- 20 mar 2009
Israel's dirty secrets in Gaza
Army veterans reveal how they gunned down innocent Palestinian families and destroyed homes and farms
Donald Macintyre The Independent March 20, 2009
Israel was last night confronting a major challenge over the conduct of its 22-day military offensive in Gaza after testimonies by its own soldiers revealed that troops were allowed and, in some cases, even ordered to shoot unarmed Palestinian civilians.
The testimonies the first of their kind to emerge from inside the military are at marked variance with official claims that the military made strenuous efforts to avoid civilian casualties and tend to corroborate Palestinian accusations that troops used indiscriminate and disproportionate firepower in civilian areas during the operation. In one of the testimonies shedding harsh new light on what the soldiers say were the permissive rules of engagement for Operation Cast Lead, one soldier describes how an officer ordered the shooting of an elderly woman 100 metres from a house commandeered by troops.
Another soldier, describing how a mother and her children were shot dead by a sniper after they turned the wrong way out of a house, says the atmosphere among troops was that the lives of Palestinians were very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers.
A squad leader said: At the beginning the directive was to enter a house with an armoured vehicle, to break the door down, to start shooting inside and I call it murder to shoot at everyone we identify. In the beginning I asked myself how could this make sense? Higher-ups said it is permissible because everyone left in the city [Gaza City] is culpable because they didn't run away.
The accounts, which also describe apparently indiscriminate destruction of property, were given at a post-operation discussion by graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military course at the Oranim Academic College in northern Israel. The transcript of the session in front of the head of the course details from which were published by the newspaper Haaretz prompted the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) military advocate general Avichai Mendelblit yesterday to announce a military police investigation into the claims. Haaretz said the airing of the dirty secrets would make it more difficult for Israelis to dismiss the claims as Palestinian propaganda. The course principal, Danny Zamir, told the newspaper that after being shocked by the testimonies on 13 February he told the IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi he feared a serious moral failure in the IDF.
In one account, an infantry squad leader describes how troops released a family who had been held in a room of their house for several days. He said: The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay. The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him. He shot them straight away. I don't think he felt too bad about it, because, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to, the lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers.
A second squad leader, who described the killing of the elderly woman, says he argued with his commander over loose rules of engagement that allowed the clearing out of houses by shooting without warning residents beforehand. After the orders were changed, soldiers had complained that we should kill everyone there [in the centre of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist. The squad leader said: To write death to the Arabs on walls, to take family pictures and spit on the, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics.
Ehud Barak, Israel's Defence Minister, said: I say to you that from the chief of staff down to the last soldier, the most moral army in the world stands ready to take orders from the government of Israel. I have no doubt that every incident will be individually examined.
But Israeli human rights organisations, including B'Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, called for an independent investigation and complained that the military police inquiry had only been announced after Haaretz published the story, three weeks after the relevant materials reached the Chief of the General Staff. This tardiness follows a pattern of failures to investigate suspicions of serious crimes.
Amos Harel, the paper's respected military correspondent who broke the story, wrote that Mr Zamir was sentenced in 1990 for refusing to guard a settlers ceremony at Joseph's tomb in the West Bank. But he added that a reading of the transcript shows that Mr Zamir acts out of a deep concern for the spirit of the IDF.
In their own words: Soldiers stories
Squad leader Aviv
At the beginning the directive was to enter a house with an armoured vehicle, to break the door down, to start shooting inside and to ascend floor by floor and I call it murder to go from floor to floor and to shoot at everyone we identify. In the beginning I asked myself how could this make sense? Higher-ups said it is permissible because everyone left in the city [Gaza City] is culpable because they didn't run away. This frightened me a bit. I tried to influence it as much as possible, despite my low rank, to change it. In the end the directive was to go into a house, switch on loudspeakers and tell them you have five minutes to run away and whoever doesn't will be killed.
Soldier Ram
There was an order to free the [confined] families. The platoon commander set free the family and told them to turn right. A mother and two children didn't understand and turned left. [Officers] had forgotten to tell the sniper on the roof that they were being set free and that everything was okay and he should hold fire. You can say that he acted as he was supposed to, in accordance with the orders. The sniper saw a woman and children approaching him, past lines that no one was to be allowed to cross. He fired directly at them. I don't know if he fired at their legs but in the end he killed them.
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israels-dirty-secrets-in-gaza-1649527.html
http://bit.ly/cHL2RL
14 JUNI 2010
ICRC: Gaza closure must be lifted
The hardship faced by Gaza's 1.5 million people cannot be addressed by providing humanitarian aid. The only sustainable solution is to lift the closure.
The serious incidents that took place on 31 May between Israeli forces and activists on a flotilla heading for Gaza once again put the spotlight on the acute hardship faced by the population in the Gaza Strip.
As the ICRC has stressed repeatedly, the dire situation in Gaza cannot be resolved by providing humanitarian aid. The closure imposed on the Gaza Strip is about to enter its fourth year, choking off any real possibility of economic development. Gazans continue to suffer from unemployment, poverty and warfare, while the quality of Gaza's health care system has reached an all-time low.
The whole of Gaza's civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility. The closure therefore constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law.
The closure is having a devastating impact on the 1.5 million people living in Gaza, said Béatrice Mégevand-Roggo, the ICRC's head of operations for the Middle East. That is why we are urging Israel to put an end to this closure and call upon all those who have an influence on the situation, including Hamas, to do their utmost to help Gaza's civilian population. Israel's right to deal with its legitimate security concerns must be balanced against the Palestinians right to live normal, dignified lives.
The international community has to do its part to ensure that repeated appeals by States and international organizations to lift the closure are finally heeded.
Under international humanitarian law, Israel must ensure that the basic needs of Gazans, including adequate health care, are met. The Palestinian authorities, for their part, must do everything within their power to provide proper health care, supply electricity and maintain infrastructure for Gaza's people.
Furthermore, all States have an obligation to allow and facilitate rapid and unimpeded passage of all relief consignments, equipment and personnel.
Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is about to enter his fifth year in captivity. Hamas has continued to rebuff the ICRC's requests to let it visit Gilad Shalit. In violation of international humanitarian law, it has also refused to allow him to get in touch with his family. The ICRC again urges those detaining Gilad Shalit to grant him the regular contact with his family to which he is entitled. It also reiterates that those detaining him have an obligation to ensure that he is well treated and that his living conditions are humane and dignified. *
Ruined livelihoods
Although about 80 types of goods are now allowed into Gaza twice as many as a year ago over 4,000 items could be brought in prior to the closure. Generally, the price of goods has increased while their quality has dropped this is one consequence of the largely unregulated trade conducted through the tunnels that have been dug under the Gaza-Egypt border to circumvent the closure.
Fertile farmland located close to the border fence has been turned into a wasteland by ongoing hostilities, affecting people's livelihoods in many rural communities. The buffer zone imposed by Israel extends in practice over one kilometre into the Gaza Strip, covering a total area of about 50 square kilometres that is host to nearly a third of Gaza's farmland and a large share of its livestock. Agricultural activities in the area are hampered by security conditions. Israel's enforcement of the buffer zone and frequent hostilities have resulted not only in civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian property but also in the impoverishment and displacement of numerous families.
Gaza's fishermen have been greatly affected by successive reductions imposed by Israel on the size of the fishing grounds they are allowed to exploit. The latest restriction to three nautical miles has cut down both the quantity and quality of the catch. As a result, nearly 90% of Gaza's 4000 fishermen are now considered either poor (with a monthly income of between 100 and 190 US dollars) or very poor (earning less than 100 dollars a month), up from 50% in 2008. In their struggle to survive, the fishermen have little choice but to sail into no-go zones, at the risk of being shot by the Israeli navy.
I have already been arrested and my boat has been confiscated several times, said Nezar Ayyash, who heads Gaza's fishermen's union. But this is our life here. We know that fishing can cost us our lives, but we have no other choice but to go out with our boats: we need to feed our families.
No cure in sight for ailing health-care system
Gaza is suffering from an acute electricity crisis. The power supply in Gaza is interrupted for seven hours a day on average. The consequences for public services, especially the primary health-care system, are devastating. Hospitals rely on generators to cope with the daily blackouts.
