Palestine Watch

Ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem

2009-03-30T21:59:00.001+02:00

Ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem
Dr. Marcy Newman writing from occupied East Jerusalem, Live from Palestine, 10 March 2009

An Israeli flag hangs from a Palestinian home in Silwan taken over by Israeli settlers.

Last week when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a press conference in Ramallah with Mahmoud Abbas, whose term as Palestinian Authority president officially expired on 9 January, a Washington Post reporter questioned her about the 143 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem that Israel intends to demolish in the coming weeks. She responded: "clearly, this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the roadmap." While some hailed this remark as a condemnation of Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing project, it appeared to many on the ground as callous and flippant.

Since the press conference, the number of Palestinian homes Israeli occupation forces intend to level has increased from 143 to 179. It seems that the number of homes and families who will be forced from their homes, and many from their villages entirely, increases every day. Just this past week in the East Jerusalem area, 88 homes in al-Bustan, 55 homes in Shufat refugee camp, 35 Bedouin homes on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road, and 66 homes in al-Isawiyya were slated for destruction, affecting more than 2,000 Palestinians, most of whom have lived there for generations. Ras al-Amoud, al-Abasiyya, Sheikh Jarrah and Ras Khamis appear to be next on the list of targeted areas. The affected families see this method of adding new neighborhoods to the demolition list every day as a means of making it more difficult to challenge and protest these eviction orders.

I recently visited the al-Bustan neighborhood of Silwan, one of the many slated for demolition any day now. The roads into the valley where al-Bustan lies were all closed to Palestinian cars with border police blocking off almost every street. Like many neighborhoods in Jerusalem, the homes reflect a mixture of architectural styles from the Ottoman era to the present, although the Israeli government contends that these homes have been built "illegally" because they have not been granted permission to be built in the first place, a permission that is next to impossible for Palestinians regardless of whether they have an Israeli residency ID or citizenship. Such is the logic of colonialism and ethnic cleansing in Palestine over the last 61 years. And accordingly, a number of Israeli colonists have been confiscating and taking over homes and buildings to pave the way for the wholesale seizure of Palestinian neighborhoods.

It is this history of ethnic cleansing, particularly that of the catastrophe of 1948 when three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population were forced from their land and property, an event termed the Nakba, that fuels the solidarity work among Palestinians in Jerusalem. Following the lead of Umm Kamel al-Kurd who put up a tent near her home in Sheikh Jarrah after she was forcibly removed from her home four months ago, other neighborhoods in Jerusalem facing a similar fate have set up such tents as spaces for organizing and encouraging others to stand in solidarity with each neighborhood. Such tents exist now on the Mount of Olives and in Ras Khamis. One of the organizers of the solidarity tent in al-Bustan, Ahmed Siam, told me "We will not let history repeat itself. We learned from history. We will not leave our land like we did in 1948. If they come and kill my son, I will not leave. This is our land. Even if they kill me and only my blood remains, it will remain on this land." The 7,000 residents of the area intend to fight for their right to stay on their land rather than see it turned into a new, illegal Israeli colony.

The Silwan community is resisting this widespread confiscation of their land -- for the purposes of a tourist destination called "the city of David" as well as Jewish-only colonies already surrounding it -- by remaining steadfast and staying on their land as member of the al-Bustan Neighborhood Committee Fakhre Abu Diab stated in a letter written to Clinton: "If the Israeli eviction and demolition orders are implanted it will be a catastrophe for our families, children and elders who will suffer the most. In the face of this destruction we are refusing the municipality's plans and we will not leave our lands and houses nor our community under any circumstances."

The al-Qadi family outside their home in the al-Bustan neighborhood of Silwan.

Already the elders and children, in particular, are bearing the brunt of the trauma from the news of this latest catastrophe or Nakba. In the heart of al-Bustan the winding, narrow alleyways with homes tightly packed inside remind one of Palestinian refugee camps. The al-Qadi family who has lived down one of these alleys for 25 years, and in this neighborhood for generations, includes seven children, none of whom have attended school since the orders for their home's demolition were issued by the Israeli occupation authorities. This is indicative of most families in al-Bustan. They explained to me that they are afraid to send their children to school because at any time they could be forcibly removed from our homes while the children are gone. Ironically, they told me, that two days ago the municipality opened a new school in their neighborhood, but they see this as part of the plan by the Israeli occupation authorities.

As the children suffer without their ability to go to school, so do the elderly. Like many families in al-Bustan, the Bedran family has lived here for centuries. Indeed, many of the houses lining the valley were built in the 1870s. Abed and Fatima Bedran built their home in 1980 on land their family has lived on for centuries; like most Palestinian families they built a new home to accommodate their expanding family. Abed, who is 82 years old, suffered from a stroke and is now bedridden after hearing the news of their eviction and house demolition orders for their neighborhood. They, too, refuse to flee their home.

These are just two of the families resisting the latest Nakba in Palestine, individuals who refuse to become Palestine's latest refugees. But the latest ethnic cleansing and colonization plans are not limited to Jerusalem. The number of homes scheduled for demolition in all of Palestine is growing every day. While the focus is on East Jerusalem in much of the international media, this week Palestinians in villages near Nablus and Hebron have also received orders to evacuate their homes. In al-Aqraba and Burin near Nablus, Palestinians are being forced to abandon 20 homes and barns by 26 March. As with the homes in East Jerusalem, some of these pre-date the 1967 colonization of the West Bank. Likewise, in al-Baqaa, near Hebron, eight homes are scheduled to be destroyed in a village whose lands have already been stolen for the purposes of illegal colonies and Jewish-only roads. Dozens of Palestinians will become homeless once their homes are confiscated. And in the village of Nilin near Ramallah, Israeli occupation authorities are in the process of expropriating 35.5 acres of land.

Although most of these families are separated by hundreds of checkpoints and established colonies, what the residents of these villages have in common is their steadfast determination to remain in their homes. From Nablus to Jerusalem to Hebron to Nilin they see their most potent means of resistance as remaining in their homes, refusing to live in a constant state of catastrophe, always on the brink of becoming the next refugees. Jawad Abu Ramoz, the son of a refugee from Hebron who fled to Silwan in 1948, is one of the thousands of Palestinians in al-Bustan who rejects a return to the fate of their parents and grandparents, literally and metaphorically.

All images by Marcy Newman.

Dr. Marcy Newman is Associate Professor of English at An Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine. Her writing may be found at bodyontheline.wordpress.com.

French company runs Israeli bus services to settlements

2009-03-30T21:42:00.002+02:00

Adri Nieuwhof and Daniel Machover, The Electronic Intifada, 11 March 2009

A Veolia-run bus operates in the occupied West Bank. (Anne Paq/ActiveStills)

The international Derail Veolia and Alstom campaign is gaining momentum by coordinating efforts to pressure French transportation giants Veolia and Alstom to withdraw from the Israeli tramway project in Jerusalem that runs illegally on Palestinian land. With its involvement in this project, Veolia is directly implicated in maintaining illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the company is playing a key role in Israel's attempt to make its annexation of Palestinian East Jerusalem irreversible.

Veolia, for example, is heavily involved in the project with a five percent stake in the City Pass Consortium that holds the contract with the State of Israel for the construction of the tramway. The French company also has a 30-year contract as operator of the tramway. Activists and lawyers from Israel, Palestine, Australia, France, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom share information and work together to inform the public, influence local governments and politicians, and take legal action on this issue.

Veolia's activities in the light rail in Jerusalem are not only in violation of international law, but also contravene the company's commitments with respect to codes of conduct and conventions which regulate the activities of multinational corporations, some of which the company has itself pledged to uphold. As a transnational corporation, Veolia must comply with international rules governing corporate responsibility with respect to human rights. These include, but are not limited to, the Tripartite Declaration of Principles Concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy (2000), UN Norms on the responsibilities of transnational corporations (2003), OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (2000), including guidance in respect of Weak Governance Zones, and the UN Global Compact (2000). It is notable that Veolia is not only a participant in the UN Global Compact but has also contributed to the Foundation for the United Global Compact. Its first two principles state that businesses should support and respect the protection of international human rights within their spheres of influence, and make sure they are not complicit in human rights abuses. Yet, by participating in the construction and maintenance of the Jerusalem tramway, Veolia flagrantly violates both of these provisions.

Veolia's painful loss of a $4.5 billion contract in Stockholm has resonated in Scandinavia. At the end of February 2009 the financial committee of Oslo city council adopted a policy to stop doing business with companies involved in violations of international law. This proposed policy has to be ratified by the city council. The parties in favor of the policy -- the Labor Party, Socialist Left Party and the Left Party -- hold the majority in the city council. The driving force behind the policy is longstanding city council member Erling Folkvord of the Red Party. In an interview with the electronic magazine Frontlinjer, Folkvord said "this apartheid-like transport system strengthens the occupation and annexation of Palestinian land. In this way the project contributes to the colonization of the Palestinian territory." Veolia has a substantial contract for collecting waste in Oslo. According to Folkvord the new policy will have consequences for Veolia in Oslo.

Veolia is not only involved in the illegal tramway in Jerusalem. In December 2008 The Electronic Intifada reported the findings of the Who Profits from the Occupation? project that Veolia is also involved in illegally dumping waste from Israel and the settlements in Tovlan landfill in the Jordan Valley. Veolia turns out to be a loyal partner for Israel in the colonization of Palestine. After receiving a tip from someone participating in the Derail Veolia campaign, research undertaken by Who Profits confirmed that Veolia is running bus services 109 and 110 from West Jerusalem to settlements in the West Bank. For instance, Connex bus 110 goes through road 443 in the West Bank to Mevo Horon and Givat Zeev settlements.

Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) and the annexation of East Jerusalem are illegal under international law. Numerous UN resolutions and the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on Israel's wall in the West Bank have confirmed that settlements violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention -- which states "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." By running bus services Veolia is directly implicated in maintaining illegal settlements in the OPT.

In December 2005, Amnesty International in France invited Veolia to discuss its concerns about the illegality of the tramway. The company refused the invitation and informed Amnesty it had appointed an independent legal expert to study the file. Three years later one can conclude Veolia has not backed out of illegal activities that facilitate Israel's occupation of Palestine. Campaigners believe that a fair public debate on these issues would be illuminated by Veolia's publication of the advice it received: after all, what has Veolia got to hide if it is proud of its economic activities in the OPT?

Adri Nieuwhof is consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland. Daniel Machover is attorney and co-founder of Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights based in Great Britain.

Israeli War on Palestinian Olive

2009-03-30T21:35:00.001+02:00

Israeli War on Palestinian Olive

By Khalid Amayreh, IOL Correspondent

Palestinians say hundreds of thousands of grown olive trees were destroyed and uprooted by Israel in the past few years.

RAMALLAH — Israeli occupation forces and protected Jewish settlers are waging war on Palestinian olive orchards throughout the occupied West Bank, especially in areas contiguous to Jewish settlements.

"Imagine watching the trees you planted and nurtured all your life being suddenly uprooted and destroyed by the callous blades of a huge caterpillar bulldozer," weeps Abdullah al-Hurub, an elderly farmer from the village of Dir Samet, near the southern town of al-Khalil (Hebron).

Uprooting olive orchards (Watch)

He has lost hundreds of olive trees to the Israeli separation wall, a mix of electronic fences and concrete walls Israel is building across the West bank.

"One raises the tree like he does his own child," says an emotional al-Hurub.

Thousands of farmers have to struggle, nearly on a daily basis, with Israeli army troops and Jewish settlers who are pursuing a relentless campaign to destroy Palestinian olive orchards throughout the West Bank.

Olive trees, some a century old or older, are extirpated by heavy machinery and replanted at a neighboring Jewish settlement or kibbutz.

Al-Hurub, like other Palestinian farmers, are left completely helpless to stop the theft which takes place in broad daylight.

"You can imagine the anguish and the mental pain we suffer watching our life-long labor reduced to zero in a matter of a few minutes."

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, there are as many as 10 million grown olive trees in the West Bank, covering more than 45 percent of arable land in the occupied territory.

The Israeli army has been targeting Palestinian olive orchards for many years.

However, the last two years saw a phenomenal increase in the destruction and bulldozing of olive fields.

Palestinian officials estimated that "hundreds of thousands of grown olive trees" were destroyed and uprooted by Israel in the past few years.

Most of these trees were destroyed by Israeli army bulldozers for the purpose of the construction the separation wall, which Israel claims is aimed at preventing Palestinian fighters from sneaking into Israel.

Israel is annexing large swathes of Palestinian land to build the wall.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice branded the 900 kilometers steel and concrete wall illegal.

The UN General Assembly has asked Israel to tear it down and compensate the Palestinians affected.

Declared War

The Israeli army has been targeting Palestinian olive orchards for many years.

Because of the Israeli wall, hundreds of Palestinian farmers were simply cut off from their olive orchards and other farms on the western side of the barrier.

Initially, the Israeli occupation army granted the farmers special permits to plough and harvest their orchards.

However, in recent years, Israeli security officials have been turning back farmers and owners, telling them that their property was confiscated.

In some instances, security guards would tell the frustrated farmers that the person responsible for granting them permits had died and that the land was simply expropriated by the government.

When Mohammad Shawamreh, a farmer from the village of Dir al-Asal, 22 kilometers west of Al-Khalil, tried to access his olive orchard through a small opening in the wall, the Israeli guard trained his gun toward him.

"He said 'if you walk another step, I’ll fire.' I told him that I possessed a permit to enter my orchard but he wouldn’t listen," Shawamreh told IOL.

"He said the man dealing with permits had died and that he didn’t know when a substitute would be hired in his place."

Shawamreh described the Israeli measure of denying him and other farmers access to their land as "a scandalous act of theft."

"First they told us this was a security barrier, not a border, then they told us that we would have constant access to our land, and now they are telling us the land has been confiscated," he fumed.

"I don’t really know if we are dealing with a state or with a gang of criminals and liars?"

Asked why he doesn’t take his case to Israeli courts, Shawamreh dismissed the suggestion as "irrelevant and ridiculous."

"Are you kidding? What courts are you talking about? In Israel, non-Jews can’t really dream of receiving justice. Besides, everyone knows that the Israeli justice system is effectively a rubber stamp in the hand of the Israeli army."

Symbolic

Olive trees have an immense economic, nutritional as well as symbolic importance for the basically agrarian Palestinian society.

Olive oil has always been and continues to be a basic and healthy food component for the average Palestinian family.

Moreover, the Olive Tree is considered somewhat "sacred" in the Palestinian culture as it is mentioned in Holy Scriptures, especially the Qur'an.

Palestinians often liken their continued survival as a people with the olive tree which can live for hundreds of years.

Similarly, the extirpation and destruction of a Palestinian olive orchard, especially by the Israeli occupation army and Jewish settlers, is viewed metaphorically as symbolizing the uprooting of the community itself.

Armed settlers, including students of Talmudic schools, known as Yishivot, often attack Palestinian olive farmers to drive them away and take over their land.

When farmers try to defend their crops, settlers attack them with firearms or call up the Israeli army which arrests the Palestinians for "entering a closed military zone.

Some influential rabbis, especially those affiliated with the religious-Zionist camp, teach that Jews may steal Palestinian olive crops because "this is a Jewish land that had been usurped by the Arabs."

http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1236508996579&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout

NOTE: In Islam, it is forbidden to cut down trees when making war.

IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement

2009-03-30T21:20:00.002+02:00

Last update - 12:40 19/03/2009

By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent

Tags: Israel News, IDF, Hamas, Gaza

During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive.

The soldiers are graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Tivon. Some of their statements made on Feb. 13 will appear Thursday and Friday in Haaretz. Dozens of graduates of the course who took part in the discussion fought in the Gaza operation.

The speakers included combat pilots and infantry soldiers. Their testimony runs counter to the Israel Defense Forces' claims that Israeli troops observed a high level of moral behavior during the operation. The session's transcript was published this week in the newsletter for the course's graduates.

The testimonies include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children. "There was a house with a family inside .... We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof," the soldier 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, and he should hold his fire and he ... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders."

According to the squad leader: "The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them.

"I don't think he felt too bad about it, because after all, 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 ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way," he said.

Another squad leader from the same brigade told of an incident where the company commander ordered that an elderly Palestinian woman be shot and killed; she was walking on a road about 100 meters from a house the company had commandeered.

The squad leader said he argued with his commander over the permissive rules of engagement that allowed the clearing out of houses by shooting without warning the residents beforehand. After the orders were changed, the squad leader's soldiers complained that "we should kill everyone there [in the center of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist."

The squad leader said: "You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most."

More soldiers' testimonies will be published in Haaretz over the coming days.

UK to Israel: War crimes law unchangeable now

2009-03-27T23:46:00.001+02:00

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 07:48:06 GMT

In 2005, Doron Almog managed to avoid arrest in Britain by remaining on board a plane at Heathrow airport

The British government says it cannot change for now a law that allows for the arrest of Israel's visiting authorities over war crimes.

In an unofficial message to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Britain said that due to Israel's public image in the country following its massive strike against the Gaza Strip, London believes it will be unable to pass an amendment to the legislation before next year's elections, Haaretz reported.

The Israeli offensive, namely Operation Cast Lead, triggered a wave of outrage worldwide as it left more than 1,434 Palestinians, including 960 civilians, killed and thousands more injured.

Suspected use of forbidden ammunitions, such as white phosphorus and depleted uranium, testimonies by Israeli officers on racist and religious motifs among their comrades, and UN reports of wanton killings of civilians raised protests to Israeli war crimes and 'even crimes against humanity' during the 23-day-long onslaught.

Under British law, UK citizens can press war crime charges against foreigners, who could be arrested upon entry into Britain once an indictment has been issued.

In 2005, Maj. Gen. Doron Almog flew to London but decided not to leave the plane when he was informed British police were waiting to arrest him.

An arrest warrant had been issued against him for his role in the controversial demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah.

Almog remained on the aircraft and returned to Israel but his case has caused senior Israeli army officers in both active and reserve service, including former chiefs of staff and cabinet ministers (Ehud Barak and Shaul Mofaz), to avoid traveling to Britain ever since.

Britain's government, first under former premier Tony Blair and recently under his successor Gordon Brown, had promised to pass changes in the legislation so that private citizens would first have to obtain the approval of the chief prosecutor to be able to press war crimes charges.

While Israeli diplomats are seeking support for such an amendment from Conservative lawmakers, Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor on Saturday urged London to find a way to fulfill its promise.

But the British Foreign Office described the measure as "a complex legal issue".

MRS/DT

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=89321&sectionid=351020202

'IDF troops used 11-year-old boy as human shield in Gaza'

2009-03-27T23:25:00.002+02:00

Last update - 23:23 23/03/2009

By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz Correspondent, and News Agencies

Israel Defense Forces soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group of UN human rights experts said Monday.

IDF troops ordered the boy to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa and enter buildings before them, said the UN secretary-general's envoy for protecting children in armed conflict.

Radhika Coomaraswamy said the incident on Jan. 15, after Israeli tanks had rolled into the neighborhood, was a violation of Israeli and international law.

It was included in a 43-page report published Monday, and was just one of many verified human rights atrocities during the three-week war between Israel and Hamas that ended Jan. 18, she said.

Coomaraswamy accused Israeli soldiers of shooting Palestinian children, bulldozing a home with a woman and child still inside, and shelling a building they had ordered civilians into a day earlier.

Israel's diplomatic mission in Geneva said it would respond to the allegations later Monday at a session of the UN Human Rights Council.

There also have been allegations that the militant group Hamas used human shields, but UN human rights experts have yet to verify those, said Coomaraswamy.

"Violations were reported on a daily basis, too numerous to list," said Coomaraswamy.

Coomaraswamy, who visited Gaza and Israel for five days in February, said her list constituted "just a few examples of the hundreds of incidents that have been documented and verified" by UN officials who were in the territory.

She was the only one of the nine UN experts who compiled the report that was allowed into Gaza following the war. The experts covered issues ranging from health and hunger to women's rights and arbitrary executions.

The experts also noted reports that Hamas had committed other abuses. They said Hamas had been unwilling to investigate the allegations.

The report called for Israel to end its blockade of the impoverished territory, where they said more than 90 percent of people are dependent on food aid; allow Palestinians to move between Gaza and the West Bank; and investigate human rights abuses that occurred during the conflict.

Coomaraswamy has been a UN undersecretary-general since April 2006. She formerly headed the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission and reported as a UN special investigator on violence against women.

Coomaraswamy's comments formed part of a much longer report from nine UN investigators including specialists on the right to health, to food, to adequate housing and education and on summary executions and violence against women.

All cited violations by Israel - and in some cases by the Hamas Islamic movement that controls Gaza - during the invasion from December 27 until January 17 which Israeli leaders say was launched to stop rocket attacks by Hamas from the territory.

Palestinian officials say 1,434 people in Gaza - 960 of them civilians - were killed in the fighting, a figure Israel contests. The report from the nine gave the total as 1,440, saying of these 431 were children and 114 women.

The overall report was criticized in the 47-nation Council by Israel's ambassador Aharon Leshno Yar, who said it "wilfully ignores and downplays the terrorist and other threats we face," and the use by Hamas of human shields.

Leshno Yar said the 43-page document was part of a pattern of "demonizing Israel" in the Council - where an informal bloc of Islamic and African nations usually backed by Russia, China and Cuba has a built-in majority.

Another report presented to the Council on Monday came from Robert Falk, a U.S. academic and the body's special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Falk, whom Israel barred from entry last year after accusing him of bias and prejudice, said Israel had subjected civilians in Gaza to "an inhuman form of warfare that kills, maims and inflicts mental harm."

His report, in which he called for an independent experts group to probe possible war crimes by Israel and Hamas and also suggested that the UN Security Council set up an ad hoc criminal tribunal, was issued late last week.

State Department spokesman Robert Wood was asked whether the U.S. supports Falk's call for an independent inquiry into possible war crimes in Gaza by both Israel and Hamas.

"We've expressed our concern many times about the special rapporteur's views on dealing with that question, and we've found the rapporteur's views to be anything but fair. We find them to be biased. We've made that very clear," said Wood.‬

Zionism is the problem

2009-03-19T12:47:00.000+02:00

The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace.

By Ben Ehrenreich
March 15, 2009

It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with "the concept of a racial state -- the Hitlerian concept." For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews -- my grandparents among them -- tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else's. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.

It has been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover ideology from the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged uncomfortably into 21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not merely outdated. Even before 1948, one of its basic oversights was readily apparent: the presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That led some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century, many of them Zionists, to balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The Brit Shalom movement -- founded in 1925 and supported at various times by Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem -- argued for a secular, binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be accorded equal status. Their concerns were both moral and pragmatic. The establishment of a Jewish state, Buber feared, would mean "premeditated national suicide."

The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has lived in a state of war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens with second-class status and more than 5 million Palestinians deprived of the most basic political and human rights. If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children.

Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have methodically diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of an independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults.

All of this has led to a revival of the Brit Shalom idea of a single, secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal political rights. The obstacles are, of course, enormous. They include not just a powerful Israeli attachment to the idea of an exclusively Jewish state, but its Palestinian analogue: Hamas' ideal of Islamic rule. Both sides would have to find assurance that their security was guaranteed. What precise shape such a state would take -- a strict, vote-by-vote democracy or a more complex federalist system -- would involve years of painful negotiation, wiser leaders than now exist and an uncompromising commitment from the rest of the world, particularly from the United States.

Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an "epidemic" more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel's apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can't be said.

It's not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, "turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground."

Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel "The Suitors."

West Bank villagers pushed away from their valley

2009-03-18T23:00:00.000+02:00

Dr. Marcy Newman, The Electronic Intifada, 17 March 2009

The village of Aqraba.

The West Bank village of Aqraba sits nested in the Jordan Valley, approximately 20 kilometers southeast of Nablus and around 50 kilometers east of Israel's wall that separates Palestinians in what is now considered Israel from those who reside in the West Bank. It is close enough to the Jordanian border that Palestinian cell phones roam here as if one were in Jordan.

There are 9,000 persons who live in this village, most of whom live on the top of the mountain, but these families have not always resided there. In 1968, shortly after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, when 400,000 Palestinians became refugees, many for the second time, hundreds of Palestinians from Aqraba fled to Jordan. Villagers fled upon hearing accounts of massacres in nearby villages, as happened in 1947-48, during which at least 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homeland in a period referred to as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Historically the families of this village farmed and worked as shepherds, using the land stretching all the way to the Jordan River. But since 1967, Israeli occupation forces have continuously pushed families up towards the valley, a good 20 to 30 kilometers away from lands that used to belong to them. At first this forced removal was because the land was confiscated for a military training area. Then in 1973, part of that land was converted into the colony of Gitit on the mountain above Aqraba's valley.

From the beginning the Israeli military and illegal settlers alike used force to make room for more colonies in the area. Abu al-Aez recalled his family's flight in 1974 from the valley to the center of Aqraba on the mountain after the occupying Israeli army launched a rocket that hit their home: "Thirty dunums of land were stolen from us and now the settlers plant grapes there."

According to official reports, last week the Israeli army issued orders to demolish six homes, their adjoining barns, one elementary school, and a mosque in the valley of Aqraba. However, families there say they suspect that up to 20 houses will be destroyed. On 26 March they are scheduled to have a hearing in an Israeli colonial court in Beit El, a settlement close to al-Bireh, to challenge this decision.

The roads leading down into the valley where the buildings slated for demolition lie are in Area C, while the part of the village on the mountain remains in Area B. Under the Oslo Accords the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B and C, referring to urban areas, built-up villages and rural areas respectively. Under this agreement the Palestinian Authority technically controls civilian life, including security; in contradistinction Area C is entirely controlled by Israeli occupation forces. One can tell the difference as one drives into the valley and the road changes from the paved road to a dirt road (though much of the paved road, like the electricity, was only installed two years ago). The Palestinian Authority exercises limited autonomy in Area B, while Area C -- comprising 59 percent of the West Bank -- is subjected to Israeli military administration. On one of the main dirt roads running through the agricultural land at the bottom of the valley -- a road that was created by the occupying Israeli army -- there are stones that have recently been marked with red spray paint. Villagers believe this indicates that their homes will be demolished in order to create a Jewish-only road connecting the surrounding, illegal Israeli colonies of Gitit, Itamar, Yitzhar and Hamra.

Like many villages in the West Bank surrounded by illegal Israeli colonies, the areas of Aqraba are invaded by Israeli forces daily and Israeli settlers regularly. Between 1975 and 1982 shepherds were regularly arrested by the Israeli army. Their sheep were confiscated while the shepherds were in prison and they were forced to pay 10 Jordanian dinars per sheep to get them back upon their release. Since the second Palestinian intifada broke out in September 2000, at least one shepherd per year has been murdered by Israeli settlers. Most famously, in September 2008, Yahia Ateya Fahmi Bani Maneya, an 18-year-old shepherd, was murdered by settlers. These daily threats since 1967 have meant that numerous families who own land in the valley for grazing their animals and growing food -- fava beans, lentils and wheat -- have sold their livestock and moved to the part of Aqraba at the top of the mountain. Those who have moved, but who have tried to continue to tend to their land, have been prevented from doing so by the Israeli army.

Driving into the valley, one notices that there are still shepherds out with their sheep grazing the land. The village itself is 250 years old, although all of the original homes are more than a hundred years old. As families have expanded they added onto the original structures, which they still use. The history of these families on the land can be traced as these homes are built next to the caves that their families inhabited with their sheep generations ago, prior to building homes. The elementary school and the mosque are newer, but these buildings, like the homes, are all slated for destruction in this latest episode of ethnic cleansing, which will affect the 200 people residing in this valley for generations. These are the remaining families who have not fled to Jordan nor to the center of Aqraba.

Two young girls, Lubna and Maram, of the Anas family.

Every family in Aqraba has a similar story to tell: of relatives fleeing in 1967 to Jordan, of relatives fleeing to Aqraba's center and leaving their agrarian way of life, of the looming dispossession. Like many of the families from Aqraba, Fatima and Maher Anas trace their families back for generations and their migration from cave to home, part of which was built more than 200 years ago. Like many other families, much of their livelihood has been destroyed by Israeli army bulldozers that destroyed all of their wheat last year. Many of their relatives fled to Zarqa refugee camp in Jordan, joining the fate of other Aqraba families.

Reflecting on what will happen if the remaining part of her family is turned into internally displaced refugees, Fatima explained, "If they destroy our houses they will destroy our crops and our ability to make food. If we cannot plant food any longer, what will happen to our livelihood?"

Fatima's brother, Yusef, has already faced this fate. Across the way from the mosque scheduled to be demolished is the foundation is Yusef Nasrallah's home. He started building it last year only to be ordered to stop by the Israeli army. Like many before him, Yusef sold his sheep and moved to Aqraba's center where he has been unable to find work.

To be sure, this latest phase in the ethnic cleansing of Aqraba is not unique to the West Bank nor to the part of historic Palestine that is now considered Israel. This week saw the destruction of two Palestinian homes and 100 olive trees in the Negev town of Beer Seba, now given the Hebraized name of Beersheva. In the West Bank, from Qalqiliya to Hebron to East Jerusalem, families await the status of the orders for their homes to be demolished. But while there is a great deal of attention paid to the impending destruction of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, there is little if any media attention or support for families in small villages like Aqraba. In the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, Palestinians flock to the demonstration tent set up to show solidarity, but there has been no such solidarity presence in Aqraba. Israel's colonial divide-and-rule policy continues to fragment the people in ways that separate them physically by its system of checkpoints and permits. But this is not about the occupation of the West Bank. Indeed, these same methods were used to confiscate large land tracts during the 1948 catastrophe. It is an ongoing Nakba that requires learning the lessons of history by not submitting to the divisions imposed by the colonial regime.

All images by Dr. Marcy Newman.

Dr. Marcy Newman is Associate Professor of English at An Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine. Her writing may be found at bodyontheline.wordpress.com.

Durban II: no-show is slap in face of victims of apartheid

2009-03-18T22:37:00.000+02:00

Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada, 17 March 2009

Israel has been convincing its allies to boycott the upcoming anti-racism conference, which in the past has criticized Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

More and more Western countries are either announcing their boycott or are threatening to boycott Durban II, a United Nations conference scheduled for April to review progress made since the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa in 2001, nicknamed Durban I. Earlier this month, Italy became the first EU member to withdraw from the event, stating that it could not endorse a draft agenda that criticizes Israel. Italy followed in the footsteps of Israel, Canada and the United States. France and the Netherlands are threatening their own boycotts. Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch foreign minister, recently explained that "The Netherlands will not be party to a propaganda circus." In December 2008, Verhagen claimed that the 2001 summit was an "anti-Semitic witch-hunt."

Perhaps in September 2001, the world was not yet ready to accept the notion that Israel is in fact practicing apartheid. But ever more observers are coming to precisely that conclusion. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warned four years ago that "if Israel does not relinquish the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians will soon outnumber the Jews and Israel will become either an apartheid state or a non-Jewish state."

Four years later, Friedman wrote, "Well, having taken a little drive through part of the West Bank, as I always do when I visit, it strikes me more than ever that it's not only five after midnight, it's five after midnight and a whole week later."

The Israeli organization Peace Now stated early in March that Israel's housing ministry has plans that would nearly double the number of settlers in the West Bank, rendering a two-state solution impossible. Israel has planned 73,000 new housing units in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli group stated, of which 15,000 have already received approval. Moreover, Israel's prime minister designate Benjamin Netanyahu announced that a government he leads will expand settlements.

Israel worked hard to influence its allies to stay away from the forthcoming review conference. However, this is not the first time that it has done so. The first two conferences of 1978 and 1983 took strong positions against apartheid and are credited by observers as having contributed greatly to end apartheid in South Africa. In 1978 the US led a boycott of the WCAR and was followed by a number of European countries, because the document of that conference, which referred to apartheid-era South Africa, also included a condemnation of Israel's systematic violations of Palestinian rights. In 1983, the WCAR declared that "apartheid as an institutionalized form of racism is a deliberate and totally abhorrent affront to the conscience and dignity of mankind, a crime against humanity and a threat to international peace and security." In September 2001, the US and Israel walked out of Durban I. In that year, preceding the UN conference, the African National Congress (ANC) stated that having defeated apartheid, South Africans had a direct stake in the eradication of apartheid practices on a global scale and particularly in relation to the plight of the Palestinian people.

Since Durban I, an increasing number of respected observers have borne witness to the reality of Palestinian life under occupation. Most prominently this includes Nobel Peace laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former US President Jimmy Carter as well as veterans of the ANC anti-Apartheid struggle.

Even Israel's outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert admitted to the truth of the apartheid analogy, albeit without endorsing it, when he warned in November 2007 that Palestinians, already equal in number to Israeli Jews within the borders of historic Palestine, could soon demand political rights in a single state. Olmert warned that Israel would "face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished." More recently, Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beitenu, proposed that hundreds of thousand Palestinians in towns in northern Israel be stripped of their Israeli citizenship and transferred to a future Palestinian entity.

Last year, UN General Assembly President, Ambassador Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, stated that "although different, what is being done against the Palestinian people seems to me like a version of the hideous policy of apartheid. That cannot, should not, be allowed to continue."

It may take time for these hard truths to be fully absorbed but ever more individuals who make an effort to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and look for creative solutions are convinced that the occupation must end and that peoples need to live in freedom and be respected on the basis of full equality no matter where they live.

Arjan El Fassed is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and the author of Niet iedereen kan stenen gooien (Uitgeverij Nieuwland, 2008). In 2001 he was part of the Palestinian non-governmental delegation to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

Broad nonviolent resistance to Zionism

2009-03-18T22:06:00.001+02:00

Ahmad Hijazi, The Electronic Intifada, 18 March 2009

An artist in Gaza paints a mural depicting the Nakba in 1948 and the ongoing war on Palestine. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

Amid the escalating violence, and the 60-year-long status quo, there are certain fundamental questions that need to be asked.

Are there certain values and absolute foundations that make resistance in general, and against Zionism specifically, a moral and humane necessity? What is the framework for nonviolent resistance, and how is it connected to these values? What is the ultimate end goal of the struggle? Is it returning the land and some rights to the indigenous Palestinian population, or can it lead to "solutions" that include acceptance of Zionism or even its right to exist?

Millions of persons hope for a chance to participate in this noble struggle, yet can't find the medium in which they can contribute. This is where there is an important role for a group of "movers" to create the vehicles for individual and collective contributions within the above framework and mobilizing the hitherto wasted support to achieve measurable results.

The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions defines Zionism as: "a global, political, ideological movement that aims to return the land of 'Israel' to the Jewish people," but this definition, besides its racist flavor (as it doesn't mention or consider an entire people who were inhabiting that land), doesn't tell the complete story. It might be important to mention that UN Resolution 3379 of 10 November 1975, after a prolonged discussion of the mechanisms of racist regimes, their alliances and human rights violations, decided that Zionism was equivalent to racism (the General Assembly revoked this decision by resolution 84/86 in 1991 after the advance of "peace negotiations").

To properly understand Zionism we cannot rely only on how it defines itself or how the dictionary defines it, as indicative as those might be. We must also look at the behaviors and practices that have characterized Zionism from the beginning of the movement and that were given intellectual and ideological rationales, fundamentally related to the materialization of Zionism through a state.

Zionism could not have effected its program without the ethnic cleansing of the people that inhabited what it called Greater Israel. Forced displacement, terrorism, murder and devaluation of the most basic human rights were justified because of the complete belief in the right of the Jewish "race" which consequently becomes racially "supreme" because Zionism claims that this "race" possesses an undeniable and superior "right" in this land.

The existence of Zionism, and its continuation as it is, constitutes a legitimization of all the previously mentioned crimes, co-existence with the logic of power, and the acceptance of the practical if not openly acknowledged racial inferiority of the Palestinian (read "Arab") people.

The right to resist derives from the values of justice, equality and freedom, but in the case of the Arab people it specifically gains the added value of being an existential struggle and a fight against the supremacist vision of the inferiority of the Arab people, and a refusal of the ideology of the oppressing power. Thus it is in no way merely a nationalistic, Arab or Islamic idea and its end goal can never be fighting the Jewish people or even uprooting Israel.

The clear goal of resistance should be defeating the Zionist ideology. This is an existential fight and one should never fear clearly stating a complete refusal of this ideology and its result (which in no way is an uncivil or a non-life-loving expression). Peace negotiations achieved nothing regarding this central dimension of the struggle, although removing Zionism as an ideology and practice is vital for peace in the Middle East.

The rocket and the gun -- as significant as their role may be -- cannot have the decisive word in the realm of the cultural, intellectual and humanistic battle. We need to understand the role of holistic resistance that the Arab people now more than ever have the ability and interest in deploying to place a siege around Zionism and racism. This resistance is very closely connected to values, culture and history.

In the age of globalization, the Internet and social media, the importance of centralized efforts is diminished as compared with decentralized, self-driven networks. More than ever, nonviolent resistance can harness the work of individuals contributing to a worldwide effort that has several aspects:

The knowledge dimension (cultural/educational/learning): This dimension is the most connected to the motives for resistance and is the logical input into the other dimensions. Understanding the motives and reasons behind the struggle and understanding the adversary and its methods, contributes to building the relationship between the values of justice and humanity on the one hand and the actions of resistance on the other. This dimension answers the "why" and increases the sense of moral and humane responsibility. Resistance must include learning curricula about the values being defended, and the educational and cultural work has to attack Zionism through arts and literature and the other cultural contributions. This is an important role of parents, researchers, writers and the elites in general.

Media and public relations: This dimension has internal and external aspects. The internal is directed to Arab audiences, educating them about the struggle, its goals, methods and cultural importance which it should be emphasized are humanistic and not nationalist or religious.

The external effort is directed to global public opinion which has a central role in the cultural struggle. Zionism realized this from the start and developed its strategy of hasbara (propaganda) and became a model to be studied in polishing the reputation of Israel and pressuring different groups and organizations. There are so many Israeli websites that aim to "educate" volunteers on how to refute accusations against Zionism, on creating pressure groups and organizing networks and public relations campaigns through tapping the huge potential of networks ready to provide support. We need to develop this dimension to empower the many people who believe in the cause but lack the means get the chance to express themselves.

The political-social dimensions: And here I don't mean politics in its direct relation with the military struggle, but rather as the translation of the wishes of the people. It should reflect the people's hopes of a dignified life and culture, and advancement towards good living that supports the belief in the values of justice. Civil society should, as a unit, communicate the values of resistance, justice and equality.

The economic and financial dimension: This is a very important weapon that we have until now failed to utilize. The least we can do is not buy the products of companies that are committed to the prosperity and development of the Israeli economy. I am not calling for a mass-scale boycott here, but rather surgical boycott of certain companies that really have a black history of unlimited and unjustified support to Israel, after communicating with them clearly about the reasons and the intent to boycott their products. There is already a global and growing boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that provides a framework to build on and support.

The judicial dimension: To try all Israeli and other individuals (and the state) for their responsibility for all the crimes (massacres, assassinations, displacement, theft, piracy, murders, rape, kidnapping and more) and flooding the international courts of law and civil rights groups with cases addressing Israeli crimes on all levels. There is a secondary role to this activity which is to direct the world's attention to the gravity of the various crimes. This should include all institutions that and individuals (even those deceased) who have actively contributed to supporting Zionism so they are recognized for what they are: criminals. There seems to be a need here for a central body that can coordinate the efforts of many research and legal groups.

All the above-mentioned aspects of nonviolent resistance are at the heart of a dignified, prosperous and humane life. The belief in and practice of these values can never be negative or destructive, but is a positive, value-affirming activity.

All efforts need to be directed to the origin of the problem in order to solve it, and the origin here is very clear: Zionism. As for occupation, that is just a symptom.

Ahmad Hijazi is Lebanese writer and researcher on the Arab-Israeli struggle and the effects of media and international opinion on shaping it. His blog is nth-word.blogspot.com.

The pasta, paper and hearing aids that could threaten Israeli security

2009-03-05T23:39:00.001+02:00

From the Independent
By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor, Monday, 2 March 2009

Members of the highest-ranking American delegation to tour Gaza were shocked to discover that the Israeli blockade against the Hamas-ruled territory included such food staples as lentils, macaroni and tomato paste.

"When have lentil bombs been going off lately? Is someone going to kill you with a piece of macaroni?" asked Congressman Brian Laird. It was only after Senator John Kerry, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raised the issue with Defence Minister Ehud Barak after their trip last month that Israel allowed the pasta in. Macaroni was considered a luxury item, not a humanitarian necessity, they were told. The total number of products blacklisted by Israel remains a mystery for UN officials and the relief agencies which face long delays in bringing in supplies. For security reasons such items as cement and steel rods are banned as they could be used by Hamas to build bunkers or the rockets used to target Israeli civilians. Hearing aids have been banned in case the mercury in their batteries could be used to produce chemical weapons.

Yet since the end of the war in January, according to non-government organisations, five truckloads of school notebooks were turned back at the crossing at Kerem Shalom where goods are subject to a $1,000 (£700) per truck "handling fee".

Paper to print new textbooks for Palestinian schools was stopped, as were freezer appliances, generators and water pumps, cooking gas and chickpeas. And the French government was incensed when an entire water purification system was denied entry. Christopher Gunness, the spokesman for the UN agency UNRWA responsible for Palestinian refugees, said: "One of the big problems is that the 'banned list' is a moving target so we discover things are banned on a 'case by case', 'day by day' basis."

Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said: "Israel's blockade policy can be summed up in one word and it is punishment, not security."

UK gov't boycotts settlement financier Leviev

2009-03-05T23:33:00.000+02:00

Press release, Adalah-NY, 4 March 2009

The government of the United Kingdom has decided to boycott Israeli diamond and real estate mogul Lev Leviev over his companies' construction of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported today. The decision by the UK government followed a coordinated advocacy campaign by human rights advocates in New York, the UK, Palestine and Israel demanding that the UK government end plans to rent the new UK Embassy in Tel Aviv from Leviev's company Africa-Israel.

The UK's Tel Aviv Ambassador notified Leviev of the decision by letter, following a British parliamentary debate, and inquiries with Leviev's company Africa-Israel over its activities in the West Bank, Haaretz reported. According to Haaretz, "The embassy in Tel Aviv confirmed the details of the story."

The Haaretz article did not note the construction of the settlement of Zufim on the land of the village of Jayyous by Leviev's company, Leader. The Israeli army has recently intensified efforts to crush Jayyous' protest campaign against the construction of Leviev's settlements and Israel's wall on village land. Sharif Omar, the head of Jayyous' Land Defense Committee, commented, "We feel heartened by the UK government decision opposing Leviev's settlement construction, and we expect our brothers and sisters in the UAE to follow the UK government's example by banning Leviev from selling his diamonds in Dubai. We need more pressure in order to end Israeli repression, return our land, and restore our rights."

Adalah-NY has held 13 protests at Leviev's Madison Avenue jewelry store since it opened. UNICEF and Oxfam have renounced Leviev over human rights abuses, Hollywood stars have distanced themselves from him, and the Dubai government is under pressure to boycott Leviev's businesses. Additionally, Africa-Israel has also lost 90 percent of its value and has been engaged in an embarrassing New York real estate battle.

Leviev's companies have built Jewish-only homes on occupied Palestinian land in the Israeli settlements of Zufim, Mattityahu East, Har Homa and Maale Adumim, impoverishing villages like Bilin and Jayyous and violating international law. Leviev also funded the settlement organization the Land Redemption Fund. In December, the Israeli financial journal Globes published an expose of Leviev's serious human rights abuses and failure to fully comply with the Kimberley Process in Angola. And in Namibia, Leviev recently fired around 200 striking diamond polishers, some of whom were already struggling to survive on less than $2 per day.

After Israeli and British papers reported the UK's plans to rent its new Tel Aviv embassy from Leviev, eight groups in the US, UK and Palestine launched a letter-writing campaign to the UK's Foreign Office. Among those writing to demand a boycott of Leviev were ex-BBC Middle East Correspondent Tim Llewelyn, US academics Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, Vice President of the European Parliament Luisa Morgantini, and British lawyer Daniel Machover, writing in The Independent. A 22 November letter in the Guardian by eight Palestinian civil society leaders, including Palestinian Legislative Council members Mustafa Barghouti and Hanan Ashrawi, called on the UK to "publicly guarantee that it will not do business with settlement-builders such as Lev Leviev."

Omar Barghouti, one of the initiators of the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) said, "I wholeheartedly congratulate British activists and Adalah-NY for this substantial achievement for the boycott movement. This is a step in the right direction for the British government, a government that has taken thousands of steps in the wrong direction, not least of which is its open complicity in Israel's war crimes in Gaza and the rest of the occupied territory. Time for a British arms ban on Israel."

Israel boycott movement gains momentum

2009-03-05T23:25:00.000+02:00

Mel Frykberg, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2009

RAMALLAH (IPS) - "Standing United with the People of Gaza" is the theme of this week's Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), which kicked off in Toronto and another 39 cities across the globe Sunday.

A movement to boycott Israeli goods, culture and academic institutions is gaining momentum as Geneva prepares to host the UN's Anti-Racism Conference, Durban II next month amidst swirling controversy.

Both Canada and the US are boycotting the Durban II conference in protest over what they perceive as a strongly anti-Israel agenda.

The first UN Anti-Racism conference, held in the South African city Durban in 2001, saw the Israeli and US delegates storm out of the conference, accusing other delegates of focusing too strongly on Israel.

United States and Canadian support might have offered some comfort for Israel. However, international criticism of Israel's three-week bloody offensive into Gaza, which left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead and thousands more wounded, most of them civilian, has breathed fresh life into a boycott, divest, sanctions (BDS) campaign.

The BDS campaign followed a 2005 appeal from more than 170 Palestinian civil society groups to launch a divestment campaign "as a way of bringing nonviolent pressure to bear on the state of Israel to end its violations of international law."

In the wake of the BDS campaign, critics of Israel have lashed out at what they see as parallels between South Africa's former apartheid system and Israeli racism.

They point to Israel's discriminatory treatment of ethnic Palestinians within Israel who hold Israeli passports, and the extensive human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territories by Israeli security forces.

During the apartheid era, ties between Israel and South Africa were extremely strong, with Israel helping to train South Africa's security forces as well as supplying the regime in Pretoria with weapons.

