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- 3 sept 2010
Israel and Palestine: A true one-state solution
"Where is the Palestinian Mandela?" pundits occasionally ask. But after these latest Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Washington fail -- as they inevitably will -- the more pressing question may be: "Where is the Israeli de Klerk?" Will an Israeli leader emerge with the former South African president's moral courage and foresight to dismantle a discriminatory regime and foster democracy based on equal rights?
For decades, the international community has assumed that historic Palestine must be divided between Jews and Palestinians. Yet no satisfactory division of the land has been reached. Israel has aggravated the problem by settling roughly 500,000 Jews in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, eliminating the land base for a viable Palestinian state.
A de facto one-state reality has emerged, with Israel effectively ruling virtually all of the former Palestine. Yet only Jews enjoy full rights in this functionally unitary political system. In contrast, Palestinian citizens of Israel endure more than 35 laws that explicitly privilege Jews as well as policies that deliberately marginalize them. West Bank Palestinians cannot drive on roads built for Israeli settlers, while Palestinians in Gaza watch as their children's intellectual and physical growth are stunted by an Israeli siege that has limited educational opportunities and deepened poverty to acute levels.
Palestinian refugees have lived in exile for 62 years, their right to return to their homes denied, while Jews from anywhere can freely immigrate to Israel.
Israeli leaders Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have admitted that permanent Israeli rule over disenfranchised Palestinians would be tantamount to apartheid. Other observers, including former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have said that apartheid has already taken root in the region.
Clearly, Palestinians and Israeli Jews will continue to live together. The question is: under what terms? Palestinians will no more accept permanent subordination than would any other people.
The answer is for Israelis and Palestinians to formalize their de facto one-state reality but on principles of equal rights rather than ethnic privilege. A carefully crafted multiyear transition including mechanisms for reconciliation would be mandatory. Israel/Palestine should have a secular, bilingual government elected on the basis of one person, one vote as well as strong constitutional guarantees of equality and protection of minorities, bolstered by international guarantees. Immigration should follow nondiscriminatory criteria. Civil marriage between members of different ethnic or religious groups should be permitted. Citizens should be free to reside in any part of the country, and public symbols, education and holidays should reflect the population's diversity.
Although the one-state option is sometimes dismissed as utopian, it overcomes major obstacles bedeviling the two-state solution. Borders need not be drawn, Jerusalem would remain undivided and Jewish settlers could stay in the West Bank. Moreover, a single state could better accommodate the return of Palestinian refugees. A state based on principles of equality and inclusion would be more morally compelling than two states based on narrow ethnic nationalism. Furthermore, it would be more consistent with antidiscrimination provisions of international law. Israelis would enjoy the international acceptance that has long eluded them and the associated benefits of friendship, commerce and travel in the Arab world.
The main obstacle to a single-state solution is the belief that Israel must be a Jewish state. Jim Crow laws and South African apartheid were similarly entrenched virtually until the eves of their demise. History suggests that no version of ethnic privilege can ultimately persist in a multiethnic society.
Israeli perspectives are already beginning to shift, most intriguingly among right-wing leaders. Former defense minister Moshe Arens recently proposed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israel annex the West Bank and offer its residents citizenship. Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin and Likud parliamentarian Tzipi Hotovely have also supported citizenship for West Bank Palestinians, according to the Haaretz. In July, Hotovely said of the Israeli government's policies of separation: "The result is a solution that perpetuates the conflict and turns us from occupiers into perpetrators of massacres, to put it bluntly."
Is one of these politicians the Israeli de Klerk? That remains to be seen. Gaza is pointedly excluded from the Israeli right's annexation debate. They still envision a Jewish state, simply one with a larger Palestinian minority. But their challenge to the two-state orthodoxy, which empirical experience has proven unrealistic, is healthy.
If Americans aspire to more than managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via perpetual and inconclusive negotiations, we should applaud this emerging discussion. Having overcome our own institutionalized racial discrimination, we can model the virtues of a vibrant, multicultural society based on equal rights. President Obama, moreover, would be a fitting emissary for this vital message.
The writer is a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestinian Studies.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/02/AR2010090204665.html
1 oct 2010
What unity could look like - S. C. Yuter
Unity between Palestinian factions has remained elusive, but as peace talks falter and the Arab League mulls the idea of bringing the Palestinian issue to the UN Security Council, reconciliation becomes more and more essential in the creation of a viable Palestinian state.
While most unity agreements involve the collapse of the Hamas government in Gaza and its amalgamation into a West Bank PA framework, increasing criticism of the PLO, as unrepresentative and biased, give credence to new ideas that recognize the legitemacy of Hamas as a ruling party elected by the Palestinian people, but bring the government into an international fold by extending a 10-year hudna, or truce, to Israel, under the umbrella of which sides could develop trust and end the siege on Gaza.
Hamas and Fatah would have to agree on the 10-year truce, under which Hamas would continue to govern and police the Gaza Strip, and Fatah the West Bank via the Palestinian Authority.
Hamas truce would include a moratorium on violence, provisional respect for agreements reached between Israel and the PLO, and temporary recognition for Israel's right to exist. At the same time Fatah and the Palestinian Authority would agree to amend all relevant documents of the PLO to admit Hamas as a member of the PLO for the 10-year period. In all governing bodies, Hamas would be granted rights equal to those of Fatah.
Political and economic incentives for the agreement would come from the international community in the form of a treaty, which would see a port opened in Gaza City, effectively ending the siege on Gaza and promoting peaceful business coexistence among Hamas, Fatah and Israel during the 10-year truce.
The treaty, creating a Middle East Free Trade Area , would include a free port in Gaza controlled by the administering and policing US-led Multinational Force and Observers - which already supervise Egypt-Israel peace in the Sinai - to securely import and export goods and people between Gaza and the world. Getting goods to and from the Gaza Strip would necessitate a below-ground road connecting the free port to the West Bank.
Including unity in the creation of the port, the treaty would mandate an equal sharing between Hamas and Fatah of port jobs and business sites.
The Reconciliation Agreement also provides that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority cooperate in promptly building the below-ground road between the West Bank and the MEFTA port.
Once the mechanisms for unity were in place, Hamas would agree to release all Fatah political prisoners and vice versa, while the PA would agree to process pending passport requests from all Gaza Strip residents, and a gradual settling of accounts from the electricity and medical sectors would be negotiated. Disputes would me mediated by the MFO, Egypt and Jordan.
As the truce progresses, Fatah and Hamas agree to adopt the language of dialogue as the sole basis for solving political disagreements in the Palestinian arena, to stress the principle of political partnership on the basis of political pluralism and to prevent the shedding of Palestinian blood, especially with respect to both doing business in the port.
Negotiations among Hamas, Fatah, the PLO, the MFO and Israel for a port treaty could be led by the European Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton. In fact, similar proposals for the opening of a port in Gaza under niternational supervision remain under consideration by the EU.
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said about the conditions in the Strip, that "the economic problem of Gaza . . . cannot be solved without direct negotiations with Hamas," so the proposal would have the EU would conduct direct the port treaty negotiations with both Hamas and Fatah as well as Israel and the MFO to provide a decent economic future with a great many secure jobs for Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinians and Israelis need not negotiate with each other.
Once Gaza is open to the world, an additional condition of the truce could be applied, that Gaza has the right to accept the return of Palestinian refugees into its borders.
The treaty governing the port, established under the agreement of a 10-year truce, and signed by the PLO (including Hamas), Israel and the MFO, provides for normal business relations between Hamas and Israel, especially in tourism and manufacturing.
Hamas officials recently called on international societies to work on saving tourism in Gaza. In an effort to draw visitors from across the Mediterranean and beyond, all hotels, restaurants, bars and shops would be duty and tax free.
The Reconciliation Agreement is only among Hamas, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority and the PLO, jointly "the parties" and the future government of Palestine.
Under the treaty, the parties lease to the MFO a 7-square-kilometers area along the coast between Deir Al-Balah and the former Gush Katif settlement to establish and administer a the port for a period of 35 years. The lease would automatically be renewed for successive 15-year periods unless Palestine, for any reason, terminates the lease on five years' written notice.
Notwithstanding the 35-year lease, Hamas would only be asked to agree to the lease for a 10-year period, and would reserve the right to resume the armed struggle providing a referendum at the end of the 10-year period of all voting Gaza residents.
A key provision of the treaty would be that Hamas undertakes to exert its best efforts in Gaza to block any Gaza leaders from violently opposing the treaty.
Under the treaty, in payment for the lease, the MFO would pay to Hamas and Fatah each ten percent of all rentals paid by acceding parties to the treaty for land site leases for such parties and their companies they designate to construct buildings in the port at their own expense with an internationally guaranteed initial 35-year term.
All nonexecutive labor selectively chosen by land site lessees for employment in the port would have to be Palestinians, approved half by Hamas and half by Fatah.
Under the Treaty, the MFO would ensure equal treatment in at the port to Palestine and Israel. In particular, the MFO international police force would include equal numbers of former Palestinian police (half appointed by Hamas and half appointed by Fatah) and former Israeli police in addition to MFO nations' police and police of Egypt and Jordan.
The cost of the initial public infrastructure of the port, including a $250-million power/desalination plant and a $200 million sunken four-lane road to the West Bank, could reach $1 billion. Two thirds of this (some $7.4 billion) would be from aid pledged to the Palestinians at the 17 December 2007 donor's conference in Paris. After the construction of the initial public infrastructure, the port would be financed solely by land site rentals.
In 2003, shortly before Israel's unilateral pullout from Gaza under the Sharon government, MEFTA was deemed of great interest by the by Israeli leaders, setting a precedent that could allow the the Netanyahu government to welcome a plan, subject to the return of captuerd Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Under the treaty, the MFO would promptly begin construction of the port infrastructure and the sunken road starting with a barge-accessible harbor quickly constructed by the Mefta-construction-supervising US Army Corps of Engineers to bring in building materials from Egypt and Israel. The construction of the sunken road and Port Mefta infrastructure - comprising the power/desalination plant and the administrative and commercial buildings including hotels and factories - requires every construction worker local Palestinians can muster since nonexecutive labor must be Palestinian.
The West Bank would remain under Fatah control and in business job-sharing unity with Hamas in Gaza. An economically-thriving West Bank would benefit, with workers, merchants and products traveling via a temporary Israeli safe route in Israeli-guarded convoys to a booming Gaza. At the same time workers would benefit from jobs in creating the sunken road.
The quality of life of West Bankers would improve with freer movement there and to Gaza and, like Gazans, to the rest of the world. The sunken road would be completed on a two-year timetable.
If successful after the first three years, the port would expand to an MFO-administered Gaza zone, adding the former Gush Katif area (except Morag where high rise apartments are planned for Palestinians) comprising 20% of the Strip. Hamas-controlled Gaza would book economically in the remaining 80% of the Strip, which would become the Hamas-governed Gaza Province of a future federal Palestinian State.
The Gaza MEFTA would remain a combined duty- and tax-free Singapore, Las Vegas and Riviera with ample affordable power and desalinated water using cheap gas off the Gaza coast. Full employment for Gaza's local workers would be provided by Hamas in Gaza and especially the construction of Gaza MEFTA infrastructure plus manning the administrative buildings, consulates, power/desalination plant, hotels, factories, casinos and duty- and tax-free shops. After full employment for Gaza's local workers there is a return to Gaza of needed Gaza refugee workers and their families.
S. C. Yuter is author of New U.S. Foreign Policy; Middle East Free Trade Area (Mefta) Will Bring Business Peace to Israel and Palestine (2008, www.cheapoilbook.com).
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=319719 3 oct 2010, 07:25 , Respect -
Maria 2 oct 2010
Palestinians need a commission of truth
There are portents of reconciliation in the air, and Palestinians and their friends and allies are quite optimistic that Fatah and Hamas may finally be on their way to close one of the saddest chapters in our recent history.
Needless to say, the national rift which emanated from manifestly treacherous efforts by American-backed elements within the Fatah movement to effectively undo the outcome of the 2006 elections, which Hamas won decisively, wreaked havoc on the Palestinian cause and thoroughly poisoned inter-Palestinian relations to an extent never seen before.
We all know how the former Bush administration utilized the bribable and buyable elements within Fatah to carry out a bloody coup aimed at decapitating Hamas once and for all in the Gaza Strip. Which eventually forced Hamas to do what it did in July, 2007?
Likewise, and looking retrospectively, one might safely claim that had the Fatah leadership refused American and Israeli solicitations and incitement, the Palestinian arena would have been spared the hateful ramifications of the rift.
I know for sure that Hamas didn't enjoy the so-called "victory" over Fatah three years ago. In the final analysis, a victory against one's brother and countryman is not a real victory; it was rather a real defeat for both Hamas and Fatah and the entire Palestinian people and its just cause.
None the less, what could Hamas have done, watching treacherous elements, enjoying Israeli and American backing, sharpen their swords and daggers, and preparing their guns to gang up on Hamas in order to consign the movement into oblivion.
Hamas had to defend itself and thwart criminal American designs to eliminate every anti-Zionist and revolutionary Islamic movement in the context of its ill-conceived "global war on terror."
The ensuing propaganda war on Hamas effectively turned the white into black and the big lie into a "truth" glorified by many. Hamas was caricatured as the main party under the sun that impeded the achievement of peace in the Middle East. Zionist spin doctors would disseminate their poisoned lies in Europe and North America, claiming that if only Hamas didn't exist, Israel and Fatah would make peace in a matter of a few weeks. The lies continue unabated and are unlikely to subside soon. After all, mendacity has always been a key component of the American-Israeli discourse toward the Palestinians.
Unfortunately, Fatah and bankrupt Arab regimes played an effective role in disseminating these lies as international Zionism was using Hamas as a sort of a red herring to justify murderous Israeli hegemony and criminality against the Palestinian people.
It is somewhat reassuring that many people within Fatah have realized, though belatedly, that America and Israel and their monies and nice words will not advance the Palestinian cause even one millimeter.