The power cuts pose a serious risk to the treatment of patients and to their very lives. It takes two to three minutes for a generator to begin operating, and during that time electronic devices do not function. As a result, artificial respirators must be reactivated manually, dialysis treatment is disrupted and surgery is suspended as operating theatres are plunged into darkness.
To make matters worse, fuel reserves for hospital generators keep drying up. Three times this year, fuel shortages have forced hospitals to cancel all elective surgery and accept emergency cases only. Gaza's paediatric hospital had to transfer all its patients to another facility because it could no longer function. Laundry services have repeatedly shut down. With the prospect of increased electricity consumption during the hot summer months when air conditioning is required, the situation is likely to deteriorate further if hospitals do not receive ample fuel.
Fluctuations in the power supply can also damage essential medical equipment. Repairs are difficult owing to the closure, under which the transfer into Gaza of spare parts for medical equipment is subject to excessive delays of up to several months.
The transfer of disposable electrodes, which are used to monitor the heart rhythm of cardiac patients, has been delayed since August 2009. Without this equipment, patient lives are at risk, as heart problems may not be detected in time. Because of the restrictions in place, most heart monitors in Gaza will be unusable by the end of this month. The run-down state of equipment is one of the reasons for the high numbers of patients seeking treatment outside the Strip.
Stocks of essential medical supplies have reached an all-time low because of a standstill in cooperation between Palestinian authorities in Ramallah and Gaza. At the end of May 2010, 110 of 470 medicines considered essential, such as chemotherapy and haemophilia drugs, were unavailable in Gaza. When chemotherapy is interrupted, the chances of success drop dramatically, even if another painful round of treatment is initiated. Haemophilia patients face life-threatening haemorrhages when compounds such as Factor VIII and IX are not available.
More than 110 of the 700 disposable items that should be available are also out of stock. The only way to cope is to re-use such items as ventilator tubes or colostomy bags, even though doing so can lead to infections that endanger patients lives.
The state of the health-care system in Gaza has never been worse, said Eileen Daly, the ICRC's health coordinator in the territory. Health is being politicized: that is the main reason the system is failing. Unless something changes, things are only going to get even worse. Thousands of patients could go without treatment and the long-term outlook will be increasingly worrisome.
The health-care system is further weakened by severe restrictions imposed on the movement of people into and out of Gaza. The restrictions prevent medical staff from leaving the Strip to get the training they need to update their skills, and technicians from entering to repair medical equipment.
Lack of sanitation hazardous for health and the environment
The lack of proper sanitation and certain agricultural practices are polluting Gaza's aquifer. Only about 60% of the territory's 1.4 million inhabitants are connected to a sewage collection system. Raw sewage discharged into the river Wadi Gaza, which snakes through urban areas, jeopardizes the health of the communities living on its banks.
Because the aquifer is over-exploited, drinking water in most of Gaza contains high levels of nitrate, chloride and salt. The water is unfit for consumption, and the risk of contracting an infectious disease is high.
Assembling enough suitable materials to carry out sanitation projects is a slow and haphazard process. Materials obtained through the tunnel trade can be of questionable quality, while some items, such as certain electro-mechanical pumps, cannot be found at all, which hobbles construction efforts.
The current situation is critical and may lead to an irreversible trend in the degradation of underground fresh water, said Javier Cordoba, who oversees the ICRC's water and sanitation activities in Gaza. Large-scale projects, such as the construction of a desalination plant, must be undertaken to meet water-supply needs without further exposing the aquifer. The closure must be lifted so that the 4.5 billion US dollars pledged by donor countries over a year ago can be put to use.
* Over 800 Gazan detainees in Israeli prisons have been prevented from meeting face-to-face with their loved ones since June 2007, when Israel suspended the ICRC's family visit programme. To mitigate the effects of this measure, the ICRC has doubled its own visits to Gazan detainees and stepped up its efforts to maintain family links by delivering written and oral messages between detainees and their families.
http://bit.ly/aQ1NG3
Children of dust in Palestine
Israel has stolen the dreams of the Palestinian children.
Israel is being allowed to destroy the very notion of a state of Palestine and is imprisoning an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond.
These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure." The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.
Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure," this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.
Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war," suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children."
The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza's more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment ... The shadows of human beings roam the ruins ... They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions."
Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.
More than 40 percent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr. Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound." A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust." Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.
I met Dr. Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children's community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 percent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 percent of the study group's homes were bombarded; 97.5 percent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 percent witnessed shootings; 95.8 percent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed."
He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships."
Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises." Just as the invasion of Iraq was a "war by media," so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term "occupied territories" is seldom explained. Only 9 percent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism," "murder" and "savage, cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians.
There are honorable exceptions. The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem (al-Quds), the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply.
A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel's destruction" and one that "refuses to recognize Israel and wants to fight not talk." This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine's destruction. Moreover, Hamas's long-standing proposals for a ten-year cease-fire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel. "The [Hamas] charter is not the Qur'an," said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions ... If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don't think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution]."
When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.
JP/IS
http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/10838.html
16 juni 2010
Comment is free Off the hook: Israel's own Widgery inquiry into Bloody Monday
Israel cannot be trusted to investigate its military over the Gaza flotilla raid. Only an international, independent inquiry will do
The man who ordered the attack on the aid flotilla to Gaza, set up the inquiry, chose its members and determined its mandate, has announced its outcome even before it has started. Binyamin Netanyahu's beaming smile showed an Israeli prime minister confident that he had faced down international protestations over the Israeli attack on the Gaza aid flotilla, buying off the pressure with an inquiry that even the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, described as a farce.
For those without crystal balls, Netanyahu helpfully told us that the inquiry will show that Israel took "appropriate defensive actions in accordance with the highest international standards". Well, it will say that, we can be sure.
Is this a rerun of the Widgery inquiry into Bloody Sunday that falsely found that civilians opened fire on British soldiers first? (Israel stated that it was the civilians who attacked first, as if the boarding of the ships never happened). Let us hope that it will not take 38 years to find a Saville, unearth the truth and for someone to apologise for this Bloody Monday massacre as well as others.
The inquiry chairman, Jacob Turkel, has stated that holding people to account is a marginal issue. Israeli soldiers will not testify at the inquiry. Would any of the activists co-operate with or trust this kangaroo court? Would an activist beaten up by Israeli soldiers, who has seen their friends and colleagues killed and shot, feel safe going back? Will all their photographs and video footage be released intact after having been illegally confiscated by the Israeli authorities? Israel was very fast to release its own carefully edited selected footage.
Turkey has understandably dismissed this inquiry. A valid inquiry requires Turkey's co-operation to share the findings of the post-mortems into the nine Turkish citizens killed. They reportedly show that one victim was shot five times from less than 45cm.
Netanyahu has hand-picked two international observers including Lord Trimble who on the day of the attack on the flotilla was starting a "Friends of Israel initiative". They will not be allowed to vote on the inquiry's conclusions. In case of need, the commission can hold closed sessions as it sees fit.
Do not expect the inquiry team to be so naive as to produce a report that will totally exonerate Israeli actions. No doubt there will be references to alternatives that should have been used, operational shortcomings, grey areas in international law and lessons to be learned.
If Israeli actions were legitimate, and if their soldiers did act properly and legally, then what has Israel to fear? If it wants to restore its image then only a proper international, independent inquiry reporting to the UN security council would suffice. Such an inquiry would have to have full powers making it mandatory on all parties to co-operate including Israel, Turkey and the activists. Any party found responsible for illegal actions should then be held to account.
The Israeli record of investigating itself is shockingly poor. Even when the Kahan Commission into the Sabra and Shatila massacres found Ariel Sharon to have "personal responsibility", he still retained ministerial office in Begin's cabinet, and before long became foreign minister and ultimately prime minister. The Shamgar commission set up to investigate the massacre of 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron in 1994 exonerated both the army and the settler leadership of all responsibility, and recommended the partitioning a site that had been a mosque for nearly 1,400 years.
The Landau commission investigating Israeli interrogation techniques, not only took no action but deemed Israel had the right to "use moderate physical pressure" %u2013 torture to the rest of us. It even outlined in a secret part of the report exactly how this should be done. Torture continues today, with recent reports of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy threatened with torture by use of car battery leads on his hands and genitalia.