Meanwhile, Toronto, where the Israel Apartheid Week movement was born, will hold forums, film shows, cultural events and street protests to mark IAW week. One of the guest speakers is former South African intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils.

Kasrils is no stranger to controversy. His parents fled from Tzarist Russian pogroms carried out against Jews, and immigrated to South Africa at the beginning of the last century.

During white rule, as a member of the African National Congress (ANC), working both in exile and underground in South Africa, he was reviled by many white South Africans as a "terrorist."

He has also been labeled a self-hating Jew by many Israelis and South African Jews due to the strong stand he and the ANC have taken against Israel's policies.

Meanwhile, in New York, prominent IAW activist Nir Harel, a member of Israel's Anarchists Against the Wall, will also be courting controversy. His group regularly protests against Israel's separation barrier, which divides Israel proper from the Palestinian West Bank.

The barrier deviates significantly from the green line, the internationally-recognized boundary between Israel and the West Bank, into occupied Palestinian territory where it has swallowed huge amounts of land, dispossessing farmers from their agricultural crops.

Another Israeli activist, Matan Cohen, has been central in the first US college implementing a divestment campaign against Israel. Hampshire College in Massachusetts called for divestment from over 200 companies that the college says is responsible for violating its socially responsible investment policies in Israel.

The companies which provide the Israeli military with equipment and services in the occupied West Bank and Gaza include Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola and Terex.

A Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) petition for divestment was supported by more than 800 students, professors and alumni at the college, that has only 1,350 students.

Hampshire College may be small but it has been big in social activism. It was also the first US educational institution to divest from South Africa, ten years before other universities and colleges followed suit.

US campus activism is spreading. The University of Rochester in New York and members of the community are also involved in boycott activities.

Students from Macalester College, a liberal arts college located in St. Paul, Minnesota, occupied the Minnesota Trade Office in January and then picketed there 6 February, demanding that the state end all trade with Israel. New York University students too began a divestment campaign.

Professors and university employees in Quebec, Canada, endorsed the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees' call to boycott Israel.

SJP's actions at Hampshire College follow similar moves by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education in the UK.

In London, students held sit-ins at Goldsmith University and the London School of Economics, among other institutions. Similar protests have spread throughout the UK, with some winning concessions from university officials.

At Manchester University, about a thousand students joined a campaign equating Israel with apartheid-era South Africa, and called on the administration and student union to boycott Israeli companies and support Gaza and the BDS movement.

In Australia the University of Western Sydney's Student Association recently joined the international BDS campaign. International trade union support for political action against Israel has been seen from Spain to South Africa.

The South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, under directive of the Council of South African Trade Unions, refused recently to unload an Israeli ship which docked in Durban, despite threats and pressure from both management and the Israeli lobby.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, with 600,000 members in 55 unions, is preparing to start a boycott of Israeli goods.

Meanwhile, the biggest trade union in Canada's Ontario province, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), was forced under pressure to moderate its call for a boycott of all academic institutions in Israel. Instead it called for a boycott of Israeli institutions engaged in research which aided the Israeli military.

Did Clinton sabotage a Palestinian reconciliation?

2009-03-05T23:19:00.001+02:00

Hasan Abu Nimah and Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2009

Hillary Clinton speaks at a press conference at the International Conference in support of the Palestinian Economy and Reconstruction of Gaza, 2 March 2009. (Victoria Hazou/Sipa Press)
Still reeling from the Israeli massacres in the occupied Gaza Strip, Palestinians have lately had little to celebrate. So the strong start to intra-Palestinian reconciliation talks in Cairo last week provided a glimmer of hope.

An end to the schism between the resistance and the elected but internationally-boycotted Hamas government on the one hand, and the Western-backed Fatah faction on the other, seemed within reach. But the good feeling came to a sudden end after what looked like a coordinated assault by United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, European Union High Representative Javier Solana, and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas whose term as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) expired on 9 January.

On Friday 27 February, the leaders of 13 Palestinian factions, principal among them Hamas and Fatah, announced they had set out a framework for reconciliation. In talks chaired by Egypt's powerful intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, the Palestinians established committees to discuss forming a "national unity government," reforming the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to include all factions, legislative and presidential elections, reorganizing security forces on a nonpolitical basis, and a steering group comprised of all faction leaders. Amid a jubilant mood, the talks were adjourned until 10 March.

Then the blows began to strike the fragile Palestinian body politic. The first came from Clinton just before she boarded her plane to attend a summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh ostensibly about pledging billions in aid to rebuild Gaza.

Clinton was asked by Voice of America (VOA) whether she was encouraged by the Cairo unity talks. She responded that in any reconciliation or "move toward a unified [Palestinian] Authority," Hamas must be bound by "the conditions that have been set forth by the Quartet," the self-appointed group comprising representatives of the US, EU, UN and Russia. These conditions, Clinton stated, require that Hamas "must renounce violence, recognize Israel, and abide by previous commitments." Otherwise, the secretary warned, "I don't think it will result in the kind of positive step forward either for the Palestinian people or as a vehicle for a reinvigorated effort to obtain peace that leads to a Palestinian state."

The next strikes came from Ramallah. With the EU's top diplomat Solana standing next to him, Abbas insisted that any national unity government would have to adhere to the "two-state vision" and abide by "international conditions and signed agreements." He then demanded that Gaza reconstruction aid be channeled exclusively through the Western-backed, but financially bankrupt and politically depleted PA. Solana affirmed, "I would like to insist in agreement with [Abbas] that the mechanism used to deploy the money is the one that represents the Palestinian Authority." Solana fully endorsed the campaign waged by Abbas ever since the destruction of Gaza that the PA, plagued by endemic corruption, and which only pays salaries of workers deemed politically loyal, be in sole charge of the funds, rather than neutral international organizations as Hamas and others have suggested.

Was the Sharm al-Sheikh summit then really about helping the people of Gaza or was it about exploiting their suffering to continue the long war against Hamas by other means? Indeed, Clinton had already confirmed the politicization of reconstruction aid when she told VOA, "We want to strengthen a Palestinian partner willing to accept the conditions outlined by the Quartet," and, "our aid dollars will flow based on these principles."

Hamas warned that Clinton's and Abbas's statements set Palestinian reconciliation efforts back to square one. "Hamas will not recognize Israel or the Quartet's conditions," said one spokesman Ismail Radwan, while another, Ayman Taha, said Hamas would "reject any preconditions in the formation of the unity government." Khaled Meshal, head of the movement's political bureau, insisted that the basis for national unity must remain "protecting the resistance and the rights of the Palestinian people."

Such statements will of course be used to paint Hamas as extremist, intransigent and anti-peace. After all, what could be more reasonable than demanding that any party involved in a peace process commit itself to renouncing violence, recognizing its enemy, and abiding by pre-existing agreements? The problem is that the Quartet conditions are designed to eliminate the Palestinians' few bargaining chips and render them defenseless before continuous Israeli occupation, colonization, blockade and armed attacks.

None of the Western diplomats imposing conditions on Hamas have demanded that Israel renounce its aggressive violence. Indeed, as Amnesty International reported on 20 February, the weapons Israel used to kill, wound and incinerate 7,000 persons in Gaza, half of them women and children, were largely supplied by Western countries, mainly the US. In a vivid illustration, Amnesty reported that its field researchers "found fragments and components from munitions used by the Israeli army -- including many that are US-made -- littering school playgrounds, in hospitals and in people's homes."

For Palestinians to "renounce violence" under these conditions is to renounce the right to self-defense, something no occupied people can do. Palestinians will certainly note that while Abbas stands impotently by, neither the US nor the EU have rushed to the defense of the peaceful, unarmed Palestinians shot at daily by Israeli occupation forces as they try to protect their land from seizure in the West Bank. Nor has Abbas' renunciation of resistance helped the 1,500 residents in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan whose homes Israeli occupation authorities recently confirmed their intention to demolish in order to make way for a Jewish-themed park. A cessation of violence must be mutual, total and reciprocal -- something Hamas has repeatedly offered and Israel has stubbornly rejected.

While Israeli violence is tolerated or applauded, Israel's leaders are not held to any political preconditions. Prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu emphatically rejects a sovereign Palestinian state and -- like his predecessors -- rejects all other Palestinian rights enshrined in international law and UN resolutions. When told to stop building illegal settlements on occupied land, Israel responds simply that this is a matter for negotiation and to prove the point it revealed plans in February to add thousands of Jewish-only homes to its West Bank colonies.

Yet Quartet envoy Tony Blair, asked by Al-Jazeera International on 1 March how his masters would deal with a rejectionist Israeli government, said, "We have to work with whoever the Israeli people elect, let's test it out not just assume it won't work." Unless Palestinians are considered an inferior race, the same logic ought to apply to their elected leaders, but they were never given a chance.

It is ludicrous to demand that the stateless Palestinian people unconditionally recognize the legitimacy of the entity that dispossessed them and occupies them, that itself has no declared borders and that continues to violently expand its territory at their expense. If Palestinians are ever to recognize Israel in any form, that can only be an outcome of negotiations in which Palestinian rights are fully recognized, not a precondition for them.

During last year's US election campaign, Clinton claimed she helped bring peace to Northern Ireland during her husband's administration. Yet the conditions she now imposes on Hamas are exactly like those that the British long imposed on the Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, thereby blocking peace negotiations. President Bill Clinton -- against strenuous British objections -- helped overturn these obstacles by among other things granting a US visa to Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, whose party the British once demonized as Israel now demonizes Hamas. Like Tony Blair, who as British prime minister first authorized public talks with Sinn Fein, Hillary Clinton knows that the negotiations in Ireland could not have succeeded if any party had been forced to submit to the political preconditions of its adversaries.

Former British and Irish peace negotiators including Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume, and former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami made similar points in a 26 February letter they co-signed in The Times of London. "Whether we like it or not," the letter states, "Hamas will not go away. Since its victory in democratic elections in 2006, Hamas has sustained its support in Palestinian society despite attempts to destroy it through economic blockades, political boycotts and military incursions." The signatories called for engagement with the movement, affirming that "The Quartet conditions imposed on Hamas set an unworkable threshold from which to commence negotiations."

Those who claim to be peacemakers should heed this advice. They should allow Palestinians to form a national consensus without external interference and blackmail. They should respect democratic mandates. They should stop imposing grossly unfair conditions on the weaker side while cowering in fear of offending the strong, and they should stop the cynical exploitation of humanitarian aid for political manipulation and subversion.

There are many in the region who were encouraged by US President Barack Obama's appointment of former Northern Ireland mediator Senator George Mitchell as Middle East envoy. But in all other respects the new president has continued the Bush administration's disastrous policies. It is not too late to change course, for persisting in these errors will guarantee only more failure and bloodshed.

Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).

Chris Hedges condemns Israeli Gaza Massacre

2009-03-01T22:39:00.000+02:00

Chris Hedges, author, spoke at a Revolution Books Town Hall Meeting at Ethical Culture Society January 13, 2009 condemning Israel and US complicity in Israel's murderous destruction of Gaza

Global boycott movement marks its successes

2009-03-01T22:17:00.000+02:00

Jeff Handmaker, The Electronic Intifada, 20 February 2009

Responding to the many calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, solidarity movements around the world have marked many successes. It is important for human rights advocates to build on this momentum and seize the opportunity to do what is within their power to try and hold Israel accountable for its abuses of human rights and other international laws.

Since the initial BDS call by Palestinian intellectuals and academics in October 2003, which was followed by separate calls for sports, arts, economic and other calls for BDS, there has been a seismic shift in the global solidarity movement for human rights in Israel-Palestine. Lawyers, doctors, academics, students, trade unionists, school teachers and many other activists have marked successes around the world. Their efforts are an inspiring reflection of the South African anti-apartheid movement, where BDS was also used very effectively.

In first few weeks of 2009 alone, European, North American and South African solidarity movements have made remarkable progress:

A growing number of politicians in Europe and North America have put forward uncomfortable, probing questions to their governments and clearly want to do more. One example is the "Break the Silence" campaign within the Dutch Labor Party.
Numerous letters and opinion pieces have been published by prominent figures in major national newspapers, including statement by prominent lawyers and professors published by The Sunday Times on 11 January 2009.
The global "Derail Veolia" campaign has grown in leaps and bounds. An important success was the decision by the Stockholm municipality to cancel an agreement with Veolia Transport, on the basis of its involvement in the Jerusalem light-rail project, to the tune of several billion euros.
There have been calls for international investigations of war crimes from the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the UN Human Rights Council, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the head of UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestine refugees) and the UN Secretary General as well as scores of high-profile international lawyers around the world.
The European Parliament managed to halt negotiations on strengthening the trading relationship between the EU and Israel in the framework of the Association Agreement and there are new, emboldened efforts to try and get the Association Agreement suspended altogether.
Countless demonstrations have taken place in villages, towns and cities around the world, from Cape Town to Swansea and from Stockholm to Montreal and they are attracting decent publicity. Where there has been no television crew present, activists have made effective use of online resources such as YouTube.
In South Africa there was a major success when dockworkers affiliated with SATAWU and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) refused to unload a ship containing Israeli goods. The story made national headlines for several days.
Academic boycott is taking hold in academic institutions around the world -- students in particular have been leading the way on this, but academics also.

Israel's 22-day-long bombardment of Gaza, the greatest use of military force in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1967 and what several commentators have already referred to as the Palestinian Sharpeville, has greatly fueled BDS efforts.

Especially before the blockade and recent carnage in Gaza, some activists raised concerns that by pursuing BDS, they may be curtailing dialogue, isolating progressive elements within Israel or even harming Palestinians. However, these concerns have greatly diminished as activists have realized how effective a mechanism BDS really is. In any event, the existence of a dialogue towards a just and sustainable peace between Palestinians and Israel is clearly non-existent, and there is little incentive on the part of Israel to engage in this any time soon. Progressive elements within Israel are still very marginal, but growing and many of these courageous, progressive Israelis have themselves called for BDS against Israel. As for harm against Palestinians, the fact that Palestinians themselves have called for BDS should be as clear a sign as any that the cost of not responding to the call causes far more harm.

Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, activists should continue to grasp the opportunities that BDS offers and build up the momentum that has been generated. As Israeli apartheid week, taking place worldwide from 1-8 March (see http://apartheidweek.org), solidarity activists should continue to work within the narrow, but highly significant space that exists for them to try and hold the Israeli government, and their own governments, accountable for abuses of human rights and humanitarian law against Palestinians.

Jeff Handmaker is an author, a human rights lawyer, and a researcher and university lecturer in human rights at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. A version of this article was originally published by Indymedia US.

The dismantling of Israel Document: Israel is an outlawed entity

2009-03-01T21:41:00.001+02:00

The dismantling of Israel Document: Israel is an outlawed entity

In the name of God
The Lord of all human beings

The authors of this document are a group of youth who do not belong to a political trend or party, and do not have any ethnic, racist, or religious agenda. We uphold humanity and the right of all humans to live with dignity and peace regardless of religion, color, race, political beliefs, ethnicity, and nationality.
We announce our full respect of all principles and creeds, and our support to righteousness and justice against oppression, suppression, murder, usurpation of rights, and distortion of facts.

As advocates for human rights and values, we believe in dismantling what is internationally recognized as “the state of Israel”.
This document states our legitimate and humanitarian arguments.

First: Israel is not a state according to the international definition.

The definition of a state is: “A state is a political association with effective sovereignty over a geographic area and representing a population.”
In reference to the above definition, we can construe that:
- Israel is not a political association; it is a religious-ethnic racist association.
- Israel is not a sovereign state, it depends entirely on US political, economical, and militarily support, making it an American colony, rather than a sovereign state.
Consecutive US administrations unremittingly state its commitment to Israeli security. According to international norms, every state is committed only to its own security, and no state on earth is committed to another state’s security, except the United States of America which is committed to Israeli security.
It would be more realistic and precise if Israel is recognized as a US colony.

Second: Israel is an internationally outlawed entity and must be prosecuted.
Although Israel is the creation of the United Nations — created after Zionist terrorist groups assassinated Folk Bernadette, the Count of Weisberg, who acquired legal proofs to avert the foundation of Israel — yet, Israel, from its very inception, was a deviant entity that never conformed to international laws or UN Security Council resolutions, relying on the US veto.

1- Israel was founded by terrorist groups prosecuted of bombing civilians in hotels, cinemas, and markets: Lehi, Stern, Revisionist Zionist group, Irgun, and Haganah.
2- Israel has violated 35 UN Security Council resolutions and, protected by the US veto, has not been prosecuted.
3- Israel maintains occupation, deliberately targets civilians, reporters, and doctors, and it prevents the arrival of aid to the injured.
4- Israel has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel develops weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, and deliberately targets civilians with internationally prohibited weapons.
5- Israel violates the political and civil rights of its own citizens despite its claims of being a democracy. Israel has banned a number of Israeli political parties from nomination in the late elections because members of these parties are from Arab origins. This decree was issued according to discriminating and racist measures which are against international law and are reminiscent of the obsolete South African apartheid system.
Israeli officials announce openly that they believe in the “purgation” of the “Jewish State” from non-Jewish citizens. Tzipi Livni said that in the case of founding the Palestinian state, all Israelis from Arab origins would have to leave Israel to the Palestinian state in order to “purify” Israel.

Third: Zionism contradicts articles of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

1- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Articles breached by Israel:

Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colors, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

- Zionism is based mainly on discrimination. It is rooted in the idea of the “Chosen People”. Such a misinterpretation for the Torah explains the discrimination practiced by Israel against Palestinians and Arab-Israeli citizens as seen in occupation, blockade, targeting civilians, land confiscation, building an apartheid wall, and deprivation of political, social, and economical rights. All these atrocities are directed to Arabs because of their ethnicity and religions.
- N.B.: Such violations are totally condemned by religious Jews, and as human beings we believe that Zionism and Israel are the greatest anti-Semites in the world as they defame Judaism, distort the Jewish image, and monopolize what they think is the right interpretation of Judaism, which is completely rejected by anti-Zionist Jews.

Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.

- From the moment Israel was founded, it was mainly based on depriving people from their rights of life, liberty and security. It started with the Deir Yassin massacre, which was executed by the Zionist terrorist groups. This massacre was the seed of the Zionist state. Immediately after the foundation of Israel, several massacres against civilians took place. As there is no space to mention all of them here, so we will mention only a few of them: al-Dawayma massacre (1948), Kafr Kassem massacre (1965), and the most recent massacre took place in Gaza (2008/2009). Israel officials stated frequently that they deliberately target civilians to put pressure on groups that resist them.
- Israel bombed UN buildings and staff several times in Lebanon and Palestine.
- Israel targets civilians and UN buildings with internationally prohibited weapons.
- Israel refused to receive the UN deputy after the Jenin massacre (2002).

Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

- Israel practices unrelenting torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian prisoners, civilians seized at checkpoints, children on their way to schools, and civilian inhabitants of the Occupied Territories.
- Israeli soldiers handcuff and blindfold civilians and children seized at checkpoints. They also take children as human shields to protect themselves from the rocks thrown by other children.
- Palestinian homes are also subject to daily incursions by Israeli soldiers directing their rifles toward children and women to terrify them.

Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

- Israel from its very beginning expelled Palestinians from their lands, demolished their homes. As a result, Palestinians are now living as refugees in different countries.
- Israel denies the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.
- Israel is imprisoning thousands of Palestinians, many of whom are children and women.
- Reports as well as eyewitnesses assert that during the recent aggression on Gaza (2008/2009), Israel arrested more than one thousand Palestinians over the age of 16 and placed them in dangerous areas, often using them as human shields.
- During the war on Gaza (2008/2009), the Israeli army arrested injured civilians and deliberately left them bleeding, preventing medical crews from reaching them.
- Witnesses assert that during the war (2008/2009), the Israeli army used injured civilians as human shields by placing them in holes dug right in front of tanks, jeopardizing their lives by placing them on the line of fire.
- Witnesses testify that Israeli soldiers used a number of families as human shields during breaking into homes in Gaza (2008/2009).
- The Israeli army used homes in Gaza as military observation points and military bases, detaining families in these homes to use them as human shields.
- Till now, there are more than 200 citizens under the custody of the Israeli army, some of whom were subjected to direct investigation, torment, and extortion.
- The Israeli army refused to cooperate with the Red Cross, Palestinian authorities, and human rights organizations which demanded that Israel reveal the numbers and names of the arrested. Such rejection of cooperation arouses intense apprehension in relation to the safety of the arrested.

Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

- Israel deprives Palestinians from their right to freedom of movement and residence by seizing them at checkpoints for long periods of time that may reach twenty hours or more.
- Israel prevents refugees from returning to their homeland.
- Israel restricts the residence of a huge number of Palestinians and stops them from leaving the country without stating reasons.

Article 14.
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

- Israel bombs Palestinian cities and stops Palestinian civilians from leaving dangerous spots by the closure of borders and blockade (war on Gaza 2008/2009).

Article 15.
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

- Israel grants its nationality to any Jew in the world on a religious basis, while it threatens some Arab-Israelis with the revocation of their nationality, because they adopt certain political views that Israel does not agree with.
- After exiling Palestinians from their lands, Israel refuses to grant them the right of return.
- Israel imposes Israeli nationality on residents in the Golan Heights and practices all kinds of intimidations on those who refuse the Israeli nationality.

Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

- Israel confiscates Palestinian lands, expels Palestinians, and banishes them in order to build its own settlements on occupied territories.
- Israel, for decades, uproots and destroys tens of thousands of olive trees, as well as citrus and grape groves. They all belong to the Palestinians for centuries.
- Israel built an apartheid wall on confiscated Palestinian land and divided Palestinian villages into unviable cantons.

Article 21.
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

We have already pointed out that Israel has denied Arab-Israeli parties participation in elections and exercising their democratic rights because of their ethnic background. Israel refuses, suppresses, and undermines all democratic options of the Palestinian people at the territories under the Palestinian Authority’s rule. It detains democratically elected ministers, deputies, and representatives, and suppresses their freedom without trials or with formal military trials. Detainees do not enjoy the most basic civil rights as individuals and as representatives of the people.

Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

- Israel closes border crossings and denies Palestinians access to humanitarian aid as has been the ongoing situation in Gaza.
- Israel exploits Palestinian workers and makes them work for lower wages. Palestinian workers do not enjoy any legal rights inside Israel, further exposing them to ill-treatment and being fired at any time without having any legal rights.

Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Israel is violating all these articles by putting restrictions on Palestinian workers, detaining them for long hours at the crossings and checkpoints. Israel is also politically exploiting most of them by asking them to reveal security information to its intelligence agency about Palestinian officials and citizens in order to kill or arrest them, in exchange for the workers’ wages and rights.
Israel has made the humanitarian situation and living conditions of Palestinians a living hell.
Many Palestinian pregnant women give birth at the crossings and checkpoints in the open. The Israeli army does not offer any assistance or facilities to transport pregnant women and patients.
Hundreds die annually at the crossings after having been denied access to hospitals and aid. Palestinian children are born and grow up under bombardment and blockade, and among scenes of death and destruction, depriving them of their most basic rights as children.
Israel imposes on children a life in an environment of perpetual war, depriving them from their rights to learn and to go safely to schools.
Schools have been bombed many times, and the proportion of dead Palestinian children is the highest in modern wars. Among these children many infants are shot dead at point-blank range.