The opposite is true. Fatah, or more correctly the Fatah leadership, has done every conceivable act of treachery in order to obtain a certificate of good conduct from America and Israel. Fatah detained and imprisoned Palestinians by the thousands. Fatah tortured and killed and humiliated Palestinians, with Fatah security leaders going as far as assuring their Israeli "counterparts" that Israel was no longer the enemy and that the real enemy was Hamas.
Fortunately, the Fatah leaders in Ramalalh have discovered before it is too late that no mater how deep they sink in the sea of treason, and how virulently anti-Hamas their general discourse becomes, America and Israel will not give them a state or even a semi-state. After all, both Israel and the US don't really seek peace partners but seek collaborators and slaves and puppets.
None the less, the Palestinian people must learn the necessary lessons from what happened. This is because we are bound to repeat the same blunders over and over again, including the bloody mistakes, if we fail to draw the necessary lessons from the dark periods that followed the 2006 elections.
To begin with, and while we should refrain as much as possible from finger-pointing and futile mutual recriminations, the Palestinian people need to create a commission of truth, not to malign and criminalize those responsible for what happened, but rather in order to establish the truth. Know the Truth, for the truth shall set you free.
The Palestinian people have the right to know what was happening during these secret meetings between American and Israeli officials on the one hand, and Fatah officials on the other hand.
The Palestinian people need to know the amount of coordination against Hamas involving Fatah, especially with regard to the perpetuation of the criminal siege on the Gaza Strip as well as the Nazi-like Israeli onslaught against the coastal enclave nearly two years ago which destroyed much of the Strip and killed or caused the death of thousands of innocent people.
I know that "explosive chapters" ought to remain closed and unhealed wounds must be given more time to heal. However, it is also important not to decapitate the truth in the name of national reconciliation.
Again, the purpose of a grand commission of truth, whose members would have to be carefully chosen from among the crème de la crème of the Palestinian intellectuals, people with high rectitude and sense of justice, wouldn't be to erect a Guillotine in the streets of the West Bank and Gaza to execute the guilty.
The purpose of such a commission would be to establish the truth, nothing more and nothing less.
More over, while we can't bring those who were unjustly killed back to life, we are supposed to be able to give justice, as much as possible, to those unjustifiably wronged by both sides.
Blood money is an effective mechanism stipulated by the Islamic Sharia whereby people wrongly killed or injured can receive monetary compensation. The compensation itself will not revive the dead, but it does help their families lead a dignified life and above all gives them a feeling that at least a semblance of justice has finally been done. In the final analysis, God will be the ultimate judge, and whoever escapes justice in this world will not escape justice in the hereafter.
Another point which must be carefully discussed and resolved in order to give national reconciliation a real meaning. Following Hamas's military intervention in Gaza in the summer of 2007, the Fatah authority in the West Bank carried out a real inquisition whose purpose was to eradicate Hamas as much as possible.
All Islamic social, religious, educational, athletic, medical, and youth institutions were systematically closed or seized by Fatah. The draconian measures must be reversed if national reconciliation is to take root and be irreversible.
Second, thousands of people, suspected of affiliation with Hamas, have been summarily dismissed from their jobs. These wronged people must be reinstated in their previous jobs immediately.
Finally, the police-state structure, now permeating throughout the West Bank, must be immediately terminated, because there can be no genuine national reconciliation in the shadow of police brutality and suppression of human rights and civil liberties.
In short, the Palestinian people want and need a real national reconciliation, not a short-lasting truce.
By Khalid Amayreh
http://bit.ly/cKsZIg 5 oct 2010, 01:19 , Respect -
Maria 4 oct 2010
This is Keith Dayton's Fatah's fiefdom
By Khalid Amayreh
The United States and to a lesser extent Europe never stop praising the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) regime. Indeed, upon hearing the never-ending commendations of the Ramallah Junta, one would think that "the police-state without a state" is a paragon of good governance, democracy and all that is good.
One would also think that there is an active and exemplary justice system that respects human rights and civil liberties, a system that doesn't discriminate against citizens on the basis of creed, sex and political orientation.
However, the shocking truth is that the Ramallah regime is none of that. It is rather a police state apparatus whose main function is mainly confined to persecuting and tormenting Palestinian citizens deemed "non-conformist." And as we all understand, this repression is done on Israel's behalf and in order to obtain a certificate of good conduct from the evil occupiers.
A few days ago, I received a message from Palestinian lawmaker Nasser Abdul Jawwad from the Salfit region, describing how the PA security agencies have been tormenting and punishing people for their ideological views.
In the message, Abdul Jawad, an honest man of unquestionable credentials, pointed out that a poor woman whose husband had been fired from the local Police apparatus because he looked too religious (for frequenting the mosques for prayer) applied for the petty job of selling falafel at the local girls' school. The school's principal agreed, but demanded that the woman receive a "security clearance" from three agencies: The police, the Preventive Security, and the Mukhabarat or General Intelligence. The unsuspecting woman applied for a "certificate of good conduct" thinking that the matter was only routine and procedural in nature and that she had nothing to worry about anyway, given her clean record.
A few days later, however, she was summoned for an "interview' at the Mukhabarat's regional headquarters in Salfit. There, she was told that she couldn't obtain a certificate of good conduct since she had voted for an Islamic-oriented candidate in the 2006 elections. She argued that selling Falafel had nothing to do with her political preferences and that she had an absolute right to obtain a certificate of good conduct in order to find a job and be able to support her family. So after selling Falafel for a trial period for 21 days at the local school, she had to leave her short-lasting job which she did on 28 September.
It was not clear if the Mukhabarat apparatus asked the woman to "work" with them as an informer. The various security agencies have consistently taken advantage of the Palestinian people's severe economic condition to recruit thousands of people all over the West Bank to work as "mandoobeen" or agents to inform on people who might criticize the PA or show signs of opposition to the Ramallah junta.
Hence, every conceivable institution in the West Bank, including schools, colleges, and hospitals, has been thoroughly implanted with informers. Just imagine a situation where a school teacher is made to spy on his colleagues, or an office clerk is made to inform on his or her fellow clerk. Imagine college professors and lecturers always worried that one of their students or even colleagues might inform on them to the security agencies in case they said something that might be interpreted "differently" during their lectures.
Well, this is how the Keith Dayton's republic is trying to foster freedom of thought and expression in occupied Palestine. This must be a promising preview of the Palestinian state that Abbas and cohorts are trying to create. !!!! May God help the Palestinians.
Going back to that poor woman, Abdul Jawwad reminded us that her husband, a policeman for ten years, was unceremoniously fired from his job and jailed for four months, during which he reportedly was subjected to cruel torture, for no reason other than being a religious man.
Like his wife, the former policeman reportedly was accused of having voted for a candidate affiliated with the "wrong" political party in 2006. Eventually, he was fired from his job because, according to the police, "he didn't enjoy good reputation." To add insult to injury, the now unemployed and impoverished former policeman is yet to receive his benefits from the police where he worked for ten years.
Now, one is prompted to ask what kind of a state or quasi-state or political entity would treat its citizens this way? Are Palestinian citizens supposed to work as collaborators and informers for Israel in order to please the Dayton republic? Must they work in Jewish settlements in order to be good citizens? Surely, the answer is the responsibility of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyadh.
Needless to say, this poor and modest family is only a random epitome caricaturing the general situation facing thousands if not tens of thousands of Palestinian families. Moreover, one exaggerates very little by suggesting that this case represents more or less the modus operandi at most if not all the private and public institutions operating under the Dayton regime in Ramalalh.
More to the point, if selling falafel sandwiches at a girls' school in the heart of the Palestinian countryside requires all these KGB-style calculations, including summoning dignified housewives to the offices of the security agencies, just imagine how the "procedure" of appointing high-ranking civil servants would look like.
In short, the problem under this hateful regime goes far beyond the dismissal of thousands of civil servants, including teachers, doctors, and engineers from their jobs because of their political views or association with the "wrong people", but also include the sullen hostility shown toward hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are suspected of supporting Hamas and other Islamic organizations.
This is a message of paramount significance to the Hamas and Fatah officials who are going to meet in Damascus in a few days to iron out a possible national reconciliation agreement.
A successful national reconciliation can't be achieved without putting all these despicable acts, done by an entity that has shown no respect for its own citizens, in the dustbin of history. Otherwise, the goal of true national reconciliation would remain as elusive and as distant as ever.
http://bit.ly/az1vEX 13 oct 2010, 02:42 , Respect -
Maria 6 oct 2010
BAKER: Israel needs to stop playing the victim
The Palestinians are constantly being accused of playing the victim, an unflattering role by any standards. Many Palestinians would agree that we do not want to be portrayed as the victim so as not to delegitimize our argument or weaken our point. Not that we don't have ample reason to call ourselves victims in the face of Israel's oppressive occupying machine. However, putting yourself in this category necessarily means you are accepting a much weaker starting point than your opponent, a position that begs sympathy rather than rational and valid support.
Ironically, Israelis, who themselves often accuse us of this tactic, are even more guilty of it. Actually, their perceived victimization is what they thrive on. What is so baffling is how the same unbecoming tactic works so well for them.
Take for example, the recent trial and conviction of two Israeli soldiers accused of using a nine-year old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the 2008-2009 Gaza war. The soldiers had apparently made the boy open bags they believed may contain explosives, something which the boy's family says has traumatized their son ever since.
Outside the courtroom, the soldiers army buddies stood in staunch support of their comrades wearing T-shirts with these words embossed on them: We are all Goldstone's victims, in reference to the famed Richard Goldstone Report on the Gaza war, which accused Israel of war crimes. Using civilians as human shields especially children is one of them. The fact that their army friends forced a young child with no choice but to obey in such a horrible situation was not an issue for them. What they were more concerned with was the perceived injustice they had been done by Goldstone in his report. Israel was, after all, defending itself when it went in and killed nearly 1,500 people in the course of three weeks. Making a small boy open a bag they (and he no doubt) believed was rigged with explosives was surely an act of defense against Hamas rockets, right?
Unfortunately, this is hardly the only victim card Israel plays to the world. Everyone understands by now the ultimate victim role played by Israel: that of the Holocaust. It shuts people up, weighs heavily on the consciences of those who still feel pangs of guilt because of it and basically offers Israel a carte blanche for existing both as its own state and as an occupying power. Where else could the Jews have gone after their persecution in WWII? No matter that in granting the victimized Jews a homeland, the world was thus creating a new, fresher victimized nation that had absolutely nothing to do with the Jewish tragedy.
Little exploitations or littler than what Norman Finkelstein calls the Holocaust Industry occur all the time. Israelis portray themselves as a democratic and peaceful nation in a sea of Arab hostility. Their security is so extensive because they are under constant threat of terrorist attacks, both inside the country (by the Palestinians) and outside its borders. Israel is victimized by its terrorist neighbors, the Palestinians, by the looming threat of Iran and by the threat of anti-Semitism worldwide. All in all, Israelis have covered just about every base possible, even turning the situation around whereby victimizer becomes the victim, much like in the case of the Goldstone T-shirts.
Israel could very well be left to its own devices if it were not for the world the United States in particular falling prey to the propaganda time and again, thus casting the Palestinians in an unfavorable light. Israel has consistently insisted that its security comes first, trumping any peace deals or settlement with the Palestinians. This twisted logic has been forced down the world's throat for so long it is no longer even questioned. That has put the Palestinians at a constant disadvantage where they are forced to counter claims that they threaten Israel's security while watching how Israel creates oppressive facts on the ground in its name.
At the end of the day, this is what we know: Israel continues to occupy the Palestinians and their land, it continues to expand illegal settlements and it continues to maintain the self-granted prerogative to bomb, arrest, kill and harass Palestinians at will. In the meantime, the Palestinians continually find themselves on the defensive, having to counter this lopsided image of Israel as the victims (of Palestinians but also of history) at every turn. Palestinians certainly do not want to be seen only as the victims. At the same time, they also do not want to be forced to defend themselves against Israel's self portrayal as the true victim in this conflict.
It is time the smokescreen was lifted. No fair solution can ever be reached if the parties are not on fair ground. All that is required is for the powers that be to call a spade a spade. The Palestinians have their problems and they are responsible for fixing them. Israel, however, cannot be allowed to continue milking the whole victim role, especially when it plays the part of the victimizer. Once upon a time, Jews were victimized in the most horrible of ways. But that time has past and we Palestinians should not be made to take the blame.
Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at [email protected].
http://bit.ly/9EAuvX 13 oct 2010, 16:38 , Respect -
Maria 12 oct 2010
His father's boy: the three faces of Binyamin Netanyahu
* Bibi the weakling, the invertebrate, who always gives in to pressure, who zigzags to the left and to the right, depending on whether the pressure comes from the US or from his coalition partners?
* The tricky Likud chief, who is afraid that Avigdor Ivett Lieberman might succeed in pushing him towards the centre and displace him as the leader of the entire right?
* Netanyahu, the man of principle, who is determined to prevent at any cost the setting up of the State of Palestine, and is therefore using every possible ruse to sabotage real negotiations?
The real Netanyahu stand up!
Hey, wait a minute, what's going on here? Do I see all three of them rising?
The first Netanyahu: "conman without principles"
The first Netanyahu is the one who meets the eye. A leaf in the wind. The conman without principles and with plenty of tricks, whose sole aim is to survive in power.
This Netanyahu practically invites pressure on himself.
Barack Obama pressured him, so he agreed to the settlement freeze or the perceived settlement freeze. In order to avoid a crisis with the settlers, he promised them that after the agreed 10 months, the construction boom would be resumed with full vigour.
The settlers pressured him, and he did indeed resume the building at the appointed time, in spite of the intense pressure from Obama, who pushed for an extension of the moratorium for another two months. Why two months? Because the congressional elections take place on 2 November, and Obama desperately needs to avoid a crisis with the Jewish establishment before that. To this end, he is ready to sell Netanyahu the whole inventory arms, money, political support, a set of guarantees about the outcome of the negotiations that have not yet even begun. Sixty days! sixty days! my kingdom for sixty days!