While a UN inquiry into Israel's assault on Gaza found evidence of potential war crimes and crimes against humanity, the initial Israeli investigation only prosecuted one soldier %u2013 for the use of a stolen credit card. History repeats itself, as it seems a credit card of one of the activists, taken by Israeli security ended up being used in Tel Aviv.
Impunity also extends to soldiers and settlers in the occupied territories. The Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem has reported for years on how settlers are never held to account for their crimes. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a Hebron settler leader, was given a five-month sentence for killing a Palestinian, reduced to only four. While western fatalities attract more attention from the Israeli authorities and international media, justice rarely ensues and the families of Rachel Corrie or Tom Hurndall, both killed by Israeli soldiers, still await the truth of what happened to their loved ones even today.
How can a government that uses overwhelming force against civilians, torture, detains children without trial, steals land and resources of another people, demolishes their homes and property, and has violated so many laws and conventions it would be difficult to list them on one page, seriously be expected to hold itself to account?
Sadly, British ministers have already welcomed the inquiry despite its shortcomings and lack of independence. Suspicions have been aroused that acceptance of this charade was in return for a cosmetic easing of the blockade of Gaza, and not what is needed, its full and final lifting.
The international community, and in particular the United States, never says enough. Like a spoilt child, Israel can do as it pleases. Should we be surprised that Israel uses fake British passports to assassinate people in third countries? The impact of this lack of accountability was highlighted in the report of the UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict in 2009 arguing that this only led to further crimes.
Stitching up an inquiry will be a Pyrrhic victory for Israel, just as Widgery did not help the British. The blockade of Gaza is unravelling, its barbaric siege and imprisonment of Gaza further exposed to a horrified world, with more flotillas prepared to run the gauntlet of Israeli gunboats and boarding parties. Hamas gets stronger as do more hardline elements in Gaza. Israeli leaders are not asking the right questions. Only a root-and-branch change in their policies and actions towards the Palestinians will bring them both security and international acceptance that they crave.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/16/israel-gaza-flotilla-inquiry 2 oct 2010, 20:51 , Respect -
Maria 28 juni 2010
Blockade 'Eased' as Gaza Starves more Slowly
As Israel this week declared the 'easing' of the four-year blockade of Gaza, an official explained the new guiding principle: 'Civilian goods for civilian people.' The severe and apparently arbitrary restrictions on foodstuffs entering the enclave coriander bad, cinnamon good will finally end, we are told. Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants will have all the coriander they want.
This adjustment, as the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu termed it, is aimed solely at damage limitation. With Israel responsible for killing nine civilians aboard a Gaza-bound aid flotilla three weeks ago, the world has finally begun to wonder what purpose the siege serves. Did those nine really need to die to stop coriander, chocolate and children's toys from reaching Gaza? And, as Israel awaits other flotillas, will more need to be executed to enforce the policy?
Faced with this unwelcome scrutiny, Israel as well as the United States and the European states that have been complicit in the siege desperately wants to deflect attention away from demands for the blockade to be lifted entirely. Instead it prefers to argue that the more liberal blockade for Gaza will distinguish effectively between a necessary security measures and an unfair civilian blockade. Israel has cast itself as the surgeon who, faced with Siamese twins, is mastering the miraculous operation needed to decouple them.
The result, Mr Netanyahu told his cabinet, would be a tightening of the security blockade because we have taken away Hamas ability to blame Israel for harming the civilian population. Listen to Israeli officials and it sounds as if thousands of civilian items are ready to pour into Gaza. No Qassam rockets for Hamas but soon, if we are to believe them, Gaza's shops will be as well-stocked as your average Wal-Mart.
Be sure, it won't happen.
Even if many items are no longer banned, they still have to find their way into the enclave. Israel controls the crossing points and determines how many trucks are allowed in daily. Currently, only a quarter of the number once permitted are able to deliver their cargo, and that is unlikely to change to any significant degree. Moreover, as part of the security blockade, the ban is expected to remain on items such as cement and steel desperately needed to build and repair the thousands of homes devastated by Israel's attack 18 months ago.
In any case, until Gaza's borders, port and airspace are its own, its factories are rebuilt, and exports are again possible, the hobbled economy has no hope of recovering. For the overwhelming majority of Palestinians in Gaza, mired in poverty, the new list of permissible items including coriander will remain nothing more than an aspiration.
But more importantly for Israel, by concentrating our attention on the supposed ending of the civilian blockade, Israel hopes we will forget to ask a more pertinent question: what is the purpose of this refashioned security blockade?
Over the years Israelis have variously been told that the blockade was imposed to isolate Gaza's terrorist rulers, Hamas; to serve as leverage to stop rocket attacks on nearby Israeli communities; to prevent arms smuggling into Gaza; and to force the return of the captured soldier Gilad Shalit.
None of the reasons stands up to minimal scrutiny. Hamas is more powerful than ever; the rocket attacks all but ceased long ago; arms smugglers use the plentiful tunnels under the Egyptian border, not Erez or Karni crossings; and Sgt Shalit would already be home had Israel seriously wanted to trade him for an end to the siege.
The real goal of the blockade was set out in blunt fashion at its inception, in early 2006, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian elections. Dov Weisglass, the government's chief adviser at the time, said it would put Palestinians in Gaza on a diet, but not make them die of hunger. Aid agencies can testify to the rampant malnutrition that followed. The ultimate aim, Mr Weisglass admitted, was to punish ordinary Gazans in the hope that they would overthrow Hamas.
Is Mr Weisglass a relic of the pre-Netanyahu era, his blockade-as-diet long ago superseded? Not a bit. Only last month, during a court case against the siege, Mr Netanyahu's government justified the policy not as a security measure but as economic warfare against Gaza. One document even set out the minimum calories or red lines, as they were also referred to needed by Gazans according to their age and sex.
In truth, Israel's security blockade is, in both its old and new incarnations, every bit a civilian blockade. It was designed and continues to be collective punishment of the people of Gaza for electing the wrong rulers. Helpfully, international law defines the status of Israel's policy: it is a crime against humanity.
Easing the siege so that Gaza starves more slowly may be better than nothing. But breaking 1.5 million Palestinians out of the prison Israel has built for them is the real duty of the international community.
- Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=16085 3 oct 2010, 07:24 , Respect -
Maria 30 juni 2010
The Two Sides of a Barbed-Wire Fence
West Bank
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable and costly to the country's image. But one more blunt truth must be acknowledged: the occupation is morally repugnant.
On one side of a barbed-wire fence here in the southern Hebron hills is the Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir, where Palestinians live in ramshackle tents and huts. They aren't allowed to connect to the electrical grid, and Israel won't permit them to build homes, barns for their animals or even toilets. When the villagers build permanent structures, the Israeli authorities come and demolish them, according to villagers and Israeli human rights organizations.
On the other side of the barbed wire is the Jewish settlement of Karmel, a lovely green oasis that looks like an American suburb. It has lush gardens, kids riding bikes and air-conditioned homes. It also has a gleaming, electrified poultry barn that it runs as a business.
Elad Orian, an Israeli human rights activist, nodded toward the poultry barn and noted: Those chickens get more electricity and water than all the Palestinians around here.
It's fair to acknowledge that there are double standards in the Middle East, with particular scrutiny on Israeli abuses. After all, the biggest theft of Arab land in the Middle East has nothing to do with Palestinians: It is Morocco's robbery of the resource-rich Western Sahara from the people who live there.
None of that changes the ugly truth that our ally, Israel, is using American military support to maintain an occupation that is both oppressive and unjust. Israel has eased checkpoints this year a real improvement in quality of life but the system is intrinsically malignant.
B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization that I've long admired, took me to the southern Hebron hills to see the particularly serious inequities Palestinians face here. Apparently because it covets this area for settlement expansion, Israel has concocted a series of feeble excuses to drive out Palestinians from villages here or make their lives so wretched that they leave on their own.
It's an ongoing attempt by the authorities to push people out, said Sarit Michaeli, a B'Tselem spokeswoman.
In the village of Tuba, some Palestinian farmers live in caves off the grid because permanent structures are destroyed for want of building permits that are never granted. The farmers seethe as they struggle to collect rainwater while a nearby settlement, Maon, luxuriates in water piped in by the Israeli authorities.
They plant trees and gardens and have plenty of water, complained Ibrahim Jundiya, who raises sheep and camels in Tuba. And we don't even have enough to drink. Even though we were here before them.
