. Also, not skilled in the art of lying, I thought it a moral point to not be made to feel as though working for a respected Palestinian human rights organization was anything less than legitimate. But we all knew that our fates would be arbitrarily determined, for there is no established and transparent process for ensuring entry. Amongst expatriates living in Ramallah, there were stories of spouses of West Bank ID-carryingPalestinians who have been continuously getting the three-month B-2 tourist visa for as many as twenty years, by coming and going to Jordan several times a year. These individuals had acquired the status of legends amongst the expat community, though the precarious situation of international passport-holders(including Palestinians living in the diaspora) who marry and have families with Palestinians holding West Bank or Gaza ID cards is all too real. Thousands of Palestinian families perpetually live in fear of a family member being deported -- a worry shared by my corner shopkeeper with an American passport-holding wife who goes to Jordan and back every three months, and a friend whose American sister-in-law simply overstayed her visa for five years, knowing this would mean she could never return once she left.
Recently, this fear has been confirmed; countless families in which one or more members hold a foreign passport have found themselves fractured by the denial of entry of one of their members. Many of these are middle class families headed by diaspora Palestinians who returned to help develop their country during the post-Oslo years. As a Palestinian official who holds a European passport pointed out to me, "this is particularly symbolic since, by choosing to return to Palestine, these people represented the optimism of the Oslo years and personified the state-building project." If this trend continues, a whole segment of the Palestinian middle class may be dispersed, taking with them their business investments and entrepreneurship, leaving the Palestinian economy that much more unstable. On top of this, there are the countless numbers of Palestinians who at one point left (or were forced out from) their country and are not allowed to re-enter with the passport of their adopted country. This was the case with a colleague's European passport-holding brother, who was denied entry to the West Bank via Allenby Bridge around the same time as myself. And while he was taking me to the American embassy in Amman where I would pick up my new US passport, a taxi driver from the West Bank city of Nablus recounted how he left to work in Jordan some years ago, leaving behind his wife so she would not be separated from her family. Having lived outside the West Bank for too long, the Israeli authorities did not let him return, and so he and his wife continue to live apart.
Access is restricted even internally within the West Bank, making it difficult or impossible for many individuals from Jenin or Nablus to travel to Ramallah or Hebron and vice versa. The Israeli military controls all Palestinian movement with its hundreds of forms of movement restrictions in the West Bank and its restrictive permit system. Most Palestinians holding a green or orange West Bank or Gaza ID have not been able to access East Jerusalem, considered part of the West Bank under international law, in over ten years as they are not allowed to do so without a rarely issued Israeli permit. And these days, not even members of thePalestinian government (save President Mahmoud Abbas) are able to travel from the West Bank to Gaza, and viceversa. Palestinians are left unable to reach places of worship, education and health services, and even family members - breaking social, economic, and cultural structures. Israel imposes such policies for "security" reasons, but the terms that more accurately reflectreality are collective punishment and oppression.
These movement restrictions are becoming increasingly formalized by million dollar checkpoints-cum-terminals, suggesting that the intention is actually to strengthen Israel's grip on the occupied territories and establish"facts on the ground" to preempt a negotiated resolution to the conflict. When Israel began building its new "Atarot Crossing" terminal between Ramallah and Jerusalem where the former Qalandiya checkpoint lay, rumors began to fly that the thousands of Palestinian Jerusalemites holding Israeli permanent residency cards would have to obtain permits to cross to Ramallah and the northern WestBank. Since the new terminal has been in use, this hasn't been the case (though since the beginning of this month, they not able to pass through a similar terminal at the entrance to Bethlehem), but many believe that there is no telling when such a policy could be put into place.
The permanency of the technologically sophisticated structure gives weight to such speculation. Why would so much money be invested in a temporary security measure? The same question must asked of Israel's barrier in the West Bank, the current route of which effectively annexes ten percent of the West Bank to Israel, and isolates Palestinian communities from one another.
DANGEROUS SILENCE
Earlier this year, then-Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz of the new scope of impunity that Israel enjoys following last year's unilateral disengagement from Gaza. Regarding the state's illegal assassination operations in Gaza, he bragged, "there is not a single word of criticism anywhere in the world. And do you know why? Because the disengagement gave us degrees of freedom in carrying out everyday security activities, which we never had before ... The day before yesterday we carried out a targeted interception [sic] in Gaza. The day before that we did another targeted interception [sic]. Not a critical remark, not a hint of critical remark, has come from anywhere in the world.'" The international community's silence has been deafening as Israel routinely drops missiles onto Gaza-- one of the most densely populated areas of the world-- in its illegal extrajudicial assassinations, and is currently embarking on its indefinite deployment there. Of course, the civilian casualty count has been predictably high. When asked to, Israel justifies such operations as necessary to deter the launching of crude, homemade Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. But such measures are not in compliance with the legal principle of proportionality, and the daily shelling of the Gaza Strip amounts to another form of collective punishment of the Palestinian civilian population. Meanwhile, Olmert has been meeting with world leaders to secure international support of his"convergence plan," the latest Israeli euphemism for unilaterally determining final-status negotiations issues. But the foundation of these unilateral plans has already been laid. With much of the Wall and the new permanent checkpoints in place or under construction, the architecture for new,Israeli-determined borders is already there.
Though not accepting the scheme hook, line and sinker,the international community is greeting this latest unilateral plan as the "only one in town," despite past affirmations that a bilateral negotiated resolution to the conflict is the only way to move forward. With the international community's boycott of the democratically elected Palestinian government, half of them currently in Israeli detention, the Palestinians are as powerless to claim their rights as ever. Worsening the situation, now that it is becoming increasingly difficult for international observers to access the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian civil society institutions will be losing invaluable conduits of advocacy to the outside world.
The international community will become all the more blind and deaf to human rights abuses and rights violations committed in the occupied Palestinian territories. While Olmert will continue to enjoy the warm company of fellow statesmen, Palestinian civilians will become increasingly isolated under Israeli occupation. What will be the effect on Palestinian society if internationals working in Palestinian civil society are not allowed to conduct their work, and Palestinians who returned to develop their country are forced to leave? With Palestinian voices largely absent from mainstream corporate media coverage of the conflict, who will be there to communicate the everyday devastation of Israeli occupation and unilateralism to the rest of the world? With a toothless international community, including consulates in Jerusalem who privilege Israel's policies over the rights and interests of their own citizens that they are meant to protect, the outlook is indeed grim.
When I sought advice from the US Embassy in Jordan after being turned away at Allenby bridge, I was told that while Israel has the right to control its borders, at a certain point the turning away of American citizens (while Israeli citizens are not kept fromentering the US) becomes "a bilateral issue." Despite this, after I was deported from the airport, the response from the US consulate in Jerusalem was that tighter restrictions on foreigners entering the West Bank was understandable given the growing tensions between Hamas and Fatah. Other Americans who have contacted the consulate have been told a similar story. However, one has a hard time believing that any sweeping policy denying international passport-holders entry is actually in the interest of safety, rather than to remove some of the most credible and able persons likely to witnesses and protest Israel's designs on the West Bank.---------------------------------------------------Bio: Arts, Music & Culture Editor of The ElectronicIntifada, Maureen Clare Murphy had spent the last yearand a half living in the West Bank city of Ramallah andworking for the Palestinian human rights organizationAl-Haq before being deported late May
The Electronic Intifada, 11 July 2006
In another Israeli move designed to further isolatePalestinians from the rest of the world community, itis being reported that the Israeli army will be declaring the West Bank closed to foreign nationals.