Netanyahu is now zigzagging between these pressures, trying to find out which is the stronger, which one to give in to, how much and when. In his dreams he probably feels like the Baron von Munchhausen, who found himself on a narrow path, with a lion behind him getting ready to spring and a crocodile in front of him opening its awesome jaws. (If I remember right, the baron ducked and the lion jumped straight into the jaws of the reptile.)
This is the great hope of Netanyahu. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will help to deliver Obama a crushing defeat in the elections, Obama will deliver a crushing blow to the settlers, and Baron von Netanyahu will rub his hands and survive to fight another day.
Is this the real Netanyahu? For sure.
The second Netanyahu: the trickster
But the second Netanyahu is no less real. This is Tricky Bibi who is trying to out-fox Tricky Ivett [Lieberman].
Lieberman astounded the UN General Assembly, when, as the foreign minister of Israel, he addressed this august body from the rostrum.
Because our foreign minister did not rise to defend the policies of his country, as did his colourless colleagues. Quite the opposite: from the UN rostrum he vigorously attacked the policy of his own government, giving it short shrift.
The official policy of the government of Israel is to conduct direct negotiations with the Palestinian leadership, in order to achieve a final peace treaty within one year.
Nonsense, said the foreign minister of that same government. Rubbish. There is no chance at all of a peace treaty, not within a year and not within a hundred years. What's needed is a long-term interim agreement. In other words, the continuation of the occupation without time limits.
Why did Lieberman give this performance? He was not addressing the few delegates who had remained in the UN assembly hall, but the Israeli public. He challenged Netanyahu: either dismiss me or pretend that the spittle on your face is rain.
But Netanyahu did not dismiss and did not react, except for a weak statement that Lieberman was not expressing his views. And this why? Clearly, if Netanyahu were to kick Lieberman's party out of the government and bring in Tzipi Livni's Kadima Party, Lieberman would do to Netanyahu what Netanyahu did to Yitzhak Rabin. He would declare him a traitor selling out the fatherland, an enemy of the settlements. His devotees would parade around with posters of Netanyahu in SS uniform or wearing a keffiyeh, [Arab head dress] while others performed arcane Kabbalah rituals to bring about his death.
Lieberman would raise the flag of the right, split the Likud and take sole possession of the entire Israeli right. He believes that this is the way to become prime minister.
Netanyahu understands this perfectly. That's why he is restraining himself. As a man who grew up in the United States he probably remembers what Lyndon Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover: better to have him inside the tent pissing out, then outside the tent pissing in.
And perhaps this Netanyahu the second one does not really object to the plan outlined by Lieberman at the UN assembly.
The foreign minister was not content with rejecting peace and bringing up the idea of the long-term interim agreement. He described the solution he has in mind. Not surprisingly, it is the electoral platform of his party, Israel Beytenu ("Israel Our Home"). In essence: Israel, the "Nation-State-Of-The-Jewish-People", will be free of Arabs, or, translated into German, Araberrein.
But Lieberman is a humane person, and does not advocate (at least in public) ethnic cleansing. He does not propose a third Nakba (after the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe and the 1967 expulsion). No, his solution is far more creative: he will separate from Israel the Arab towns and villages along the eastern border, the so-called "triangle", from Umm al-Fahm in the north to Kafr Kassem in the south This area, together with its inhabitants and lands, would be joined to the territory of the Palestinian Authority, and in return Israel would annex the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
That raises, of course, several questions. First, what about the Arab concentrations in Galilee, which include dozens of villages, towns like Nazareth and Shefa Amr, and the Arab population in the mixed towns, Haifa and Acre? Lieberman does not propose to transfer them too. Nor does he propose to give up East Jerusalem, with its quarter of a million Arab residents. If that is the case, is he prepared to leave in the "Nation-State-Of-The-Jewish-People" more than three quarters of a million Arabs? Or does he dream at night, lying in his bed, of conducting ethnic cleansing after all?
A second question: to whom will he transfer the Arab towns and villages of the triangle"? Without a peace treaty, there will be no Palestinian state. Instead, there will remain the Palestinian Authority, with its few small enclaves all subject to Israeli occupation. The long-term interim agreement would leave this situation, more or less, intact. Meaning that this area, now part of Israel, would become a territory under Israeli occupation. Its inhabitants would lose their status as Israeli citizens and become an occupied population, devoid of civil rights and human rights.
As far as is known, not a singe Arab leader in Israel agrees to that. Even in the past, when it seemed that Lieberman agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state and wanted to transfer to it the Arab areas of Israel, not a single Arab leader in Israel agreed. The Arab citizens of Israel, a population approaching a million and a half, are indeed a part of the Palestinian people, but they are also a part of the Israeli population.
Netanyahu is certainly afraid of Lieberman, but can it be that he did not condemn Lieberman's UN speech because he secretly shares his views?
In any case, this week Netanyahu announced that he is adopting Lieberman's baby, the demand that non-Jewish (meaning Arab) people who wish to obtain Israeli citizenship swear allegiance not just to the State of Israel and its laws, as is usual, but to "Israel as a Jewish and democratic state". This is a nonsensical and meaningless addition, solely devised to provoke the 20 per cent of Israelis who are Arabs. One might as well demand candidates for US citizenship swear allegiance to the "United States as a white Anglo-Saxon Christian and democratic nation".
But it is quite possible that there is a third Netanyahu, who stands taller than the others.
The third Netanyahu: advocate of Greater Israel
This is the Netanyahu who always believed in a Greater Israel, and who has never given up the ideology which he suckled with his mother's milk.
The veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Samet goes further: he believes that Binyamin Netanyahu's main motivation is his total obedience to his old father.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu is now 100 years old, and in full possession of his mental faculties. He is a professor of history, born in Warsaw, who came to Palestine in 1920 and changed his name from Mileikowsky to Netanyahu ("God has Given"). He has always been on the extreme right-wing fringe. Ben-Zion Netanyahu spent several periods of his life in the US, where his three sons grew up. When in 1947 the UN General Assembly adopted the plan to partition Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state, father Netanyahu signed a petition, published in the New York Times, condemning the resolution in the strongest terms. Returning to Israel, he was not accepted into the new Freedom Party (the forerunner of Likud), because his views were too extreme even for Menachem Begin's tastes. He claims that he was barred from a professorship in the Hebrew University because of his opinions, and his bitterness about this poisoned the atmosphere at home.
The professor's special field is Spanish Jewry, with the emphasis on the Spanish Inquisition. He condemns the Jews who were baptized (the Marranos) and says that the great majority of them were eager to be assimilated into Christian Spanish society, contrary to the official heroic myth, which says that they continued to practise the religion of their forefathers in secret.
When Netanyahu the son transferred a part of Hebron to the Palestinian Authority, his father rebuked him and stated publicly that he was unfit for the job of prime minister, fit at most to serve as foreign minister. But the son made a huge effort to remain true to his father's views, and that is the main motivation for his policy. According to Samet, he would not dare to face his father and tell him that he had given away parts of Eretz Israel.
I tend to accept this version. Netanyahu will never agree to be responsible for the establishment of the state of Palestine, will never conduct serious peace negotiations %u2013 unless under extreme duress. That is all there is to it, everything else is hollow talk.
If the real Netanyahu were called to stand up, all three, and perhaps a few more, would rise. But the third one is the most real.
* Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, writer and peace activist.
http://bit.ly/dls8Xx 14 oct 2010, 10:05 , Respect -
Maria 13 oct 2010
Is a Jewish holocaust against the Palestinians in the offing?
Note: This piece was written as Israeli security forces were embarking on a large-scale training exercise to carry out a possible "population exchange," a euphemism for ethnic cleansing of non-Jews.
A few days ago, Dov Lior, the Rabbi of the Jewish colony of Kiryat Arba, called for the annihilation of the people of the city of Nablus. Speaking to fellow settler leaders, Lior addressed one settler leader, telling him "I am sure you can become the mayor of Shchem (Hebrew name of Nabslus) I am sure you will be able to do the job in one month, even one day."
Like most other national-religious rabbis, Lior believes that the Bible condones the mass murder of non-Jewish men, women and children who refuse to submit to the "master race." In 1994, the same rabbi enthusiastically endorsed the massacre of innocent Palestinian worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in downtown Hebron at the hands of an American Jewish Terrorist named Baruch Goldstein, who had immigrated to Israel from the United States. Lior eulogized Goldstein, who was subsequently killed by survivors, calling him a "great hero and saint."
Predictably, Lior has no difficulty "proving" that non-Jews living in Palestine should be given three choices: physical extermination, enslavement as water carriers and wood hewers in the service of the master race, or violent expulsion. He can always go straight to the books of Deuteronomy or Kings or Joshua and select some of the bloodiest verses urging slaughter. He would dutifully avoid other verses that urge fair treatment of "aliens" living in the land!!
Unfortunately, Lior is not rare species. The vast majority of Zionist rabbis in Israel seem to have more to do with the doctrine of Adolph Hitler than with the Ten Commandments.
For example, instead of "thou shall not murder," these Judeo-Nazis teach their gullible students and disciples that what is really meant her is "Don't murder a Jew." As to non-Jews, it is a different matter because their lives have no sanctity. And instead of "thou shall not lie," these sick rabbis teach their followers that not telling the truth is a mitzvah (good deed with which one endears himself to God) if telling the truth would harm Jewish interests or expose a Jewish killer of a goy, a derogatory word for a non-Jew. The same thing applies to the Biblical commandment against theft. In recent days and weeks, dozens of settler rabbis all over the West Bank have told their followers that "stealing Palestinian olive crops was an act of religiosity and piety." Upon hearing these blasphemous edicts, hundreds of "religious" settlers converged on nearby Palestinian olive orchards, stealing the crop in broad daylight. When Palestinian peasants protested, the Hitler Youth-like settlers trained their guns on them. As if that were not enough, the Israeli occupation army sent soldiers to brutalize the Palestinian farmers for "provoking the settlers."
As mentioned above, the settlers and their leaders claim to be performing a religious act by murdering, stealing and lying. However, a fleeting look at their actions and behaviors show that these people are heretical at best and constitute the ultimate moral antithesis of true religion, especially one that is based on justice and fairness.
I am saying these people are murderous and genocidal because mass murder is their only prescription for the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Several months ago, a settler leader named Dalia Weis arrived in Hebron to encourage Gush Emunim settlers to resist army efforts to dislodge them from an Arab building the settlers had seized.
Weis, a fiery speaker who doesn't mince words, addressed the settler squatters, telling them that the only way to deal with "these Palestinians" was by adopting the Biblical methods as "a catalogue for action." Then the middle-aged woman, a former mayor of the settlement of Kedomim in the northern West Bank, started reciting Biblical verses describing genocidal massacres in Biblical times, including the murder of men, women, children and oxen and sheep and not leaving a breathing thing!!
The Israeli government knows perfectly what is happening in the West Bank but ignores settler criminality and barbarianism. The government believes that the settlers are Israel's ultimate sword against the Palestinians; the ultimate tool of ethnic cleansing against the Arabs.
Sometimes, a few settlers are arrested, but the arrest is mostly disingenuous and is done to elude and deceive the international public opinion into thinking that Israel is still a democratic state where the authority of the law is still supreme.
Well, but what kind of law is that whose authority must be respected? The Nazis, too, had a law, but it was a kind of law that legislated fascism and barbarianism. Remember, some of the world's most barbarian crimes were committed under the rubric of the law.
Today, Israel is doing more or less the same thing, legislating fascism and enabling these mad dogs to violate every conceivable aspect of justice and morality under the sun, all in the name of Jewish national fulfillment.
Seven decades ago, the Third Reich sought German national fulfillment. We all know the rest of the story.
Now, a completely arrogant Israel, which has come to control American politics and policies, is trying to emulate the Nazis, taking a advantage of Jewish influence on the American media.
To be sure, the matter in Israel goes far beyond a few wild weeds such as Lior and Lieberman. The truth of the matter is the Jewish fascism has become a mainstream in Israel .
Well, what type of a country, let alone one claiming to be a true democracy, would force a segment of its citizens to recognize another segment as the population as "masters" and themselves as "inferior citizens."
It is really sad and lamentable that most Jewish leaders both in Israel and abroad are quite silent about this brazen, whoring fascism now unmasking its ugly face in Israel, the very county the paragons of mendacity and hypocrisy had always wanted us to believe was meant to be a light upon the nations?
Where is the sanctimonious Eli Weisel? Where is the tribal Abraham Foxman, who wouldn't stop invoking morality? Where is Britain 's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who doesn't stop claiming that Judaism stands at the first line of defense for morality and human rights? Where are the hundreds of writers, intellectuals, rabbis and academics and others who would cry out to the seventh heaven whenever the slightest criticism is leveled against Israel and its criminal behaviors?
Where are they?
Jewish leaders rightly claim that the holocaust didn't start with Auschwitz , Bergen Belsen, Mauthausen and other death camps but much earlier with comparatively innocuous acts such as the Nuremburg laws and other racist laws passed by the German authorities.
I have no doubt that Israel is now very much like Germany in the early 1930s. The ascendancy of Kahanist and other fascist and Judeo Nazi parties in Israel can mean one and only thing: that full-fledged Jewish Nazism is a matter of a few years. Some well-meaning people are convinced it is already alive and kicking.
In the final analysis Nazism is Nazism and it doesn't matter if it has a German or Jewish face. I am saying this because a Jewish holocaust against the Palestinian people, who are even more helpless now than European Jewry were in the 1930s and 1940s, wouldn't be any less nefarious or Satanic than the German crimes during WWII.
By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem
http://bit.ly/d9et7H 17 oct 2010, 10:09 , Respect -
Maria 17 oct 2010
Muslims need to counter growing Israeli Nazism, West won't do the job for them
There should be very little doubt as to the direction toward which Israel is moving. Some Israeli cabinet ministers have already declared openly and in broad daylight that Israel is becoming a fascist state. Well since when was Israel not a fascist state? Hasn't Israel been always a state based on ethnic cleansing, land theft and mass lies?