Mr. Jundiya said that when rainwater runs out, his family must buy tankers of water at a price of $11 per cubic meter. That's at least four times what many Israelis and settlers pay.
Violent clashes with Israeli settlers add to the burden. In Tuba, Palestinian children walking to elementary school have sometimes been attacked by Israeli settlers. To protect the children, foreign volunteers from Christian Peacemaker Teams and Operation Dove began escorting the children in the 2004-05 school year and then settlers beat the volunteers with chains and clubs, according to human rights reports and a news account from the time.
Attacks on foreign volunteers get more attention than attacks on Palestinians, so the Israeli Army then began to escort the Palestinian children of Tuba to and from elementary school. But the soldiers don't always show up, the children say, and then the kids take an hour and a half roundabout path to school to avoid going near the settlers.
For their part, settlers complain about violence by Palestinians, and it's true that there were several incidents in this area between 1998 and 2002 in which settlers were killed. Partly because of rock-throwing clashes between Arabs and Israelis, the Israeli Army often keeps Palestinians well away from Israeli settlements even if Palestinian farmers then cannot farm their own land.
Meanwhile, the settlements continue to grow, seemingly inexorably and that may be the most odious aspect of the occupation.
In other respects, some progress is evident. Mr. Orian's Israeli aid group Community, Energy and Technology in the Middle East has installed windmills and solar panels to provide a bit of electricity for Palestinians kept off the grid. And attacks from settlers have dropped significantly, in part because B'Tselem has equipped many Palestinian families with video cameras to document and deter assaults.
Still, a pregnant 19-year-old Palestinian woman in the village of At-Tuwani was hospitalized this month after an attack by settlers.
Israel has a point when it argues that relinquishing the West Bank would raise real security concerns. But we must not lose sight of the most basic fact about the occupation: It's wrong.
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on July 1, 2010, on page A31 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/opinion/01kristof.html?_r=3
Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times since 2001, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week.
Mr. Kristof grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with first class honors. He later studied Arabic in Cairo and Chinese in Taipei. While working in France after high school, he caught the travel bug and began backpacking around Africa and Asia during his student years, writing articles to cover his expenses. Mr. Kristof has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to more than 150 countries, plus all 50 states, every Chinese province and every main Japanese island. He's also one of the very few Americans to be at least a two-time visitor to every member of the Axis of Evil. During his travels, he has had unpleasant experiences with malaria, mobs and an African airplane crash.
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After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. He also covered presidential politics and is the author of the chapter on President George W. Bush in the reference book "The Presidents." He later was Associate Managing Editor of the Times, responsible for Sunday editions.
In 1990 Mr. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, then also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement. They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006, for commentary for what the judges called "his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world." He has also won other prizes including the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club award, the Michael Kelly award, the Online News Association award and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award. Mr. Kristof has taken a special interest in Web journalism and was the first blogger on The New York Times Web site; he also twitters and has a Facebook fan page and a channel on YouTube. A documentary about him, "Reporter," aired on HBO in 2010.
In his column, Mr. Kristof was an early opponent of the Iraq war, and among the first to warn that we were losing ground to the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. He was among the first to raise doubts about WMD in Iraq, he was the first to report that President Bush's State of the Union claim about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa was contradicted by the administration's own investigation. He has visited the Darfur region more than 10 times. His columns have often focused on global health and poverty and he has also written often about human trafficking.
Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are authors of "China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power" and "Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia and "Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide". Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are the parents of Gregory, Geoffrey and Caroline. Mr. Kristof enjoys running, backpacking, and having his Chinese and Japanese corrected by his children.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html
3 oct 2010, 07:24 , Respect -
Maria 6 juli 2010
Israel has never lacked enemies but now it risks losing its friends
Netanyahu went into his meeting with Obama believing he has time on his side. But he's wrong: the clock is ticking
The advance word was that this was to be a "holding meeting" and not much more. Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu would not launch some grand initiative for the Middle East. Instead they would sit together, chat chummily and pose for photographers particularly important given what happened a couple of months back, when an angry Obama kept Bibi waiting for hours in the West Wing, only to cut their meeting short without so much as posing for a souvenir snap.
Accordingly, today's summit was all warm hugs and making nice. Obama spoke of the "special bond" between the two nations even if there did have to be the occasional "robust discussion". Bibi nodded, adding that disagreements were what you got in a close "family" relationship like this one.
Reports of any strain between them were "flat wrong", and to prove it Bibi invited the Obamas to Israel; Michelle showed Sara round the White House; and reporters were kept waiting during a long Bibi-Obama lunch, surely proof that the two men just couldn't get enough of each other.
For all that, the advance billing of a holding meeting was not so far off the mark. The US president was certainly in no rush to make waves: he is four months away from midterm elections, in which support for Israel threatens to become an issue, at least in the handful of states where Jewish voters might make a difference.
In several congressional contests Republicans are making mischief over the administration's recent relative firmness towards Israel, with one candidate accusing Obama of "browbeating" the Jewish state, while others suggest the Democratic administration is fraying the historic ties that have bound the two countries. Small wonder, then, that Obama was and remains keen to be all smiles with Bibi at least until polling day on 2 November.
The Israeli PM does not face imminent elections, but he too has been happy to go along with a strategy of pause and delay. For Netanyahu inaction is always preferable to action: only a demand for tricky concessions say an extension of the current, partial moratorium on settlement building in the West Bank might imperil his fragile coalition, by prompting the ultra-hawkish parties to bolt. So long as the Americans are not asking anything of him, Bibi can stay comfortably in his seat.
There is a larger explanation for why the prime minister might be fond of stasis and inertia. The operating assumption held by both him and the nationalist right he leads is that Israel has time on its side. This is a belief deeply ingrained, one that draws sustenance from a century of Zionist history.
The first Jewish settlers in Palestine pushed the boundaries of the possible, establishing themselves in places that initially seemed insanely ambitious, only for time to reward their daring. The Jews accepted a UN partition plan in 1947 that gave them 56% of Palestine, only to see their share leap to 78% by the end of the war of 1948-9. Playing the long game has worked before and, the Israeli right assumes, it will work again.
You can see why Bibi would be drawn to such thinking. Each day that passes entrenches the Israeli presence in the West Bank. Consider that there were no Jewish settlers in 1967, around 120,000 in 1994 and more than 300,000 now those numbers alone, which exclude East Jerusalem, constitute a powerful argument for playing it long, letting time change the facts on the ground until they are unalterable.
Besides, what's the urgency? The Israeli economy is ticking along nicely, defying the global trends; the beachside cafes are full; Tel Aviv is even becoming the hot destination for gay tourism. Why risk change when the status quo is so tolerable?
And yet the underlying assumption is almost certainly wrong. Israel does not have time on its side. On the contrary, time is running out fast.
Israel is surrounded by evidence that it is, in the words of one Ha'aretz columnist, "hurtling down the slippery slope of pariahdom". The Gaza flotilla episode exposed that fact most starkly, as Israel found itself isolated diplomatically, chastised by those it normally relies on as friends.
First among those has always been the US. Israel has long been able to depend on rock-solid support from a Washington that saw merit in a loyal, semi-dependent state in a region that was unreliable at best and hostile at worst. But now that calculus has been shaken.
Note the 54 Congressmen who issued a statement rebuking Israel over the flotilla. Note the paper by Anthony Cordesman, a fixture of the US foreign policy establishment, asking if Israel has become a "strategic liability" for America.
Note too the comments of David Petraeus, now Nato commander in Afghanistan, warning that Israeli intransigence was adversely affecting US interests in the Middle East. This adds up to a new climate of opinion in which Obama can afford to be firm with Netanyahu because he knows he is not alone.
The second source of previously iron support has been the mainstream Jewish diaspora, especially in the US. For decades, the official voices of American Jewry have uttered only words of unity and support; criticism was confined to the fringes. But now that too is changing.
The institutional manifestation has been J Street, which in three short years has signed up some 100,000 supporters for its alternative to the dogmatic Israel-right-or-wrong stance of American Israel Public Affairs Committee. A key recent text is an essay by Peter Beinart that appeared in the New York Review of Books, castigating the US Jewish leadership for failing to condemn the ever-rightward drift of Israeli policy.