The Gaza Strip has already been made virtually inaccessible to foreign nationals; those who wish to enter must apply to the Israeli authorities, weeks in advance, to receive elusive permits.
The effect is that the plight of the Palestinian civilian population living under Israeli occupation becomes all the more invisible to the international community.The recent trend of deportation of foreign nationals (including foreign passport-holding Palestinians) working in Palestinian civil society, studying at Palestinian universities, and those living withPalestinian family gives further cause for concern that West Bank Palestinians will no longer be allowed visitors to their open-air prison. Of course, this policy of isolation is being justified under the guise of "security."
The rightist Israeli daily Maariv reports, "According to the plan, the IDF will declare the Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] closed to foreign nationals. Denying entry to ... activists has been defined as prevention of political subversion and involvement of members of the movement in acts of terrorism, and limitation of friction with Jewish settlers."However, Israel has long been denying entry to scores of internationals whether they are activists or not --a policy that has been intensified in recent months. During April, after having lived in Ramallah for a year and a half and staying on a tourist visa that I would renew every three months, I was denied entry to the West Bank from Jordan via the Israeli-controlled Allenby Bridge land crossing, and given no documentation to indicate why I was being turned away. On the Jordanian side of the bridge, security officials there told me that scores of international passport-holders -- Palestinian-Americans in particular-- were being denied entry into the West Bank.
I eventually managed to get back in with a one-month visa after having been issued a new passport by the US Embassy in Jordan, but was deported from the airport in Tel Aviv a month and a half later. There, I was informed that I was declared "persona non grata" as it was believed that I was trying to "illegally settle in Israel," despite that I informed them that I was living in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
In any other country, staying too long on a tourist visa would be an understandable reason for deportation. However, the Palestinians have no control over their borders, and the former system that allowed foreign passport-holders working and living in the West Bank and Gaza to obtain a work permit or other special visa so they would be able to stay a prolonged time has been terminated by Israel.
Denied a hearing and any further legal recourse, I was merely given a very unofficial-looking piece of paper from the Israeli authorities as they shoved me on a plane back to Toronto. However, the document was in Hebrew, a language neither I -- nor the Canadian immigration officer I had to explain myself to once I landed -- could read.
CONTROL OF ALL MOVEMENT
The threat of Israeli deportation is the great existential fear that hangs over all expatriates' heads in the occupied Palestinian territories. Conversations with other expats would always lead to the recounting of recent "visa run" experiences, when we would dash to nearby Jordan or another country for a visit and then return to obtain a new three-month B-2 tourist visa.
Those working with UN agencies or major international organizations often held work permits; but for those of us recently working in Palestinian civil society, there was no known mechanism for acquiring such a permit without the backing of a major organization. And for those few brave souls who did try to forge new ground and apply for a permit as individuals, not even hiring the best of lawyers would guarantee that this would occur.In the post-Oslo Accords era, it used to be that internationals working in Palestinian civil society would be able to apply for a work permit from the Israeli civil administration in the West Bank via the Palestinian Authority as a matter of course. But this has not been the case for some time. A European friend working for a Palestinian civil society organization recently rang the Beit El/DCO checkpoint, which houses an Israeli West Bank civil administration office. She was told that to cross the checkpoint, she would need a work permit from Israel and that she should apply for one from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs. However, the Israeli official added, "I will tell you now that it will be impossible because they will refuse you once they know you are working for an organization that is working in the territories."
Internationals working with Palestinian organizations are left with little options for entering the Israeli-controlled borders in a "legitimate" manner. Some choose to lie about what they do when asked their purpose of visit, knowing that mere mention of the word"Palestinian" would cause them to be red-flagged in the Israeli system. Optimists like myself think that when in doubt, err on the side of truth. Also, not skilled in the art of lying, I thought it a moral point to not be made to feel as though working for a respected Palestinian human rights organization was anything less than legitimate. But we all knew that our fates would be arbitrarily determined, for there is no established and transparent process for ensuring entry. Amongst expatriates living in Ramallah, there were stories of spouses of West Bank ID-carryingPalestinians who have been continuously getting the three-month B-2 tourist visa for as many as twenty years, by coming and going to Jordan several times a year. These individuals had acquired the status of legends amongst the expat community, though the precarious situation of international passport-holders(including Palestinians living in the diaspora) who marry and have families with Palestinians holding West Bank or Gaza ID cards is all too real. Thousands of Palestinian families perpetually live in fear of a family member being deported -- a worry shared by my corner shopkeeper with an American passport-holding wife who goes to Jordan and back every three months, and a friend whose American sister-in-law simply overstayed her visa for five years, knowing this would mean she could never return once she left.
Recently, this fear has been confirmed; countless families in which one or more members hold a foreign passport have found themselves fractured by the denial of entry of one of their members. Many of these are middle class families headed by diaspora Palestinians who returned to help develop their country during the post-Oslo years. As a Palestinian official who holds a European passport pointed out to me, "this is particularly symbolic since, by choosing to return to Palestine, these people represented the optimism of the Oslo years and personified the state-building project." If this trend continues, a whole segment of the Palestinian middle class may be dispersed, taking with them their business investments and entrepreneurship, leaving the Palestinian economy that much more unstable. On top of this, there are the countless numbers of Palestinians who at one point left (or were forced out from) their country and are not allowed to re-enter with the passport of their adopted country. This was the case with a colleague's European passport-holding brother, who was denied entry to the West Bank via Allenby Bridge around the same time as myself. And while he was taking me to the American embassy in Amman where I would pick up my new US passport, a taxi driver from the West Bank city of Nablus recounted how he left to work in Jordan some years ago, leaving behind his wife so she would not be separated from her family. Having lived outside the West Bank for too long, the Israeli authorities did not let him return, and so he and his wife continue to live apart.
Access is restricted even internally within the West Bank, making it difficult or impossible for many individuals from Jenin or Nablus to travel to Ramallah or Hebron and vice versa. The Israeli military controls all Palestinian movement with its hundreds of forms of movement restrictions in the West Bank and its restrictive permit system. Most Palestinians holding a green or orange West Bank or Gaza ID have not been able to access East Jerusalem, considered part of the West Bank under international law, in over ten years as they are not allowed to do so without a rarely issued Israeli permit. And these days, not even members of thePalestinian government (save President Mahmoud Abbas) are able to travel from the West Bank to Gaza, and viceversa. Palestinians are left unable to reach places of worship, education and health services, and even family members - breaking social, economic, and cultural structures. Israel imposes such policies for "security" reasons, but the terms that more accurately reflectreality are collective punishment and oppression.
These movement restrictions are becoming increasingly formalized by million dollar checkpoints-cum-terminals, suggesting that the intention is actually to strengthen Israel's grip on the occupied territories and establish"facts on the ground" to preempt a negotiated resolution to the conflict. When Israel began building its new "Atarot Crossing" terminal between Ramallah and Jerusalem where the former Qalandiya checkpoint lay, rumors began to fly that the thousands of Palestinian Jerusalemites holding Israeli permanent residency cards would have to obtain permits to cross to Ramallah and the northern WestBank. Since the new terminal has been in use, this hasn't been the case (though since the beginning of this month, they not able to pass through a similar terminal at the entrance to Bethlehem), but many believe that there is no telling when such a policy could be put into place.