Israel breaches most, if not all, the articles of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political rights in relation with its conduct to Palestinians and residents in the occupied Golan Height’s.

PART 1

Article 1
1- All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
2- All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation, based upon the principle of mutual benefit, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.
3- The States Parties to the present Covenant, including those having responsibility for the administration of Non-Self-Governing and Trust Territories, shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right, in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations.

- Israel is occupying Palestinian territories and the Golan heights, refusing to conform to Security Council resolutions stating that Israel must retreat from the occupied lands.
- Israel denies Palestinians and tenants of the Golan's their right of self-determination, and denies their rights of freedom in determining their political status, pursuing their economic, social and cultural development, and uses fierce and illegal force to prevent them from practicing the mentioned rights.
- Israel targets prominent Palestinian cultural figures. In 1970, Israel assassinated the prominent Palestinian literary figure Ghassan Kanafani. In 1987, Israel assassinated the prominent Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali.
- Israel prevents Palestinians from reaching their schools, and prevents them from joining universities, and when they try to acquire grants abroad, it stops them from traveling.

PART II
Article 2
Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Where not already provided for by existing legislative or other measures, each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to take the necessary steps. in accordance with its constitutional processes and with the provisions of the present Covenant, to adopt such legislative or other measures as may be necessary to give effect to the rights recognized in the present Covenant.
Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes:
To ensure that any person whose rights or freedoms as herein recognized are violated shall have an effective remedy, notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity; to ensure that any person claiming such a remedy shall have his rights thereto determined by competent judicial, administrative or legislative authorities, or by any other competent authority provided for by the legal system of the State, and to develop the possibilities of judicial remedy;
To ensure that the competent authorities shall enforce such remedies when granted.

- Israel breaches this article. Arab citizens in Israel are denied all the rights that are granted to any Jewish Israel. Jews in Israel are allowed to own and carry weapons, practice rituals of their religion — even if those rituals include extremist or racist activities like cursing other religions and races — and Jews are allowed to point their weapons at any non-Jewish citizens walking in the streets. Such acts are not illegal according to Israeli law.
- Non-Jewish citizens are forced to join the army, placed in the line of fire, and their lives are jeopardized deliberately, while Jews serving in the army are highly protected.
- Non-Jewish citizens are compelled to serve in the army in Arab districts, and forced to attack their own people. If they refuse, they face imprisonment.
- Israel deprives non-Jewish citizens from practicing rituals of their religions frequently, and if they allow them, the army sieges the church or the mosque.
- Israel prevents men under the age of fifty to pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque and force them to pray in the streets surrounded by tanks and rifles.
- Arabs arrested by Israel are denied all their rights, exposed to torment and receive fake trials in which the judge deals with the prisoner according to religion and race, not according to the legal situation.
- More than ten thousand Arabs are incarcerated in Israeli prisons because of their political views. Many of them have not undergone any trials.

Article 4
In time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation and the existence of which is officially proclaimed, the States Parties to the present Covenant may take measures derogating from their obligations under the present Covenant to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation, provided that such measures are not inconsistent with their other obligations under international law and do not involve discrimination solely on the ground of race, color, sex, language, religion or social origin.
No derogation from articles 6, 7, 8 (paragraphs 1 and 2), 11, 15, 16 and 18 may be made under this provision.
Any State Party to the present Covenant availing itself of the right of derogation shall immediately inform the other States Parties to the present Covenant, through the intermediary of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, of the provisions from which it has derogated and of the reasons by which it was actuated. A further communication shall be made, through the same intermediary, on the date on which it terminates such derogation.

Israel violates all these points in the above article. Under the pretext of protecting Israeli security, Israel divests all Arab citizens from security.
Protected by US veto, Israel never complies with UN Security Council resolutions.

Article 9
Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedure as are established by law.
Anyone who is arrested shall be informed, at the time of arrest, of the reasons for his arrest and shall be promptly informed of any charges against him.
Anyone arrested or detained on a criminal charge shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorized by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to release. It shall not be the general rule that persons awaiting trial shall be detained in custody, but release may be subject to guarantees to appear for trial, at any other stage of the judicial proceedings, and, should occasion arise, for execution of the judgment.
Anyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings before a court, in order that that court may decide without delay on the lawfulness of his detention and order his release if the detention is not lawful.
Anyone who has been the victim of unlawful arrest or detention shall have an enforceable right to compensation.

Palestinians under Israeli occupation do not enjoy any security. Israeli forces break up homes and subject civilians to arbitrary arrest. They are deprived of their freedom without any legal pretext and without even knowing the reason of their arrest.
They receive inhumane treatment during their arrest.
After arresting one Palestinian, frequently, Israeli army bulldozes his or her home, and abuses his or her family.
After arrest, Palestinians are subjected to fierce torture.
Israeli courts do not apply the law on the Palestinians. They take a prior hostile position toward the prosecuted according to race and religion.

Article 10
All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.
Accused persons shall, save in exceptional circumstances, be segregated from convicted persons and shall be subject to separate treatment appropriate to their status as unconvicted persons;
Accused juvenile persons shall be separated from adults and brought as speedily as possible for adjudication.
The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation. Juvenile offenders shall be segregated from adults and be accorded treatment appropriate to their age and legal status.

- Any Palestinian or Arab arrested by Israeli forces is treated with indignity and inhumanely.
- Every Palestinian arrested by Israeli forces is subjected to torture.
- Palestinians arrested for political reasons are put in the same cells with criminals.
- Palestinian juvenile persons are put in the same cells with criminal adults.
- More than ten thousand Palestinians and Arabs are imprisoned and subjected to inhumane conditions. Many of them are children, women, and pregnant women.
- Pregnant Arab women imprisoned in Israeli jails give birth in the prison, and the babies are not allowed to go to relatives' custody outside the prison.

Article 12
Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence.
Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.
The above-mentioned rights shall not be subject to any restrictions except those which are provided by law, are necessary to protect national security, public order (ordre public), public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others, and are consistent with the other rights recognized in the present Covenant.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.

- Israel deprives millions of refugees from returning to their country from which they were expelled by force.
- Israel arbitrarily deprives Palestinian youths from leaving the country to receive an education abroad. It also deprives them from receiving education in their country.

Article 14
All persons shall be equal before the courts and tribunals. In the determination of any criminal charge against him, or of his rights and obligations in a suit at law, everyone shall be entitled to a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal established by law. The press and the public may be excluded from all or part of a trial for reasons of morals, public order (ordre public) or national security in a democratic society, or when the interest of the private lives of the parties so requires, or to the extent strictly necessary in the opinion of the court in special circumstances where publicity would prejudice the interests of justice; but any judgment rendered in a criminal case or in a suit at law shall be made public except where the interest of juvenile persons otherwise requires or the proceedings concern matrimonial disputes or the guardianship of children.
Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall have the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law.
In the determination of any criminal charge against him, everyone shall be entitled to the following minimum guarantees, in full equality:
To be informed promptly and in detail in a language which he understands of the nature and cause of the charge against him;
To have adequate time and facilities for the preparation of his defense and to communicate with counsel of his own choosing;
To be tried without undue delay;
To be tried in his presence, and to defend himself in person or through legal assistance of his own choosing; to be informed, if he does not have legal assistance, of this right; and to have legal assistance assigned to him, in any case where the interests of justice so require, and without payment by him in any such case if he does not have sufficient means to pay for it;
To examine, or have examined, the witnesses against him and to obtain the attendance and examination of witnesses on his behalf under the same conditions as witnesses against him;
To have the free assistance of an interpreter if he cannot understand or speak the language used in court;
Not to be compelled to testify against oneself or to confess guilt.
In the case of juvenile persons, the procedure shall be such as will take account of their age and the desirability of promoting their rehabilitation.
Everyone convicted of a crime shall have the right to his conviction and sentence being reviewed by a higher tribunal according to law.
When a person has by a final decision been convicted of a criminal offence and when subsequently his conviction has been reversed or he has been pardoned on the ground that a new or newly discovered fact shows conclusively that there has been a miscarriage of justice, the person who has suffered punishment as a result of such conviction shall be compensated according to law, unless it is proved that the non-disclosure of the unknown fact in time is wholly or partly attributable to him.
No one shall be liable to be tried or punished again for an offence for which he has already been finally convicted or acquitted in accordance with the law and penal procedure of each country.

- Every single item in this article is violated by Israel when it comes to Palestinians and Arabs.
- Israeli courts defuse the action of Israeli law when it deals with Palestinians and Arabs. They are found guilty before they even step into the courtroom.
- Israeli courts often dismiss attorneys assigned by the accused and assign other ones who are known of their prejudice against Arabs as a race.

Article 17
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honor and reputation.
Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Israel violates this article under international cover. Israeli forces storms into Palestinian homes without any respect for privacy, abuses families, especially children.
Concerning the unlawful attacks on a person’s honor and reputation:
During the past years there have been constant attacks against Muslims and Arabs that are known as "Islamophobia" and "Arabo-phobia". Such an organized denigration, depicting Muslims and Arabs as "terrorists", "backwards", and "uncivilized" people was meant to give excuses and justify all illegal military atrocities waged against Arab and Muslim population, starting with Israeli massacres, the US invasion of Afghanistan, the illegal occupation in Iraq and ending with the most notorious prisons in the world: Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
Such a campaign caused a great damage to all Muslim and Arab population worldwide. May Muslims, Arabs and even some Sikhs and Hindus (because they resemble Middle Eastern Muslims in color and features) were subjected to persecution, job loss, arrest and racist homicides.
Many Arab and Muslim nations were damaged economically, politically and militarily with the full support of both states and mobs.
Inhuman crimes and internationally prohibited acts were directed to Muslims and Arabs, collectively and individually word wide.
International media, relentlessly, broadcasts materials contains hate speech against Muslims and Arabs. FOX news persistently broadcasts materials arouse hatred towards Muslims, International News papers….etc).
Now, after taking steps toward closing Guantanamo Bay and retreating from Iraq, we demand the following:
1- Official apology from all those who convicted actions of material and moral atrocities against Muslims and Arabs which cause them great damages collectively and individually.
2- The immediate cease of any kind of hatred action whether militarily, economically or speech hatred.
3- Legal international condemnation of all offensives against Muslims and Arabs.
4- This spread hatred policies were meant to be a cover for inhuman war crimes executed by Israel and the world powers. Such policies have to be internationally condemned with official declaration and new legislations to protect Muslim and Arab subject from persecution.
5- Arabs are Semites, yet, they are not allowed to resort to the anti-Semite international law when they are attacked, therefore, it is essential to issue a new law to protect Arabs and Muslims.
6- Suitable financial, political and moral compensations for Arabs and Muslims have to be attributed immediately.

Article 20
Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.
Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

Israeli politicians lead war propaganda and use it in election campaigns in which they repeatedly echo the call for war using racist tones against Arabs and threatening them with genocide.
By monitoring the Israeli politicians' statements since the foundation of Israel until now, we find constant campaigns led by politicians and religious leaders waged against Arabs, describing them with the most racist descriptions inciting soldiers to kill them for racist, religious, and security reasons.

Article 25
Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity, without any of the distinctions mentioned in article 2 and without unreasonable restrictions:
To take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives;
To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors;
To have access, on general terms of equality, to public service in his country.

Palestinians do not enjoy any political rights under the occupation. Israel does not respect the election results of the Palestinian people, and does not recognize the Palestinian people's representatives. Moreover, Israel arrests elected Palestinian MPs with disregard to their parliamentary immunity.
Arab-Israelis are not allowed to occupy leading posts no matter how qualified they are.
In employment, Jews have the priority over any Arab, even if the Arabs are more qualified.

Article 27
In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language.

Israel violates this article as mention above in the document.
Israel breaches all items of Part IV of the Covenant. It does not permit the establishment of any international human rights committees to follow up the rights of people under occupation, or assist in the prosecution of criminals who take part in killings, genocide, arrest and imprisonment against the people. The United Nations and the international community are responsible for this part, but cannot prosecute Israel, its leaders, officers or soldiers. At the same time, Israel prevents the work of any international inquiring committee, whatever its reasons and goals are.
This part is not recognized or practiced by Israel, nor practiced at all on Israel by any international organization.

It is obvious to any researcher that Israel has clearly violated all international documents, charters and treaties. It is very strange indeed that Israel and its officials had never been prosecuted or held accountable for their actions.
As for the economic part of the International Covenant, below we show how Israel deals with this aspect:

Article 1
1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
2. All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation, based upon the principle of mutual benefit, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.

- We have mentioned earlier in the civil and political covenants how Israel violates this article by occupying Palestinian land, building the separation wall, placing Gaza under siege, and building settlements on Palestinian land whose owners have documents of ownership, deploying barriers between cities and villages, and stopping Palestinians for long hours on these barriers, including the workers who lose their jobs because of permanent delay.
- Israel has seized all fresh water resources in the West Bank and Golan Heights. It is establishing settlements on fertile land after the expulsion of its inhabitants and confiscation of the land. It builds its army camps near freshwater resources.Israel also had and is still cutting off hundreds of thousands of olive and citrus trees which belong to Palestinians, destroying their orchards and vineyards and confiscating them to construct the separation wall and build settlements or military barracks.

PART III
Article 6
1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right to work, which includes the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain his living by work which he freely chooses or accepts, and will take appropriate steps to safeguard this right.
2. The steps to be taken by a State Party to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include technical and vocational guidance and training programs, policies and techniques to achieve steady economic, social and cultural development and full and productive employment under conditions safeguarding fundamental political and economic freedoms to the individual.

- Most of the Palestinian youth are unemployed due to harassment at Israeli checkpoints. They are delayed for long hours and asked to provide information about their own people in order to facilitate their transit to work. At the same time, Israel has bombed most factories in Gaza after a suffocating siege where it denied Gaza the entry of any raw materials or spare parts for machines. Israel bombards small workshops, continuously pounding them to the ground and claiming that the resistance fighters are using them to manufacture explosives. These claims have often proved to be untrue because these workshops are very small and do not have any facilities for manufacturing any explosives or the like.
- All these items are not available in Gaza or the West Bank because of the policies of the occupation. No efficiency or technology is available in schools and educational institutes because of the poverty, siege, and restrictions. A Palestinian worker can not find a decent job except in Israel and most employed workers lose their jobs for the reasons mentioned earlier (delaying at checkpoints or being questioned by Israeli intelligence).

Article 7
The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of just and favorable conditions of work which ensure, in particular:
(a) Remuneration which provides all workers, as a minimum, with:
(i) Fair wages and equal remuneration for work of equal value without distinction of any kind, in particular women being guaranteed conditions of work not inferior to those enjoyed by men, with equal pay for equal work;
(ii) A decent living for themselves and their families in accordance with the provisions of the present Covenant;
(b) Safe and healthy working conditions;
(c) Equal opportunity for everyone to be promoted in his employment to an appropriate higher level, subject to no considerations other than those of seniority and competence;
(d) Rest, leisure and reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay, as well as remuneration for public holidays

Such conditions cannot be obtained under the constraints mentioned earlier as a result of the occupation. Palestinian women work in very bad conditions under the occupation in dilapidated old factories. Palestinian women working as teachers are always vulnerable to danger and stop working as schools often close for security reasons. Workers do not get paid often because Israel denies the entry of money to Gaza and prevents the entry of private banking remittances of employee salaries. Gaza often witnesses strikes because workers do not receive their salaries for months, therefore, they do not have the minimum requirements of employments and payments. They cannot get paid most of the year.

Article 10
The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize that:
1. The widest possible protection and assistance should be accorded to the family, which is the natural and fundamental group unit of society, particularly for its establishment and while it is responsible for the care and education of dependent children. Marriage must be entered into with the free consent of the intending spouses.
2. Special protection should be accorded to mothers during a reasonable period before and after childbirth. During such period working mothers should be accorded paid leave or leave with adequate social security benefits.
3. Special measures of protection and assistance should be taken on behalf of all children and young persons without any discrimination for reasons of parentage or other conditions. Children and young persons should be protected from economic and social exploitation. Their employment in work harmful to their morals or health or dangerous to life or likely to hamper their normal development should be punishable by law. States should also set age limits below which the paid employment of child labor should be prohibited and punishable by law.

- There is no protection for an individual or family under the Israeli occupation. Almost every Palestinian family is divided in several countries because of the displacement, and each Palestinian house has victims because of the Israeli bombardment. This article and many others cannot even be applied on Palestinians under the relocation, displacement, killings, bombings, and intimidation.
- Many Palestinian mothers, whether working or not, have given birth at checkpoints and on the way to hospitals because of the restriction policy at the crossings, and long waits with no distinction between patients and pregnant women or ordinary people.
- Palestinian children are exposed to death in the streets and on the way to schools. Many of them are forced to leave schools and work to support their families due to the death of the father or the mother, or because of extreme poverty caused by the continuous blockade and the starvation policy imposed on Gaza by Israel.

Article 11
1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. The States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right, recognizing to this effect the essential importance of international co-operation based on free consent.
2. The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programs, which are needed:
(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources;
(b) Taking into account the problems of both food-importing and food-exporting countries, to ensure an equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need.

- We have stated previously and it is well known that the Israeli blockade makes the application of such articles impossible. Israel has bombed relief warehouses, even those belonging to the UNRWA, as happened in Gaza recently.
- Israel has been imposing a suffocating siege, shelling relief agencies and warehouses, and preventing Palestinians from importing goods, food and medicines from abroad.

Article 12
1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for:
(a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;
(b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;
(c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases;
(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

- Palestinian hospitals and clinics have no modern equipment, and there is no electricity most of the time because Israel prevents fuel and gas from reaching Gaza. It also prevents the import of medical equipment. Palestinian patients often die because of simple medical causes which can easily be cured, as a lot of medicines are not available and cannot be imported because of the blockade.
- We've described previously the situations in hospitals and how babies are born in primitive conditions on crossings which cause their death due to the lack of basic conditions of life that the newborn needs and the requirements of special monitoring and care at hospitals.
In addition to the foregoing reasons, Israel has bombed populated Palestinian areas with internationally prohibited weapons such as phosphorus bombs, and this poses a threat to people's health as well as the environment in general.
Israel has bombed ambulances and paramedics were killed and prevented from reaching victims who die as a result. This has happened in all Israeli wars in southern Lebanon, the West Bank, Jenin, and Gaza recently.
In all wars Israel targeted ambulances and paramedics; the archives of these wars are available.

Article 13
1- The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to education. They agree that education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity, and shall strengthen the respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. They further agree that education shall enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society, promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all racial, ethnic or religious groups, and further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

In addition to the previously mentioned status of Palestinian schools and students, Israeli curriculums are full of racial lessons, songs and stories inciting hatred against Arabs, showing them as primitive criminals who deserve to be killed, displaced and abused. This may be the most dangerous thing in the world facing children, to teach them the culture of hatred and racism. These children will not make peace in the future nor will they have any mercy on those whom they consider enemies. They grow up and learn that the "other" deserves to be killed. Israeli curriculums which contain a lot of this racism can be checked for details. Photos have also been published by international news agencies that show how young Israeli children were signing their names on the missiles of the Israeli army in Lebanon war in July 2006.

It should be noted here that Israel has breached and violated most of the Geneva Convention items relating to people's status and how to deal with them during wars and conflicts. All the violations that have been mentioned earlier in this document are explicit violations of the provisions of this treaty which is known to all countries and human rights and international organizations.

From the above mentioned, we find it clear that the so-called state of Israel, is a racial entity not entitled to live. It prevents decent living and peace for all its neighbors and those under its control, specifically non-Jews. It is an entity that is not governed by any basis of legal or ethical standards like the rest of the world.

Israel is a criminal entity based on murder and destruction, and poses a danger to humanity, environment, and all forms of life.
Hereby, as we place this document in front of all mankind, we express our clear resentment and rejection of the obvious silence of most international and humanitarian organizations, and even the bias of some of these organizations against the victim and their support of the aggressor. We put this responsibility before everyone who believes in humanity, and people's rights to enjoy all the noble standards of civilization.

Sign The dismantling of Israel Document: Israel is an outlawed entity Petition

Nawara Negm
Joe Ghanem
Iman Badawi
Mohammad Shaltaf
Mohammad Qandiel
Asem Al Kassem
Rehab Elfawkhry

Thousands of Gazans remain homeless

2009-02-20T23:06:00.001+02:00

Report, The Electronic Intifada, 18 February 2009

Azza Abed Rabu with her neice and four-year-old daughter, who sustained serious head wounds during the family's evacuation. She and her family are now living in a tent in the Abed Rabu area of Jabaliya. (Erica Silverman/IRIN)

GAZA CITY, occupied Gaza Strip (IRIN) - Thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip remain homeless after their houses were badly damaged or destroyed during Israel's recent military offensive there.

The Israeli army began with aerial bombardments of the enclave on 27 December and added a ground assault from 3 January. Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire on 18 January while Hamas, the de facto ruling authority in the Strip, declared its own ceasefire later that day.

According to a 16 February report by Save the Children Alliance "at least 100,000 people, including 56,000 children, remain displaced with many continuing to take shelter in tents or crowding into remaining homes with other families, one month since the Gaza ceasefire was declared."

The non-governmental organization estimated that some 500,000 people, including 280,000 children, were forced from their homes at some point during the conflict and added that "tent cities" had sprung up where whole neighborhoods were destroyed. Many tent residents are without access to clean drinking water and toilets, it said.

The tents are small and offer no protection from the low temperatures at night, which can reach below 7-8 degrees Celsius, according to Save the Children UK's chief executive Jasmine Whitbread, speaking from Gaza on 16 February. She said that some camps of up to 40 families share one or two toilets between them, posing health risks.

Most of the tents have been provided by the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), UNICEF and other international and local aid organizations.

UNRWA said it had distributed emergency food parcels and non-food items, such as mattresses and blankets, to tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who had been affected by the conflict. This was in addition to UNRWA's regular food distribution to 900,000 refugees in the Strip.

Tented communities

According to UNRWA, tented communities have been set up in densely populated areas that came under fire by Israeli tanks. These are the northern areas of Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya, the Zeitoun area in south Gaza City, Rafah on the southern border with Egypt and around Netzarim, a former Israeli settlement, where Israeli forces constructed a temporary military base during their operation.

Hundreds of tents stand in the Abed Rabu area of Jabaliya.

"Over the past two weeks we have distributed relief to 310 individuals who completely lost their homes and to 310 whose homes were damaged," said Fadi (he declined to give his family name), a volunteer with Islamic Foundation, a local NGO that supports Hamas, as he put emergency water and food supplies into packs in a tent.

The parcels contained soap, potatoes, flour, milk and a protein supplement provided by the Hamas government. The Red Crescent delivered the water supplies and UNRWA the blankets and mattresses, Fadi said.

"The Israeli troops bulldozed my home to enter the area with tanks," said Azza Abed Rabu, 27, while clutching her four-year-old daughter, who she said sustained serious head wounds during the family's evacuation. "We have narrow streets; they [Israeli forces] were searching for tunnels beneath the homes."

Thirty Abed Rabu family members are sheltering in two tents.

At least 4,000 homes were destroyed and about 17,000 badly damaged, according to a recent UN Gaza flash appeal, while 50,000 residents took shelter in UNRWA facilities during the height of the conflict and tens of thousands took refuge with family and friends.