Of course there is nothing new about Jewish opponents of Israel: they are older than the country itself. But what makes these interventions different is that they come from those who are avowedly Israel's friends. J Street's slogan is that it is "pro-Israel, pro-peace"; Beinart is a former editor of the staunchly Zionist New Republic.
There are echoes outside the United States, too. In Europe, JCall, an online petition, has rapidly attracted the signatures of those who have previously devoted themselves to public defences of Israel, including the French glamour-intellectuals Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. Even the head of Britain's biggest pro-Israel charity last month insisted on the right of diaspora Jews to speak out, and bemoaned the lack of a peace strategy from the Israeli government.
It is this that should shatter any Israeli complacency. For these are stirrings from deep within the pro-Zionist mainstream. They cannot be dismissed as the words of implacable enemies of Israel or the Jews; they are palpably nothing of the sort.
Nor can they be ignored. Beinart's essay began with survey evidence showing young American-Jewish youth alienated and remote from Israel, with many expressing "a near-total absence of positive feelings". That sentence should strike fear into all those looking to Israel's long-term future.
Until now, the chief long-range concern of the Israeli right was demographic, the fear that eventually Israel would rule over more Arabs than Jews, given the combined populations of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Now they have another concern: "delegitimisation", what they perceive as a global campaign to ostracise, or boycott, Israel, until it is banished from the family of nations.
It is undeniable that Israel has bitter enemies. But the longer the occupation endures, the more Israel risks losing its friends. Netanyahu has to realise that Israel does not have time on its side: it needs to end this conflict and with the utmost urgency.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jul/06/israel-losing-friends-netanyahu-obama
7 juli 2010
The 'trick' of Camp David
Palestinians feel they were deceived by a PR exercise. Now aid carries disruptive caveats and the peace process is just a circus
If there are Palestinian textbooks on the failure of the Camp David talks with Israel in 2000, they ought to carry diagrams illustrating the use of smoke-and-mirrors tactics. In this case, the confusing burst of smoke used by the Israeli side to such spectacular effect was the "generous offer" made by then Israeli prime minster, Ehud Barak a now mythically impressive peace proposal which Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, it is claimed, both stubbornly and stupidly refused.
By this narration, the deal was intended to give back almost all of the 22% of historic Palestine that Palestinians have already agreed to accept as their state. And this airbrushed account has held sway ever since; although patiently taken apart many times, it is still treated as rigid fact within Israel and among its rightist supporters.
A decade on, this spin factor has endowed a key Camp David legacy: the perception among Palestinians that talks undertaken by them in good faith are primarily designed to make them look bad. Ask Palestinians in the West Bank about the disastrous summit and the words "trap", "trick" and "public relations exercise for Israel" keep coming up. According to this view, the rejection of Barak's manifestly unacceptable offer was deployed by Israel as both proof that there is "no one to talk to" and justification for a subsequent hardline approach.
Analysts observe that the failure of those talks created a political vacuum, clearing a space for extremism on both sides. Developments after Camp David read like a chronicle of misery: the violent second Palestinian intifada followed by Israel's brutal military reoccupation of the West Bank; the continued expansion of Jewish settlements and infrastructure in the West Bank, along with the increase in stifling roadblocks and checkpoints and the construction of Israeli's choking separation barrier; the devastating split between Palestinian parties Fatah and Hamas, and Israel's deadly, three-week pounding of the Gaza strip in late 2008.
Ghassan Khatib, media director for the Palestinian Authority, says: "Much of the deterioration witnessed in the decade that followed can be attributed to the miscalculation that led to Camp David." In common with other analysts he says that Palestinians were strong-armed into the "all or nothing" negotiations at Camp David, despite repeatedly advising US mediators that the situation was not ripe for such talks. As a consequence, there is now little faith in the international community as independent arbitrators.
Lack of trust is compounded by the fact that, since Camp David, international intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been focused on the journey getting talks to resume rather than the destination. This endless talks circuit, the status of which shifts from moribund to resuscitated and limping, is viewed as a distracting sideshow, a profiteering circus. As the independent Palestinian MP Mustafa Barghouti puts it: "The peace process became a business and a substitute for peace."
A toxic, humiliating consequence of those peace process years that began with the 1993 Oslo accords has been the creation of an aid economy in the occupied Palestinian territories. Palestinians, who place no less emphasis on education, economy and good business than do their Israeli neighbours, are now ashamed to point out that they are among the most aid-dependent societies.
There is no good reason for this: it is absolutely a decision made by the international community, to allay some of the more devastating consequences of Israel's occupation while refusing to push for a political agreement. Now the aid carries its own disruptive caveats: for instance, USAID feeds funds into swathes of the Palestinian NGO sector, but only on condition that documents are signed to assure that the organisations to be funded are Hamas-free. Observers say that civil society organisations and grassroots groups, pre-Oslo, were far better able to take care of Palestinians than the mushrooming, internationally dependent and politically compromised NGO economy that currently powers Palestine.
And despite Israeli and international efforts to thwart Hamas, the party's position on negotiations has traction in the decade-long shadows of the collapsed Camp David summit. Mahmoud Ramahi, senior Hamas representative and the general secretary of the Palestinian legislative council, says that the Palestinian Authority's position financially blackmailed by the international community into appearing at endless, futile negotiating tables with Israel is proof of how Camp David "infected policy" within the Palestinian frame.
"We accept '67 borders," he says. "But when we saw this proposal at Camp David, the people understood that Israel doesn't want to give us anything and that we have to keep resisting and fighting for our rights."
He says talks should be premised on the Israeli acceptance of basic tenets, upheld by UN resolutions and international law: "When Israel is ready to accept our rights, we are ready to negotiate on how to implement that decision."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/07/camp-david-palestinians 3 oct 2010, 07:24 , Respect -
Maria 8 juli 2010
Patrick Cockburn: The chronic failure of Israeli leadership
President Obama was full of gushing goodwill towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their summit in Washington this week. There was no mention of an extension to the moratorium on Israeli settlement building or the Israeli commandos' attack on the Turkish aid flotilla bound for Gaza.
In private, the White House and even the Israeli delegation were quick to say that Mr Obama's climb-down had not been quite as humiliating as it looked, and assurances had been given that the moratorium would be quietly extended. But the President was at pains to reverse the cool reception Mr Netanyahu got during his visit to the White House in March when when he was not even allowed a photograph with Mr Obama, who kept him waiting while he had dinner with his family upstairs.
The reason for Mr Netanyahu's friendlier reception is obvious enough. Mr Obama needs every vote he can get in the mid-term Congressional elections in November when a third of the Senate and all the House face re-election. The Republicans have been seeking with some success to portray him as anti-Israel. Pro-Israeli lobby groups have been putting intense pressure on Democratic Senators and Congressmen to demand that the White House be more accommodating.
The outcome of the brief confrontation between Israel and the US is not surprising. With its collective mind focused on the upcoming elections, the White House is disregarding signs of disquiet from the US chiefs of staff and security policy establishment that Israeli ill-treatment of the Palestinians and excessive use of force in the region is turning Israel into a liability for the US. They warn that the US will not always give unstinting support to acts they see as irresponsible misjudgements, be it against the Turks on the high seas or Palestinians in Gaza and Lebanon.
As in the past, such protestations have got nowhere. Israeli leaders remain protected by an all-purpose American insurance shielding them from the results of their mistakes. In fact, they do not even view these as mistakes, since Israeli propaganda portray idiocies such as the use of elite troops trained to kill to thwart the Turkish peace activists as reasonable decisions.
Since no errors are admitted, there is no reason not to repeat them. Worse, the Israeli political and military leaders go on holding their jobs despite an Inspector Clouseau-like ability to blunder. Mr Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, both behave with the swaggering arrogance of successful warlords, though their careers are littered with failed operations.
The Turkish aid boat fiasco is not difficult to understand when it is recalled that it was Mr Netanyahu, when Prime Minister in 1997, who allowed Mossad to try to assassinate a Hamas leader in Amman by injecting a slow-acting poison into his ear as he left his office. The plan went wrong; two Mossad agents were captured and Mr Netanyahu was forced by King Hussein to supply the antidote to the poison and release Palestinian prisoners.