Last week, the Israeli government approved a bill obliging non-Jews aspiring to obtain the Israeli citizenship to give allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state.
Moreover, the Israeli security forces have been making drills to test their ability to control riots in case the state carries out large-scale ethnic cleansing of the Arab community, which constitutes nearly one fourth of the population.
Meanwhile, Israel is making almost daily warnings against regional Muslim states such as Iran. Israeli officials have also tacitly warned Turkey that Israel and its long Masonic tentacles might incite the traditionally anti-Islam Turkish army to carry out a coup against the democratically-elected government.!!
As to Egypt, Zionist circles in the West are already giving funds and covert political support to Coptic separatists who would want to create a Coptic Christian theocracy in Egypt and "end the Arab occupation" by expelling and/or annihilating some 75 million Muslims back to Arabia!!
So, Zionist hands are working everywhere to mutilate the Muslim Middle East. This is happening while some obsequious and primitive Arab regimes are extending invitations to the certified war criminal Shimon Peres to visit their countries. This is really lamentable as the Zionist regime is systematically destroying Arab homes in Jerusalem while our so-called kings and presidents-for-life are responding to Zionist insolence by inviting the criminals to their capitals.
Unfortunately, real conspiracies are being hatched while the corrupt and decadent Egyptian regime is busy tightening the siege on Gaza and arresting members of the Muslim Brothers in order to please and appease Washington and obtain a certificate of good conduct from international Zionism, the ultimate antithesis and enemy of Islam and Muslims.
Some of the stupid Arab regimes in the region think erroneously that stable relations with the United States would guarantee nonaggression from Israel. However, this thinking is naïve and dangerous because Washington is the junior and subservient partner in the Israeli-American alliance. In the final analysis, the Israeli lobbies control American politics and American policies. Moreover, most American politicians, including 99% of senators and congressmen and women effectively work as little whores for Tel Aviv. This is what the elderly American journalist Helen Thomas meant when she said recently that "You can't criticize Israel and survive politically in America."
This means that whatever Israel does or may do in the Middle East, even if it carries out an unprovoked nuclear aggression against another regional state, Washington would react characteristically, uttering some flimsy and meaningless words, like saying "we call on both sides to exercise restraint." What else can we count on a country that makes no distinction between political whoredom and international politics, a country that is willing to murder millions and destroy nations in order to serve its whimsical strategic interests, which it has done and is continuing to do in many places around the world.
Israel is being armed to the teeth, with conventional and non-conventional weapons. Needless to say, the main purpose of this unending military aggrandizement is to subjugate the Arab-Islamic region to Jewish Nazism.
The main Muslim states in the region do have the ability to counter Zionist hegemony and aggression. The problem with some of states, however, is that their military capabilities are not used to counter Israeli hegemony and megalomania but rather to perpetuate autocracies and dynastic dictatorships.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been quoted as saying that Turkey, Iran and Pakistan have a common future. This statement should give some hope to progressive Muslim elements who have a strategic outlook towards the future of this area, where hundreds of millions of Muslims and non-Muslims live, mostly in the shadow of Israel's nuclear arsenal.
Ordinary Muslims in places like Cairo, Damascus and Tehran understand the horror of living with the specter of Israeli nuclear weapons. However, the scandalous thing is that our so-called leaders seem completely out of touch with reality by thinking that their respective states are immune from a possible Zionist holocaust. After all, Israel's nuclear warheads are not directed toward Rome or Athens or even Berlin; they are trained toward Cairo, Damascus and Tehran or probably Beirut and Amman although some regimes in these countries are quite docile and capitulationist.
I am not being phobic and alarmist. During the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, Israel contemplated the use of nuclear weapons against both Egypt and Syria after the Egyptian forces succeeded in overrunning the Bar Lev fortifications. Hence, the possibility of using nuclear weapons by Israel against Muslim states is not as unthinkable as many so-called experts might think.
There are those who might be prompted to think that the US would prevent Israel from embarking on such a fateful act. Again, this is stupid strategic thinking because a country's ultimate survival must never hedge on uncertain and precarious calculations. In the final analysis, the US is a little whore that is tightly controlled by the Jewish lobbies. Didn't Sharon tell Shimon Peres that "We control America and the stupid Americans know it?"
In addition, it is already amply clear that Israel is moving menacingly toward Jewish Nazism. This means that Israel's nuclear arsenal will soon be under the control and at the disposal of Nazi-minded Israeli leaders such as Avigdor Lieberman, and a long list of other Talmudic politicians who think that the annihilation of non-Jews, whose lives have no sanctity in the eyes of the Lord would be a fulfillment of the Lord's will.!!
Of course, Muslims can always shield themselves from a prospective Israeli holocaust or genocide. But everything has a price and the price Muslims, states and peoples, would have to pay in this case is their dignity, sovereignty and freedom. In other words, Muslims, states and peoples, would have to surrender completely to the sages of Zionism and come to terms with their enslavement and servitude vis-à-vis a Nazi Israel that differs very little from the Aryan Third Reich.
We who live under the Israeli occupation know what it means to live under Israeli enslavement. One day, while waiting in a long queue at a checkpoint near Hebron, Israeli soldiers ganged up on a young man because he was smiling. The commanding officer told the young Palestinians: "Don't you know that you are not supposed to smile or laugh and that you should remain sad and depressive-looking?" You see, even a smile was viewed as threat to their security. Did the Nazis behave similarly?
Finally, it is more than clear that Israel doesn't want peace. Israel, which has the ultimate protection of the United States and Europe, has had more than 60 years to make peace, but instead of making peace, it has been busy stealing Arab land, building colonies, and teaching religious students in Yeshivot or religious schools that non-Jews are only human in the outer shape and that they are animals in their very essence.
With its growing global power, and virtual control over the United States, Israel is likely to show off more manifestations of its Nazi nature. And Israel will not give a damn about goy criticisms? Didn't the Israeli foreign minister Lieberman tell the visiting foreign ministers of Franc and Spain in no unmistakable language to "shut up and mind your own business first before preaching to Israel?"
The next time Lieberman or Yeshai might ask foreign dignitaries to obtain a "kashrute" or certificate of purity from Rabbi Ovadia Yosef before they could shake hands with them!!
By Khalid Amayreh
http://bit.ly/9KFusY 23 oct 2010, 01:25 , Respect -
Maria 21 oct 2010
Abbas, alternatives
Successful strategies that produce results require the executor of such strategies to have alternatives. Traditionally, the Palestinian struggle for liberation has tried to use political and military methods as alternatives to each other. So when Palestinians were fighting using violent tactics, they waived the political stream in favour of the military one.
Under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, these two options alternated even though they took different versions. At times the politics was done by proxy, whether by Arab countries or non-PLO Palestinians. The military option also varied, from cross-border attacks on Israeli soldiers to assassinations of Israeli officials and, at various times, a series of attacks against civilians, whether foreigners or Israeli. The latter resulted in Palestinians often being labelled as terrorists.
The first and second Intifadas can be probably classified as military alternatives (even though the first was much less militaristic). So can the rocket attacks from Gaza that started after the Israeli unilateral withdrawal, which was quickly followed by an illegal and crippling Israeli land, air and sea blockade and siege of 1.5 million Palestinians.
Political efforts have included attempts to get the UN to move things, with little result in the form of any binding UN Security Council resolutions, international peace conferences like Madrid and Annapolis, or bilateral and trilateral meetings, such as Oslo, Washington, Wye River and Camp David.
The death of Arafat and the arrival of Mahmoud Abbas onto the political arena brought an end to the difficult exercise of choosing between political and military. Abbas spoke out publicly and enacted policies against what he called the militarisation of the Intifada. He blasted what he called the amateur rockets coming out of Gaza and brought discipline to the lightly armed Palestinian security forces.
Abbas made it clear that he is putting all his eggs in the political basket and pinning his hopes on the US and the international community. Internally, Abbas relinquished day-to-day policies to an able and effective prime minister who was able to reverse the stigma of terrorism on Palestinians, spending time building up the future Palestinian state rather than curse the Israeli occupation.
For some time, it seemed that Abbas strategy was working. The world supported the Palestinian cause and direction, America had a much more pro-active president and the Israeli Likud leader was publicly supporting the two-state solution, with the majority of Israelis behind him.
But the strategy appears to be stumbling, and exactly when Abbas needed a strong and serious alternative to encourage the Israelis to continue on the path of peace, he discovered he has none.
True, at the recent 6th Fateh congress Abbas spoke with conviction about the need to use popular, non-violent struggle as a way to force the Israelis to be honest in the talks. Some Fateh cadres went alone and participated in peaceful marches in Bilin, Nabi Saleh and other locations, but it was not part of a serious, well-thought-out and long-term non-violent strategy. Some of the participants in these popular demonstrations privately joked about how the Fateh leaders come to these events in their brand-ne? jeeps or Mercedes cars and spend a few minutes (enough time for the cameras to document their presence) and then leave.
The arrest of Abbas Zaki, a central committee member of Fateh, on Palm Sunday was unusual, leaving the Israelis and the Fateh leaders confused as to how to end that problem. He was released after several days and given a hero's welcome in Hebron.
Israel's refusal to commit on an extension to the moratorium on settlement activity, and America's inability to make it do so, finally brought home to Abbas the problem of having all his eggs in the political, and the American, baskets.
Seeing the writing on the wall, the Palestinian leader is giving lip service to the fact that he has four alternatives (and possibly a fifth secret one), but in reality his alternatives have no teeth. Abbas will not dissolve the Palestinian Authority and cannot resign because the head of the Palestinian Legislative Council, belonging to Hamas, would legally be in charge for 60 days until elections take place.
Going to the UN with the US veto possibility renders this avenue useless. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's state-building strategy will not be ready until the summer of 2011, and work on the Palestinian airport, which has been planned in areas C under total Israeli control, cannot take place without the approval of the occupier.
In reality, Abbas has very few (if any) choices. So despite the talk about alternatives, the best choice he has is to live in Washington and not return phone calls until after the mid-term elections.
In the meantime, there is no harm in debating the potential alternatives that Palestinians have if the present process continues to falter after the mid-term elections, and after finding a solution to the settlement obstacle.
By Daoud Kuttab
http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=31126&searchFor=israel 25 oct 2010, 03:27 , Respect -
Maria 21 oct 2010
Truth Behind Blockade of Gaza As Revealed by Israel
Due to Gisha's Freedom of Information Act Petition on Gaza Closure:
Israel Reveals Documents related to the Gaza Closure Policy
Þ After 1.5 years of obstruction, today Israel revealed the procedures governing the closure of Gaza and the lists of goods whose entrance was permitted.
Þ The documents reveal a policy of economic strangulation.
Þ The documents show that Israel was guided by considerations of image and public perception, not just security and the rights and needs of Palestinian residents of Gaza.
Thursday, October 21, 2010: After one and a half years in which Israel at first denied their existence and then claimed that revealing them would harm state security, the State of Israel today released three documents that outline its policy for permitting transfer of goods into the Gaza Strip prior to the May 31 flotilla incident. The documents were released due to a Freedom of Information Act petition submitted by Gisha-Legal Center for Freedom of Movement in the Tel Aviv District Court, in which Gisha demanded transparency regarding the Gaza closure policy. Israel still refuses to release the current documents governing the closure policy as amended after the flotilla incident.
Policy of Deliberate Reduction
The documents reveal that the state approved a policy of deliberate reduction for basic goods in the Gaza Strip. Thus, for example, Israel restricted the supply of fuel needed for the power plant, disrupting the supply of electricity and water. The state set a lower warning line to give advance warning of expected shortages in a particular item, but at the same time approved ignoring that warning, if the good in question was subject to a policy of deliberate reduction. Moreover, the state set an upper red line above which even basic humanitarian items could be blocked, even if they were in demand. The state claimed in a cover letter to Gisha that in practice, it had not authorized reduction of basic goods below the lower warning line, but it did not define what these basic goods were.
Luxuries denied for Gaza Strip residents
In violation of international law, which allows Israel to restrict the passage of goods only for concrete security reasons, the decision whether to permit or prohibit an item was also based on the good's public perception and whether it is viewed as a luxury. In other words, items characterized as luxury items would be banned even if they posed no security threat, and even if they were needed. Thus, items such as chocolate and paper were not on the permitted list. In addition, officials were to consider sensitivity to the needs of the international community.
Ban on Reconstructing Gaza
Although government officials have claimed that they will permit the rehabilitation of Gaza, the documents reveal that Israel treated rehabilitation and development of the Gaza Strip as a negative factor in determining whether to allow an item to enter; goods of a rehabilitative character required special permission. Thus, international organizations and Western governments did not receive permits to transfer building materials into Gaza for schools and homes.
Secret List of Goods
The procedures determine that the list of permitted goods will not be released to those not specified! (emphasis in original), ignoring the fact that without transparency, merchants in Gaza could not know what they were permitted to purchase. The list itemized permitted goods only. Items not on the list cumin, for example would require a special procedure for approval, irrespective of any security consideration, at the end of which it would be decided whether to let it in or not.
According to Gisha Director Sari Bashi: Instead of considering security concerns, on the one hand, and the rights and needs of civilians living in Gaza, on the other, Israel banned glucose for biscuits and the fuel needed for regular supply of electricity paralyzing normal life in Gaza and impairing the moral character of the State of Israel. I am sorry to say that major elements of this policy are still in place.
http://bit.ly/a5WLNP
25 oct 2010
How Israeli settlements popped up in Baten el-Hawa
The neighborhood of Baten el-Hawa is among the poorest and most densely populated in Silwan. Like all neighborhoods in Silwan, it suffers from a lack of public facilities to serve the population, including medical clinics, cultural centers, and public playgrounds for local children. Life in Baten el-Hawa is further complicated, however, by the the presence of the Beit Yonatan and House of Honey settlement outposts in the heart of the neighborhood. These settlements receive armed security guards funded by Israeli taxpayers, not to mention the fact that the settlers are themselves armed, and that the outposts in Baten el-Hawa and in Silwan generally are also guarded by troops from the Israeli army.