The permanency of the technologically sophisticated structure gives weight to such speculation. Why would so much money be invested in a temporary security measure? The same question must asked of Israel's barrier in the West Bank, the current route of which effectively annexes ten percent of the West Bank to Israel, and isolates Palestinian communities from one another.
DANGEROUS SILENCE
Earlier this year, then-Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz of the new scope of impunity that Israel enjoys following last year's unilateral disengagement from Gaza. Regarding the state's illegal assassination operations in Gaza, he bragged, "there is not a single word of criticism anywhere in the world. And do you know why? Because the disengagement gave us degrees of freedom in carrying out everyday security activities, which we never had before ... The day before yesterday we carried out a targeted interception [sic] in Gaza. The day before that we did another targeted interception [sic]. Not a critical remark, not a hint of critical remark, has come from anywhere in the world.'" The international community's silence has been deafening as Israel routinely drops missiles onto Gaza-- one of the most densely populated areas of the world-- in its illegal extrajudicial assassinations, and is currently embarking on its indefinite deployment there. Of course, the civilian casualty count has been predictably high. When asked to, Israel justifies such operations as necessary to deter the launching of crude, homemade Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. But such measures are not in compliance with the legal principle of proportionality, and the daily shelling of the Gaza Strip amounts to another form of collective punishment of the Palestinian civilian population. Meanwhile, Olmert has been meeting with world leaders to secure international support of his"convergence plan," the latest Israeli euphemism for unilaterally determining final-status negotiations issues. But the foundation of these unilateral plans has already been laid. With much of the Wall and the new permanent checkpoints in place or under construction, the architecture for new,Israeli-determined borders is already there.
Though not accepting the scheme hook, line and sinker,the international community is greeting this latest unilateral plan as the "only one in town," despite past affirmations that a bilateral negotiated resolution to the conflict is the only way to move forward. With the international community's boycott of the democratically elected Palestinian government, half of them currently in Israeli detention, the Palestinians are as powerless to claim their rights as ever. Worsening the situation, now that it is becoming increasingly difficult for international observers to access the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian civil society institutions will be losing invaluable conduits of advocacy to the outside world.
The international community will become all the more blind and deaf to human rights abuses and rights violations committed in the occupied Palestinian territories. While Olmert will continue to enjoy the warm company of fellow statesmen, Palestinian civilians will become increasingly isolated under Israeli occupation. What will be the effect on Palestinian society if internationals working in Palestinian civil society are not allowed to conduct their work, and Palestinians who returned to develop their country are forced to leave? With Palestinian voices largely absent from mainstream corporate media coverage of the conflict, who will be there to communicate the everyday devastation of Israeli occupation and unilateralism to the rest of the world? With a toothless international community, including consulates in Jerusalem who privilege Israel's policies over the rights and interests of their own citizens that they are meant to protect, the outlook is indeed grim.
When I sought advice from the US Embassy in Jordan after being turned away at Allenby bridge, I was told that while Israel has the right to control its borders, at a certain point the turning away of American citizens (while Israeli citizens are not kept fromentering the US) becomes "a bilateral issue." Despite this, after I was deported from the airport, the response from the US consulate in Jerusalem was that tighter restrictions on foreigners entering the West Bank was understandable given the growing tensions between Hamas and Fatah. Other Americans who have contacted the consulate have been told a similar story. However, one has a hard time believing that any sweeping policy denying international passport-holders entry is actually in the interest of safety, rather than to remove some of the most credible and able persons likely to witnesses and protest Israel's designs on the West Bank.---------------------------------------------------Bio: Arts, Music & Culture Editor of The ElectronicIntifada, Maureen Clare Murphy had spent the last yearand a half living in the West Bank city of Ramallah andworking for the Palestinian human rights organizationAl-Haq before being deported late May
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
: A War on Families
After 30 Years, a Wife Loses Her Right to Enter Israel
By AMIRA HASS
"It must be a mistake, the caprice of a clerk at border control," Aadel Samara responded when his wife Enayeh informed him by phone on May 26 that her entry to Israel, through the Sheikh Hussein Terminal (near Beit She'an), was not permitted. There was no reason to suspect anything but an error. After all, throughout their 30 years together this was the drill: Every three months, a day or two before the Israeli tourist visa in her American passport was set to expire, she would go away for a few days - to Jordan, sometimes Cyprus or Egypt, then return with a new visa for another three months.
Except when Aadel was working on his doctorate in economics, in Britain, she and the children joined him for part of the time.
The Samaras are both natives of Beit Ur al Foqa, a village west of Ramallah. Enayeh was born in 1950; Aadel in 1944. But in 1967, two months before the war, she visited her father, who was working in the United States.
After occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel conducted a census and ruled that anyone who was not present in the territories at the time of the census ceased being a resident. Thus, like thousands of other Palestinians, Enayeh lost her residency status. In 1975, she visited her birthplace on an American passport, as a tourist. She met Aadel, they fell in love and married. When their daughter, Samer, was 39-days-old and still nursing, she accompanied her mother on the quarterly trip to Jordan for visa renewal. They submitted a dozen applications for "family reunification" --in vain.
The Israeli authorities, which have controlled the Palestinian Population Registry since 1967 to this day, refused. So over the years they had no choice but to get used to the frequent travel arrangement.
"We could have built a thriving economic enterprise with all the money we spent on these trips," Aadel tried joking at his house, which seemed so empty to him without h is wife.
"Try crossing through the Allenby Bridge," he advised her on May 26. He didn't even tell his children what had happened exactly. "I try not to tell them the tough things, they'd start crying," he explained, as though he had forgotten that Samer was already 30 and Yazan was 26. But when her sister in Amman telephoned on May 28 to say that Enayeh had failed to get through once again, they realized they had been naive to think that their life, with its somewhat odd routine, would not be disrupted.
Aadel spent a month running between various offices of the Palestinian Authority and tried in vain to schedule a meeting with representatives from the American consulate. His sister-in-law in Chicago tried meanwhile to catch her senator's attention. Enayeh herself delivered a letter to the U.S. embassy in Amman and received no reply.
Similar straits
In their rushing about, they began hearing of more and more people in similar straits, and! all began to conclude that this went beyond particular cases and was a matter of policy from above. Several of those refused entry say they heard from the officials and policemen at the border crossing that "there are directives from the Interior Ministry," or that "from now on we are permitted to visit once a year, for a month only."
When Enayeh realized her return home was uncertain, she decided to go to her sister in the U.S. Her two children and 3-year-old grandson, Omar, traveled to bid her goodbye. Who knows when they will see each other again.
Aadel cannot leave. In the late 1960s and early '70s, he served five and a half years in an Israeli prison: five for activity in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and several years later--for activity in the Democratic Front (after he had already quit the group over his criticism against the Soviet Union.) In 1998 he was arrested by Palestinian intelligence for 27 days. He had been among 20 signatories to an open letter attacking Yasser Arafat for the corrupt pr actices of his regime and its failings in dealing with the Israeli occupation. But his periods of incarceration never impacted his wife's tourist visas, so her entry ban is clearly unrelated to his past or political views.
"From the moment we met and up to the moment we said goodbye at the airport, she cried," said her son Yazan. And you? "I cried too," he admitted. "And my sister also cried." His sister said that "Mom aged 10 years" in a month of forced absence from home and the uncertainty regarding when and if she would be able to return.