A UNDP-led survey of damaged and destroyed housing throughout Gaza conducted immediately following the ceasefire found the greatest destruction in the two northern governorates of north Gaza, where 1,436 houses were completely destroyed, and Gaza governorate, where 752 houses were completely destroyed.

UNRWA estimates that an average of $4,000 will be needed to repair each housing unit.

As of 5 February, the Gaza health ministry said the Palestinian death toll from the three-week conflict had reached 1,440, including 431 children and 114 women. Some 5,380 were injured, including 1,872 children and 800 women, according to the ministry.

This item comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Baroness Tonge: "Israel stands accused of war crimes witnessed by the whole world"

2009-02-20T00:54:00.001+02:00

Hampshire College first in US to divest from Israel

2009-02-20T00:29:00.000+02:00

Press release, Students for Justice in Palestine (Hampshire College), 12 February 2009

Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, has become the first of any college or university in the US to divest from companies on the grounds of their involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

This landmark move is a direct result of a two-year intensive campaign by the campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The group pressured Hampshire College's Board of Trustees to divest from six specific companies due to human rights concerns in occupied Palestine. More than 800 students, professors and alumni have signed SJP's "institutional statement" calling for the divestment.

The proposal put forth by SJP was approved on Saturday, 7 February 2009 by the Board. By divesting from these companies, SJP believes that Hampshire has distanced itself from complicity in the illegal occupation and war crimes of Israel.

Meeting minutes from a committee of Hampshire's Board of Trustees confirm that "President Hexter acknowledged that it was the good work of SJP that brought this issue to the attention of the committee." This groundbreaking decision follows in Hampshire's history of being the first college in the country to divest from apartheid South Africa 32 years ago, a decision based on similar human rights concerns. This divestment was also a direct result of student pressure.

The divestment has so far been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Rashid Khalidi, Vice President of the EU Parliament Luisa Morganitini, Cynthia McKinney, former member of the African National Congress Ronnie Kasrils, Mustafa Barghouti, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, John Berger, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, among others.

The six corporations, all of which provide the Israeli military with equipment and services in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are: Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola and Terex. Furthermore, our policy prevents the reinvestment in any company involved in the illegal occupation.

SJP is responding to a call from Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) as a way of bringing nonviolent pressure to bear on the state of Israel to end its violations of international law. SJP is following in the footsteps of many noted groups and institutions such as the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education in the UK, the Israeli group Gush Shalom, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the American Friends Service Committee.

As well as voicing our opposition to the illegal occupation and the consistent human rights violations of the Palestinian people, we as members of an institute of higher education see it as our moral responsibility to express our solidarity with Palestinian students whose access to education is severely inhibited by the Israeli occupation.

SJP has proven that student groups can organize, rally and pressure their schools to divest from the illegal occupation. The group hopes that this decision will pave the way for other institutions of higher learning in the US to take similar stands.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10304.shtml

Israel's very own Guantanamos

2009-02-20T00:16:00.000+02:00

The "death ride" -- welcome to 21st century torture, says Khaled Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem

Palestinians inspect the wreckage of a car hit by an Israeli air strike on Gaza, virtually the largest open air prison in the world

Israeli maltreatment of Palestinian captives and political prisoners has reached unprecedented levels of brutality, according to lawyers, human rights groups and newly-released prisoners.

There are currently as many as 12,000 Palestinian detainees languishing in Israeli detention camps, many of them without charge or trial. They include hundreds of university professors, engineers, school teachers as well as religious and civic leaders, students, resistance fighters and women activists.

Two years ago, the Israeli occupation authorities abducted hundreds of democratically- elected officials, including mayors, members of local city councils, law-makers, and cabinet ministers, many associate with Hamas's political wing.

Israel employs a set of draconian laws, some dating back to the British mandate era, to torment Palestinian prisoners. The same laws are also used to lend a façade of legality to other harsh treatment of Palestinians, such as house demolitions, land confiscation and deportation.

Normally, the harsh treatment meted out to Palestinian detainees starts in earnest with crack Israeli soldiers raiding a given Palestinian home in the quiet hours before dawn. There, the undisciplined soldiers normally ransack the house, vandalise property and furniture, smash house appliances and terrorise the entire family, before blindfolding and handcuffing their victim and dragging him away to a military truck that takes him to one of the dozens of interrogation centres all over Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Upon arrival at the interrogation centre, the detainee is instantly subjected to an array of harsh treatment techniques designed to shock him and destroy his psychological immunity. These include sleep deprivation and solitary confinement as well as sporadic beating.

Then the victim is made to go through the routine technique called shabh whereby he is forced to sit on a 25cm high stool, with his hands tied to his back. He can be kept in this extremely uncomfortable position for weeks or even months except for short periods to go to the toilet and eat.

The main purpose behind the harsh treatment is ostensibly to extract confessions from the victim. On many occasions, the victims confess to having committed fictitious violations only to escape the harsh and intolerable torture. Eventually, however, if no confessions are extracted, the detainee is sentenced to administrative detention, or open-ended captivity without being charged or tried.

Torture, which the Israeli judicial authorities euphemistically refer to as "moderate physical and psychological pressure", is officially sanctioned by Israel's law. Indeed, several Palestinian detainees have recently died in Israeli jails either due to torture or medical negligence. According to the Palestinian Prisoner Club, which monitors Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, 167 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since 1967.

However, while torture was normally performed on detainees mainly in order to extract confessions, the Israeli prison authorities have been using torture for the purpose of simply tormenting and humiliating Palestinian detainees.

"Their goal is to make us suffer, to torment us, to humiliate us. They want to punish us further for our survival, for refusing to die and disappear as a people, for refusing to collapse. Perhaps they think that by tormenting us, they get the feeling that they are avenging the holocaust, at least vicariously," said Mohamed Abu Zneid, from Dura, who was released recently from an Israeli detention camp near the Egyptian borders. "But I can say that such behaviour can only come from a sick people, a sadistic people. Otherwise, why would normal people behave this way?"

"Administrative detention" which is a mere euphemism for prolonged and mostly unlawful captivity as punishment for one's political thoughts and attitudes has become of late the modus operandi of Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners. Today, Israel is detaining hundreds of mostly innocent Palestinians in detention camps all over Israel, such as the notorious Kitziot concentration camp in the Negev desert.

A few years ago, Mustafa Shawar, a detainee at Kitziot, informed this writer that on several occasions he had appealed to the Jewish military "judge" at the Treblinka-like facility to tell him why he was being incarcerated so that he wouldn't commit the same violation again once he was released. Shawar, a senior lecturer at the University of Hebron, said the judge paid no attention to his just request. "He told me that he wouldn't grant me the privilege of knowing why I was in jail because, as he said, the Jews are the masters and non-Jews are the slaves and the chosen people are under no moral or legal obligation to explain to the inferiors why they are being mistreated."

Today, Shawar is still languishing at Kitziot for the fourth successive year, not knowing why he is being tormented by a state that claims to be a "light unto nations" and the "only democracy in the Middle East".

Shawar is not an exceptional case. He epitomises the fate of thousands of Palestinian detainees and hostages languishing in Israeli detention camps, mostly for harbouring ideas and thoughts that the Ashkenazi establishment deems too dangerous.

Similarly, Azzam Salhab, professor of comparative religion at Hebron University, has been languishing in the same desert concentration camp for eight years on vague charges such as "constituting a danger to the safety and security of Israel and the Jewish people."

According to the Nafha Society, a human rights group defending Palestinian prisoners' rights, the Israeli occupation authorities issue dozens of administrative detention orders per month.

Earlier, this week, the Israeli army renewed the "administrative detention" for Radi Sami Al-Asi for additional six months. Al-Asi, a journalist from the northern West Bank town of Nablus, was arrested on unspecified charges. However, when it became clear that there was no evidence indicting him, the Israeli military judge decided to sentence him to six months in jail, renewable for as long as the occupation authorities deem fit. So far, Al-Asi has spent more than 38 months in administrative detention without knowing why.

Farhat Asad, a 40-year-old father of three children from Ramallah, was sentenced to a sixth term of administrative detention on 16 June. All in all, Asad has spent more than 100 months in administrative detention.

According to Tawhid Shaaban, a prominent lawyer from East Jerusalem, some detainees have spent nine years in Israeli captivity without charge or trial. "Yes, this happens in a state that claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East."

The so-called "death ride" is one of the most agonising and nightmarish experiences a detainee undergoes. It starts with a sudden raid of a given ward by the notorious Nahshon squad, which is specialised in repressing Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Then a prisoner or several prisoners are ordered to board an extremely filthy, hot and nearly hermetically sealed white vehicle, allegedly in order to appear before a judge several hundred kilometres away. The hateful vehicle would move very slowly from one prison to the other to carry additional prisoners, including dangerous Jewish criminals. The car would stop every hour for refreshment, while the inmates are sweating in the back chamber.

The nightmarish journey, which could last for 24 hours, is first and foremost meant to make the prisoners suffer as much as possible in the oven-like metal chamber where there is very little oxygen. The prisoners are barred from using toilets for close to 16 hours, and some are forced to urinate and defecate inside the lock-up car.

Saed Yassin, a human rights activist describes the "death ride" as "an intolerable and unbearable form of torture. They don't treat you as a human being but as cattle or a piece of luggage. People are left to rot and suffer in these oven- like chambers for up to 24 hours without food, without water, and with very little oxygen. And if they want to torment a given person, he is forced to undergo this nightmare every few days."

In addition to the death ride, the Israeli Prison Authority has been introducing additional forms of punishments, aimed at breaking the prisoner's will. These include barring family visits for an extended period of times for the slightest and pettiest violation of outstanding instructions.

Moreover, the Israeli occupation authorities have been barring family visits for more than 900 Gazan prisoners in Israeli jails under the pretext of the 18-month harsh blockade which Israel has been imposing in Gaza. The Red Cross asked Israel on several occasions to allow Gazans to visit their beloved ones, but to no avail.

Israel recently resorted to "unorthodox tactics" to harass Palestinian prisoners, including raiding and vandalising their homes and mistreating their wives and children, imposing hefty financial fines on them, and carrying out surprise searches usually after midnight.

Last week, lawyers and newly-released prisoners reported that the Israeli Prison Authorities have naked Jewish women, probably prostitutes, harass prisoners, especially religious inmates, through sexually suggestive behaviour. A spokesman for the prison authorities refused to confirm or deny the revelation.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/902/re1.htm

Hamas maintained cease-fire June - November 2008

2009-02-19T23:43:00.003+02:00

Former Israel foreign minister gets his facts wrong about Hamas rocket attacks and is stopped by the news presenter Emily Reuben with a "fact sheet" given by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and created by the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center, (IICC), which is routinely cited on the Israeli government websites.

Rebuilding the Islamic University of Gaza

2009-02-16T19:54:00.001+02:00

Akram Habeeb and Marcy Newman, The Electronic Intifada, 16 February 2009
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10308.shtml

Since Israel's bombing of the buildings housing scientific laboratories at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) on 28 December, the rubble that remains debunks Israeli claims that those labs were used to manufacture weapons. Of course such allegations are preposterous; indeed it would be quite foolish for IUG to even entertain the notion of producing weapons given the way in which Palestinian universities have been under constant Israeli attack since the founding of Birzeit University in the West Bank in 1975.

Rather, it is Israeli universities that contain the laboratories where the weaponry used to destroy Palestinian lives in Gaza and elsewhere is developed. In the 14 June 2007 issue of The Nation, US journalist Naomi Klein makes it clear that the relationship between the State of Israel, its academic institutions and its military are intertwined:

"Thirty homeland security companies were launched in Israel in the past six months alone, thanks in large part to lavish government subsidies that have transformed the Israeli army and the country's universities into incubators for security and weapons start-ups (something to keep in mind in the debates about the academic boycott)."

The way that Israel binds together its universities (all of which are state-run and funded) and its military can be gleaned from any number of Israeli universities and their laboratories, which serve as incubators of destruction while the Palestinian people inevitably become its guinea pigs. In a recent article in the Tel Aviv University Review (Winter 2008-2009) entitled "Lifting the Veil of Secrecy," Gil Zohar lays out the collaboration between Israeli universities and Israel's colonial military project quite clearly:

"... Tel Aviv University [TAU] is at the front line of the critical work to maintain Israel's military and technological edge. While much of that research remains classified, several facts illuminate the role of the university. MAFAT, a Hebrew acronym meaning the [Research and Development] Directorate of the Israel Ministry of Defense, is currently funding 55 projects at TAU. Nine projects are being funded by DARPA -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense."

What is significant is that the US government and its military are complicit in the research leading to the destruction and devastation of Palestinian lives through their funding of these research projects, projects that inevitably lead to acts of aggression such as the bombing of IUG.

IUG is an institution of higher education open not only to its 20,000 students, but also to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza who visit its libraries and attend its lectures. USAID, the US government's foreign aid agency, claims that it funded more than $900,000 of projects, which went into building IUG's campus (see "Audit finds US funded university linked to terrorism," The Chicago Tribune, 12 December 2007). In March 2007 The Washington Times published a propagandistic article, "School Linked to Hamas Gets US Cash," charging that USAID did not follow US federal laws when financially assisting IUG, as well as Al-Quds University (famous for its normalizing relations with Israeli academia, although it recently promised to cease such joint projects). USAID conducted an audit in response to The Washington Times article that questioned $140,000 of USAID money awarded to the university and to 49 students who received scholarships. The article and the audit argued that funding a so-called "Hamas-controlled" university violates US federal law. As a result of this audit faculty and students at IUG have been prohibited from receiving US State Department funds -- whether USAID-related funds for building, scholarships or the Palestinian Faculty Development Program. This is yet another method of destroying educational opportunities for Palestinians in Gaza over the course of the past few years.

It is difficult to assess at present how much of the damage sustained by IUG was built with USAID funds. Likewise, it is difficult to ascertain a direct link between military research projects at Tel Aviv University funded by Israel and the US and the destruction of IUG. But what is clear is that past educational opportunities, for individual faculty members and students as well as for expanding scientific studies in the form of building laboratories, coming from the US are no longer available to Palestinians affiliated with IUG. Moreover, the primary "living" testimony which verily refutes Israeli claims about IUG as a place for hiding or manufacturing weapons can be found in the rubble of its destroyed buildings, which were decimated with knowledge produced by American research projects at Israeli universities. The mountains of rubble call out to any investigation team to come, to dig, to excavate in order to prove that Israeli allegations are merely a pretext employed to destroy a prestigious academic institution in Palestine. The debris of the science lab buildings shows that beneath it were 74 laboratories serving the science and engineering students at IUG. These labs were places for diligent research and scientific experiments. They were a fountain of hope for impoverished students, many of whom were about to graduate.

The science and engineering lab buildings were not the only premises that were pounded by the Israelis with their American-made weapons. Many other university buildings housing sophisticated computer labs, classrooms, workshops and seminar rooms were also bombed. In spite of the tremendous damage inflicted on IUG, it will be rebuilt with the spirit of resiliency that we see in the young minds of our students. This role however cannot be sustained without the help of our colleagues from around the world. That academics have taken the decision to boycott Israel and support Palestinians given Israeli academia's role in its continuous military aggression, offers a glimmer of hope for IUG.

IUG needs financial support to help it rebuild and re-equip its labs. But it does not just need charity. IUG faculty and students also require solidarity from their academic colleagues at institutions around the world to start partnerships in order to rehabilitate the rest of its premises. Projects such as collaborative video-conference courses, faculty and student exchange programs and scholarships for faculty and students are all important ways of lending solidarity to IUG. Equally important for our American colleagues is to remove the false label that IUG is a "Hamas-controlled" institution. Just as Palestinians in Gaza belong to a variety of political parties, IUG's students, board, faculty and staff represent that reality. IUG is a university like any other in Palestine that reflects the diversity of its population. As with Israel's propagandistic claims that it engaged in a "war with Hamas," when they besiege all Palestinians living in Gaza, this classification of IUG hurts all Palestinians pursuing higher education. We call on our colleagues to work to rebuild IUG through their solidarity through which it can remain an edifice of light, love and learning.

Akram Habeeb, teaches literature at the Islamic University of Gaza and Marcy Newman teaches literature at An Najah National University. For more information about IUG reconstruction please visit http://www.iugaza.edu.ps/iugrec/en/. For more information about how you can help please email Marcy at marcynewman at riseup dot net or Akram at akramhabeeb at yahoo dot com.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10308.shtml

Rebuilding the Islamic University of Gaza

2009-02-16T19:54:00.000+02:00

Students angered by Gaza revive sit-ins

2009-02-16T19:38:00.001+02:00

Alexandra Topping

* The Guardian, Saturday 14 February 2009

A new wave of student activism sparked by events in Gaza has seen dozens of university buildings occupied in Britain, with some of the UK's top educational establishments agreeing to set up scholarships for Palestinians or disinvest in arms companies linked to Israel.

Though the assault on the territory ended three weeks ago, lingering anger over the attack has prompted students to stage sit-ins at 21 universities, many organised via blogs, Facebook and text messages.

Students at Glasgow and Manchester are refusing to leave the buildings until their demands are met, after similar occupations at other universities provided tangible results in what is being seen as a new era of highly organised student activism.

Katan Alder, 22, one of 50 Manchester University protesters who have occupied a university building for nine days, said students were abandoning diplomatic tactics in favour of direct action.

"There is a new level of anger among students that we haven't seen before," he said. "There is definitely a new confidence among students who are beginning to realise that if they want to achieve anything simple negotiation won't work, our actions have to escalate."

Students at Goldsmiths, University of London, ended their occupation yesterday after their demand - two scholarships for students from Palestine's al-Quds university - was met. The students campaigned for a year without success, but their demands were met within 24 hours after they occupied Deptford town hall, which houses the university management offices, said James Heywood, 21.

"We were getting ignored and patronised, so when we saw what was happening at other universities we took direct action," he said.

Technology has played an integral part in the protests. Within minutes of starting the occupation students at Goldsmiths were blogging, and a recent protest that gathered 2,000 students was organised almost entirely by viral text messaging, said Heywood.

Student demands include a call to end all investments in arms companies that may trade with Israel, scholarships for Palestinian students and humanitarian assistance.

At King's College London, students gained scholarships and donations to institutions in Palestine.

A seven-day Cambridge University occupation, which saw students denied access to food before being threatened with a court injunction on 1 February, achieved little in the way of concessions.

But last week 60 academics at the university sent an open letter to the vice-chancellor deploring the "heavy-handed" tactics used to crush the protest and supporting the students' calls for disinvestment from the arms industry and scholarships for Palestinian students.

Prof Priyamvada Gopal, one of its signatories, said: "It was only when the students became galvanised that we looked at writing a group letter from the academics following the lead of the students."

She believes the movement is the first signs of a new political awareness. "As yet this is a small but vocal minority, but I think we are seeing an emergence from the froth and apathy of the 1990s."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/14/gaza-student-protests

A Message to Israel: Time to Stop Playing the Victim Role‏

2009-02-16T18:16:00.000+02:00

Philip Slater :
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

I can understand that after centuries of persecution it's satisfying for a Jewish state to be the aggressor for a change, but there's a codicil that goes with that role. You don't get to act like a victim any more. "Poor little Israel" just sounds silly when you're the dominant power in the Middle East. When you've invaded several of your neighbors, bombed and defeated them in combat, occupied their land, and taken their homes away from them, it's time to stop acting oppressed. Yes, Arab states deny your right to exist, threaten to drive you into the sea, and all the rest of their futile, helpless rhetoric. The fact is, you have the upper hand and they don't. You have sophisticated arms and they don't. You have nuclear weapons and they don't. So stop pretending to be pathetic. It doesn't play well in Peoria.
(Yes, I know, we Americans should talk--always trembling in our boots about terrorists and 'rogue states' and 'evil empires' when we have enough nukes to blow up entire continents, and spend more on arms in an hour than most of the world's nations spend in a year. But just because we're hypocrites and Nervous Nellies doesn't mean you have to be).
Calling Hamas the 'aggressor' is undignified. The Gaza strip is little more than a large Israeli concentration camp, in which Palestinians are attacked at will, starved of food, fuel, energy--even deprived of hospital supplies. They cannot come and go freely, and have to build tunnels to smuggle in the necessities of life. It would be difficult to have any respect for them if they didn't fire a few rockets back.
The Israel lobby has a hissy fit when anyone points out that Israel has been borrowing liberally from the Nazi playbook, but to punish a whole nation for the attacks of a few--which Israel has been doing consistently in Gaza--is a violation of international law--a law enacted in response to the Nazi practice. And please, spare us the hypocrisy--borrowed, I'm ashamed to admit, from my own government--of saying 'every effort is made to avoid civilian casualties'. When you drop bombs on a crowded city you're bombing civilians. Bombs don't ask for ID cards. Bombs are civilian killers. That's what they do. They're designed to break the spirit of a nation by slaughtering families. They were used all through World War II by all sides for that very purpose. And that's what they're intended for in Gaza.
And please, Israel, try to restrain yourself from using that ridiculous argument, borrowed again from Bush (how low can you get?), that Hamas leaders "hide among civilians", by living in their own homes. Apparently, in the thinking of Israelis, they should all run out into an uninhabited area somewhere (try to find one in Gaza), surround themselves with flares and write in the sand with a stick, "Here I am!"
Yesterday you shelled three UN-run schools, killing several dozen children and adults, despite the fact that the UN had given you the precise coordinates of all its schools in Gaza. So much for 'taking every care to avoid civilian casualties'. You seem to feel you can kill whomever you like, whenever you like, and wherever you like, just because you have a blank check from the United States. Every day this assault goes on you're demonstrating contempt for the UN, the international community, and human life. Talk about a rogue state.
You might also pay attention to the fact that your outdated policy of macho bullying--the policy you've been following for decades--isn't working! The Palestinians are human. They're not dogs you can beat into submission. The worse you treat them, the more they'll fight back. That's what it means to be human. The more you oppress people, the more people resist. We dropped more bombs on Viet Nam than all the bombs dropped by all nations in World War II. Not to mention napalm, herbicides and all kinds of sophisticated land mines. But did they bow down and kiss the feet of their conquerors? They did not.
You'll have to kill them all. And when you do, you may finally lose the support even of the United States.
Remember that American support is based entirely on the notion that no politician can win without the Jewish vote. But not all American Jews think Israel is on a divine mission from God. A great many American Jews believe in international law and justice.
I can understand how Israel could resent this lecture coming from an American. After all, isn't this what we Americans did? Came into someone else's country, slaughtered 95% of its inhabitants and took over? And didn't we go all Nervous Nellie whenever they fought back, accusing them of aggression to justify even more genocidal slaughter? And didn't we get away with it?
Yes, but I'm sorry to tell you, Israel, you came on the scene too late. Genocide just doesn't fly any more. I know it isn't fair, you have every right to feel aggrieved about this, but the world's smaller, cowboys are passé, and bullies aren't heroes any more.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/a-message-to-israel-time_b_155978.html

The Wounds of Gaza

2009-02-13T22:29:00.001+02:00

From the Lancet (Medical Journal)

February 2nd 2009

The Wounds of Gaza

Two Surgeons from the UK, Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and Dr Swee Ang, managed to get into Gaza during the Israeli invasion. Here they describe their experiences, share their views, and conclude that the people of Gaza are extremely vulnerable and defenseless in the event of another attack.