Ever since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Israel has been ruled by one of the stupidest and least responsible leaderships in the world. Their failings have been masked by propaganda and by Israel's American insurance policy, but nothing else can explain Israel's record of repeated failure in military and security operations. So much of Israeli politics revolves around manipulating the sense of threat felt by Israeli voters, that the capacity to deal with real threats is stultified.
Contrary to Israel's reputation for military prowess, the last time it won a war was 37 years ago, against Egypt and Syria in 1973. Israel's long invasion of Lebanon in 1982 initiated an 18-year-long guerrilla war against Israeli occupation of the south of the country, which only ended with a precipitate Israeli withdrawal in 2000. All its military operations over the last 10 years have failed to achieve their aims.
Political leaders are so often accused of stupidity that it is worth asking if they behave more foolishly in Israel than elsewhere. The main explanation is that Israelis believe their own propaganda and their supporters abroad adopt a skewed view of events as if it was an article of faith. Israelis, leaders and followers alike, acquire a wholly distorted picture of the world around them. Hubris breeds self-righteousness and arrogance that robs Israel of friends and allies and repeatedly leads its leaders to underestimate their enemies.
Critics of Israeli actions, be they Israeli peace activists or members of the Turkish government, are demonised as supporters of terrorism. In this fantasy world sensible policies become difficult for leaders to devise and, if they do so, impossible to sell to voters. It is scarcely surprising that Israel's only victories these days are won on the sofas of the White House.
Deferred delight
Turkey's progress towards becoming a regional power in the Middle East moves nervously forward as it fends off allegations that it is "turning to the east". It is surprising that its increased influence is so late in coming, given Turkey is more powerful than any of its neighbours, including Iran. Divisions within Turkey are deepening, not evaporating. The long battle between the mildly Islamic but democratic AKP party and its secular but authoritarian opponents is, if anything, hotting up.
So too is the struggle between Kurdish guerrillas and the central government in the south east of the country. "The Turkish government displays a taste for moderation and mediation abroad that it seldom shows at home," says one diplomat acidly.
With the European Union on its sickbed, it is surprising anybody still wants to join it. Turkish enthusiasm has been ebbing fast. Its economy is expanding faster than many EU members. But the main reason for Turkey joining the EU is political rather than economic. Seeking EU membership has been a potent antidote to military coups, torture, arbitrary arrests and censorship of the media in recent years. This could all go into reverse if Turkey's EU membership application is finally pronounced dead.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-the-chronic-failure-of-israeli-leadership-2020931.html
24-26 sept 2010
Why Does Israel Still Occupy the Palestinians?
The majority of Israel's anti-occupation movement, unfortunately, does not focus on the rights of Palestinians to live free, but on the damage that the occupation causes to Israeli society (Sternhell, 2009).
The arguments that the occupation is a major investment of resources that could be useful in alleviating Israel's many social problems, and that the settlements, or colonies, enjoy exorbitant government subsidies (Swirski, 2008) are well known in Israeli society, and seldom challenged on a factual basis.
Within Israel, the arguments used to support the occupation on the basis of its purported economic benefits to Israel have gone silent. Even Marxist economists who effectively demonstrated the profits derived by Israel from the occupation in its first two decades largely abandoned the notion that Israel occupies the Palestinian territories for economic profit after the First Intifada of 1987, since when Palestinian resistance to the occupation has exacted a heavy economic toll on Israel - although clearly Palestinians paid a much heavier price for daring to challenge Israel's occupation (Swirski, 2005).
The costs of the occupation to Israeli society can be divided into three. First, the massive subsidies to the illegal colonists in the West Bank are estimated at about US$ 3 billion annually, and growing by 5%-8% annually. Second, the cost of security for the colonies, and the military expenditure to keep the Palestinians under control (both in the West Bank and Gaza) is about double that at US$ 6 billion annually, and growing at about the same rate as the civilian costs (Hever, 2005). Third, the social costs of the occupation are too numerous and complex to list here, including the collapse of public services, social solidarity and democratic institutions within Israel, and the widening of social gaps to monstrous levels.
Ever since the Israeli economy began to absorb cheap Palestinian labour in 1967, more and more companies adopted a business model dependent upon cheap labour, and so worker's rights have been eroding, contributing to a spike in inequality (Swirski, 2005). Meanwhile, the dual legal system for Israeli citizens and for Palestinians has strained Israel's democratic institutions beyond what they could bear (Kretzmer, 2002).
It would therefore seem that the rational course of action for the Israeli government would be to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Policies Defying Rationality?
Instead, it seems that the Israeli government focuses its energies on marketing itself as a legitimate, democratic and respectable country, for instance by setting up propaganda agencies to supplement the efforts of embassies (Ravid, 2010), while not giving up one iota of control over the Palestinians, not ending the siege on the Gaza Strip, and not evacuating colonies in the West Bank.
The colonists in the West Bank are often blamed by critics of the occupation as the main obstacle to Israeli withdrawal. The argument, according to the Israeli Zionist left, is that colonists are driven by an irrational, messianic ideology, and fail to see that their actions push Israel further and further towards the edge of the abyss (Shenhav, 2010).
However, colonists only constitute about 7% of Israeli citizens. How have they been able to hijack the government and prevent it from ending the occupation? Furthermore, it is convenient to forget the massive economic subsidies received by the colonists from the government, subsidies which, if stopped, could slow down the rate of expansion and convince many to relocate back into Israel (Gutwein, 2004). If the colonists are not serving the interests of the government, why do they receive preferential treatment compared to average Israeli citizens? (Zertal & Eldar, 2007).
The colonists power over Israeli society is a mystery that confounds the Zionist left argument about Israel's unwillingness to act according to its own interests (Kleinman, 2005). Colonists have indeed been receiving billions of dollars worth of subsidies by the Israeli government and yet most of Israel's richest capitalists are not colonists. Colonists have risen to prominent positions within the Israeli military, but the majority of the army's top brass are not colonists (Zertal & Eldar, 2007). Furthermore, when the Israeli government was determined to evacuate the settlers from the Gaza Strip, it did so despite the desperate campaign put together by the colonists to try to stop the evacuation.
Although colonists do have a powerful impact on Israeli politics, this is because the majority of the public allows them to. The religious zeal for the "holy" land is a convenient scapegoat for presenting a hard-line negotiation position, which many Israelis believe gives the Israeli government leverage to secure a better deal during the peace process. The peace process may be delayed indefinitely as a result of Israelis adopting a non-compromising position, but as long as the costs of the occupation are bearable, why hurry to make any compromises? Thus, the colonists actually serve a useful function for the Israeli government. Their seeming irrationality and apparent dangerous messianic politics are used to divert attention from the Israeli public's reluctance to recognize Palestinian rights.
The mainstream Israeli narrative obviously does not portray the dilemma in terms of economic arguments, but as a strategic issue essential to Israel's security (Greenberg, 2008). Despite the fact that modern warfare has made territorial buffers largely irrelevant (especially the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which buffer Israel from states it has signed peace treaties with), the argument that conceding to Palestinian demands would amount to a victory for terrorists is routinely invoked. Moreover, Israeli generals claim that only by maintaining tight control over the borders of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip can they ensure that no rockets or rocket components are smuggled into these territories and into firing range of Israel (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2009).
These arguments inverse cause and effect, as if Palestinians desire to attack Israel is inherent, rather than being motivated by decades of repression and military occupation. Interestingly, there are numerous examples of Israeli senior officers and high-ranking politicians who suddenly realize that resistance is the symptom and not the cause of the occupation merely weeks after retiring from their military or political careers.[1]
Reasons for the Continuation of the Occupation
So why do Israelis support the occupation, even though they realize that it is an economic burden? The answer is complex, as Israelis are not a homogeneous group.
Several elite groups in Israel support the occupation because after decades of occupation and repression, they have become defined by it.
1. The army commanders are trained and educated to see Palestinians as enemies, and have adopted a narrow, mechanistic approach to dealing with them. Rather than bother with the why of Palestinian resistance, they focus only on the how of controlling the Palestinians and suppressing their resistance. As a professional group which specializes in the use of force for problem solving, it is not surprising that soldiers and officers tend to adopt a right-wing perspective on the occupation, many of them strongly empathise with the colonists, and many young Israelis whose beliefs are more leftist find ways to evade military service. When conscription rates have fallen to about 50%, young Israelis who go to the army do so out of choice (Harel, 2010).