"We had so hoped," said Samer, an engineer by profession, "that now, when we're adults and earning a living, that Mom would be able to rest, work less hard" (at the beauty parlor she opened in Ramallah). In the four days they spent with her "I felt how weak I am," Yazan recounted. "I can't help my mother. We don't have an authority that can help, and the Israeli regime does as it pleases. Israel's policy is known. If it could, it would expel everyone. By any means possible it will get people out of here."
Amira Hass writes for Ha'aretz. She is the author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza.
By AMIRA HASS
"It must be a mistake, the caprice of a clerk at border control," Aadel Samara responded when his wife Enayeh informed him by phone on May 26 that her entry to Israel, through the Sheikh Hussein Terminal (near Beit She'an), was not permitted. There was no reason to suspect anything but an error. After all, throughout their 30 years together this was the drill: Every three months, a day or two before the Israeli tourist visa in her American passport was set to expire, she would go away for a few days - to Jordan, sometimes Cyprus or Egypt, then return with a new visa for another three months.
Except when Aadel was working on his doctorate in economics, in Britain, she and the children joined him for part of the time.
The Samaras are both natives of Beit Ur al Foqa, a village west of Ramallah. Enayeh was born in 1950; Aadel in 1944. But in 1967, two months before the war, she visited her father, who was working in the United States.
After occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel conducted a census and ruled that anyone who was not present in the territories at the time of the census ceased being a resident. Thus, like thousands of other Palestinians, Enayeh lost her residency status. In 1975, she visited her birthplace on an American passport, as a tourist. She met Aadel, they fell in love and married. When their daughter, Samer, was 39-days-old and still nursing, she accompanied her mother on the quarterly trip to Jordan for visa renewal. They submitted a dozen applications for "family reunification" --in vain.
The Israeli authorities, which have controlled the Palestinian Population Registry since 1967 to this day, refused. So over the years they had no choice but to get used to the frequent travel arrangement.
"We could have built a thriving economic enterprise with all the money we spent on these trips," Aadel tried joking at his house, which seemed so empty to him without h is wife.
"Try crossing through the Allenby Bridge," he advised her on May 26. He didn't even tell his children what had happened exactly. "I try not to tell them the tough things, they'd start crying," he explained, as though he had forgotten that Samer was already 30 and Yazan was 26. But when her sister in Amman telephoned on May 28 to say that Enayeh had failed to get through once again, they realized they had been naive to think that their life, with its somewhat odd routine, would not be disrupted.
Aadel spent a month running between various offices of the Palestinian Authority and tried in vain to schedule a meeting with representatives from the American consulate. His sister-in-law in Chicago tried meanwhile to catch her senator's attention. Enayeh herself delivered a letter to the U.S. embassy in Amman and received no reply.
Similar straits
In their rushing about, they began hearing of more and more people in similar straits, and! all began to conclude that this went beyond particular cases and was a matter of policy from above. Several of those refused entry say they heard from the officials and policemen at the border crossing that "there are directives from the Interior Ministry," or that "from now on we are permitted to visit once a year, for a month only."
When Enayeh realized her return home was uncertain, she decided to go to her sister in the U.S. Her two children and 3-year-old grandson, Omar, traveled to bid her goodbye. Who knows when they will see each other again.
Aadel cannot leave. In the late 1960s and early '70s, he served five and a half years in an Israeli prison: five for activity in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and several years later--for activity in the Democratic Front (after he had already quit the group over his criticism against the Soviet Union.) In 1998 he was arrested by Palestinian intelligence for 27 days. He had been among 20 signatories to an open letter attacking Yasser Arafat for the corrupt pr actices of his regime and its failings in dealing with the Israeli occupation. But his periods of incarceration never impacted his wife's tourist visas, so her entry ban is clearly unrelated to his past or political views.
"From the moment we met and up to the moment we said goodbye at the airport, she cried," said her son Yazan. And you? "I cried too," he admitted. "And my sister also cried." His sister said that "Mom aged 10 years" in a month of forced absence from home and the uncertainty regarding when and if she would be able to return.
"We had so hoped," said Samer, an engineer by profession, "that now, when we're adults and earning a living, that Mom would be able to rest, work less hard" (at the beauty parlor she opened in Ramallah). In the four days they spent with her "I felt how weak I am," Yazan recounted. "I can't help my mother. We don't have an authority that can help, and the Israeli regime does as it pleases. Israel's policy is known. If it could, it would expel everyone. By any means possible it will get people out of here."
Amira Hass writes for Ha'aretz. She is the author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza.
Gaza Watch #1
Note: From now until the seige of Gaza ends (whatever that means), I will be posting articles about the ongoing crisis. As the humaitarian crisis worsens for Palestinians living not only in Gaza but in The West Bank and Israel as well, it is important to continually shed light on the crimes being committed by the Israeli Occupation Forces.
IOF Continue to Target Civilians in the Gaza Strip: 3 Children Killed and another Seriously Injured in an Air-Raid on Beit Hanoun Palestinian Centre for Human Rights 11 July 2006
http://pchrgaza.org/files/PressR/English/2006/74-2006.htm
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed 3 Palestinian children and seriously injured a fourth one yesterdayevening (10 July 2006) in Beit Hanoun, when an IOF plane fired a rocket at them. This crime comes within the context of the open war against Palestinian civilians inthe Gaza Strip since the capture of the Israeli soldier on25 June 2006.
It is part of the chain of collective punishment, targeting civilians, and destroying civilian property and infrastructure. With the death of these children, the number of Palestinian casualties in the GazaStrip since the start of the Israeli military operation rises to 51 dead, including 26 civilians, and 140 injured.There are 7 children and a woman among the dead; and the majority of the injured are civilians.
PCHR's preliminary investigation indicates that at approximately 19:15 on Monday, 10 July 2006, and IOF plane fired a rocket at 4 children who were near Hayel Abdel Hamid Secondary School in northern part of Beit Hanoun.They were in an area previously used as soccer field near their homes. The rocket fell amidst the children. Three were killed instantly; and their bodies were torn by the blast. The fourth child suffered serious injures. The dead children are: Mahfouth Farid Nuseir (16), Ahmad Ghalib AbuAmsha (16), and Ahmad Fathi Shabat (16).
The injured child is Raji Omar Deifallah (16).
PCHR condemns the killing of Palestinian civilians by IOF, endangering their lives, and destroying their property through disproportionate use of lethal force. These actions are considered reprisals and forms of collective punishment under article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Centre calls upon the High ContractingParties of the convention to act immediately to ensureprotection for the lives of civilians, and to ensure IOFrespect for the convention. The Centre calls upon the HighContracting Parties to enforce article 1 on the convention regarding the respect of the convention under all circumstances, and to take the necessary punitive steps against the perpetrators of serious violations.
IOF Continue to Target Civilians in the Gaza Strip: 3 Children Killed and another Seriously Injured in an Air-Raid on Beit Hanoun Palestinian Centre for Human Rights 11 July 2006
http://pchrgaza.org/files/PressR/English/2006/74-2006.htm
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed 3 Palestinian children and seriously injured a fourth one yesterdayevening (10 July 2006) in Beit Hanoun, when an IOF plane fired a rocket at them. This crime comes within the context of the open war against Palestinian civilians inthe Gaza Strip since the capture of the Israeli soldier on25 June 2006.