The wounds of Gaza are deep and multi-layered. Are we talking about the Khan Younis massacre of 5,000 in 1956 or the execution of 35,000 prisoners of war by Israel in 1967? Yet more wounds of the First Intifada, when civil disobedience by an occupied people against the occupiers resulted in massive wounded and hundreds dead? We also cannot discount the 5,420 wounded in southern Gaza alone since 2000. Hence what we are referring to below are only that of the invasion as of 27 December 2008,

Over the period of 27 December 2008 to the ceasefire of 18 Jan 2009, it was estimated that a million and a half tons of explosives were dropped on Gaza Strip. Gaza is 25 miles by 5 miles and home to 1.5 million people. This makes it the most crowded area in the whole world. Prior to this Gaza has been completely blockaded and starved for 50 days. In fact since the Palestinian election Gaza has been under total or partial blockade for several years.

On the first day of the invasion, 250 persons were killed. Every single police station in Gaza was bombed killing large numbers of police officers. Having wiped out the police force attention was turned to non government targets. Gaza was bombed from the air by F16 and Apache helicopters, shelled from the sea by Israeli gunboats and from the land by tank artillery. Many schools were reduced to rubble, including the American School of Gaza, 40 mosques, hospitals, UN buildings, and of course 21,000 homes, 4,000 of which were demolished completely. It is estimated that 100,000 people are now homeless.

Israeli weapons
The weapons used apart from conventional bombs and high explosives also include unconventional weapons of which at least 4 categories could be identified.

Phosphorus Shells and bombs

The bombs dropped were described by eye witnesses as exploding at high altitude scattering a large canopy of phosphorus bomblets which cover a large area.

During the land invasion, eyewitnesses describe the tanks shelling into homes first with a conventional shell. Once the walls are destroyed, a second shell - a phosphorus shell is then shot into the homes. Used in this manner the phosphorus explodes and burns the families and the homes. Many charred bodies were found among burning phosphorus particles.

One area of concern is the phosphorus seems to be in a special stabilizing agent. This results in the phosphorus being more stable and not completely burning out. Residues still cover the fields, playground and compounds. They ignite when picked up by curious kids, or produce fumes when farmers return to water their fields. One returning farming family on watering their field met with clouds of fumes producing epistaxis. Thus the phosphorus residues probably treated with a stabilizer also act as anti-personnel weapons against children and make the return to normal life difficult without certain hazards.

Surgeons from hospitals are also reporting cases where after primary laparotomy for relatively small wounds with minimal contamination find on second look laparotomy increasing areas of tissue necrosis at about 3 days. Patients then become gravely ill and by about 10 days those patients needing a third relook encounter massive liver necrosis. This may or may not be accompanied by generalized bleeding , kidney failure and heart failure and death. Although acidosis, liver necrosis and sudden cardiac arrest due to hypocalcemia are known to be a complication of white phosphorus it is not possible to attribute these complications as being due to phosphorus alone.

There is real urgency to analyze and identify the real nature of this modified phosphorus as to its long term effect on the people of Gaza. There is also urgency in collecting and disposing of the phosphorus residues littering the entire Gaza Strip. As they give off toxic fumes when coming into contact with water, once the rain falls the whole area would be polluted with acid phosphorus fumes. Children should be warned not to handle and play with these phosphorus residues.

Heavy Bombs

The use of DIME (dense inert material explosives) were evident, though it is unsure whether depleted uranium were used in the south. In the civilian areas, surviving patients were found to have limbs truncated by DIME, since the stumps apart from being characteristically cut off in guillotine fashion also fail to bleed. Bomb casing and shrapnel are extremely heavy.

Fuel Air Explosives

Bunker busters and implosion bombs have been used . There are buildings especially the 8 storey Science and Technology Building of the Islamic University of Gaza which had been reduced to a pile of rubble no higher than 5-6 feet.

Silent Bombs

People in Gaza described a silent bomb which is extremely destructive. The bomb arrives as a silent projectile at most with a whistling sound and creates a large area where all objects and living things are vaporized with minimal trace. We are unable to fit this into conventional weapons but the possibility of new particle weapons being tested should be suspected.

Executions

Survivors describe Israeli tanks arriving in front of homes asking residents to come out. Children, old people and women would come forward and as they were lined up they were just fired on and killed. Families have lost tens of their members through such executions. The deliberate targeting of unarmed children and women is well documented by human right groups in the Gaza Strip over the past month.

Targeting of ambulances

Thirteen ambulances had been fired upon killing drivers and first aid personnel in the process of rescue and evacuation of the wounded.

Cluster bombs

The first patients wounded by cluster were brought into Abu Yusef Najjar Hospital. Since more than 50% of the tunnels have been destroyed, Gaza has lost part of her lifeline. These tunnels contrary to popular belief are not for weapons, though small light weapons could have been smuggled through them. However they are the main stay of food and fuel for Gaza. Palestinians are beginning to tunnel again. However it became clear that cluster bombs were dropped on to the Rafah border and the first was accidentally set of by tunneling. Five burns patients were brought in after setting off a booby trap kind of device.

Death toll
As of 25 January 2009, the death toll was estimated at 1,350 with the numbers increasing daily. This is due to the severely wounded continuing to die in hospitals. 60% of those killed were children.

Severe injuries
The severely injured numbered 5,450, with 40% being children. These are mainly large burns and polytrauma patients. Single limb fractures and walking wounded are not included in these figures.

Through our conversations with doctors and nurses the word holocaust and catastrophe were repeatedly used. The medical staff all bear the psychological trauma of the past month living though the situation and dealing with mass casualties which swamped their casualties and operating rooms. Many patients died in the Accident and Emergency Department while awaiting treatment. In a district hospital, the orthopaedic surgeon carried out 13 external fixations in less than a day.

It is estimated that of the severely injured, 1,600 will suffer permanently disabilities. These include amputations, spinal cord injuries, head injuries, large burns with crippling contractures.

Special factors
The death and injury toll is especially high in this recent assault due to several factors:

No escape: As Gaza is sealed by Israeli troops, no one can escape the bombardment and the land invasion. There is simply no escape. Even within the Gaza Strip itself, movement from north to south is impossible as Israeli tanks had cut the northern half of Gaza from the south. Compare this with the situation in Lebanon 1982 and 2006, when it was possible for people to escape from an area of heavy bombardment to an area of relative calm - there was no such is option for Gaza.
Gaza is very densely populated. It is eerie to see that the bombs used by Israel have been precision bombs. They have a hundred percent hit rate on buildings which are crowded with people. Examples are the central market, police stations. Schools, the UN compounds used as a safety shelter from bombardment, mosques (40 of them destroyed), and the homes of families who thought they were safe as there were no combatants in them and high rise flats where a single implosion bomb would destroy multiple families. This pattern of consistent targeting of civilians makes one suspect that the military targets are but collateral damage, while civilians are the primary targets.
The quantity and quality of the ammunition being used as described above.
Gaza’s lack of defense against the modern weapons of Israel. She has no tanks, no planes, no anti-aircraft missiles against the invading army. We experienced that first hand in a minor clash of Israeli tank shells versus Palestinian AK47 return fire. The forces were simply unmatched.
Absence of well constructed bomb shelters for civilians. Unfortunately these will also be no match for bunker busters possessed by the Israeli Army.

Conclusion
Taking the above points into consideration, the next assault on Gaza would be just as disastrous. The people of Gaza are extremely vulnerable and defenseless in the event of another attack. If the International Community is serious about preventing such a large scale of deaths and injuries in the future, it will have to develop a some sort of defense force for Gaza. Otherwise, many more vulnerable civilans will continue to die.

Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and Dr Swee Ang

After ceasefire, Gazans still don't feel safe

2009-02-13T22:27:00.000+02:00

Report, PCHR, 10 February 2009

Faten, holding her young daughter Nagham, in their home in Rafah. (Malian)

Foreign correspondents and camera crews have now begun to leave Gaza, in search of the next headline-grabbing location. But ongoing air strikes and violations of international law are a stark reminder that there is no real end to Israel's offensive here.

Since Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire on 18 January it has continued to launch strikes against targets in the Gaza Strip. Some families in the southern town of Rafah have been evacuated from their homes up to 10 times in the last 15 days.

Faten al-Shaer, a 31-year-old mother of one, lives just 150 meters from Gaza's southern border with Egypt. This area, known as the Philadelphi Route has been repeatedly targeted and is now a mass of rubble, sand and bomb craters. Her home is one of the few left standing here, surrounded by the grey concrete remains of homes, and the shreds of tarpaulin that once covered smuggling tunnels.

"I was baking bread when the bombing of the border area began on 28 December," says Faten. "Thousands of people took to the streets, trying to escape. Everybody was on the move. My mother, my five-year-old daughter Nagham and I ran to my uncle's house, which is further from the border." Other family members were scattered at the homes of relatives.

"During the war there was daily bombing of this area -- sometimes in the morning, sometimes at midnight," says Faten. "It went on for 22 days. When the ceasefire was declared we came back to the house but had to evacuate it again the next day because they started bombing again."

Faten and the 35 members of her extended family have still not spent the night at their home. They come back during the day but always leave before darkness falls.

"The children are suffering real trauma," Faten adds, as her green-eyed daughter Nagham clings to her. "Some of them are incontinent and they wake up in the night and start crying. My daughter Nagham has to hold onto me all the time. They understand it's a war."

The impact of the air strikes and incursions on the children of the Gaza Strip has been acute. Faten's seven-year-old nephew Dia was in school a few days ago, when he heard an unmanned Israeli drone in the sky. He automatically picked up his schoolbag and ran home, crying "The drones are still over my head. I can't take it anymore."

Gaza's 1.5 million people are still being denied their rights to appropriate living conditions and humanitarian aid is still not reaching many people in need. Families like Faten's who are not registered as refugees have not received any aid at all.

One of their only sources of income -- a small patch of land where Faten's brother grew vegetables -- was bulldozed by the Israeli military a few years ago. Since then they have had to rely on help from relatives in an already beleaguered community. Border closures imposed by Israel since June 2007, have steadily tightened and continue to have a disastrous impact on the economy.

"The international community should intervene," says Faten. "I just hope they can reach some sort of solution. If the borders were opened for food and fuel then we wouldn't need the tunnels. It is Israel's closure policy that has created a need for the tunnels."

The Israeli-imposed siege has also resulted in a steady deterioration of health conditions. There are chronic shortages of vital medicines and hospital facilities that rely on electricity have been adversely affected by the lack of fuel to power generators.

The psychological cost of the air strikes cannot be underestimated. The bombs that Israeli warplanes are still dropping on Rafah and other parts of Gaza cause huge explosions and earth tremors and lead to sustained feelings of panic and fear among local residents, especially the elderly and children. Civilians often receive automated telephone messages before attacks, urging them to evacuate their houses near the border. But Gaza is densely populated and civilian structures including schools and hospitals sheltering displaced people, have been attacked. People feel there are no safe places left.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights is calling upon the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to take effective steps to ensure Israel's respect of the Convention in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and to provide immediate protection for civilians like Faten and her family.

"We never feel safe," adds Faten. "We know Israel will bomb again. We just hope there will be a proper ceasefire so we can come back to our homes and start to rebuild what is left."

This report is part of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights' series "Aftermath" that looks at the aftermath of Israel's 22-day offensive on the Gaza Strip, and the ongoing impact it is having on the civilian population.

Israeli "investigation" whitewashes West Bank execution

2009-02-13T16:31:00.000+02:00

AL-HAQ ALERT

REF.: 7.2009E
9 February 2009

On 2 February 2009, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported the findings of an "investigation" into an incident in which, that morning, "a Palestinian gunman opened fire at an [Israeli army] Patrol Force near the Community Yatir [sic], south of Hebron." As a result of the investigation, the Israeli military Central Command "assumes" that the "terrorist," who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers, "was intending to execute a terror attack against Israeli civilians."

After a full field investigation, Al-Haq has determined serious factual inaccuracies and false assumptions in the Israeli authorities' version of events, and reports the following findings:

On the morning of Monday, 2 February 2009, an infantry unit of the Israeli occupying forces was deployed to Janba, southeast of Yatta in the Hebron district of the southern West Bank. Between 7:30 and 8:00am, the Israeli soldiers stopped a total of three vehicles on a dirt road in the Marah al-Tabaka area of Janba. This road is close to the West Bank's southern border with Israel, and is used by Palestinian merchants who travel to Israel to sell their goods. Two of the three vehicles were returning from Israel, while the other was traveling towards Israel from Yatta. The Israeli soldiers had not set up a visible "flying" checkpoint on the road, but rather each time a vehicle arrived, the soldiers jumped out from positions of hiding off to the side of the road, ordered the drivers to turn off their engines, took the IDs of those in the vehicles, and forced them to wait at the side of the road. By the time the three vehicles had been stopped, a total of 11 Palestinians were being kept by the Israeli soldiers at the side of the road.

At approximately 8:45am, a fourth vehicle arrived along the road, coming from Yatta, containing only the driver, Taysir Shihda Manasra, 28, from Bani Neim. Although the first three vehicles were still blocking the road, they were not yet visible to Manasra because of a bend in the road. The Palestinian witnesses, being guarded by soldier "A," were at the side of the road, on the bend, and could see Manasra's car approaching. Further back up the road, the rest of the Israeli soldiers were hiding again, and two of them jumped out (one from each side of the road) to ambush Manasra in a similar manner to the other vehicles. He was already passing them by the time they emerged and called on him to stop. It is not clear whether Manasra noticed the soldiers or not, as he did not stop immediately, driving for another 10 meters, before seeing soldier A emerge from the side of the road at the bend, 25 meters in front of him. Manasra stopped immediately as the soldier fired five shots into the air. A total of five Israeli soldiers then opened fire on the car, without warning or justification: soldier A, from the front; the two soldiers who had initially called on Manasra to stop, from behind; and another two soldiers who had been hiding in line with where Manasra stopped his car, from the side.

Corroborated witness reports confirmed that no shots came from the car, and that the barrage of shooting at the car continued for approximately 15 minutes, with hundreds of bullets fired. Medical reports later showed that Manasra was hit and killed by four bullets: one to the face, one to the back, one to the left arm, and the fourth to the left leg. Manasra's body was left on the road outside his car until approximately 2:00pm. He was then placed on a stretcher by four Israeli soldiers who repeatedly kicked the body as they brought it to a military ambulance.

Shortly after the victim had been killed, a number of Israeli officials arrived, including a military police unit as well as an apparently senior officer who arrived in a helicopter, spoke to the soldiers present about what had happened, and left after 10 minutes. At approximately 10:00am, a remote-controlled robot was brought by the Israeli forces to open the doors of the car and remove Manasra's body from the car.

Between 11:00am and 2:00pm, the Palestinian witnesses were taken one by one to a military jeep close to where they were still being kept at the side of the road, and interviewed by Israeli military police officers. Each one was asked whether Manasra had shot at the Israeli soldiers, and each one responded in the negative. However, when one of the military police investigators asked soldier A what had happened, the soldier claimed that Manasra had fired 30 shots at him with a pistol from inside the car. Witnesses reported that no gun was found on Manasra's body or in his car when searched by the Israeli soldiers.

After the body was removed, the Palestinian witnesses were all brought to the nearby Israeli military checkpoint at Lasifer, and held there from 3:00pm to 5:00pm before being released.

The findings above demonstrate that Taysir Manasra was summarily executed by the Israeli occupying forces, amounting to an extrajudicial killing in violation of international human rights and humanitarian law. It also constitutes a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, as a willful killing. Having stopped his car, Manasra was under the control of the Israeli soldiers, yet they made no attempt to question or arrest him for any alleged offense before opening fire. The "assumption" on the part of the Israeli authorities that Manasra intended to carry out an attack on Israeli civilians is disingenuous and unfounded in fact. There is no evidence that Manasra had any weapon, and the Israeli military is fully aware of the fact that the road in question is regularly used by Palestinian workers and merchants to enter Israel, which Manasra did every day. Any assumptions or suspicions as to the victim's intentions certainly provide no basis in law for the arbitrary deprivation of his inalienable and inviolable right to life.

Al-Haq emphasizes its concern over the lack of impartiality and diligence in the Israeli authorities' "investigation," the findings of which were reported on the same day as the incident occurred, and calls for a full and independent investigation into the incident by the Israeli authorities. Al-Haq further reiterates its condemnation of the systematic impunity with which the Israeli occupying forces in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are allowed to persistently violate the right to life of Palestinians.

AL-HAQ ALERT

Gaza 2009: Culture of resistance vs. defeat

2009-02-13T02:19:00.000+02:00

Dr. Haidar Eid, The Electronic Intifada, 11 February 2009

Can the brutal 22-day Israeli war on the Gaza Strip be considered a victory for the Palestinian people? (Matthew Cassel)

The ongoing bloodletting in the Gaza Strip and the ability of the Palestinian people to creatively resist the might of the world's fourth strongest army is being hotly debated by Palestinian political forces. The latest genocidal war which lasted 22 days, and in which apartheid Israel used F-16s, Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks and conventional and non-conventional weapons against the population, have raised many serious questions about the concept of resistance and whether the outcome of the war can, or cannot, be considered a victory for the Palestinian people. The same kind of questions were raised in 2006 when apartheid Israel launched its war against the Lebanese people and brutally killed more than 1,200 Lebanese.

At the beginning of the Gaza war, we were told by certain sectors of the Palestinian political leadership that "the two sides are to blame: Hamas and Israel" and that "Hamas must stop the launching of the rockets from Gaza." Resistance in all its forms, violent and otherwise, was considered, by these same people, "futile." Now that there are fewer bombs raining down on Gaza, the conflict focuses on whether the outcome of the war was one of victory or defeat. For the Israeli ruling class the answer is clear -- in spite of the fact that none of the objectives announced at the beginning of the war have been achieved. It is clear because they, like the defeatist Palestinian camp, simply use the numbers of martyrs, disabled and homeless to determine victory and defeat.

This approach fails to acknowledge that none of the so-called "objectives" of the war have been achieved: Hamas is still in power; rockets are still being launched; no pro-Oslo forces have been reinstated in the Gaza Strip. The question now being raised by some Palestinian intellectuals and political forces, after the (un)expected brutality of the Israeli occupation forces, is "was it worth it?" The "it" here remains ambiguous depending on the reaction of the listener/reader. What is of interest here is the radical change that some national forces, especially the left and their intellectuals, have gone through in their mechanical, as opposed to dialectical, interpretation of history and their role, thereafter, in its making.

The war on Gaza has emerged as a political tsunami that has not only put an end to the fiction of the two-state solution and brought liberation rather than independence back to the agenda, but it has also created a new Palestinian political map given the intellectual debate vis-a-vis the outcome of the war. This new classification of the Palestinian intelligentsia and ruling classes has led to many ex-leftists joining the right-wing anthem of Oslo and its culture of defeatism. Not unlike the Oslo intelligentsia, the new pragmatic left is characterized by demagogy, opportunism and short-sightedness. The conduct of these NGOized intellectuals (those emerging from western-funded "nongovernmental organizations" -- NGOs) does not show any commitment to their national and historical responsibility.

Michel Foucault's famous formulation, "where there is power, there is resistance," helps us to theorize the political and, hence, the cultural resistance, represented in some of the (post)war discourse. Within the context of resistance, it is worth quoting Frantz Fanon's definitions of the role of the "native intellectual" during the "fighting phase": "[T]he native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will ... shake the people ... [H]e turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, and a national literature."

On the other hand, there are intellectuals who, according to Fanon's theorization, "give proof that [they] [have] assimilated the culture of the occupying power. [Their] writings correspond point by point with those of [their] opposite numbers in the mother country. [Their] inspiration is European [i.e. Western] ..." Hence the adoption of the Israeli narrative by some intellectual sections, including NGOized leftists, whereby Israel was exonerated of its crimes: "we are to blame for what happened;" "we were not consulted when Hamas started the war!" and "the people are paying the price, not the resistance movement;" "Hamas should have renewed the truce;" "we cannot afford to lose so many lives; Hamas should have understood this;" "there was no resistance at all on the streets of Gaza; resistance men ran away as soon as they saw the first tank."

By the same token, one would also condemn the Algerian, South African, French, Vietnamese, Lebanese and Egyptian resistance to occupation. The same logic was used by the Bantustan chiefs of South Africa against the anti-apartheid movement, by the Vichy government of France, the South Vietnamese government, the reactionary Egyptian Forces against the progressive regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956, and even by the Siniora-Jumblatt-Geagea-Hariri March 14 coalition in Lebanon in 2006.

Obviously, these intellectuals' assimilation of the Western mentality, through a process of NGOization, and hence Osloization, makes them look down upon the culture of resistance as useless, futile and hopeless. Resistance, broadly speaking, is not only the ability to fight back against a militarily more powerful enemy, but also an ability to creatively resist the occupation of one's land. The Oslo defeatists and the neo-left camp fail to use people power creatively or even to see that it exists. They are defeated because they want to fight the battle on Israel's terms -- through the adoption of an Israel-Hamas dichotomy, rather than apartheid Israel vs. the Palestinian people -- instead of looking at their strengths: that they are the natives of the land, they have international law supporting their claims, they have the moral high ground, the support of international civil society, etc.

One good lesson from the South African struggle is the way it tried to define resistance and its adoption of what it referred to as "the four pillars of the struggle" to achieve victory over the apartheid regime: armed struggle, internal mass mobilization, international solidarity, and the political underground. Alas, none of these pillars seem to fit within the paradigm of the Palestinian neo-left.

The principled critical legacy of the likes of Ghassan Kanafani, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon is no longer the guiding torch of the NGOized left -- the secular democratic left which is supposed to be, as Said would argue, "someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations [or donors], and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug." A fascinating, and timely, remark by Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs points the way that the NGOized left should be talking right now: "When the intellectual's society reaches a historical crossroads in its fight for a clear definition of its identity, the intellectual should be involved in the whole sociopolitical process and leave his ivory tower."

Decolonizing cultural resistance insists on the right to view Palestinian history as a holistic entity, both coherent and integral. It also reflects a national and historical consciousness that Palestinians are able to be agents of change in their present and future regardless of the agendas of western donors, the Quartet and other official "international" bodies. Yet we see that the neo-democrats of Palestine are unable to acknowledge Palestinian agency because they refuse to respect the will of the people as expressed through the ballot box. This position is meant to synergize with that of their donors and international bodies who have worked hard over the last two years to delegitimize Palestinian agency.

This lack of political consciousness and the search for individual solutions -- the major characteristics of defeatist ideology -- contradict the collective national reality of the colonized Palestinians. Political consciousness must begin with a rejection of the conditions imposed by the Israeli occupation and the Quartet (Russia, the United States, the United Nations and the European Union) on the majority of Palestinians and even more crucially, a rejection of the crumbs that are offered as a reward for good behavior to a select minority of Palestinians. Indeed, class consciousness is dialectically related to the struggle for national liberation. It is the interests of some NGOized groups, ex-leftists, and neo-liberals, whose defeatist perspective on the outcome of Gaza 2009 is being disseminated with the help of some unpopular media outlets, which is at stake here -- not the interests of the Palestinian people who have gained even more legitimacy through their steadfast resistance to the Israeli bombardment.