There is no doubt that these Jewish-only settlements in the heart of this Palestinian neighborhood constitute a significant provocation and lead to many clashes and other problems, but the environment of poverty and neglect that the Israeli authorities have created in the Silwan aggravates these tensions and accelerates the emergence of clashes. There is no place for the children of Silwan to play but the narrow streets of the village, which are mostly unpaved. Dozens of children in Baten el-Hawa spend their free time in the alleys of the neighborhood, only a few meters from the entrances of the outposts where armed security and Israeli soldiers stand guard.
We did not want to wait for the municipality to provide for our children's recreational and cultural needs, so we began organizing modest projects to remove the children from the streets and from scenes of violence, explains Jawad Siyam, Director of the Wadi Hilweh Information Center, who works to help empower children in Silwan. We are working hard to create a safe space for children to express themselves through music, art, theater, and other activities, with an emphasis on our cultural identity and the well-established roots of our village, and we will not give the keys to our homes to strangers.
The settlement organization Ateret Cohanim has been the primary force behind the establishment of Jewish outposts among the Palestinian community of Baten el-Hawa.
According to Baten el-Hawa resident Zuhair Rajabi, whose cousin legally purchased the building now known as the House of Honey outpost, this home was known as Beit Asilah, after the family that originally owned the property, but then the settlers moved in and began calling it the House of Honey. In 2003, explained Rajabi, M. M. purchased the home, an area of about 60 square meters, from the Asilah family, claiming he wished to repair the house and live in it. M. M. had recently come from the United States, and had also begun constructing a building with seven floors a few meters away from Beit Asilah.
In September 2003, M. M. sold the Beit Asilah to my cousin, and we have proof of this sale.
However, on March 30, 2004, before the Rajabi family could move into their new home, Jewish settlers seized the Beit Asilah, as well as the seven-story building which M. M. had constructed, known today as the Beit Yonatan settlement. That day, violent clashes erupted in the neighborhood between Palestinians and the Israeli troops who came to guard the settlers, leaving more than twenty Palestinians wounded and twenty-five arrested.
It was later revealed that the Ateret Cohanim settlement group were responsible for hiring M. M. to purchase the Beit Asilah with the goal of housing new Jewish settlers. Ateret Cohanim had also assigned to M. M. the task of constructing the seven-story Beit Yonatan settlement.
The following day, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a decision to evacuate the settlers from the so-called House of Honey, after the Rajabi family provided the Court with papers proving their ownership of the house in question. However, Israeli police refused to implement the evacuation order, claiming that the settlers also possessed proof of ownership. In response, the Court issued a decision that things should remain as they are a final verdict is given.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Court also issued an evacuation order for the Beit Yonatan outpost, ruling that the structure had been built illegally and was incompatible with the construction plan for the region. However, this evacuation order was never carried out.
On April 25, 2010, in response to a letter by the Israeli General Prosecutor asking the mayor of the Jerusalem municipality to implement the evacuation order for the Beit Yonatan outpost, a group of settlers held a provocative march through the neighborhood of Wadi Hilweh, calling for the implementation of demolition orders against more than 200 Palestinian homes in Silwan. The march, led by the right-wing extremist Baruch Marzel, was approved by the Israeli authorities and included a police escort for the settlers.
http://silwanic.net/?p=7761 26 oct 2010, 23:07 , Respect -
Maria 26 oct 2010
Flash Back: Israeli Nuclear Threats & Blackmail
The Samson Option Still Threatens the World
by Carol Moore
December 2009 verson
10-25-10
Martin Van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has been quoted as saying: "Most European capitals are targets for our air force....We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under."[38]
The phrase the "Samson Option" is used to describe Israel's strategy of massive nuclear retaliation against "enemy" nations should its existence as a Jewish state be jeopardized through military attack. Israeli leaders created the term in the mid-1960s, inspired by the Biblical figure Samson, who destroyed a Philistine temple, killing himself and thousands of Philistine enemies.[1][2]
Israel refuses to admit officially that it has nuclear weapons - a policy known as "nuclear ambiguity" or "nuclear opacity."[3] This despite government officials inferring repeatedly - and occasionally admitting - the fact. And despite Israeli nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu making public smuggled photographs of nuclear weapons and production equipment in the 1980s.[4]
Israel now may have as many as 400 atomic and hydrogen nuclear weapons,[5][6] as well as the ability to launch them via long range missiles, submarines and aircraft.[7] It can use them in a second strike even if its military is devastated.
Originally a strategy of last resort retaliation - even if it means Israel's annihilation - it has developed into being a nuclear bullying strategy to further Israel's territorial goals through threats and blackmail. Israel has bullied not only Arab and Muslim nations, but the United States and Russia with its Samson Option threats.
Mordechai Vanunu has alleged that Israel uses for purposes of blackmail its ability to "bombard any city all over the world, and not only those in Europe but also those in the United States."[8]
ISRAEL NUCLEAR TIME LINE
(collected from various sources)
1949: French and Israel atomic researchers start to exchange information. Israeli Defence Force Science Corps begins two year geological survey of the Negev desert in search of recoverable Uranium.
1952: Israeli Atomic Energy Commission is created. Its chairman, Ernst David Bergmann of Israel's Weizman Institute of Science, "the father of Israel's bomb," has been promoting nuclear armed missiles for Israel since arriving after World War II. Newly elected President Eisenhower will refuse to sell arms to Israel during his two terms, ending in 1960. France sells them to Israel from 1955 to 1967.
Israeli nuclear plant at Dimona, left. Mordechai Vanunu photo, right. More Vanunu photos from inside Dimona here.
(http://www.vanunu.com/uscampaign/photos.html)
1955: Under Atoms for Peace program, overseen by pro-Israel Lewis Stauss who was head of America's Atomic Energy Commission, U.S. helps fund a small Israeli nuclear research reactor. Strauss learned about Dimona and its purpose before the U.S. government but did not inform the U.S. government.
1953: Israeli researchers perfect a process for extracting Uranium, and developing a new method of producing heavy water, which is a key ingredient in the process. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be raised to build Israel's nuclear bomb over the next twenty years, mostly from American Jews; effort is led by Abraham Feinberg who financially backs both Presidents Truman and Johnson, as well as presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. (John F. Kennedy accepts his money but is incensed by the pro-Israel lobbying.)
1956: France and Israel formally and secretly agree to build a nuclear reactor in the Negev desert. Britain, France and Israel invade Egypt (Suez Canal crisis) and the Soviet Union threatens to use rockets against them if they do not desist, leading to a cease-fire. U.S. begins U-2 spy flights over targets world wide, including Israel.
1957: France and Israel sign a revised agreement calling for France to build a 24 MWt reactor; unwritten was the agreement to build a plutonium reprocessing plant.
1958: Israel breaks ground at Dimona, with assistance of French scientists and contractors, and U-2 spy planes provide evidence Israelis are building nuclear plant there.
1960: Israeli scientists witness first French atomic explosion in South Pacific. French President Charles DeGaulle threatens to cut off reactor fuel if Israel doesn't accept international inspections, but eventually accepts Israel's assertions Dimona is only for peaceful purposes and work continues. United States intelligence leaks to the press that Israel is building a secret nuclear facility that will eventually produce a nuclear bomb. Israel admits this to its Parliament and world but claims it is only for peaceful purposes.
1961: President Kennedy makes the man who leaked Israel's bomb to the press head of the CIA. Kennedy is very opposed to Israel having the bomb and tells Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion so in many letters and in meeting in New York about the purpose of Dimona. Ben-Gurion tells him its purpose is peaceful and refuses to allow international inspections. Israel launches its first rocket.
1962: Ben-Gurion allows inspections by American inspectors only in return for sales of Hawk surface-to-air missiles. Israel builds a fake control room and bricks off parts of buildings to hide from inspectors the true size and purpose of the reactor (three times bigger than admitted) and that it was connected to a plutonium reprocessing plant; this feint continues during seven such inspections until they end in 1969. Reactor at Dimona goes into operation.
1963: Kennedy refuses to sign any security arrangement with Israel.
After Kennedy assassination brings the very pro-Israel Lyndon Johnson to power. (Not surprisingly there is an assassination conspiracy theory that the Mossad killed Kennedy.)
1964: Dimona plutonium processing plant goes online. In first official visit by an Israeli Prime Minister (Eshkol) to Washington, Johnson promises Israel offensive fighter jets and other weapons if it refrains from producing nuclear weapons. Israel's Eshkol eventually agrees to Johnson's terms and holds off on producing the bomb for a few years. China explodes first nuclear bomb.
1965: Israel performs its first plutonium extraction, and France assists Israel in developing its Jericho missiles.
1966: U.S. begins fighter jet and arms shipments to Israel. Johnson discourages further reports on Israel nuclear situation from U.S. embassy in Israel. Israel refuses money for nuclear desalination plant which is tied to international inspections of Dimona.
1967: Six Day War when Israel pre-emptively attacks an Egyptian military buildup in the Sinai Peninsula. Israel attacks USS Liberty surveillance vessel, killing 34 sailors; (see BBC allegation below that Israelis wanted to instigate a U.S. nuclear attack on Cairo).
Soviet Union supports Arabs militarily, sends ships to the region and breaks diplomatic ties with Israel. Americans unofficially inform Israel that the Soviet Union has put four Israeli cities on its nuclear target list.
1968: Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, believing Israel cannot depend on the U.S. to defend it, unilaterally orders full production of nuclear weapons, averaging four to twelve per year, depending on size. Israel illicitly imports two hundred tons of uranium.
1969: President Richard Nixon takes office and fully supports Israel's nuclear weapons, as does his National Security chief Henry Kissinger. Ends American inspections at Dimona and shares some nuclear targeting information about the Soviet Union. CIA tries to inform President Johnson about Dimona, but he brushes off information, signs Nonproliferation Treaty, and sends Israel advanced Phantom fighter jets.
1973: Israelis catch Soviet spy ring in high levels of Israeli government and make it clear to Soviets they have produced "suitcase nukes" they could sneak into Russia. Egypt and Syria attack unprepared Israeli forces in Sinai and Golan Heights on the Jewish fast in Yom Kippur War. Israel goes on nuclear alert and begins to ready nuclear weapons for actual use, forcing the U.S. to airlift them weapons and to start redeploying nuclear armed ships and airplanes.
When Soviets started talking about sending in Russian troops, Israel again goes on nuclear alert. Washington pressures Israel to accept a cease-fire.
1974: Defense Minister Dayan visits South Africa to discuss testing a nuclear weapon there.
1975: Israel receives nuclear-capable Lance missiles from the United States, even as U.S. remains in official denial about Israel having nuclear weapons.
1976: South Africa's Prime Minister visits Israel to sign several nuclear and other agreements.
1977: Menachem Begin's right wing expansionist Likud Party takes power in Israel and is determined to reshape Middle East to suit Israel's needs, including through using the nuclear threat. Commits to nuclear targeting of even more cities in the Soviet Union. President Carter does not take on the issue, despite conducting Camp David peace talks between Egypt and Israel.
1979: President Carter provides Israel ability to see American spy satellite photos for defense purposes only, but Israelis manage to get them for pre-emptive strikes against Middle East and Russia. Israel and South Africa explode first nuclear bomb in South Indian Ocean but appointed U.S. committee refuses to conclude it was a nuclear explosion.
1981: Israel, using U.S. spy satellite photos, sends F-16s to bomb and destroy Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction at Osirak. U.S. strictly limits further access to spy photos. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon recruits American Navy employee Jonathan Pollard as a spy to obtain satellite photos plus massive amounts of other classified information about Israel's enemies, some of which Israel turns over to the Soviet Union to try to win over its adversary. Ariel Sharon talks President Reagan into a formal Israel-U.S. military alliance against the Soviet Union but Defense Chief Weinberger delays and sabotages it.
1982: Under Ariel Sharon's military leadership, Israel invades Lebanon to attack Palestinian militants as first part of plan to drive Palestinians into Jordan, using the threat of nuclear weapons to intimidate any adversaries. However, despite destroying Beruit and killing more than ten thousand Arabs and 500 Israelis, Sharon's efforts in Lebanon fail. Israel eventually withdraws and Sharon loses his position.
1985: Jonathan Pollard captured leaving office with stolen papers.
Eventually sentenced to life in prison.
1986: Mordechai Vanunu, a disaffected Dimona technician who left with photographs and other evidence of nuclear weapons production, publishes details in the London Sunday Times newspaper; reveals Israel has over 100 nuclear weapons. Israel starts disinformation campaign then lures him to Italy where he is kidnaped, taken to Israel and imprisoned for 18 years. He was released in spring of 2004 and remains under house arrest because of his continuing contact with the media.
1987: Israel test-fires a Jericho 2 missile capable of carrying a nulcear weapon. UN General Assembly and the IAEA General Conference passes first of more than a dozen resolutions calling on Israel to join the Nonproliferation Treaty.
1988: Israel launches its first spy satellite into orbit.
1991: U.S. convinces Israel to refrain from attacking Iraq with nuclear weapons, even if Iraq uses chemical or biological weapons against it, but Israel's nuclear weapons remain on alert.
1999: US Department of Energy document ranks Israel sixth among countries with nuclear weapons.
2000: Knesset debates Israel's nuclear weapons program for first time. Germany sells Israel three state-of-the-art 800-class Dolphin submarines and Israel tests first submarine-launched missile in the area of the Indian Ocean. Ariel Sharon is elected Prime Minister of Israel, still intending to use nuclear weapons to bully other nations and remake the Middle East for the benefit of Israel. George Bush is elected in the United state and his neoconservative allies fully intend that the United States help Sharon fulfill that mission. Right wing Israelis begin freely talking about attacking other nations, including with nuclear weapons.