It is part of the chain of collective punishment, targeting civilians, and destroying civilian property and infrastructure. With the death of these children, the number of Palestinian casualties in the GazaStrip since the start of the Israeli military operation rises to 51 dead, including 26 civilians, and 140 injured.There are 7 children and a woman among the dead; and the majority of the injured are civilians.
PCHR's preliminary investigation indicates that at approximately 19:15 on Monday, 10 July 2006, and IOF plane fired a rocket at 4 children who were near Hayel Abdel Hamid Secondary School in northern part of Beit Hanoun.They were in an area previously used as soccer field near their homes. The rocket fell amidst the children. Three were killed instantly; and their bodies were torn by the blast. The fourth child suffered serious injures. The dead children are: Mahfouth Farid Nuseir (16), Ahmad Ghalib AbuAmsha (16), and Ahmad Fathi Shabat (16).
The injured child is Raji Omar Deifallah (16).
PCHR condemns the killing of Palestinian civilians by IOF, endangering their lives, and destroying their property through disproportionate use of lethal force. These actions are considered reprisals and forms of collective punishment under article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Centre calls upon the High ContractingParties of the convention to act immediately to ensureprotection for the lives of civilians, and to ensure IOFrespect for the convention. The Centre calls upon the HighContracting Parties to enforce article 1 on the convention regarding the respect of the convention under all circumstances, and to take the necessary punitive steps against the perpetrators of serious violations.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Hope?
We are now in the second week of Israel's re-occupation of Gaza. Olmert has stated that the assault will not cease until the captured Israeli soldier, Gillad Shilat is returned safe and sound.
Olmert and Peretz have stated that no Palestinian will be safe from the bloodshed. Well, I know neither of these two are prone to exaggeration when it comes to war crimes being committed against the Palestinians. In fact, whether your at the beach sun-bathing and enjoying a nice picnic with your family or merely having a bar-b-que with loved ones, you better recognize that your on notice.
I've been removed from blogging lately due to the fact that I am in the process of moving. I don't have access to the internet in my house so, unfortunately, I had to rely on the mainstream media to find out what's going on in the World.
Biting my lip and praying for a miracle, I turned on the television and watched the CBS news last night. Stories of investigations about murders that US soldiers were accused of committing in Iraq headlined the news, but after this they turned to Gaza and spoke of an Israeli missile that struck the car of suspected militants. Nothing new I thought, they've done this in the past, but what took me by surprise was that they gave a name of an eight year old Palestinian girl who had been killed.
What the.....? I shook my head in amazement and thought; "I didn't just hear what I thought I heard did I?" But sure enough, they gave out her name, something I have never heard them do before when stating that a Palestinian civilian had been killed or wounded.
Throughout this "Summer Rain" the news has constantly repeated Shilat's name and shown his picture. Most news agencies have often used the word kidnapped rather than captured to acknowledge his situation. But until yesterday, no major news media has even bothered to announce the name of a Palestinian civilian whose life was taken at the hands of an Israeli missile or bullet.
Could it be that the outside World is finally starting to shake off the notion that Palestinians are less valuable than Israelis or am I just dreaming?
Hmmm, it would be one helluva dream wouldn't it?
Olmert and Peretz have stated that no Palestinian will be safe from the bloodshed. Well, I know neither of these two are prone to exaggeration when it comes to war crimes being committed against the Palestinians. In fact, whether your at the beach sun-bathing and enjoying a nice picnic with your family or merely having a bar-b-que with loved ones, you better recognize that your on notice.
I've been removed from blogging lately due to the fact that I am in the process of moving. I don't have access to the internet in my house so, unfortunately, I had to rely on the mainstream media to find out what's going on in the World.
Biting my lip and praying for a miracle, I turned on the television and watched the CBS news last night. Stories of investigations about murders that US soldiers were accused of committing in Iraq headlined the news, but after this they turned to Gaza and spoke of an Israeli missile that struck the car of suspected militants. Nothing new I thought, they've done this in the past, but what took me by surprise was that they gave a name of an eight year old Palestinian girl who had been killed.
What the.....? I shook my head in amazement and thought; "I didn't just hear what I thought I heard did I?" But sure enough, they gave out her name, something I have never heard them do before when stating that a Palestinian civilian had been killed or wounded.
Throughout this "Summer Rain" the news has constantly repeated Shilat's name and shown his picture. Most news agencies have often used the word kidnapped rather than captured to acknowledge his situation. But until yesterday, no major news media has even bothered to announce the name of a Palestinian civilian whose life was taken at the hands of an Israeli missile or bullet.
Could it be that the outside World is finally starting to shake off the notion that Palestinians are less valuable than Israelis or am I just dreaming?
Hmmm, it would be one helluva dream wouldn't it?
Thursday, July 06, 2006
An Experiment in Human Despair
July 6, 2006
The Real Reasons for Israel's Invasion of Gaza
An Experiment in Human Despair
By JONATHAN COOK
One needed only to watch the interview on British television this week with Israel's ambassador to the UK to realise that the Israeli army's tightening of the siege on Gaza, its invasion of the northern parts of the Strip today, and the looming humanitarian crisis across the territory, have nothing to do with the recent capture of an Israeli soldier -- or even the feeble home-made Qassam rockets fired, usually ineffectually, into Israel by Palestinian militants.
Under questioning from presenter Jon Snow of Channel Four news on the reasons behind Israel's bombing of Gaza's only power station -- thereby cutting off electricity to more than half of the Strip's 1.3 million inhabitants for many months ahead, as well as threatening the water supply -- Zvi Ravner denied this action amounted to collective punishment of the civilian population.
Rather, he claimed, the electricity station had to be disabled to prevent the soldier's captors from having the light needed to smuggle him out of Gaza at night. It was left to a bemused Jon Snow to point out that smugglers usually prefer to do their work in the dark and that Israel's actions were more likely to assist his captors than disadvantage them.
The Alice Through the Looking Glass quality of Israeli disinformation over the combined siege and invasion of Gaza -- and its widespread and credulous repetition by the Western media -- is successfully distracting attention from Israel's real goals in this one-sided war of attrition.
The current destruction of Gaza's civilian and administrative infrastructure is reminiscent of the Israeli army's cruel rampages through the streets of West Bank cities in the repeated invasions of 2002 and 2003, and the Jewish settlers' malicious attacks on Palestinian farmers trying to collect their olive harvests.
The relative absence of these horror stories today is simply a reflection of the terrible success of the wall Israel has built across Palestinian farmland and around Palestinian population centres in the West Bank. Settlers no longer need to plunder the olive harvest when the fruit is being left to rot on the trees because farmers can no longer reach their groves.
In the case of the West Bank invasions, Israeli tanks rolled easily into Palestinian cities that had already been isolated and crippled by the stranglehold of checkpoints and roadblocks all over the territority. Israeli heavy armour knocked down electricity pylons as though they were playing a game of ten-pin bowling, snipers shot up the water tanks on people's roofs, soldiers defecated into office photocopiers and the army sought out Palestinian ministries so that their confidential records and documents could be destroyed or stolen.
Notably, only in the warren of alleys in the overcrowded refugee camps of Jenin and Nablus did the army find the going far tougher and suffer relatively high casualties.