Osloized and NGOized classes argue that the only solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict is the establishment of two states which basically means the creation of an independent Palestine on 22 percent of Mandate Palestine. They maintain that the only way to reach independence is through negotiations, though more than ten years of negotiations have not moved the Israeli position at all. The establishment of a Palestinian state is not mentioned in any of the clauses of the Oslo agreement, thus leaving the matter to be determined by the balance of power in the region. This balance tilts in favor of Israel, which rejects the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state, in spite of its recognition of the Palestinian people and its national movement the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). No Israeli party, neither Labor, Likud nor Kadima is ready to accept a Palestinian state as the expression of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The impasse negotiations have reached has proven the oppositional camp correct.

Hence the "shocking" results of the 2006 elections, in which Hamas won the majority of the seats of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Both liberals and leftists were "surprised" and even felt "betrayed!" Accusations of the "immaturity" and even "backwardness" of the Palestinian people have been thrown around since then. Nothing was mentioned about the failure of "the peace process;" nor the end of the two-state solution, and thereafter, the necessity and need for a new national program that can mobilize the masses; a program that is necessarily democratic in its nature; one that respects resistance in its different forms and, ultimately, guarantees peace with justice.

It is this lack of a political vision and a clear-cut ideological program that allows for the contortions of the Osloized classes. It is this lack that makes it prepared to recognize a "Jewish state" alongside a Palestinian state, including the legitimization of discriminatory practices applied by Israel against its non-Jewish, i.e. mainly Palestinian citizens and residents since 1948, and the end of the right of return of more than six million of refugees. What we are constantly told, is either accept Israeli occupation in its ugliest form -- i.e. the ongoing presence of the apartheid wall, colonies, checkpoints, zigzag roads, color-coded number plates, house demolitions and security coordination supervised by a retired American general -- or have a hermetic medieval siege imposed on us, but still die with dignity. The first option seems to be the favorite of some NGOized "activists."

The new, much-needed program, however, must make the necessary link between all Palestinian struggles: the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel's ethnically-based discrimination and rights violations of more than one million Palestinian citizens, and the 1948 externally displaced refugees. Gaza 2009 was not a defeat but a victory, because in Gaza the Israelis shot the two-state solution in the head; it is a victory achieved with the blood of those children, men and women who sacrificed their lives so that we could live and continue to resist, not surrender. Those Palestinians that are mourning the demise of the two-prison solution are out of step with new facts on the ground: there can be no going back to fake solutions and negotiations; it is time for a final push to real freedom and statehood. They can join other Palestinians, and internationals, in their demand for a secular, democratic state in Mandate Palestine with equality for all or they can walk into the dustbin of history.

Haidar Eid is an independent political commentator and activist residing in Gaza.

Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes By NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD

2009-02-12T12:49:00.001+02:00

February 9, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/nlg02092009.html

A Report from Gaza
Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes By NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD

Gaza City.

We are a delegation of 8 American lawyers, members of the National Lawyers Guild in the United States, who have come here to the Gaza Strip to assess the effects of the recent attacks on the people, and to determine what, if any, violations of international law occurred and whether U.S. domestic law has been violated as a consequence. We have spent the last five days interviewing communities particularly impacted by the recent Israeli offensive, including medical personnel, humanitarian aid workers and United Nations representatives. In particular, the delegation examined three issues: 1) targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure; 2) illegal use of weapons and 3) blocking of medical and humanitarian assistance to civilians.

Targeting of Civilians and Civilian Infrastructure
Much of the debate surrounding Israel’s aerial and ground offensive against Gaza has centered on whether or not Israel observed principles of proportionality and distinction. The debate suggests that Israel targeted Hamas i.e., its military installations, its leaders, and its militants, and in the process of its discrete military exercise it inadvertently killed Palestinian civilians. While we have found evidence that Palestinian civilians were victims of excessive force and collateral damage, we have also found troubling instances of Palestinian civilians being targets themselves.

The delegation recorded numerous accounts of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, in the head, chest, and stomach. Another common narrative described Israeli forces rounding civilians into a single location i.e., homes, schools which Israeli tanks or warplanes then shelled. Israeli forces continued to shoot at civilians fleeing the targeted structures.

We spoke to Khaled Abed Rabbo, who witnessed an Israeli soldier execute his 2-year-old and 7-year-old daughters, and critically injure a third daughter, Samar, 4-years old, on a sunny afternoon outside his home. Two other Israeli soldiers were standing nearby eating chips and chocolates at the time on January 7, 2009. Abed Rabbo recounts standing in front of the Israeli soldiers with his mother, wife and daughters for 5 – 7 minutes before one of the soldiers opened fire on his family.

We spoke to Ibtisam al-Sammouni, 31, and a resident of Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza City. On January 4th, the Israeli army forced approximately 110 of Zaytoun’s residents into Ibtisam’s home. At approximately 7 am on January 5th, the Israeli military launched two tank shells at the house without warning killing two of Ibtisam’s children: Rizka, 14 and Faris, 12. When the survivors attempted to flee Israeli forces shot at them. Her son Abdullah, 7, was injured in the shelling and remained in the home among his deceased siblings for four days before Israeli forces permitted medical personnel into Zaytoun to rescue them. After medical personnel removed the injured persons, an Israeli war plane destroyed the house and it crumbled over the lifeless bodies. The dead remained beneath the rubble for 17 days before the Israeli Army permitted medical personnel to remove their bodies for burial.

We spoke to the family of Rouhiya al-Najjar, 47, who lived in Khoza’a, Khan Younis. Israeli forces ordered her neighborhoods residents to march to the city center. Rouhiya led 20 women out of her home and into the alley. They all carried white scarves. Upon entering the alley, an Israeli sniper shot Rouhiya in her left temple killing her instantly. Israeli forces prevented medical personnel from reaching her body for twelve hours. These are only some of the accounts that we’ve collected.

Israeli forces also destroyed numerous buildings throughout the Gaza Strip during the recent incursion. Guild delegates viewed the remains of hundreds of demolished homes and businesses – in addition to the remains of the American School in Gaza, damaged medical centers, and the charred innards of UNRWA warehouses. While in situations of armed conflict, collateral damage and mistakes can occur, the circumstances surrounding the cases that the delegation investigated indicate deliberate targeting rather than collateral damage or mistake. Specifically:

The American School at Gaza, which was hit with two F-16 missiles on January 3, 2009, killing the watch guard on duty. According to Ribhi Salem, the school’s director, the Israelis gave no warnings. Mr. Salem stated that the school had come to an agreement with resistance groups not to use school grounds and there had never been resistance activity on the property.

United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)

John Ging, the Director of Gaza Operations for UNRWA reported that Israeli forces fired missiles at UNRWA schools in Gaza City, Jabalyia and Bet Lahiya. The United Nation compound in Gaza city was also hit with white phosphorous shells and missiles. Ging noted that al United Nations buildings and vehicles all fly UN flags, are marked in blue paint from the top, and that during hostilities the UN personnel remained in constant contact with Israeli authorities.

Misuse of Weapons

Our delegation has heard allegations of the use of DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) weaponry, white phosphorus and other possible weapons whose use in civilian areas is prohibited. We have also heard of the use of prohibited weapons, such as fleshettes. We have found our own evidence of the use of fleschette shells, which we will combine with evidence collected by Amnesty International to push for further investigation. We have not found any conclusive evidence of the use of DIME, though we believe that this warrants further investigation and disclosure by the Israeli military.

Our findings overwhelmingly point to the use of conventional weapons in a prohibited manner, specifically, the use of battlefield weaponry in densely populated civilian areas. Customary international law forbids the use of weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering. We found evidence that Israel used white phosphorus in extensively throughout its three-week offensive in a manner that led to numerous deaths and injuries. For example, Sabah Abu Halima, 45, lived in Beit Lahiya with her husband, seven boys, and one girl. It was midday and she and her entire family was home. Within minutes she felt her home shaking and missiles fell through the rooftop. She fell to the ground upon impact. When she looked up she saw her children burning.

Preventing Access to Medical and Humanitarian Aid

Under customary international humanitarian law, the wounded are protected persons and must receive the medical care and attention required by their conditions, to the fullest extent practicable and with the least possible delay. Parties to a conflict are required to ensure the unhindered movement of medical personnel and ambulances to carry out their duties and of wounded persons to access medical care. Speaking to medical workers and the family of victims, NLG delegates documented serious violations of this provision. Among the stories documented include:

Zaytoun neighborhood, which came under attack and invasion by ground foces on January 3, 2009. The Palestinian Red Crescent received 145 calls from Zaytoun for help, but were denied entry by Israel. Bashar Ahmed Murad, Director of Emergency Medical Services for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society told us that “a lot of people could have been saved, but hey weren’t given medical care by the Israelis, nor did the Israeli army allow Palestinian medical services in.” When paramedics were finally allowed to enter on January 7, Israeli forces only gave them a 3-hour “lull” to work and prohibited ambulances into the area. Instead they forced paramedics park the ambulances 2 kilometers away and enter the area on foot. Murad told delegation members how they had to pile the wounded on donkey carts and have the medical workers pull the carts in order to help the most people possible in the short time they were given. After the 3 hours were over, the Israeli army started shooting toward the ambulances. The Red Crescent was not able to reach that area again to evacuate the dead until January 17, 2009 when the Israeli army pulled out.

Al-Shurrab Family

On January 16th, Israeli forces shot at the jeep of Mohammed Shurrab, 64 years of age, and two of his sons, Kassab and Ibrahim, aged 28 and 18 as they were returning from their fields. Mohammad was shot in the left arm and Ibrahim was shot in the leg. The elder son, Kassab, sustained a fatal bullet wound to the chest, being shot multiple times after being ordered out of the car. Mohammad, bleeding from his wound, contacted the media, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and a number of NGOs via mobile phone in order to acquire medical assistance. Israeli forces denied medical relief agencies clearance to reach them until almost 24 hours after Mohammad, Ibrahim and Kassab had been shot. Earlier that morning, Ibrahim had succumbed to his wound and died. Mohammad Shurrab and his sons were shot during a so-called “lull” in Israeli ground operations, which Israeli forces had agreed to in order to allow humanitarian relief to enter and be distributed in the Gaza Strip. As such NLG delegates fail to see how this denial of medical access to the wounded Shurrab family could have been absolutely necessary and not simply arbitrary.

International humanitarian law also prohibits attacks on medical personnel, medical units and medical transports exclusively assigned to carry out medical functions. Delegate members saw ambulances seriously damaged and destroyed, some apparently deliberately crushed by Israeli tanks. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society and the Palestinian Ministry of Health informed delegates that 15 Palestinian medics were killed and 21 injured in the course of Israel’s assault.

Conclusions

This delegation is seriously concerned by our initial findings. We have found strong indications of violations of the laws of war and possible war crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip. We are particularly concerned that most of the weapons that were found used in the December 27 assault on Gaza are US-made and supplied. We believe that Israel’s use of these weapons may constitute a violation of US law, and particularly the Foreign Assistance Act and the US Arms Export Control Act.

A report of our initial findings will be compiled and submitted to, among others, members of the United States Congress. We intend to push for an investigation by the United States government into possible violations by Israel of US law. We also hope to contribute our finding and efforts to other efforts by local and international lawyers to push for accountability against those found responsible for the egregious crimes that we have documented.

MEMBERS OF THE LEGAL DELEGATION

Huwaida Arraf (New York, Washington DC)
huwaida.arraf@gmail.com
Palestine: 0599-130-426
USA: 1-202-294-8813

Noura Erekat (Washington DC)
noo194@yahoo.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-510-847-4239

James Marc Leas (Vermont)
jolly39@gmail.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-802 864-1575 and 1-802 734-8811(cell)

Linda Mansour (Ohio)
Lindamansour@aol.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-419-535-7100 and 1-419-283-8281 (cell)

Rose Mishaan (California)
roseindigo7@gmail.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-917-803-2201

Thomas Nelson (Oregon)
nelson@thnelson.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-503-709-6397

Radhika Sainath (California)
radhika.sainath@gmail.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-917-669-6903

Reem Salahi (California)
reemos@gmail.com
Palestine:
USA: 1-510-225-8880

The tunnels of Gaza

2009-02-12T00:19:00.002+02:00

By Sara Flounders
Published Feb 8, 2009 8:39 AM

Resistance takes as many forms as life itself dictates.

Life in Gaza could not be more impossible. Its tunnels are a symbol of resistance.

Eighteen months ago, outraged when the Palestinians voted for the militant leadership of Hamas in democratic elections, Israel imposed a total lockdown on the entire population of Gaza.

But the entire people were determined to continue to resist. They found a way to circumvent total starvation.

The Israeli blockade led to a new economic structure, an underground economy. The besieged Palestinians have dug more than 1,000 tunnels under the totally sealed border.

Many thousands of Palestinians are now employed in digging, smuggling or transporting, and reselling essential goods. Smuggling constitutes approximately 90 percent of economic activity in Gaza, Gazan economist Omar Shaban told The Guardian. (Oct. 22, 2008)

The tunnels demonstrate the great ingenuity and enormous determination of the entire population and its leadership.

Because millions of Palestinians have been forced into refugee status outside of historic Palestine, large extended families on both sides of the border help arrange the buying and shipping of goods or send funds so family members locked in Gaza can buy essential supplies.

The tunnels connect the Egyptian town of Rafah with the Palestinian refugee camp of the same name inside Gaza. They have become a fantastic, life-sustaining network of corridors dug through sandy soil. Tunnels are typically three-tenths of a mile long, approximately 45 to 50 feet deep. They cost from $50,000 to $90,000 and require several months of intense labor to dig.

They pass under the Philadelphi buffer zone—a border strip of land put under Israeli military control by the 1993 Oslo accords.

The Israeli siege of Gaza, followed by 23 days of systematic bombing and invasion, has created massive destruction and scarcity. Food processing plants, chicken farms, grain warehouses, U.N. food stocks, almost all the remaining infrastructure, and 230 small factories were destroyed. Now hundreds of trucks packed with essential supplies from international and humanitarian agencies sit outside the strip, refused entry to Gaza by Israeli guards. As soon as the Israeli bombing ended, work on the tunnels resumed.

Lara Marlowe reported from Rafah: “From a distance, you’d think it was a horticultural project. Banks of red earth criss-cross the Palestinian side of the no-man’s land between Gaza and Egypt. Every 20 or 30 meters, young Palestinian men work under what appear to be greenhouse canopies.

“The tunnels of Rafah–more than one thousand of them–are a major stake in the war between Hamas and Israel. Israel wants the tunnels shut; the Palestinians say they would starve without them, because of Israel’s 19-month siege of the Gaza Strip. Despite three weeks of heavy bombing, the majority of the tunnels are open.

“The area has as many holes as a Swiss cheese. ‘Sometimes the tunnels intersect,’ says a worker. ‘We try to avoid it. We go under or over other tunnels. It’s like directing train traffic.’

“The smugglers work in jeans, T-shirts and bare feet. ‘We shore up the collapsed parts with wood,’ Hamdan [a tunnel worker] explains. ‘If the Israelis bomb again, we’ll use metal next time, and concrete the time after that. As long as there’s a siege, the tunnels will keep working.’” (Irish Times, Jan. 26)

Food is towed through on plastic sleighs. Livestock are herded through larger tunnels. Flour, milk, cheese, cigarettes, cooking oil, toothpaste, small generators, computers and kerosene heaters come through the tunnels. Every day, about 300 to 400 gas canisters for cooking come through the lines. On the Egyptian side the trade sustains the ruptured economy while corrupt or sympathetic guards and officers look the other way.

Electricity and fans provide ventilation. Essential supplies of diesel fuel are pumped through the tunnels in hoses and pipes.

Rami Almeghari, editor-in-chief of the Gaza-based Palestinian Information Service and contributor to The Electronic Intifada, has described the organization that goes into digging and maintaining the tunnels. The Hamas-led government in Gaza imposed regulations and restrictions on the tunnel trade to avoid accidents and prevent smuggling of drugs and prohibited substances. “However, the besieged Hamas government cannot guarantee an end to the tunnel trade, unless the Israeli blockade comes to a halt.”

Almeghari interviewed one tunnel worker as he loaded cooking oil canisters: “Let Israel besiege us the way it wants, and we bring in what we want. At the end of the day, we will not let anyone repress us.”

Xinhua News headlined a Jan. 22 article: “In spite of Israeli offensive, Gaza tunnels are back to work.”

“We dug tunnels because we have no other alternative. Israel was imposing a very tough blockade on Gaza Strip and the tunnels were the smartest way to defeat this blockade,” Hashem Abu Jazzar, a 23-year-old worker, told Xinhua News.

“As long as Israel is still imposing the siege on Gaza Strip, I don’t think that we will stop working in the tunnels, but if all crossings are fully and permanently opened, I believe that working in tunnels will automatically stop,” said Abu Jabal, a 45-year-old owner of a tunnel.

Commercial tunnels are used only for food, fuel, medicines and basic necessities. Other totally separate tunnels are operated by resistance groups to bring in small weapons and munitions.

Israel claims it drops 100-ton bombs on the tunnels from F-16 jets to stop Palestinian rockets. But closing off supplies to an entire population or bombing life-sustaining tunnels will not prevent the firing of small rockets.

A population with skills, education, massive unemployment, lots of time and no future will be able to build rockets, mortars, pipe bombs and mines out of the tons of scrap metal and twisted ruins that Israel left behind.

The continued blockade is strictly punitive.

The Israeli military and their Pentagon backers are deeply frustrated. The bombing failed to demoralize the Palestinian people or break their will. It is also clear that the massive bombardment of the Rafah border and the targeting of hundreds of tunnels have failed to close these lifelines of basic supplies.

On Feb. 1, Israel again bombed the border, targeting the tunnels.

What is needed is a broad international campaign to demand an end to U.S.-supported Israeli collective punishment and an end to the intended starvation of an entire population.

The only possibility for peace in the region is through the recognition of the full rights of the Palestinian people to return to all their land. Their sovereignty and economic development must be guaranteed.

The immediate starvation siege must be lifted. The international movement that emerged in solidarity with Gaza must focus world attention on this international war crime.

A letter from a Palestinian Child to the US President

2009-02-10T22:34:00.000+02:00

Precaution: The Palestinian child doesn't have a specific clear definition for terms like "terrorism" and "peace".

Dear Mr. President,

First I would like to congratulate you for your new post; I guess it is a good but tiring job.
I want to apologize for not watching your inaugural ceremony, we have no electricity in Gaza, and moreover, I was busy dragging out the corpses of my family while the ceremony was taking place. I heard it was a hell of a ceremony, I wish I could shared the world its joy, but you know, it was a bit difficult to feel happy in such circumstances.

But I heard you after the ceremony, two days later a neighbour came to us while we were still searching for the corps of my little sister carrying with him a portable TV. He looked very serious and said: Youth, the new president of the United States is going to comment on what happened. He said that he is optimistic because you assigned someone called Michael or… Mitchell, something like that. He added that he is a good person.

Oh, we found the corps of my three years old sister, she was completely burnt, my twenty one years old cousin fainted, but I remembered my father's advice for me: Be a man. I was about to faint while I was pulling out her body which was stuck under the devastated building and her body started to crumble…. It was totally scorched. Before I lose control, I remembered my mother's suggestion when we were frightened of the loud voice of the Israeli strikes: When you feel frightened try to think of something else.

Thank you Mr. President, it was your speech that distracted me while I was collecting my sister's fragments. I heard you saying: Israel has the right to defend itself… achieving peace in the middle east…. Hamas was sending rockets ….. democracy … and other words that I cannot remember. I am sorry again, I was striving to concentrate in your speech but the smell of my sister's body and my fear that I may lose some of it didn't help me to grasp what you were saying exactly. I just realised our neighbour's anger when he turned the TV off murmuring that he wasted the battery for nothing.

We had already pulled out the corps of my mother and half of the corps of my father; we couldn't find the rest of his body.
To be frank with you, I never thought of addressing any American president, I mean, it goes without saying that we are killed with American weapons and taxes. The doctors in the hospitals said that Americans were experimenting a new weapon called DIME in this war, I mean the war on Gaza. We don't talk to the enemy.

But during the funeral I heard you – on the same TV that belongs to the same neighbour who usually turns it off after your speeches cursing his stupid persistence on wasting the battery - in an interview with an Arab TV channel saying that you want to deliver us a message that America is not our enemy.

Oh, I felt responsibility, it seems Mr. President that someone is playing behind your back, it seems that you don't know that we are killed with your weapons, it seems that those who use the veto to protect Israel and let it get away with its crimes against us in the security council are just doing this without even telling you, it seems that you don't know that your country annually pumps a huge amount of money to Israel, well Mr. President, Israel is the enemy, and we didn't choose it. We didn't beg for check points, we didn't beg for blockage, we didn't beg for cluster bombs, phosphorus bombs and this new bomb you are experimenting on us.

Besides, I heard you saying that you want to achieve peace in the Middle East; I know, I know, it is us, we are theMiddle East. Why Mr. President? Why do you want to achieve more peace in us? We had enough peace; we had more than enough peace during the last war. Do you want to achieve more?
The blond woman called Livni said that she wants peace that is why Israel waged this aggression on us. I lost my whole family in this peace process. And those who imposed the blockage on Gaza – during which one of my cousins died because of the shortage of medicine – always talk about peace: Abbas, Fayyad, Mubarak. They are men of peace, exactly like Livni. They did all what they can to achieve peace, I don't think that you need more peace, do you?

I went to my cousin's home, he also lost all his family, I am in his custody now. He is my all family and I am his only family. He is twenty one years old as I told you before, he was a student in the faculty of medicine, but he was not allowed to graduate, the blockage and the bad circumstances pushed him to leave the university and work, then he joined the resistance during this last war. He is a Hamas member now. You said you will achieve peace on them.. in them … within them? Something like that… right? Anyway, I don't remember, I just remember that you want to harm my cousin too because he is a terrorist. I wonder what is wrong with terrorists like my cousin. He is a very nice guy, you would like him if you meet him. He prepares breakfast for me, he cooks very delicious smashed eggs, he takes me to school, he stays all night besides me because I have nightmares every night, and when I wake up startled with the frightening nightmare he puts his hand on my forehead and recites some verses from the Quran and sing me beautiful songs till I fall asleep again.

After school he plays with me soccer in the street, he tells me very funny jokes and gorgeous fairy tales, he swings me along with his friends whom you call terrorists and I laugh to tears. On my neighbour's TV I watched you practicing some terrorism with your daughters; you were playing with them exactly like my cousin plays with me. Why don't you want my cousin to be a good terrorist like you?
Why do you want to make peace in my country while you all live in terrorism happily? Did we annoy you Mr. President? We don't even know you, if someone in my district did anything wrong to you just tell me and I will oblige him to apologize for you.

Then you tell us that you are not our enemy! Then who is our enemy Mr. President? I see, it is the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Oho, my mother used to tell me that I have to lessen my satirical remarks, I am sorry Mr. President, but imagine Mr. Obama that you were dragging the corps of one of you girls – God forbids – while someone is nagging behind you blaming you for the death of your own daughter and never blames the one who killed her, on the contrary, he thinks that the murderer's crime is entirely justified and you and your daughter deserve what happened to you, what would you think of that guy? Would you think that he is your friend?