2001: Bush inflames Arabs by clearly taking sides with Israel's expansionist aims, part of the reason for the September 11 attacks against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. He obsesses about attacking Iraq, not defending America against known Al Queda terrorists. Starts planning war against Iraq after September 11 attacks, including option of using nuclear weapons.
2002: George Bush gives Israel the go-ahead to use nuclear weapons against Iraq if Saddam attacks Israel before the American invasion of Iraq. Pentagon Office of Special Plans uses information from Iraqi dissidents and Israel's Mossad to convince Americans that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction that are an imminent threat against America. Israel launches Ofek-5 satellite with a powerful new inter-continental missile.
2003: Israel repeatedly demands sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program and threatens to bomb Iran's operating nuclear power plant, despite Iran's threats to retaliate hard against Israel.
Russia may have sold Iran additional advanced missiles capable of shooting down Israeli bomber and fighter jets. Russian President Putin proposes Security Council formally call for establishment of a Palestinian state and arrests last of the Jewish "oligarchs" who bought state industries for pennies on the dollar under Yeltsin. Arab and other nations repeatedly ask that Israel nuclear facilities come under international inspections. So does the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohammed el-Baradei. United Nations General Assembly passes resolution that Israel join the nonproliferation treaty by a vote of 164-4. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tells Israeli newspaper that Israel will not dismantle its "special measures" because the U.S. will not remain in the Middle East forever.
2004: Israel buys two more German submarines for delivering nuclear tipped cruise missiles, making a total of five. Mordechai Vanunu's prison term ends 2004 but Israel keeps putting him in prison and or under house arrest for trying to speak to others outside the country on nuclear issues and for wanting to leave Israel permanently.
The phrase the "Samson Option" is used to describe Israel's strategy of massive nuclear retaliation against "enemy" nations should its existence as a Jewish state be jeopardized through military attack. Israeli leaders created the term in the mid-1960s, inspired by the Biblical figure Samson, who destroyed a Philistine temple, killing himself and thousands of Philistine enemies.[1][2]
Israel refuses to admit officially that it has nuclear weapons - a policy known as "nuclear ambiguity" or "nuclear opacity."[3] This despite government officials inferring repeatedly - and occasionally admitting - the fact. And despite Israeli nuclear whistle blower Mordechai Vanunu making public smuggled photographs of nuclear weapons and production equipment in the 1980s.[4] Israel now may have as many as 400 atomic and hydrogen nuclear weapons,[5][6] as well as the ability to launch them via long range missiles, submarines and aircraft.[7] It can use them in a second strike even if its military is devastated.
Originally a strategy of last resort retaliation - even if it means Israel's annihilation - it has developed into being a nuclear bullying strategy to further Israel's territorial goals through threats and blackmail. Israel has bullied not only Arab and Muslim nations, but the United States and Russia with its Samson Option threats.
Mordechai Vanunu has alleged that Israel uses for purposes of blackmail its ability to "bombard any city all over the world, and not only those in Europe but also those in the United States."[8]
Official policy and threats
During the 1960s Israel concentrated on conventional military superiority to defend lands confiscated in the 1948 and 1967 wars - and to convince Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories that they could not break free of it. However, in 1973's Yom Kippur War Israel was almost overwhelmed by Arab forces. Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized a nuclear alert, ordering 13 atomic bombs be prepared for missiles and aircraft. Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Simha Dinitz threatened "very serious conclusions" if there was not an immediate airlift of supplies.[9] This forced U.S. President Richard Nixon to make emergency airlifts of state of the art military supplies to Israel.[10][11]
Fearing intervention by the Soviet Union, U.S. forces went on Defense Condition (DEFCON) III alert status[12], something which could have led to full scale nuclear war in case of misinterpretation of signals or hardware or software failures. Additionally, as Seymour Hersh documents in detail in his book The Samson Option, from 1973 these weapons have been used to discourage the Soviet Union - now Russia - from intervening militarily on behalf of Arab nations.[13] Obviously an Israeli nuclear attack on Russia by the United States' great ally Israel would result in Russia sending thousands of nuclear weapons towards the U.S. and the U.S. responding in kind.
Not surprisingly, no nation state has attempted to attack Israel since 1973. A former Israeli official justified Israel's threats. "You Americans screwed us" in not supporting Israel in its 1956 war with Egypt. "We can still remember the smell of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next time we'll take all of you with us."[14] General Moshe Dayan, a leading promoter of Israel's nuclear program[15], has been quoted as saying "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."[16] Amos Rubin, an economic adviser to former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, said "If left to its own Israel will have no choice but to fall back on a riskier defense which will endanger itself and the world at large... To enable Israel to abstain from dependence on nuclear arms calls for $2 to 3 billion per year in U.S. aid."[17]
In 1977, after a right-wing coalition under Menachen Begin took power, the Israelis began to use the Samson Option not just to deter attack but to allow Israel to "redraw the political map of the Middle East" by expanding hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers into the West Bank and Gaza.[18] Then-Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon said things like "We are much more important than (Americans) think. We can take the middle east with us whenever we go"[19] and "Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches."[20] He proclaimed his - and many Likud Party members' - goals of transforming Jordan into a Palestinian state and "transferring" all Palestinian refugees there.[21][22] A practice known worldwide as "ethnic cleansing."
To dissuade the Soviet Union from interfering with its plans, Prime Minister Begin immediately "gave orders to target more Soviet cities" for potential nuclear attack. Its American spy Jonathan Pollard was caught stealing such nuclear targeting information from the U.S. military in 1985.[23]
During the next 25 years Israel became more militarily adventurous, bombing Iraq's under-construction Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, invading Lebanon to destroy Palestinian refugee camps in 1982 and to fight Hezbollah in 2006, massively bombing civilian targets in the West Bank Jenin refugee camp in 2002 and thoughout Gaza in 2008-2009. There are conflicting reports about whether Israel went on nuclear alert and armed missiles with nuclear weapons during the 1991 Gulf War after Iraq shot conventionally armed scud missiles into it.[24][25]
In 2002, while the United States was building for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon threatened that if Israel was attacked "Israel will react. Is it clear?"[26] Israeli defense analyst Zeev Schiff explained: "Israel could respond with a nuclear retaliation that would eradicate Iraq as a country." It is believed President Bush gave Sharon the green-light to attack Baghdad in retaliation, including with nuclear weapons, but only if attacks came before the American military invasion.[27]
Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres has admitted that nuclear weapons are used by Israel for "compellent purposes" - i.e., forcing others to accept Israeli political demands.[28] In 1998 Peres was quoted as saying, "We have built a nuclear option, not in order to have a Hiroshima, but to have an Oslo," referring to imposing a settlement on the Palestinians.[29]
In her book Israel's Sacred Terrorism Livia Rokach documented how Israelis have used religion to justify paramilitary and state terrorism to create and maintain a Jewish State.[30] Two other Israeli retaliation strategies are the popularized phrase "Wrath of God," the alleged Israeli assassination of those it held responsible for the 1972 killings of Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics[31], and the "Dahiya doctrine" of destruction of civilian areas to punish Palestinians for supporting their leaders.[32]
Israeli Israel Shahak wrote in 1997: "Israel clearly prepares itself to seek overtly a hegemony over the entire Middle East...without hesitating to use for the purpose all means available, including nuclear ones."[33] Zeev Schiff opined in 1998 that "Off-the-cuff Israeli nuclear threats have become a problem."[34] In 2003 David Hirst noted that "The threatening of wild, irrational violence, in response to political pressure, has been an Israeli impulse from the very earliest days" and called Israel a candidate for "the role of 'nuclear-crazy' state."[35] Noam Chomsky said of the Samson Option "the craziness of the state is not because the people are insane. Once you pick a policy of choosing expansion over security, that's what you end up getting stuck with."[36] Efraim Karsh calls the Samson Option the "rationality of pretended irrationality," but warns that seeming too irrational could encourage other nations to attack Israel in their own defense.[37]
Samson Option Supporters
Two Israel supporters are frequently quoted for their explicit support of the Samson Option. Martin Van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has been quoted as saying: "Most European capitals are targets for our air force....We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under."[38]
In 2002 the Los Angeles Times, published an opinion piece by Louisiana State University professor David Perlmutter in which he wrote: "What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens? For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away--unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans--have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?"[39]
Two influential Israel supporters advocate more active use of the Samson Option threat. Louis René Beres, a professor of Political Science at Purdue University and an Ariel Sharon advisor, recommends Israel use the Samson Option threat to support conventional preemptive attacks against enemy nuclear and non-nuclear assets, discouraging conventional retaliation.[40] Jerome Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D. in political science and author of two books encouraging Israel to use nuclear weapons[41], writes that "Israel's Samson Option" could be "a preemptive strike against Iran."[42]
The Israelis also are egged on in its nuclear threats by "Christian Zionists" like Hal Lindsay who believe Israel must expand its control of territory to its Biblical borders in order to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ.[43] Some suspect that former President George W. Bush holds such beliefs,[44] especially after his November 2007 statement "If you want to see World War Three, you know, a way to do that is to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon."[45]
Israeli Threats Against Iran
Israel's threats to use nuclear weapons, including preemptively, have increased greatly since the revelation in 2002 that Iran was building uranium enrichment facilities. That year Prime Minister Ariel Sharon demanded that the international community target Iran as soon as it was finished dealing with Iraq.[46]
Unlike Israel, Iran has accepted supervision of its nuclear program under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran claims its program is only for production of nuclear power as oil becomes more scarce and expensive, and not for nuclear weapons. However, Israel opposes any challenge to its nuclear hegemony since not only would it be less able to use its nuclear threat to keep confiscated lands, but fear of Iran actually might cause citizens to leave Israel and investment to dry up.[47][48] Israel also must worry about other "enemy" Arab nations which already are seeking or soon may seek nuclear energy.[49]
In 2004 Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said that Israel would consider "all options" to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons.[50] Rumors and warnings of an impending Israeli attack on Iran's facilities, including possibly with nuclear weapons, have circulated repeatedly since that time.[51][52]
Meanwhile, Israel still considers Russia a target because of its technical assistance to Iran's nuclear program and its continued arms sales to Iran and other "enemy" nations.[53] [54][55] In 2007 Israeli officials warned Russia: "We hope they understand that this is a threat that could come back to them as well."[56]
In 2005 George Bush admitted that the U.S. would support an Israeli attack on Iran.[57] Soon after his election President Barak Obama seemed to accept the inevitability of an Iranian nuclear bomb.[58] However, in early 2009 Likud Party hawk Benjamin Netanyahu was elected Israeli Prime Minister. Netanyahu already had threatened that Israel would attack Iran to stop its nuclear program if Obama did not do so.[59] Considering Iran's threats to retaliate, this easily could lead to a "Samson Option" scenario.[60][61] After May[62] and September meetings with Netanyahu in 2009, Obama threatened Iran with attack if it did not "come clean about" and curb its nuclear program.[63][64] This statement came a day after Netanyahus' speech to the United Nations where he invoked the memory of Auschwitz and family members slain by Nazis.[65] Obama also has suffered constant pressure to take a more belligerent stand against Iran from neoconservatives and the "Israel lobby."[66][67][68][69]
Too few peace or political activists, left or right, are willing to challenge Israel's Samson Option threats or even to make a nuclear free Middle East a central demand.[70] Until military and political leaders, as well as activists, are willing to change U.S. policy of defacto support for Israel's Samson Option the whole world remains a potential victim of this horrific strategy.
Note: If you see some resemblance to the wikipedia article on the Samson Option, I also worked on that and contributed many of the same facts from many of the same sources.
Also, my comments on the "Samson Option" were quoted in the New York Sun, September 2005.
References
1. Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, pp. 42, 136-137, 288-289.
2. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. 2, 7, 341 and Avner Cohen, "Israel's Nuclear Opacity: a Political Genealogy," published in The Dynamics of Middle East Nuclear Proliferation, pp. 187-212, edited by Steven L. Spiegel, Jennifer D. Kibbe and Elizabeth G. Matthews. Symposium Series, Volume 66, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.
3 Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, p. 1-3.
4. Peter Hounam, Woman From Mossad: The Torment of Mordechai Vanunu, Vision Paperbacks,1999, pp. 155-168.
5. Harold Hough, "Could Israel's Nuclear Assets Survive a First Strike?" Jane's Intelligence Review, September, 1997, pp. 407-410.
6. "U.S. Air Force: Israel has 400 nukes, building naval force," World Tribune, July 4, 2002
7. Douglas Frantz, "Israel Adds Fuel to Nuclear Dispute, Officials confirm that the nation can now launch atomic weapons from land, sea and air," Los Angeles Times, Sunday, October 12, 2003.
8. "Vanunu Confirms Israel's Global Thermonuclear Blackmail," An Interview With Hesham Tillawi, PhD, December 19, 2009.
9. Seymour Hersh, pp. 225-227; Avner Cohen, p. 236 and Mark Gaffney, Dimona, The Third Temple:The Story Behind the Vanunu Revelation, 1989, Amana Books, p. 147.
10. Warner D. Farr, "The Third Temple's Holy of Holies: Israel's Nuclear Weapons." Counterproliferation Paper No. 2, USAF Counterproliferation Center, Air War College, September 1999.
11. Avner Cohen, "The Last Nuclear Moment," The New York Times, 6 October 2003.
12. Federation of American Scientists web page on DEFCON DEFense CONdition.
13. Seymour Hersh, pp. 17, 40, 66, 174-75, 177, 216, 220, 223-231.
14. Seymour Hersh, p. 42
15. Seymour Hersh, p. 174-180
16. David Hirst, "The War Game, a controversial view of the current crisis in the Middle East," The Observer Guardian, September 21, 2003.
17. Mark Gaffney, p. 153.
18. Seymour Hersh, 259-261.
19. Seymour Hersh, 289.
20. Mark Gaffney, p. 165.
21. Encyclopedia of Orient on Likud Party and Elfi Pallis, "The Likud Party: A Primer," Journal of Palestine Studies, Winter 1992.