Which may explain the military caution that has been exercised by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in regard to the ground invasion of Gaza. The tiny Strip, besieged on its land borders by the Israeli army behind an electronic fence and on the seafront by the Israeli navy, is one giant, overcrowded refugee camp. The past week has seen Gaza "softened up" with airstrikes on its infrastructure and government ministries. Today, land forces began wreaking more death and destruction -- fourteen killed at the time of writing -- in "mopping up" exercises in the pattern established earlier in the West Bank.
Three long-standing motives are discernible in Israel's current menacing of Gaza.
First, Israel is determined to continue its campaign of impairing the Palestinian Authority's ability to govern. This has nothing to do with the recent election of Hamas to run the Palestinian Authority. Israel's official policy of unilateralism -- ignoring the wishes of the Palestinian people -- began long before, when Yasser Arafat was in charge. It has continued through the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, a leader who is about as close to a quisling as Israel is likely to find.
Hamas's electoral success has merely supplied Israel with the pretext it needs for launching its invasion and the grounds for demanding international support as it chokes the life out of Gaza. Israel doubtless hopes that at the end of this process it will be left with Abbas, a figurehead president backed into a corner and ready to put his name to whatever agreement Israel imposes.
Second, the attack on Gaza -- as ever -- is partly a distraction from the real battle. It was widely recognised that Ariel Sharon's dogged pursuit of his Gaza disengagement policy last year was designed to free his hand for the annexation of large chunks of a greater prize, the West Bank, and for securing the biggest prize of all, East Jerusalem. Nothing has changed on this front.
As Israel keeps all eyes directed towards the suffering in Gaza, it is starting to make significant moves in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
It is preparing for the much-delayed evacuation of a handful of illegal West Bank hilltop settlements -- known in Israel as "outposts" -- demanded as the first stage of the implementation of the almost-forgotten US-sponsored peace process called the Road Map.
These outposts are tiny, often just a few caravans. It will be much to Israel's advantage if the world fails to examine too closely the miserly act of evacuating these places, which doubtless will later be presented both as Israel having made a huge sacrifice for peace and as having satisfied its side of the Road Map's conditions.
The loss of these outposts and a few larger settlements will pave the way for international acceptance of Olmert's convergence plan, his unilaterally imposed expansion of Israel's borders at the expense of a viable Palestinian state.
Equally significant are the overlooked manoeuvres Israel is undertaking in East Jerusalem as it beats a warpath towards Gaza. Last week Israel stripped four Hamas MPs of their right to live in East Jerusalem, effectively expelling them to the West Bank. It also showed that it could lock up them and dozens of other democratically elected Palestinian representatives with barely a peep from the international community.
In yet another dose of Alice in Wonderland, Israel's policy of making hostages of these MPs was referred to as "arrests" by the Western media. Few bothered to report that the MPs are being deprived of even their most basic rights, such as meeting with their lawyers.
As the four Jerusalem MPs' lawyers have argued, it is a nonsense that Israel allowed these Hamas politicians to stand in the recent elections and now, after their victory, it calls their membership of the party "support for terrorism". It is also a disturbing sign of how easily Israel will be able to begin ethnically cleansing East Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants using the flimsiest of excuses.
And third, and perhaps most significantly of all, Israel is using the siege and invasion of Gaza as a laboratory for testing policies it also intends to apply to the West Bank after convergence. Gazans are the guinea pigs on which Olmert can try out the "extreme action" he has been boasting of.
The destruction of Gaza's power plant and loss of electricity to some 700,000 people; the consequent scarcity of water, build-up of sewage that cannot be disposed of, and inevitable spread of disease; the shortages of fuel and threats to the running of vital services such as hospitals; the sonic booms of Israeli aircraft that terrify Gaza's children and unpredictable air strikes that terrify everyone; the inability of Palestinian officials to run bombed ministries and provide services; the constant threat of invasion by massed Israeli troops on the "border"; and the breakdown of law and order as Fatah and Hamas gunmen are encouraged to turn on each other. All these factors are designed to one end: the slow demand by Palestinians, civilians and militants alike, to clear out of the hell-hole of Gaza.
The traffic through the tunnels that once served Gaza's smugglers will change directions: where once cigarettes and arms came into Gaza, the likelihood is that soon it will be people passing through those underground passages to leave Gaza and seek a life outside.
If this experiment in human despair works in the small Gaza Strip, its lessons can be applied to much bigger effect in the West Bank ghettoes left behind after convergence. This is how ethnic cleansing looks when it is designed not by butchers in uniforms but by technocrats in suits.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
The Real Reasons for Israel's Invasion of Gaza
An Experiment in Human Despair
By JONATHAN COOK
One needed only to watch the interview on British television this week with Israel's ambassador to the UK to realise that the Israeli army's tightening of the siege on Gaza, its invasion of the northern parts of the Strip today, and the looming humanitarian crisis across the territory, have nothing to do with the recent capture of an Israeli soldier -- or even the feeble home-made Qassam rockets fired, usually ineffectually, into Israel by Palestinian militants.
Under questioning from presenter Jon Snow of Channel Four news on the reasons behind Israel's bombing of Gaza's only power station -- thereby cutting off electricity to more than half of the Strip's 1.3 million inhabitants for many months ahead, as well as threatening the water supply -- Zvi Ravner denied this action amounted to collective punishment of the civilian population.
Rather, he claimed, the electricity station had to be disabled to prevent the soldier's captors from having the light needed to smuggle him out of Gaza at night. It was left to a bemused Jon Snow to point out that smugglers usually prefer to do their work in the dark and that Israel's actions were more likely to assist his captors than disadvantage them.
The Alice Through the Looking Glass quality of Israeli disinformation over the combined siege and invasion of Gaza -- and its widespread and credulous repetition by the Western media -- is successfully distracting attention from Israel's real goals in this one-sided war of attrition.
The current destruction of Gaza's civilian and administrative infrastructure is reminiscent of the Israeli army's cruel rampages through the streets of West Bank cities in the repeated invasions of 2002 and 2003, and the Jewish settlers' malicious attacks on Palestinian farmers trying to collect their olive harvests.
The relative absence of these horror stories today is simply a reflection of the terrible success of the wall Israel has built across Palestinian farmland and around Palestinian population centres in the West Bank. Settlers no longer need to plunder the olive harvest when the fruit is being left to rot on the trees because farmers can no longer reach their groves.
In the case of the West Bank invasions, Israeli tanks rolled easily into Palestinian cities that had already been isolated and crippled by the stranglehold of checkpoints and roadblocks all over the territority. Israeli heavy armour knocked down electricity pylons as though they were playing a game of ten-pin bowling, snipers shot up the water tanks on people's roofs, soldiers defecated into office photocopiers and the army sought out Palestinian ministries so that their confidential records and documents could be destroyed or stolen.
Notably, only in the warren of alleys in the overcrowded refugee camps of Jenin and Nablus did the army find the going far tougher and suffer relatively high casualties.
Which may explain the military caution that has been exercised by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in regard to the ground invasion of Gaza. The tiny Strip, besieged on its land borders by the Israeli army behind an electronic fence and on the seafront by the Israeli navy, is one giant, overcrowded refugee camp. The past week has seen Gaza "softened up" with airstrikes on its infrastructure and government ministries. Today, land forces began wreaking more death and destruction -- fourteen killed at the time of writing -- in "mopping up" exercises in the pattern established earlier in the West Bank.