2. Certain business interests, especially in the fields of arms trade, finance and homeland security, directly profit from the conflict (Klein, 2007). Many Israeli millionaires made their fortunes by providing services to the army, or by peddling temporary and ad-hoc security solutions to a public that has adopted fear as its main pillar of politics, culture and moral justification. Israel's domestic demand for security products is extremely large. According to OECD publications, Israel spends 8% of its GDP on security (OECD, 2010), which makes it as the most militarized state in the OECD, (most OECD countries spend 1%-2% of their GDP on security). It also places Israel as one of the biggest spenders on security in the world. But a recent study found that Israel actually spends a lot more on security than the official figures admit. A more accurate estimate is that Israel spends 12.3% of its GDP on security (Wolfson, 2009).
Israel has also become one of the world's largest arms exporters, estimated to be the 4th biggest global exporter (Associated Press, 2007). Israeli arms companies are able to present themselves as experts in fighting terrorism, because of their close ties with the Israeli army and the fact that their equipment is used and tested on Palestinians. The same logic also made Israel the world's capital of homeland security products (Gordon, 2009).
This reality is clearly the result of decades of conflict, occupation and resistance to occupation.
Financial companies also benefit from the culture of fear and the instability in the capital markets, although their benefits are less direct than those of the arms dealers.
3. Israeli politicians, many of them former military commanders, compete with each other for the image of the tough guy, to best assuage the worries of a fear-stricken population, even as they stoke the flames of panic. Netanyahu is a prime example of this. On the one hand, he markets himself as Israel's strong leader, and attacks his opponents as soft. On the other hand, he continuously expresses fear of Iran's possible nuclear weapons. Such politicians have nothing to gain by making compromises in the framework of negotiations with Palestinian leaders, because were the repression of Palestinians to end and the conflict to subside, the political capital of these politicians would lose its value, and they would quickly be replaced by a new generation of politicians (Ben Meir, 1995).
More significant than these elite groups, however, are lower socioeconomic classes in Israel, which deserve special attention. Although this group is cut-off from the centres of military, economic and political power, it is also the largest group in Israeli society, with massive electoral power.
The Jewish lower classes in Israel, whose members are disproportionately religious, unemployed and poor, and who disproportionately originate from Arab countries, have been largely supportive of Israel's military adventures and opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state (Shalev, Peled & Yiftachel, 2000).
The Zionist left is often baffled by this, and has tried to launch campaigns targeted at these lower socioeconomic classes. These campaigns used slogans such as money for [poor] neighborhoods, not for the settlements. The underlying message was that poor people don't know what's good for them, and have been supporting right-wing parties in Israel at the expense of their own economic interests. The same parties believe that Palestinians can be cajoled into signing a peace treaty that won't require overly painful compromises from Israel with offers of free trade and international aid as economic compensation (Elgazi, 2007).
Obviously, the patronizing undertones were not lost on the Israeli public, nor were they lost on the Palestinian public, which refused to give up on its right for sovereignty and self-determination in exchange for the promise of increased standard of living. The Zionist left's agenda was exposed with Prime Minister's Barak's generous offer to the Palestinians, a take-it-or-leave-it offer to end the conflict and the resistance in exchange for a Palestinian state in disconnected cantons on most of the area occupied by Israel in 1967. The Palestinian public rejected that offer, the Second Intifada erupted and the Zionist left has been in steep decline in the decade since (Ackerman, 2002).
The Jewish lower socioeconomic classes are aware that the occupation has turned Israel into a military state, and that there is a clear causal connection between the fact that security remains the government's first priority and the fact that welfare mechanisms have been mostly liquidated.
Yet people rarely make their choices in life, and in politics, based on material considerations alone. A strong national identity, and the celebration of victory over the Palestinians, can sometimes substitute for economic comfort and prosperity. The soldier at a West Bank checkpoint will often be from the lower classes, and considered poorly educated by Israeli social standards. However, in the checkpoint that soldier's will is law, and a soldier can build his or her self image at the expense of others with impunity.
Is Israel a Pawn of the U.S?
When considering Israeli policies, one cannot ignore the crucial role played by the United States in the Middle East. Israel could never have sustained its aggressive policies without massive U.S. Support. The United States warmongering in the Middle East needs no introduction, and the reasons and complex political and economic structures in the U.S. that drive it to instigate conflict in the Middle East are beyond the scope of this article. The fact that the U.S. grants military aid to the most aggressive state in the Middle East Israel to the tune of US$3 billion annually (more aid than that received by any other country in the world) should be sufficient evidence of the correlation between U.S. and Israeli strategy in the region (Bowels, 2003).
Some political analysts believe that Israel merely serves as a proxy to U.S. policy, that U.S. decision-makers find it easier to send Israeli soldiers to risk life and limb in war than to send even more U.S. soldiers to the battlefield. But Israel's internal politics suggest that the Israeli public does not perceive itself as serving U.S. interests, but its own. Propaganda and brainwashing cannot explain such a wide rift between the analysis and public opinion.
Other analysts argue that Israel, despite its small size, wields disproportionate influence over U.S. policy, as in John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's book The Israel Lobby and U.S Foreign Policy (Mersheimer & Walt, 2007). One should remember, however, that much stronger lobbies than the Israeli lobby operate in Washington, such as those of the large weapons companies (Lockheed-Martin, McDonald Douglas), companies that profit directly from U.S. aid to Israel, since Israel is required to use the aid to buy U.S.-made weaponry. There is no faster way to boost these firms arms sales than to ensure continued U.S. support for its friend and ally Israel (Yom, 2008).
It seems reasonable to suppose that were Israel to end the occupation and the repression of Palestinian citizens and refugees, and sign a peace treaty with its neighbours, the U.S. would no longer have an urgent incentive to support Israel economically and diplomatically. Nevertheless, this hypothetical scenario is not part of the Israeli political discourse, and the reasons why Israelis support the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories extend far beyond Israel's dependency on U.S. support.
How to Change the Situation?
But let us be honest, there is one argument that many Israelis make that does make some sense, and that is the domino theory. The argument that if Palestinians have their own, independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, there will still be protests and political struggles to change the nature of the Israeli state is an accurate argument. Zionists who seek to preserve the Jewish state, a state where Jews enjoy preferential status over all others, use the occupation as a buffer to draw attention from the inherently ethnic nature of the state of Israel and its discriminatory laws. Zionists who fear the day when the Palestinian Naqba of 1948 will become a daily political issue on the government's agenda, the day when Palestinian refugees will organize behind a unified demand for compensation and re-patriation, cling to the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The occupation helps transform what is essentially a question of civil rights and democracy into a military issue. In a military conflict, Israel still holds the advantage.
So how can those who hope for a better future deal with an Israeli society that refuses to seriously consider the rights of Palestinians? The first step is to abandon the notion that Israeli society is an agent of change. There are no historical precedents of empires willingly giving up their colonies. Only the subjects of occupation can win their own freedom. Israeli society is a decadent society in an unstoppable decline, resistant to internal calls for reform and politically paralyzed from within.
Only external pressure can truly bring change to this society, and allow democracy to take hold in the region, not only for the benefit of Palestinians, but for the benefit of Israelis too. External pressure, by using political and economic tools such as sanctions and boycott, returns the issues of civil rights and democracy to the fore, and deprives Israel of the option to use its military might to make the problem go away.
Shir Hever is an economist at the Alternative Information Center. His new book: Political Economy of Israel's Occupation has recently been published by Pluto Press.
Notes.
[1] A good example of this was a conference in the Van Leer Institute in February 13th, 2008, where senior officers such as Hagain Alon, Ilan Paz, Shlomo Brom and Amos Ben Avraham expressed the notion that checkpoints and other control mechanisms encourage Palestinian resistance more than they repress it.
By SHIR HEVER
http://www.counterpunch.org/hever09242010.html 3 oct 2010, 07:25 , Respect -
Maria 12 juli 2010
A Special Place in Hell / Israelis need a Gandhi of their own
Israeli protesters in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan
There is nothing more threatening to the occupation than the specter of Palestinian non-violence.
The more insoluble a conflict, it seems, the more durable the axioms that help keep a solution at bay.