22. Seymour Hersh, pp. 288-289.
23. Seymour Hersh, p. 260.
24. Avigdor Haselkorn, The continuing storm: Iraq, poisonous weapons and deterrence, Yale University Press, 1999 131-135.
25. David Eberhart, "Samson Option: Israel's Plan to Prevent Mass Destruction Attacks," NewsMax.Com, October 16, 2001.
26.Stephen Farrell, Robert Thomson and Danielle Haas, "Attack Iran the day Iraq war ends, demands Israel," London Times, November 5, 2002.
27. Ross Dunn, "Sharon eyes 'Samson option' against Iraq," Scotsmann, November 3, 2002.
28. Mark Gaffney, p. 131
29. Warner D. Farr online article, op cit.
30. Livia Rokach, Israel's Sacred Terrorism, Third Edition, Association of Arab American University Graduates,1986.
31. "Operation Wrath of God" article in Wikipedia.
32. "The Dahiya strategy," including interview with IDF Northern Command Chief Gadi Eisenkot,Yedioth Ahronoth (Ynet News), June 10, 2008.
33. Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies, Pluto Press, 1997, p. 2.
34. "United States Information Agency's Foreign Media Reaction Report, Middle East section, February 4, 1998," reprinted at GlobalSecurity.org..
35. David Hirst article, op cit.
36. Transcript of Noam Chomsky talk: "Assessing the Role of US Foreign Policy, Israeli Security, & Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories," April 7, 2009 Madison, WI. Youtube Video of talk.
37. Efraim Karsh, Between war and peace: dilemmas of Israeli security, Routledge, 1996 pp.130-131.
38. David Hirst article, op cit
39. David Perlmutter, Opinion Page piece "Israel: Dark Thoughts and Quiet Desperation," Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2002.
40. Louis Rene Beres, "Israel and Samson. Biblical Insights on Israeli Strategy in the Nuclear Age," March 22, 3004; Beres, et al. Project Daniel final report; "The world, of course, continues to begrudge the Jewish state: Israel and Palestine, the Samson Option" Canada Free Press, March 31, 2009.
41. Jerome Corsi, Atomic Iran, Chapter: "The Samson Option, Israel's Preemptive Strike," WND Books, 2005, and
Why Israel Can't Wait: The Coming War Between Israel and Iran, Simon and Schuster, p. 101, 2009.
42. Jerome Corsi, Atomic Iran, op cit.
43. See Hal Lindsay on the Samson Option: The Samson Option, July 14, 2007 at StandingWithIsrael.org and "Prophesied destruction of Damascus imminent?", WorldNetDaily.Com, September 21, 2007.
44. Michael Ortiz Hill, "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Bush's Armageddon Obsession, Revisited," Counterpunch.org, January 4, 2003.
45. "Bush defends World War Three comments on Iran," Reuters, Nov 7, 2007.
46. Stephen Farrell, Robert Thomson and Danielle Haas, "Attack Iran the day Iraq war ends, demands Israel," London Times, November 5, 2002.
47. Roger Howard, "Why Israel Really Fears Iranian Nukes," Antiwar.com, November 27, 2004.
48. "Nuclear Shadow over the Middle East," PalestineChronicle, May 11, 2009.
49. Stuart Reigeluth, "Race to ultimate arms," Weekly Ahram.org, 14-20 August 2008, Issue No. 910.
50. "Israel Takes Issue With Iran Weapons," Yahoo News, September 29, 2004.
51. "Israeli Defence Minister Calls For Calm Over Rumoured Attack On Iran Jerusalem," Agence-France Presse, December 22, 2004.
52. Jason Ditz, "Israel Preparing to Attack Iran Without US Assistance," Antiwar.com, December 4, 2008.
53. Alan Sabrosky, "Bibi Netanyahu: a Knave of Ghosts and Shadows," Salem-News.com, October 5, 2009.
54. Michael Jasinski, "Russia's Nuclear and Missile Technology Assistance to Iran; Nasser Karimi, Russian Fuel Ready for Iran," Associated Press, September 16, 2007 and Robert Tait, Mark Tran, "Putin warns US against military action on Iran," The Guardian, October 16, 2007.
55. Herb Keinon, "Jerusalem sees Russian interests behind arms sales to Damascus," The Jerusalem Post, August 20, 2007
56. Yaakov Katz and Herb Keinon, "Israel warns Russia on Iran arms sale," Jerusalem Post, January 16, 2007
57. Francis Harris, "America would back Israel attack on Iran," The Telegraph February 18, 2005.
58. Aluf Benn, "Obama's atomic umbrella: U.S. nuclear strike if Iran nukes Israel," Haaretz, November 12, 2008.
59. Jeffrey Goldberg, "Netanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran-Or I Will," The Atlantic, March 31, 2009.
60. Michael Theodoulou, "Iran threatens to set Israel ablaze as fears grow of US-backed war," Scotsman, July 9, 2008.
61. "Iran threatens to strike Israel's nuclear sites if attacked," Daily Star, December 10, 2009.
62. Jason Ditz, "Obama Emphasizes Iran 'Threat' on Eve of Netanyahu Visit," Antiwar.com, May 17, 2009.
63. Jason Ditz, "Netanyahu Leads Calls for Harsh Moves Against Iran," Antiwar.com, September 24, 2009.
64. Jason Ditz, "Obama: Iran Is on Notice, Won't Rule Out Military Action," Antiwar.com, September 25, 2009.
65. Text of Netanyahu speech before the United Nations, September 24, 2009.
66. Stephen J. Sniegoski, "Obama and the Neocon Middle East War Agenda," Antiwar.com, March 21, 2009.
67. Daniel Luban, "Under Pressure from Hawks, Obama Tacks to the Right," Inter Press Service, August 12, 2009.
68. Robert Parry, "Is Joe Lieberman Protecting Israel?" originally published in ConsortiumNews.com, December 15, 2009.
69. Stephen M. Walt, "On Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Lobby: A response to Peter Beinart," ForeignPolicy.com, December 9, 2009.
70. John Steinbach, "Israeli Weapons of Mass Destruction, A Threat to Peace: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal," GlobalResearch.Ca, March 2002.
http://windowintopalestine.blogspot.com/2010/10/flash-back-israeli-nuclear-threats.html
26 oct 2010, 23:29 , Respect -
Maria Israel slammed for 'human trafficking'
Migrants to Israel have denounced as "human trafficking" Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu's plans to pay African nations to take them in, reports say.
FULL STORY
Article Source: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/148665.html
The Shocking Jewish Role in Slavery
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list...
Israel Leader of Racism and Terrorism wants to Deport All African Immigrants then build wall
Israel is behind all the World's Terrorism
...
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTI...
Dr Alan Sabrosky Former Director of US Military War College - The Military KNOWS Israeli Mossad and Rogue Zionist US Government did 911 Full Playlist
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list...
BBC Alan Hart - Israel Mossad did 911 and Iran does not want Nukes
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Israel did 9/11, ALL THE PROOF IN THE WORLD!!-
http://theinfounderground.com/forum/v...
The Dark Side of the ADL
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list...
Warning to America - Benjamin H Freedman Ex-Jew
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list...
JFK vs Israel and Dimona - The Stand, Murder, and Takeover (John F. Kennedy)
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Israels Fake Videos of the Freedom Flotilla EXPOSED
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GORDON DUFF: "DANCING ISRAELI" FILM STUDIOS PRESENT: FAKED ATTACK VIDEOS
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/06/...
6-9-10 Alan Sabrosky on Israels Gaza Flotilla Attack
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list...
USS LIBERTY - ISRAEL AMBUSHED ON JUNE 8, 1967 - HONOR HER CREW
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Making Treason Transparent Jeff Gates
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AIPAC Brilliantly Broke Down by Anthony Lawson
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6-1-10 Paul C Roberts USA Traitors AIPAC, Zionist Jews,Zionist Chrisian Loyal to ISRAEL - USA Hijacked
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6-2-10 Cynthia Mckinney Israel owns the US Government
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5-31-10 Gaza Flotilla Massacre - Cynthia McKinney TIU Radio
PLAYLIST LINK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy6kW7FVpAg -
Maria 26 oct 2010
Israel is the most immediate threat to the future of the planet. Interview
Dear editor,
I've conducted a new interview with the American pro-Palestinian journalist and activistJeffrey Blankfort. We discussed a variety of issues including the influence of Israeli lobbyon the decision-makers of the U.S. government, Israel's illegal, underground nuclear program, the prospect of Israeli 3 Palestinian conflict and the imminent threat of an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
I hope it will be useful for publication
Best regards Kourosh Ziabari
Jeffrey Blankfort is an American photojournalist, radio producer and Middle East analyst. He is a well-known pro-Palestinian activist whose articles and writings have appeared on Counter Punch, Voltairenet, Palestine Think Tank, Dissident Voice and many other publications.
He currently hosts radio programs on KZYX in Mendocino, CA and KPOO in San Francisco. Blankfort was formerly the editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and co-founder of the Labor Committee of the Middle East. In February 2002, he won a lawsuit against the Zionist organization Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which was found to have been spying on the American citizens critical of Israel and its expansionistic policies.
Jeffrey joined me in an exclusive interview to discuss the influence of Israeli lobby on the decision-makers of the U.S. government, Israel's illegal, underground nuclear program, the prospect of Israeli Palestinian conflict and the imminent threat of an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
Blankfort is quite outspoken in his criticism of the apartheid regime of Israel and believes that Israel is the most immediate threat to the future of our planet.
Kourosh Ziabari: In your article The Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions, you elaborately explore the dominance of Israeli lobby over the U.S. administration and cite good examples of the influence of well-off Zionists on the multinational companies and mainstream media in America. My question is that, what are the root causes of this enormous power and immense wealth which the Zionists have possessed?
How did the Jews take over the vast resources of power and money that has made them capable of framing, modifying and overturning the political equations in the United States?
Jeffrey Blankfort: That question requires a long and complicated answer. In short, an important, well organized segment of the American Jewish community emerged after World War II that has been dedicated to the establishment and prospering of a Jewish state in historic Palestine in which the lives and well being of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs were of no consequence.
That this segment did not and has never represented the majority of American Jews has been more than been made up for by its concerted activity on Israel's behalf in every critical sector of U.S. society and at every level of the nation's political life. Its success would not have been possible, however, were it not for the fact that within its ranks have been a sizeable number of wealthy Jewish businessmen who have been quite willing to expend the funds necessary to either purchase the support of the U.S. Congress as well as virtually all of the state legislatures or intimidate Israel's would-be critics into silence.
Well before the birth of the first Zionists, Jewish bankers and capitalists had established themselves in Europe and the United States so it was not surprising that a number of them, beginning with Lord Rothschild in the early part of the century, became supporters of the Zionist project. Now, far and away, they make up the largest segment of individual donors to both political parties.
The media, as could be expected, was one of its primary targets, and that avowedly pro-Israel interests, although not exclusively Jewish, such as Rupert Murdoch, now thoroughly dominate it at every level is, unfortunately proved on a daily basis.
While there should be no question that this Israel support network, euphemistically described as a lobby, has been a major force in shaping U.S. Middle East policies overall, and the determinant factor in dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict, its power has its limits. While it was able, through its agents in the White House and the Pentagon, to push the U.S. into a war on Iraq, it has yet to get Washington to bomb Iran or, apparently, to sanction an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities.
It is clear that there are important elements within the Pentagon as well as the intelligence agencies which know that an attack by either the U.S. or Israel on Iran would more likely than not lead to a global catastrophe.
KZ: In your articles, you've alluded to the conflicts and struggles between the U.S. and Israel administrations during the past decades in which the U.S. Presidents, starting from Richard Nixon, tried to curb the expansionistic policies of Israel and bring about an improved living condition for the oppressed nation of Palestine. Should you believe that there have been such efforts on the side of U.S. administration, what has led to their failure, having in mind that they've repeatedly proclaimed their commitment to the security of Israel?
JB: There has not been the slightest interest on the part of any US president, I suspect, in improving the living conditions for the Palestinians. Halting Israeli expansion and getting Tel Aviv to withdraw from all the territories it conquered in 1967 has been seen as being in the U.S. national interest.
All the past efforts have failed because none of the presidents have been willing to spend the domestic political capital that would be necessary to force an Israeli withdrawal and particularly so when they know their efforts will be opposed by the overwhelming majority of both houses of Congress irrespective of party affiliations as well as by the Zionist dominated media.
The only one who made a serious effort and who was willing to confront the Zionist network and Congress was George Bush Sr., when he denied Israel its request for $10 billion in loan guarantees in 1991 and again in 1992 but even he was eventually forced to surrender.
KZ: Israelis are used to employing the label anti-Semitism to defame and vilify whoever dares criticize their belligerent, aggressive policies and actions. They accuse whoever criticizes them of being anti-Semitist. This makes the politicians and opinion-makers hesitant and demoralized in talking of Israel negatively. Is there any solution to reveal the futility of anti-Semitism label and educate the public that the criticism of Israel is different from criticizing Judaism?
JB: The allegation of anti-Semitism leveled against critics of Israel does not carry the weight it once did but it still is extremely effective, particularly, when the accused is employed by the mainstream media as we have seen recently in the case of Helen Thomas, Octavia Nasr and Rick Sanchez, and in the film industry which has long been a Zionist bastion and which was brought into existence by Jews in the last century, although none at the time were Zionists.
The power of the accusation of anti-Semitism to bring public figures to their knees will continue to exist until there is a sufficient number of prominent Americans who are willing to challenge it. When that will be I won't begin to speculate.
KZ: Although undeclared, it's confirmed by the Federation of American Scientists that Israel possesses up to 200 nuclear warheads. Being a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Israel has never allowed the IAEA to probe into its nuclear arsenal. We already know about the destiny of Mordecai Vanunu who swapped his freedom with the expression of truth.
What's your viewpoint about the destiny of Israel's nuclear program? Will Tel Aviv continue enjoying immunity from responsibility?