Three long-standing motives are discernible in Israel's current menacing of Gaza.
First, Israel is determined to continue its campaign of impairing the Palestinian Authority's ability to govern. This has nothing to do with the recent election of Hamas to run the Palestinian Authority. Israel's official policy of unilateralism -- ignoring the wishes of the Palestinian people -- began long before, when Yasser Arafat was in charge. It has continued through the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, a leader who is about as close to a quisling as Israel is likely to find.
Hamas's electoral success has merely supplied Israel with the pretext it needs for launching its invasion and the grounds for demanding international support as it chokes the life out of Gaza. Israel doubtless hopes that at the end of this process it will be left with Abbas, a figurehead president backed into a corner and ready to put his name to whatever agreement Israel imposes.
Second, the attack on Gaza -- as ever -- is partly a distraction from the real battle. It was widely recognised that Ariel Sharon's dogged pursuit of his Gaza disengagement policy last year was designed to free his hand for the annexation of large chunks of a greater prize, the West Bank, and for securing the biggest prize of all, East Jerusalem. Nothing has changed on this front.
As Israel keeps all eyes directed towards the suffering in Gaza, it is starting to make significant moves in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
It is preparing for the much-delayed evacuation of a handful of illegal West Bank hilltop settlements -- known in Israel as "outposts" -- demanded as the first stage of the implementation of the almost-forgotten US-sponsored peace process called the Road Map.
These outposts are tiny, often just a few caravans. It will be much to Israel's advantage if the world fails to examine too closely the miserly act of evacuating these places, which doubtless will later be presented both as Israel having made a huge sacrifice for peace and as having satisfied its side of the Road Map's conditions.
The loss of these outposts and a few larger settlements will pave the way for international acceptance of Olmert's convergence plan, his unilaterally imposed expansion of Israel's borders at the expense of a viable Palestinian state.
Equally significant are the overlooked manoeuvres Israel is undertaking in East Jerusalem as it beats a warpath towards Gaza. Last week Israel stripped four Hamas MPs of their right to live in East Jerusalem, effectively expelling them to the West Bank. It also showed that it could lock up them and dozens of other democratically elected Palestinian representatives with barely a peep from the international community.
In yet another dose of Alice in Wonderland, Israel's policy of making hostages of these MPs was referred to as "arrests" by the Western media. Few bothered to report that the MPs are being deprived of even their most basic rights, such as meeting with their lawyers.
As the four Jerusalem MPs' lawyers have argued, it is a nonsense that Israel allowed these Hamas politicians to stand in the recent elections and now, after their victory, it calls their membership of the party "support for terrorism". It is also a disturbing sign of how easily Israel will be able to begin ethnically cleansing East Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants using the flimsiest of excuses.
And third, and perhaps most significantly of all, Israel is using the siege and invasion of Gaza as a laboratory for testing policies it also intends to apply to the West Bank after convergence. Gazans are the guinea pigs on which Olmert can try out the "extreme action" he has been boasting of.
The destruction of Gaza's power plant and loss of electricity to some 700,000 people; the consequent scarcity of water, build-up of sewage that cannot be disposed of, and inevitable spread of disease; the shortages of fuel and threats to the running of vital services such as hospitals; the sonic booms of Israeli aircraft that terrify Gaza's children and unpredictable air strikes that terrify everyone; the inability of Palestinian officials to run bombed ministries and provide services; the constant threat of invasion by massed Israeli troops on the "border"; and the breakdown of law and order as Fatah and Hamas gunmen are encouraged to turn on each other. All these factors are designed to one end: the slow demand by Palestinians, civilians and militants alike, to clear out of the hell-hole of Gaza.
The traffic through the tunnels that once served Gaza's smugglers will change directions: where once cigarettes and arms came into Gaza, the likelihood is that soon it will be people passing through those underground passages to leave Gaza and seek a life outside.
If this experiment in human despair works in the small Gaza Strip, its lessons can be applied to much bigger effect in the West Bank ghettoes left behind after convergence. This is how ethnic cleansing looks when it is designed not by butchers in uniforms but by technocrats in suits.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
How many more must die?
July 5, 2006
How Many More Must Die?
And Israel Shall Be Safe Again
By RAMZY BAROUD
The June 25 Palestinian fighters' raid on an Israeli military post near the Gaza-Egypt border has sent Israel "scrambling to defend itself," the voice of a BBC news reporter declared on the evening news.
The report was followed by an unchallenging interview with a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, then another with an Israeli daily newspaper reporter in Washington. No Palestinian voice was heard for days. The two Israelis communicated the same, tired, albeit ominous discourse that seems to understand, thus convey any event based on the misguided assumption that only Israeli lives matter.
There was hardly any international news source in English--including those originating from Middle Eastern Arab countries--that accepted the Palestinian predawn attack on the Israeli military base as a clear act of retaliation and a dignified one at that. After all, Israel has murdered scores of Palestinian civilians in the last few weeks, while Palestinians have refrained from following the same course, instead targeting the same Israeli soldiers who have inflicted untold hurt on the residents of Gaza.
Could it be possible that Middle East arms of major news media have mistakenly overlooked what has been happening in the Gaza Strip since the supposed Israeli withdrawal in September 2005?
It all started with extremely loud sonic booms, mock bombardments and Israeli fighter jets flying low over the overpopulated and impoverished Gaza Strip. Palestinians called on the international community to interfere to stop Israeli provocations. Their calls, as usual, fell on deaf ears.
With such scare tactics, Israel wished to convey to Palestinians a loud and clear message: there is nothing for you to celebrate; were still the masters of your destiny, and unlike the South Lebanon 2000 withdrawal, we are leaving Gaza triumphantly, and possibly just temporarily.
Soon, Israel's mock attacks became more genuine, while the international community continued to turn a blind eye to what would soon become another routine in 'liberated' Gaza. As far the media was concerned, there was hardly much to report, since Hamas, along with other Palestinian factions refused to respond to the provocations with violent retaliation, confining themselves to a unilateral ceasefire they'd reached with PA President Mahmoud Abbas in Cairo earlier.
Fed up the with the Palestinian response--or lack thereof--Israeli officials coupled their scare tactics with menacing, specific threats, with a bottom line that no Palestinian was immune from Israeli targeted assassinations. Indeed, they lived up to their words.
In an interesting turn of events, Hamas won the parliamentary elections in January 2006 in an astounding display of transparency and democratic process. John Hughes of the Christian Science Monitor echoed the mainstream media line that something went horribly wrong in the Middle East and that the "Hamas victory is a setback" to whatever imaginary peace process Hughes knows of.
Comforted by the unconditional support of the US government, Israel's violent intimidation and scare tactics became much more abound. This time however, the Israeli war on the Palestinians became an extension of an international one, led by the United States along with the ever-compliant United Nations and European Union. While Western donors held back their aid to the point of creating a humanitarian catastrophe in the Occupied Territories, the US led a campaign of political coercion--in a rare display of unity between Democrats and Republicans and all of "Israel's friends" in the media.
Western media quickly coined various mantras to justify why ordinary Palestinians must suffer for choosing a parliament in a democratic election: because Hamas refuses to recognize Israel and renounces violence, among other pretexts that seem to fit so well in Israel's political agenda. Top Israeli government advisor Dov Weissglas, optimistic as he had always been, wished to see the humor in starving Palestinians. (The economic siege) "is like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but they won't starve to death."