All too often, the problem is not that the axiom is unhelpful or untrue, but that over time it has come, ploughshare into sword, to be adopted by one side or the other as a weapon.
So it is, that dyed-in-the-wool anti-Palestinians have long delighted in denouncing the Palestinian movement for having failed to produce a home-grown Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King.
Of course, the criticism is as disingenuous as it is self-serving, since over the years the pro-settlement right has been the primary, perhaps the sole, political beneficiary of Palestinian attacks against Israelis.
But the denunciation also tends to obscure a revolution gaining traction among Palestinians. The growing openness to the power of non-violence was the subject of Nicholas Kristof's thoughtful recent dispatch from the West Bank village of Bil'in, "Waiting for Gandhi."
The column follows an eyebrow-raiser from the Wall Street Journal. In pages largely unaccustomed to portraying Hamas and Hezbollah in terms other than that of armed groups locked in a to-the-death struggle with Israel, a recent report from Jerusalem opened by saying that the flotilla incident had moved the organizations to begin to "embrace civil disobedience, civil disobedience, protest marches, lawsuits and boycotts tactics they once dismissed."
"When we use violence, we help Israel win international support," prominent Hamas West Bank lawmaker Aziz Dweik told the Journal.
"The Gaza flotilla has done more for Gaza than 10,000 rockets."
Through it all, the robust internal Palestinian debate over non-violence, underway abroad as well as within the territories, has gone largely unnoticed in Israel. Hereabouts, the problem goes beyond Seeing is Believing. All too often, the problem is the opposite: What you do not believe, you will refuse to see.
It may well be more difficult for Israelis to comprehend the idea of Palestinian non-violence than for Palestinians to do so. For many Israelis, the very thought of non-violent Palestinian protest goes so far against the grain as to be incomprehensible, lethally suspicious, a violation of a bedrock narrative.
In many cases, Israeli media have actively ignored or obscured non-violent Palestinian protest. Last month, hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians marched together through the streets of Silwan, East Jerusalem, protesting a plan by Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat to evict Arab residents and raze 22 houses for a settler-oriented tourism project.
Noting the demonstration in an evening newscast, Israel Channel 2 Television chose to show its viewers old footage of Muslims praying at the site, followed by youths throwing rocks at Israeli troops. The message was clear: Nothing new here. Nothing to see here, folks move along now.
But there is very definitely something new here. The protest was not, as the brief news item hinted, one more example of radical Islamists inciting hotheads to violence against Israelis. Far from it. What actually happened was a march in which settlers stared in wonderment and a certain anxiety at a large and unified force of Jews and Arabs taking a powerful stand against occupation.
When one Palestinian youth picked up a rock to throw at the settlers, Arabs and Jews alike stopped him and distanced him from the march.
The fact is that Israel may need a Gandhi more than the Palestinians do. As the Jewish state begins to examine its own actions and decision-making in the flotilla disaster, it is becoming that much clearer that Israelis need, for their own sake, to begin to study non-violence.
Over the past decade, Israel has been moving farther and farther away from non-violent solutions to difficult problems. In wars in Lebanon and Gaza, the nation's leaders came down on the side of blunt military force over intensive, creative, confident diplomacy. In domestic politics, as well, the implied violence of racist discourse, the verbal Dahiya Doctrines of Avigdor Lieberman and Eli Yishai, have paid off handsomely in the ballot box.
Israelis suffer at least as much as Palestinians from the machismo ethic that fuels the resort to violence. Twenty years ago, it was that macho ethos which made it so constitutionally painful for the IDF to develop, train for, and employ non-lethal methods in the face of civilian unrest. Twenty years later, it was that same macho ethos which turned tear gas into a lethal weapon in countering demonstrators in the West Bank.
Today it is that same macho ethos which drives Benjamin Netanyahu and, especially, Ehud Barak, which gave rise to the colossally tragic - and entirely unnecessary consequences of the flotilla raid.
Some Palestinian activists have complained that resort to non-violence has traditionally been seen as unmanly. That what was taken by force not only can be but must be returned by force. Palestinians are beginning to rethink this view.
At a time when use of overwhelming force has cost Israel dearly in its world standing, what will it take for Israelis to rethink the idea that what they have can only be maintained by force? A new kind of leader. A Gandhi, a Dr. King.
Cynics will note that the Israeli whom Israelis called Gandhi, was a man of war, a general, and the Israeli politician most closely identified with advocating "transfer" of Palestinians to facilitate holding on to the territories forever.
Rehavam Ze'evi was also the man who said shortly after the 1967 Six Day War "I am afraid of peace. I think that from the standpoint of the Israeli people and the Jewish people, peace in the coming decade poses many dangers."
Can there any better proof that we need a different Gandhi? A real one this time.
While we wait, the macho in us keeps us crippled. The macho in us keeps us incapable of response to reason. The macho in us makes it necessary to see boycotts as terrorism, peaceful protest as terrorism,
Yes, there is something counter-intuitive in the idea of non-violence as a threat.
There is nothing more threatening to the occupation than the specter of Palestinian non-violence. And there is nothing more hopeful for Israel's future, than the prospect, distant as it still may be, that Israelis and Palestinians can work peaceably together to bring that occupation to an end.
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/a-special-place-in-hell-israelis-need-a-gandhi-of-their-own-1.301496
29 sept 2010
South Africa's foreign policy in knots? Iqbal Jassat
Is South a recent interview, South Africa's ambassador to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, Ted Pekane, made an intriguing observation:
"Currently we have no intention of breaking ties with Israel. That would be counter-productive. Our policy of engagement applies to Israel as well. Only if the [Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas] asked us to support the disinvestments and sanctions campaign against Israel would we consider packing our bags."
This admission is the closest any senior foreign ministry official has come to in revealing an inherent weakness in this country's relations with Israel and Palestine.
It is shocking too in that it implies our diplomatic engagement in the world's number one conflict zone is blinded and being pursued while voluntarily having our hands tied behind our back.
More importantly, it discloses an intolerable weakness that inevitably is exploited by the stronger of the two sides. Israel is in effective control of all aspects of Palestinian life by virtue of the occupation and the multiple layers of restrictive measures.
In such an unusual situation, no country having diplomatic ties with both Israel and the Palestinian Authority can claim any form of political equilibrium.
For South Africa to argue that ties with Israel are balanced by maintaining a presence in the West Bank is questionable. It results in the type of untenable position articulated by Ambassador Pekane and places undue constraints on our ability to either pursue relations freely or with the legitimately elected leadership of Palestine.
On the matter of uninhibited relations it is well known that the siege on Gaza along with the occupation makes it impossible to even consider undertaking any formal agreements with the Palestinian side. Whatever may be mutually agreed upon between a sovereign state such as South Africa and the occupied Palestinian Territories will remain incapacitated as its implementation will constantly be frustrated and hindered by Israel.
This is the brutal reality flowing from irrational Israeli policies.
It does not allow for any meaningful ties in the socioeconomic or political spheres. Instead, what it does is to lend a seal of legitimacy to the illegal occupation and oppression that Pekane correctly pointed out was cruder than apartheid.
The danger associated with such dubious diplomatic exercises has enormous consequences for the victims. Their oppression is compounded by the trappings of developmental projects within the confines of open-air prisons. The wall of separation also known as the apartheid wall ensures that beyond impeding free movement of the indigenous Palestinian population, even diplomats like Pekane are restricted.
Can South Africa boast of free trade with the Palestine? It does so with Israel, illustrating the unfair imbalance inherent in these ties.
The argument for maintaining relations with Israel is underpinned by the view that we also have diplomatic presence in Ramallah.
It's obviously a presence that has extolled a price. In addition to granting Israel carte blanche, it has legitimized the occupation. And in the Israeli fashion of promoting erstwhile Bantustans such as Bophuthatswana, whereby projects were financed by Israeli entrepreneurs with the full backing of the Tel Aviv government, it is unfortunate that South Africa seems oblivious of similar trappings.
It is an obnoxious situation and the only remedy would be for Pretoria to sever all links with Tel Aviv. In addition it would necessitate the establishment of a fully functional embassy in Gaza, allowing our diplomats direct access to the views, opinions and policies of Hamas, the elected leaders, instead of being hamstrung by the US-backed puppet known as the Palestinian Authority.
Until we do this, our foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel and Palestine will remain tied up in knots.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=319047