JB: As long as the Zionist support network controls Congress and as long as no American president as the courage to even mention the existence of Israel's nuclear weapons, and while the U.S. continues to hold the purse strings to the UN, Israel will continue to enjoy both immunity and impunity. Had the leadership of the now non-existent anti-nuclear movement in the US, like the peace movement not been also Zionist-dominated, there might have been some debate on the issue but because it was, the subject was considered off limits.
KZ: Let's turn to Iran. Iran's is being portrayed by the U.S. mainstream media in a distorted and hypocritical way. Many Americans who even hadn't heard the name of Iran before are now exposed to a horrifying and dreadful image of the country presented to them by the Zionist-led media outlets. They aren't aware of the historical civilization of Iran and its unique cultural, social features. How is it possible to unveil the concealed realities of Iran for the Americans who don't find the proper opportunities to get familiarized with the misrepresented Iran?
JB: Most American would have a problem finding Iran or any other country in the Middle East, or for that matter, anywhere in the world on a map. They are, for the most part, what can be called geographically challenged, as well as historically challenged. There is no antidote to that on the horizon which is why Washington is able to get away with making war on countries and peoples that have never done them harm. If there was a military draft as there was during the Vietnam War, neither the war in Iraq or Afghanistan would have gone on as long as they have and there would be opposition to an attack on Iran.
When Nixon cleverly halted the draft of 18-year olds in the early 70s, that took the backbone out of the anti-war movement and that is the reason that as hard pressed as the U.S. is today to maintain an army large enough to fight multiple wars, Washington will not bring back the draft. Hiring private contractors became the alternative. Without the fear of 18-year olds that they will be taken into the army, there is no anti-war movement and there is none worthy of the name at this moment in the United States.
KZ: Many people around the world have come to believe that the media in the United States are unrestrictedly free and can express whatever they want to, without any impediment or obstruction imposed on them by the administration. It's almost accurate to say that the U.S. government does not have any direct involvement in the media-related affairs; however, there seems to be an implicit pressure on the media not to cross the red lines and violate the unwritten laws, including the criticism of Israel. Can you elaborate on this more precisely?
JB: It is not the government that prevents criticism from Israel in the media but fear of the repercussions that are guaranteed to follow any genuine criticism be it written or in cartoon form in the U.S. media, even when that criticism is leveled by a Jewish journalist. There are several organizations, most prominently the Anti-Defamation League, CAMERA, and HonestReporting which are able to unleash at a moment's notice a torrent of emails and letters to the editor, and in certain cases, visits to the offices of an offending newspaper, to make sure those in the media know what they can and cannot write. Since there is no corresponding pressure from Israel's critics in the public, most editors choose to avoid a fight.
There was a time when a number of columnists in the mainstream press did write critically of Israel and got away with it. But that was 20 years ago and they are no longer around
KZ: As the final question, what's your prediction for the future of Israel? Will it continue to determine the U.S. foreign policy and rule the American politicians? Is it capable of maintaining the blockade of Gaza? After all, will Israel succeed in surviving politically?
JB: As long as Israel's supporters, or agents in the U.S., are able to control the U.S. Congress and intimidate whoever happens to be president and as long as those same forces dominate the media there will be no change in the U.S. or in the situation in Gaza. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, while slowly growing in the U.S., does not have the intensity that it has elsewhere and its targets are limited to what Israel and U.S. companies do in the West Bank so, realistically, there is unlikely to be any meaningful pressure coming from the U.S.
What Israel does, however, may produce changes that are unpredictable at the moment. Having twice been defeated by Hezbollah, Israeli officials keep threatening another war on Lebanon and since the U.S., Europe and the UN have let them get away with all their previous wars on Lebanon, they are likely to try again.
Unlike the Palestinians, the Lebanese are able and willing to aggressively fight back as the Israeli soldiers know all too well, from their resistance to occupation and their halting of the vaunted Israeli wehrmacht in 2006. Should Israel find a way to attack Iran, the repercussions from that might be sufficient to send Israel on the road to what will ultimately be viewed as self-destruction. At the moment, thanks to the unconditional backing by the U.S. for all it crimes, and given its arsenal of nuclear weapons, I consider Israel to be the most immediate threat to the future of the planet.
http://windowintopalestine.blogspot.com/2010/10/israel-is-most-immediate-threat-to.html 5 nov 2010, 21:56 , Respect -
Maria 1 nov 2010
Whom Are We Kidding?
By: Mitri I. Musleh
Ever since President Obama took the time out to try and save the mid-term election in the US, the Palestinian/Israeli direct talks have been put on the shelve for at least now.
So, here is the situation, while the Palestinian leaders are debating their options, Israel's leaders are continuing with the settlement expansion policy whereby, they are illegally confiscating more Palestinian lands making it impossible for the Palestinians to have a viable state.
Also, in any future talks regarding the two-state solution, it will be harder to evict city style settlements with thousands of settlers as opposed to settlements with fewer people.
This is where the Israeli barrier comes in handy as it snakes its way throughout the West Bank. It's objective is to include all of these city style settlements as part of future Israel.
Author Rene Backmann in his book, A Wall in Palestine, quotes Ron Nochman, founder and current mayor of Ariel settlement, Because when I created this community with forty pioneer families back in 1977, I had that barrier in mind.
The Ariel settlement, named in an honor of Ariel Sharon, is located halfway between Tel Aviv and Jordan. Its objective is to secure Israel's borders and prevent any future attack against Tel Aviv from the east.
The Israeli barrier is not a coincidence of events, which has occurred in the twenty first century; it is rather a premeditated Israeli conspiracy to hold onto most of the West Bank.
With this in mind, what options do the Palestinians truly have in achieving a two-state status?
I said it before and I repeat it now, I have no doubt in my mind that a Palestinian state will be established this year. Its establishment date will coincide with the completion of the Israeli barrier and it will be fragmented small apartheid like areas that are sandwiched between Israeli controlled lands from all directions.
The West Bank Leadership is threatening to unilaterally declare Palestinian states in the West Bank and Gaza. Again, this is a far-fetched option due to the conspicuous lack of unified Palestinian leadership.
Egypt is calling on the International community to hold an International conference in Egypt to debate the Palestinian problem. Are we not all tired of the debates that have been unfruitful for over the past sixty years? Further, Israel has rejected this option when it was first introduced and recycling old ideas, will just delay the issue making it stagnant.
Maintaining the status quo is not an option.
Establishing apartheid like Palestine is not an option. Waging a war of words on Israel is no longer a sellable option.
So, what are the Palestinians to do?
Again, I hate to sound like a broken record, however, I suggest the Palestinians should trade in their primitive arms for white flags, march to the Israeli Knesset in an orderly fashion and demand that Israel abide with international human rights principles giving the Palestinians equal citizenship rights in Israel.
http://bit.ly/9CDqia 10 nov 2010, 02:08 , Respect -
Maria 7 nov 2010
JEW-NAZIS PAID THE JESUS-CRUCIFYING JEW TO MURDER AND STEAl FROM PALESTINIANS
JERUSALEM - The Jew-Nazi regieme sold or leased property in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem to Jew at exceptionally low prices, helping them cement a Jew-Nazi presence there, court documents published on Sunday show.
The documents are the first to show how easily settlers were able to put down stakes in these areas with the help of successive Jew governments. In one case, a 3,660-square-foot building in east Jerusalem's walled Old City was sold in October 2006 for $190,000 - a fraction of its market price.
The Arab neighborhoods are part of east Jerusalem, captured by Nazi-Jew in the 1967 Mideast War and claimed by the Palestinians as a future capital. Expanding Jew enclaves in these neighborhoods would make a partition of Jerusalem along ethnic lines as part of any peace deal impossible, another Jew trick.
===================================================
JEW-NAZIS ATTACK CHURCHES FOR JEW WORLD ORDER
RAHAT Israel, -- Jew-Nazis say they demolished an illegally built mosque in the southern Bedouin city of Rahat, touching off another riot which the Jew loved to see.
Citizen Yousef Abu-Jama said residents built the structure illegally because Jew-Nazis would take too long to issue approval.
Authorities rarely target mosques for demolition. This particular mosque was financed by a group that is frequently in conflict with authorities.
Critics note that Jew have not yet acted on a court ruling to evacuate Jewish settlers from a building in disputed east Jerusalem that was illegally expanded, by the Nazi-Jew.
http://bit.ly/94Milx 12 nov 2010, 00:41 , Respect -
Maria 8 nov 2010
Bibi, Tom Friedman, and U.S. Jews divesting from Israel
Many people who support Israel but oppose its policies feel slammed by the 'It's All Good! [and Palestinians Are All Bad] Faction' if they criticize Israel, even when it's warranted.
[First in a series. In part, a journal of a speaking tour hosted by J Street on the West Coast, and in part, reasons why I threw out my prepared remarks before I even got there.]
Ahead of a New Orleans address to the General Assembly [GA] of the Jewish Federations of North America, sources quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as having said that there is fundamental support for Israel within the United States.
"We may have lost Thomas Friedman, but I don't think we lost America," Netanyahu was quoted as saying.
I was getting ready to leave for the airport, when my wife caught me unawares. This was the first inkling I would have of something I was to learn again and again:
Where it comes to any issue of the Mideast conflict, and where it comes to questions relating to the complex relations between the U.S. Jewish community and Israel, you can either answer in three hours, or in one sentence. This was hers:
"You know what it is - American Jews are divesting from Israel."
This is what I was to see in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Marin County, Portland and Seattle. It's not that they're getting involved in significant numbers in the divestment movement. It's that American Jews are divesting emotionally. They are quietly %u2013 but in terms of impact, dramatically %u2013 withdrawing altogether.
Not just Jews. Americans. And the younger they are, that is, the more crucial they are to Israel's future, the more likely they are to divest.
That evening before I left, we had just watched the Israeli version of Meet the Press, very often a dreary affair, soporific domestic politics, the perfect sound track for a late Saturday snooze. But this one was different.
This time the guest was The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. And not the coolly analytical pundit you're used to. This time he was talking directly to Israelis, and directly to their prime minister. There was an urgency and a passion in his voice, in his gestures, his eyes, that suggested why this was different.
This time it was personal.
"You are losing the American people," Friedman warned. "Not to dislike, not to opposition - they are fed up, fed up with the Palestinians, believe me, fed up with the Mideast in general.
"But they're also fed up with Israel. When they see their president working hard to try to tee up an opportunity. All we're asking is just test - go all the way to test whether you have a real partner.
"And you say 'No, first pay me - let Pollard out of jail, have Abu Mazen sing Hatikva in perfect Yiddish, and then we'll think about testing.' It rubs a lot of people the wrong way."
Given a consensus among Israeli analysts, rightly or wrongly, that the man they called the world's most important commentator was speaking not only for himself, but directly for Barack Obama as well, you can bet that Benjamin Netanyahu was listening.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
It says everything about the Netanyahu government's attitude toward America, however, that what the prime minister heard was the polar opposite of what Thomas Friedman said.
"Israel doesn't have to worry about me," Friedman had stressed early in the interview. "At the end of the day, Israel will have my support - it had me at hello."
But many Americans, Friedman continued "just are fed up with this conflict, and over time, that will become a national security problem for Israel, given the fact that the United States is your only friend."
Long term, American emotional divestment, Jewish and non, may well prove more of a threat to Israel's future than Ahmedinejad and his bomb factories, or Nasrallah and Mashaal and their rockets.
Netanyahu's sanguine All Clear on grass-roots American support for Israel dovetails beautifully with pre-GA statements by Jewish Agency Chair Natan Sharansky.
"Of course there are arguments about whether this policy or that policy is more productive," Sharansky said in the course of a West Coast swing of his own, dismissing the earthquake engendered by Peter Beinart's "Failure of the American Jewish Establishment."
"But basically there is no question that Israel is playing more and more a central role in the identity of American Jewry, and that American Jewry needs Israel as the best tool to guarantee its own survival as a Jewish [community]."
Sharansky's proof? "I just spent two days in San Francisco and spoke to the leaders of the [Jewish] Federation there. The main task they face now is figuring out how to send all those who want to go to Israel on short trips and long trips."
Sharansky is a brilliant man, a genius at chess and at foiling Soviet human rights policy and Israeli peace overtures. He knows and has taken advantage, as only an immigrant can, of every weakness of the Israeli personality. How ironic, then, that he should fall victim to one of the worst of them:
Ahbal Syndrome.
As the continued political survival of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak demonstrates, Israelis have a fatal weakness for the magnificent Ahbal, the omniscient blockhead, the ostentatiously intelligent person who knows everything except the one thing he really needs to know: Everything that he doesn't.
What's fatal about it? What makes Ahbal Syndrome, until recently Israel's most closely guarded secret, the silent killer?
The one sentence answer: The Palestinians have figured it out, and American Jews are now catching on.
Question: What do the Palestinians know about Ahbal Syndrome that Netanyahu, Sharansky and Barak do not?
Answer: The Palestinians know what they have to do to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state.
Question: What's that?
Answer: Nothing.
Question: You want to explain that?
Answer: The Palestinians know, and American Jews are catching on, that no matter how many non-Jews Lieberman forces to pledge allegiance to a Jewish and democratic Israel, no matter how many ways Netanyahu can require the Palestinians to recognize a Jewish state which neither Egypt [peace treaty since 1979] or Jordan [since 1994] were asked to recognize on that very day, 15 or 20 years from now, on which there are more Palestinians than Jews in Israel and the settlement-riddled West Bank on that very day, Israel ceases to be, not only a democracy of any kind, but it ceases to be a Jewish state.
Question: You really think North American Jews care about that?
Answer: That's what they're telling me.
Question: What else are they telling you?
Answer: Many of those who support Israel but who oppose many of its policies feel caught in a bind, slammed by the Israel - It's All Good! [and Palestinians Are All Bad] Faction if they criticize Israel when it's warranted, and by the Zionists Never Deserved a State for Their Crimes Against the Palestinians Faction, when they dare declare support and, yes, love.
Question: What are you telling them?
Answer: Read Part Two, to be posted within a week.