Apparently Israel was enjoying the show: getting the world to punish an occupied nation while completely losing sight of Israel's colonial expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is the most fitting manifestation of the proverbial dream come true. Of course, Israel can never be content with such limited roles. It was time to turn up the heat one more notch; the sporadic violence was about to be upgraded to intense violence, reaching Palestinian civilians of all ages. In the matter of seven weeks, ending on June 21 with the killing of a pregnant woman, her unborn child and her brother and injuring 14 of the same family--Israel had killed 90 Palestinians, the great majority of whom were civilians. They included the killing of seven members of the same family while picnicking at a beach near the small Gaza town of Beit Lahia on June 9.
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz justified the wanton killing of civilians, along with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as an unintended mistake, vowing to continue to fight 'terrorists' who fire homemade rockets against the neighboring Israeli town of Sderot. In the same period in which 90 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more maimed and wounded, Israeli army radio reported one injury resulting from rocket fire. No other source has confirmed the lone injury claim.
However, Western media, including the BBC, is incessantly determined to equate blowing up Palestinian families with Israeli allegations of Palestinian rocket attacks: it's a tit for tat, or so it seems. It's equally valid, according to ignorant media dictates, to starve a nation because their government's refuses to recognize its military occupier.
The US administration defended the June 9 murder of a Gaza family as an Israeli right to defend itself. BBC International refused to see the Palestinian attack on an Israeli military installation on June 25, as a Palestinian right to self-defense. To the contrary, it was Israel who once again went "scrambling to defend itself". It's unclear how many Palestinians must die before Israel delivers a convincing "blow" to its unruly neighbors, and before life goes back to the way it was intended to be: Palestinians being starved, humiliated and slaughtered at the hands of Israel in their dissolute Gaza ghettos. Only then, shall Israel be safe once more.
Ramzy Baroud teaches mass communication at Curtin University of Technology and is the author of The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle. He is also the editor-in-chief of PalestineChronicle.com. He can be contacted at: editor@palestinechronicle.com
How Many More Must Die?
And Israel Shall Be Safe Again
By RAMZY BAROUD
The June 25 Palestinian fighters' raid on an Israeli military post near the Gaza-Egypt border has sent Israel "scrambling to defend itself," the voice of a BBC news reporter declared on the evening news.
The report was followed by an unchallenging interview with a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, then another with an Israeli daily newspaper reporter in Washington. No Palestinian voice was heard for days. The two Israelis communicated the same, tired, albeit ominous discourse that seems to understand, thus convey any event based on the misguided assumption that only Israeli lives matter.
There was hardly any international news source in English--including those originating from Middle Eastern Arab countries--that accepted the Palestinian predawn attack on the Israeli military base as a clear act of retaliation and a dignified one at that. After all, Israel has murdered scores of Palestinian civilians in the last few weeks, while Palestinians have refrained from following the same course, instead targeting the same Israeli soldiers who have inflicted untold hurt on the residents of Gaza.
Could it be possible that Middle East arms of major news media have mistakenly overlooked what has been happening in the Gaza Strip since the supposed Israeli withdrawal in September 2005?
It all started with extremely loud sonic booms, mock bombardments and Israeli fighter jets flying low over the overpopulated and impoverished Gaza Strip. Palestinians called on the international community to interfere to stop Israeli provocations. Their calls, as usual, fell on deaf ears.
With such scare tactics, Israel wished to convey to Palestinians a loud and clear message: there is nothing for you to celebrate; were still the masters of your destiny, and unlike the South Lebanon 2000 withdrawal, we are leaving Gaza triumphantly, and possibly just temporarily.
Soon, Israel's mock attacks became more genuine, while the international community continued to turn a blind eye to what would soon become another routine in 'liberated' Gaza. As far the media was concerned, there was hardly much to report, since Hamas, along with other Palestinian factions refused to respond to the provocations with violent retaliation, confining themselves to a unilateral ceasefire they'd reached with PA President Mahmoud Abbas in Cairo earlier.
Fed up the with the Palestinian response--or lack thereof--Israeli officials coupled their scare tactics with menacing, specific threats, with a bottom line that no Palestinian was immune from Israeli targeted assassinations. Indeed, they lived up to their words.
In an interesting turn of events, Hamas won the parliamentary elections in January 2006 in an astounding display of transparency and democratic process. John Hughes of the Christian Science Monitor echoed the mainstream media line that something went horribly wrong in the Middle East and that the "Hamas victory is a setback" to whatever imaginary peace process Hughes knows of.
Comforted by the unconditional support of the US government, Israel's violent intimidation and scare tactics became much more abound. This time however, the Israeli war on the Palestinians became an extension of an international one, led by the United States along with the ever-compliant United Nations and European Union. While Western donors held back their aid to the point of creating a humanitarian catastrophe in the Occupied Territories, the US led a campaign of political coercion--in a rare display of unity between Democrats and Republicans and all of "Israel's friends" in the media.
Western media quickly coined various mantras to justify why ordinary Palestinians must suffer for choosing a parliament in a democratic election: because Hamas refuses to recognize Israel and renounces violence, among other pretexts that seem to fit so well in Israel's political agenda. Top Israeli government advisor Dov Weissglas, optimistic as he had always been, wished to see the humor in starving Palestinians. (The economic siege) "is like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but they won't starve to death."
Apparently Israel was enjoying the show: getting the world to punish an occupied nation while completely losing sight of Israel's colonial expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is the most fitting manifestation of the proverbial dream come true. Of course, Israel can never be content with such limited roles. It was time to turn up the heat one more notch; the sporadic violence was about to be upgraded to intense violence, reaching Palestinian civilians of all ages. In the matter of seven weeks, ending on June 21 with the killing of a pregnant woman, her unborn child and her brother and injuring 14 of the same family--Israel had killed 90 Palestinians, the great majority of whom were civilians. They included the killing of seven members of the same family while picnicking at a beach near the small Gaza town of Beit Lahia on June 9.
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz justified the wanton killing of civilians, along with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as an unintended mistake, vowing to continue to fight 'terrorists' who fire homemade rockets against the neighboring Israeli town of Sderot. In the same period in which 90 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more maimed and wounded, Israeli army radio reported one injury resulting from rocket fire. No other source has confirmed the lone injury claim.
However, Western media, including the BBC, is incessantly determined to equate blowing up Palestinian families with Israeli allegations of Palestinian rocket attacks: it's a tit for tat, or so it seems. It's equally valid, according to ignorant media dictates, to starve a nation because their government's refuses to recognize its military occupier.
The US administration defended the June 9 murder of a Gaza family as an Israeli right to defend itself. BBC International refused to see the Palestinian attack on an Israeli military installation on June 25, as a Palestinian right to self-defense. To the contrary, it was Israel who once again went "scrambling to defend itself". It's unclear how many Palestinians must die before Israel delivers a convincing "blow" to its unruly neighbors, and before life goes back to the way it was intended to be: Palestinians being starved, humiliated and slaughtered at the hands of Israel in their dissolute Gaza ghettos. Only then, shall Israel be safe once more.
Ramzy Baroud teaches mass communication at Curtin University of Technology and is the author of The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle. He is also the editor-in-chief of PalestineChronicle.com. He can be contacted at: editor@palestinechronicle.com
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