Mr. President, I know that you are "not an Arab but you are a decent family man", but that doesn't mean that those indecent family Arab men, women and children deserve to be barbequed. You don't kill people because they are indecent. By the way, my parents were not Hamas members, truly they elected Hamas, but they didn't work with the resistance.
My mother was happy with the elections; she said that this is democracy. I am very sad that my mother didn't know that democracy means destruction; she thought it is a nice thing. Now I know that democracy is like peace, they both kill families and children. But it is too late; I wish my mother read more books to know better than that.

The whole situation really confuses me, my cousin says that is because I am still a child, but I am not a child, I am seven years old and I am a man as my father wanted me. Yet I really do not understand when people are occupied what usually they do except resisting? When they are the natives, the owners of the land and someone comes and expel them from this land and build settlements, are they supposed to just leave without any resistance? Would you do this Mr. President? Would you give up your home to somebody else that easy? Why would you live with your daughters safely at home while my home is devastated? I am not a creature with a tail, I really do not have any tails, you can check yourself. I am a human being like you, exactly like you.

Apparently you believe the blond woman when she says that Hamas is hiding among civilians. I will tell you the story because it is obvious that they are deceiving you. Hamas is not a ghost or a monster, it is a movement, that is to say… hmmm how can I explain it to you, yea, like a club or stuff like that, a group of people, very large number of people, those people are mostly like my cousin, I mean, ordinary people, cousins, brothers, neighbours…etc, and naturally such people have families and homes, these homes are in Gaza, so if someone of them is sitting at home with his brothers and sisters and this home is in a building that is full of women and children, actually he is not hiding, I mean if you phone called him he will answer, if you called him from the street he will look to you from the window as he does with his friends. They are the tenants, they don't have any place to go to except Gaza, they don't have any homes except their homes. And the blond woman says that they send rockets, well besides that Israel is occupation and we have to get them out of our lands, and these "cities" you are referring to are settlements built on our occupied lands, and those "civilians" whom you sympathise with are occupiers who were brought by the Israeli armyto live in our lands, beside all this, she is a liar, there was no ceasefire at all, during the calming or the ceasefire we had the Israeli planes flying over our heads, striking, killing six people one of them was my cousin's neighbour, he was wounded and left on the passage to Egypt because the borders were blocked and he died on the borders.

So I can assure you that these six were dead, because my cousin attended his neighbour's funeral. See? she is lying. I wonder how an adult woman like her lies all the time like that, and you are a kind person, I can understand why you believe her, that is because naturally an adult shouldn't lie, but life is full of surprises, I swear she is lying, I tell you what, let her face me personally with what she is telling the world, I will tell her that she is lying and she will never be able to deny it, I bet she will even refuse to face me.

I really don't want to be your enemy Mr. President, you Americans have nice movies, nice burger, nice coke, we can easily love you, but you don't give us any space. Arming Israelis to shower us with phosphorus peace, burning us with peace, destroying our schools with peace and peacefully making me an orphan… and now I am threatened to lose the last person left in my family, that doesn't make you a biased mediator or a strong ally to the enemy Mr. President, that makes you THE ENEMY.

I don't think it is smart to have a strong enemy like you, but what can I do Mr. President? Apparently it is your choice and I have nothing to do about it.
Don't worry Mr. President, everything is settled, I live with my cousin, he is preparing me emotionally that I may lose him, he told me what to do when he dies.

I know what to do, I went to a friend and I asked him to list me with the resistance and not to tell my cousin, he said that I am still a child, so I asked my cousin (without telling him the reasons of course) to find a way to smuggle milk and cheese through the tunnels so I can grow up fast and strong and join the resistance to be a nice young man like my cousin, to defend other families, to save the souls of other mothers and fathers, to protect other children from becoming orphans like me.

As for you, try to reconsider finding out who annoyed you in my district and made you insisting on killing us all, I swear I will tear him into pieces.
Best regards to you and special respect to your daughters…. I'll pray for them in order not to face my destiny.

Sincerely

Ali

Hamas is not going away

2009-02-09T22:26:00.002+02:00

Mel Frykberg, The Electronic Intifada, 9 February 2009

RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) -

Despite intensive efforts by Israel, the international community and a number of Arab leaders to weaken and destroy Hamas through economic, punitive and military action, the Islamist organization continues to be a force to reckon with.

Hamas won free and fair democratic elections in January 2006. The United States pushed for these elections, which were monitored by international observers including ex-US President Jimmy Carter, and Israel permitted them to be held.

Hamas has since then been dominant, though it took effective control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, more than a year after its election victory. The Gaza Strip took a serious battering during Israel's 22-day military assault, codenamed Operation Cast Lead.

The coastal territory has also been economically crippled by nearly two years of an Israeli embargo which has hermetically sealed Gaza off from the rest of the world, preventing the import of all but a tiny flow of humanitarian aid and goods.

Israel purportedly carried out the military operation to stop Palestinian rockets from hitting Israeli cities and towns bordering the Gaza Strip.

However, rocket fire on Israel had virtually ceased in the five months of ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that preceded an Israeli cross-border military operation into Gaza on 4 November. This operation provoked a barrage of retaliatory missiles on Israel.

Prior to Operation Cast Lead, a delegation of British parliamentarians met with Hamas leaders in Gaza. The parliamentarians were told that Hamas would be prepared to accept Israel's existence, within the internationally recognized borders of 1967, provided the Jewish state legitimized the rights of Palestinians in return.

Despite the immense scale of death and destruction wrought by Operation Cast Lead, which left over 1,300 Palestinians, mostly civilians dead, rockets continue to be fired at Israel in spite of disproportionate responses from the Israeli army.

Following the recent ceasefire most of Hamas's leadership emerged from underground bunkers unscathed. The digging of smuggling tunnels for everyday necessities as well as arms has resumed.

Furthermore, there are also growing signs that the Europeans, some Israelis and previous Arab opponents are resigned to factoring Hamas into any political equation to address a resolution of the conflict.

Last week after several days of intensive diplomatic pressure, the Israeli government managed to stymie a French initiative to weaken Israel's stance on Hamas.

Following a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels, France tried to change a pre-written closing statement released by the ministers regarding the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

Paris wanted the statement to say that the EU would be prepared to hold talks with a future Palestinian unity government which included Hamas as long as it agreed to honor the principles of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Additionally, the French delegation to Brussels proposed opening Israeli border crossings into Gaza immediately without any conditions. A previous agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2005 stipulated that the PA had to control the crossings.

However, following intervention by Israel, the Czech Republic -- the current holder of the EU presidency -- Germany, Italy and the Netherlands pushed the French initiative off the agenda.

Israel viewed the French move as an attempt to get the Quartet for Middle East peace - the UN, the US, Russia and the EU -- to soften its conditions for international recognition of Hamas.

A senior Israeli official said that since the end of the Gaza operation, his country was concerned about a possible break in European support for the boycott of the Hamas government in Gaza.

US President Barack Obama's Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, met French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner in Paris recently.

During the meeting the Gaza ceasefire was discussed and Kouchner stressed the need for inter-Palestinian dialogue and for the border crossings into Gaza to be reopened.

Kouchner again suggested France was open to the idea of a unity government if Hamas softened its stance.

Meanwhile, Irish Foreign Minister Michael Martin told reporters in Damascus on Monday that some kind of engagement with Hamas may have to feature in future European Union policy.

Hamas's erstwhile foe and bitter rival Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who controls the West Bank, also discussed the issue with French President Nicholas Sarkozy in Paris on Monday.

Abbas too called for a unity Palestinian government and said Hamas's inclusion was imperative as long as it recognized his supreme authority.

On Monday Sarkozy also met Qatar's Prime Minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, whose Persian Gulf country has emerged as a regional mediator since helping to resolve a political crisis in Lebanon last year. Al-Thani insisted Hamas should not be sidelined from peace efforts.

"We must work for a government of national unity between the Palestinians. There should not be efforts to delete or distance one of the Palestinian parties present on the ground," al-Thani told reporters.

Israeli columnist and analyst Akiva Elder noted in the daily Haaretz that Israel's continual denial of the reality of Hamas as a legitimate political entity was short-sighted.

For 20 years Israel has tried to destroy the movement using carrots and sticks alternately. The only difference between the ruling Kadima party's leader and minister of foreign affairs, Tzipi Livni, and the more right-wing opposition Likud party leader Binyamin Netanyahu is the size of the clubs to be used, argued Eldar.

"Precisely because of the many children killed in Gaza, Cast Lead has been assured a place of honor in the ethos of the struggle of the Palestinian David, armed with primitive Qassams, and the Israeli Goliath, with his F-16s," said Eldar.

"When they hear the proud declarations of Israel's leaders, to the effect that deterrence has been restored, Hamas's leaders certainly laugh themselves to death, and not just because of the rockets that continue to fall on the people of Ashkelon.

"The threat of a few more bombs on Gaza deters them like the death penalty deters a suicide bomber on the way to carry out an attack," said Eldar.

Only a long-term ceasefire, it seems, accompanied by a real diplomatic context, can pull the rug of popular support out from under Hamas and restore it to its natural proportions.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10285.shtml

Fear and trauma in Gaza's schools

2009-02-07T22:56:00.000+02:00

By Alex Dziadosz in Gaza

Counselors and teachers are addressing the trauma and fears of students in Gaza [GALLO/GETTY]

As students filed into the courtyard of Asma elementary school in Gaza City for the first time since the Israeli offensive began, they were greeted by a bleak reminder of the violence that left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead and thousands injured.
A hole punched by an Israeli rocket scarred the courtyard latrine and blood soiled the wall beside it.

Asma is one of over 600 schools in Gaza - most of which reopened on January 24 - that is today facing a large number of post-war operational challenges.
Educators across the Gaza Strip are now considering whether to reschedule exams which were abandoned when Israel began bombing the territory on December 27.
Teachers are also faced with the task of teaching in rooms which had served as shelters for dozens of refugees.
Addressing the trauma

On their first day back to class, most children meandered in the courtyard, eating bread and cheese provided by the school and playing with their friends. Inside the classrooms, debris left by the scores of refugees housed there until a few days ago still covered the floors – a box of tomatoes, empty bottles and, in some rooms, the shattered remnants of boards and chairs used for firewood in the absence of gas and electricity.
Many teachers say that a normal curriculum cannot be administered until students have been treated for trauma from the deaths of their classmates and family members.
"In the morning when I was working among the students, some of them were very frightened," said Amirah Hamdan, a teacher at Asma who handles the morning attendance call.
"They thought that the war would start again because they were in the school."
Other teachers and administrators say they will take the next few days to help the school's nearly 900 students put the war behind them and return to their studies, but the first day made it clear that this will take time.
Students at the Asma school were mostly glad to return, though many were still shaken by the violence of the past few weeks.

Nour Abdel All, 10, says she lost two of her seven brothers during the war and is worried that she will lose more.
When she is old enough to work, she says, she would like to teach human rights, an attitude inspired by the loss of her brothers.
The bombing terrified her and she is still scared - particularly of the Israeli fighter jets.
"I pray that God will one day burn them all," she says
School exams
Suha Dawoud, a supervisor at Asma, says her daughter was one of many students who had been taking her annual exams when the Israeli attacks began.
"They [the students] are not in a state of mind in which they can concentrate and focus," says Dawoud.
"Even the most disciplined student would not be able to cope with examinations after the horrible scenes they have watched either on TV or on the ground."
However, many students had been performing poorly at school even before Israel launched the war on Gaza on December 27.
The Israeli blockade has stifled the local economy forcing many students to reportedly abandoned their studies and seek employment.
Turning to education

Several schools in Gaza were damaged in the Israeli attacks [AFP]
Many Palestinians see education as one of the few paths available to them to leave the territories in search of better lives.
In recent decades, the West Bank and Gaza Strip have posted better high school enrolment rates than Lebanon and higher literacy rates than Egypt and Yemen.

The Palestinian territories and diaspora have produced many influential academics, such as Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi and Mahmoud Darwish.
"Our goal is to keep the wheel of education going, because education is what our children have. It is their actual wealth," says Dawoud.
"We do not have resources here in Gaza. We do not have raw materials or industry. We have nothing other than education itself."
Educators like Dawoud are also up against the prevailing atmosphere of occupation and violence.
Graffiti depicting armed and masked men cover the walls, the faces of fallen "martyrs" glare down from lamppost signs, and digital gunfire sputters from internet cafes as rows of children sit enthralled by military-themed video games.
Even in Dawoud's classes, the air of violence is there.
As a kind of therapy, she often gives children papers and pencils and asks them to draw what they are feeling.
"You might be shocked," she says.
"Blood, destruction, people killing each other; guns are in their paintings and drawings."
Angry students
At the Palestine Secondary School for Boys, a government-run school for some 700 students in Gaza City, administrators have decided to cancel exams altogether.
They had been scheduled for December 29 – two days after the Israeli assault began.
El-Khalily, the school's manager, told Al Jazeera that on their first day back, teachers did not hold regular class session but instead chose to help students cope with what they had seen and heard during the war.
Two students from the school were killed during the war and another five were wounded.
Teachers at the school are worried that student anger could lead to violence and failing grades in the days ahead.
"Maybe a teacher is explaining a lesson and the student is in another mental place," says Nour El-Deen, an English teacher.
"His body is with the teacher, yes, but his mind is out. He is thinking of destruction, demolition."

Source: Al Jazeera

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/crisisingaza/2009/01/200912553199345.html

Gaza desperately short of food after Israel destroys farmland

2009-02-06T14:25:00.000+02:00

Officials warn of 'destruction of all means of life' after the three-week conflict leaves agriculture in the region in ruins

Peter Beaumont in Gaza
The Observer, Sunday 1 February 2009
Article history

Gaza's 1.5 million people are facing a food crisis as a result of the destruction of great areas of farmland during the Israeli invasion.

According to the World Food Programme, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation and Palestinian officials, between 35% and 60% of the agriculture industry has been wrecked by the three-week Israeli attack, which followed two years of economic siege.

Christine van Nieuwenhuyse, the World Food Programme's country director, said: "We are hearing that 60% of the land in the north - where the farming was most intensive - may not be exploitable again. It looks to me like a disaster. It is not just farmland, but poultry as well.

"When we have given a food ration in Gaza, it was never a full ration but to complement the diet. Now it is going to be almost impossible for Gaza to produce the food it needs for the next six to eight months, assuming that the agriculture can be rehabilitated. We will give people a full ration."

The FAO estimates that 13,000 families who depend directly on herding, farming and fishing have suffered significant damage. "Before the blockade and the attack," said Ahmad Sourani, director of the Agricultural Development Association of Gaza, which runs programmes with charities such as Britain's Christian Aid, "Gaza produced half of its own food. Now that has declined by 25%. In addition, a quarter of the population depends on agriculture for income. What we have seen in large areas of farmland is the destruction of all means of life.

"We have seen a creeping process of farmers being forced out of the buffer zone around Gaza's border. Before 2000 we could approach and farm within 50m of the fence. After Israel's evacuation of the settlements in 2005, the Israeli army imposed a buffer of 300m. Although it is elastic, now there are areas, depending on the situation, where farmers cannot reach their farms in safety within an area of over a kilometre. It is indirect confiscation by fear. My fear is that, if it remains, it will become de facto. Bear in mind that 30% of Gaza's most productive land is within that buffer zone."

The wholesale destruction of farms, greenhouses, dairy parlours, livestock, chicken coops and orchards has damaged food production, which was already hit by the blockade.

Buildings heavily damaged during Israel's Operation Cast Lead included much of its agricultural infrastructure. The Ministry of Agriculture was targeted, the agriculture faculty at al-Azhar university in Beit Hanoun largely destroyed, and the offices of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees in Zaitoun - which provides cheap food for the poor - ransacked and vandalised by soldiers who left abusive graffiti.

Although international and local officials are still gathering figures, they believe that scores, perhaps hundreds, of wells and water sources have been damaged and several hundred greenhouses have been levelled, as well as severe damage inflicted on 60,000-75,000 dunums of Gaza's 175,000 dunums (44,000 acres) of farmable land.

As well as the physical damage done by Israeli bulldozers, bombing and shelling, land has been contaminated by munitions, including white phosphorous, burst sewerage pipes, animal carcasses and even asbestos used in roofing. In many places, the damage is extreme. In Jabal al-Rayas, once a thriving farming community, every building has been knocked down, and even the cattle killed and left to lie rotting in the fields.

In al-Atatra, Ahmad Hassan, 65, the overseer of an orchard that once had hundreds of lemon and orange trees, surveyed an area flattened by bulldozers. "This was the well," he said, showing a pile of bulldozed concrete. "We can clear the ground in two weeks. Then what? The well is gone. The pump has been destroyed. And where will the trees come from to replant the land?"

Van Nieuwenhuyse said: "Already, the price of meat has tripled since the Israeli operation began. What is more worrying is the situation over vegetables. Protein we can help with, but before this there were already deficiencies in the diet. Now they will have to rely on Israel."

It was a view echoed by Hassan Abu Etah, the deputy agriculture minister in Gaza. "It has all been hugely damaged. And it affects all of Gaza, not simply the farmers. We produced some of what we needed. It makes you wonder whether they wanted to change Gaza from production to consumption."

In the heavily damaged village of Khuza'a, near Khan Younis, Salam Najar surveyed the no-go zone that extends from the last houses in the village to the border fence where Israeli farmland begins. "Most of the families here have farmed that side. Now no one feels safe to go there. They have destroyed it all."

Top 5 Lies About Israel’s Assault on Gaza

2009-01-29T01:36:00.002+02:00

by Jeremy R. Hammond

Lie #1) Israel is only targeting legitimate military sites and is seeking to protect innocent lives. Israel never targets civilians.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated pieces of property in the world. The presence of militants within a civilian population does not, under international law, deprive that population of their protected status, and hence any assault upon that population under the guise of targeting militants is, in fact, a war crime.
Moreover, the people Israel claims are legitimate targets are members of Hamas, which Israel says is a terrorist organization. Hamas has been responsible for firing rockets into Israel. These rockets are extremely inaccurate and thus, even if Hamas intended to hit military targets within Israel, are indiscriminate by nature. When rockets from Gaza kill Israeli civilians, it is a war crime.

Hamas has a military wing. However, it is not entirely a military organization, but a political one. Members of Hamas are the democratically elected representatives of the Palestinian people. Dozens of these elected leaders have been kidnapped and held in Israeli prisons without charge. Others have been targeted for assassination, such as Nizar Rayan, a top Hamas official. To kill Rayan, Israel targeted a residential apartment building. The strike not only killed Rayan but two of his wives and four of his children, along with six others. There is no justification for such an attack under international law. This was a war crime.

Other of Israel’s bombardment with protected status under international law have included a mosque, a prison, police stations, and a university, in addition to residential buildings.
Moreover, Israel has long held Gaza under siege, allowing only the most minimal amounts of humanitarian supplies to enter. Israel is bombing and killing Palestinian civilians. Countless more have been wounded, and cannot receive medical attention. Hospitals running on generators have little or no fuel. Doctors have no proper equipment or medical supplies to treat the injured. These people, too, are the victims of Israeli policies targeted not at Hamas or legitimate military targets, but directly designed to punish the civilian population.

Lie #2) Hamas violated the cease-fire. The Israeli bombardment is a response to Palestinian rocket fire and is designed to end such rocket attacks.

Israel never observed the cease-fire to begin with. From the beginning, it announced a “special security zone” within the Gaza Strip and announced that Palestinians who enter this zone will be fired upon. In other words, Israel announced its intention that Israeli soldiers would shoot at farmers and other individuals attempting to reach their own land in direct violation of not only the cease-fire but international law.
Despite shooting incidents, including ones resulting in Palestinians getting injured, Hamas still held to the cease-fire from the time it went into effect on June 19 until Israel effectively ended the truce on November 4 by launching an airstrike into Gaza that killed five and injured several others.
Israel’s violation of the cease-fire predictably resulted in retaliation from militants in Gaza who fired rockets into Israel in response. The increased barrage of rocket fire at the end of December is being used as justification for the continued Israeli bombardment, but is a direct response by militants to the Israeli attacks.
Israel's actions, including its violation of the cease-fire, predictably resulted in an escalation of rocket attacks against its own population.

To read the complete article click here

it’s a ceasefire…just not on the beach, not in your home

2009-01-27T21:57:00.002+02:00

*7 year old Ahmed Hassanin, shot in the head outside his home by Israeli soldiers from Gaza’s eastern border, January 22nd.

On the 5^th morning after Israel declared a ‘ceasefire’, Israeli gunboats began shelling, as they had on several mornings since halting the 22 day air and land bombardment of Gaza. The shelling, which began just after 7:30 am off Gaza city’s coast, injured at least 6, including one boy with shrapnel in his head.

Yasser Abed, 15, came out from his home in Gaza’s Beach camp, on the coast, to see where the shelling was occurring. A shard of shrapnel lodged in his forehead.

Nisreen al Quqa, 11, was out earlier, before the navy began to fire towards Palestinian fishermen. She and her brother were walking on the beach when the firing started. A piece of shrapnel lodged in her right calf muscle.

Other injuries included a 14 year old male who was hit in the thigh by one of the shrapnel fragments, a 35 year old male also with a shrapnel injury, and a 4 year old girl with a head wound from flying shrapnel.

To the east of Gaza city, in the Sheyjaiee district close to the eastern border, also on the same day, 7 year old Ahmed Hassanian was outside his house with friends around 9:45 am. He lies now in critical condition in Shifa hospital’s ICU, a bullet still lodged in his brain and with such brain hemorrhaging and damage that he is expected to die shortly.

Mu’awiyah Hassanain, the director of Ambulance and Emergency Services, reports shelling in the northwestern coastal area of As Sudaniya on the same morning, saying five fishermen were injured in the attacks.

Israeli warplanes, on the first day of the ceasefire, flew extremely low and loudly over areas of Gaza, leaving residents expecting the worst. Drones capable of photographing and of dropping lethal, targeted missiles, continued to circle in Gaza’s skies for the first 3 days after the tanks retreated and the air-bombing ceased. At 8:30 am, one of these drones dropped 2 missiles in the Amal area east of Beit Hanoun, wounding a woman and an 11 year old child, who later died of her injuries.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reports further violations of the cease-fire.

At 10:40, Israeli troops killed Maher abu Rjaila, 23, shooting him in the chest as he walked on his land east of Khan Younis city.

Two days later, at 1:00pm, Israeli soldiers fired on residents of Al Qarara, near Khan Younis, shooting Waleed al-Astal, 42, in his right foot.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed at least 1, 330, with as many as 200 more bodies expected to be recovered from under the rubble of the over 5,000 destroyed houses and 20,000 buildings.

Dr. Fawzi Nablusi, director of Shifa’s ICU, said that of the cases in Shifa’s ICU, 90% were civilian, of these 50% were women and children. One of those civilians injured the day before Israel’s ceasefire was Mohammed Jarboua. Also from the Beach camp, the 21 year old is clinically brain dead, surviving only on mechanical life-support, after being shot in the head by Israeli naval forces.

The Director of Shifa hospital, Dr. Hassan Khalaf, and Mu’awiyah Hassanain confirmed that since the ceasefire began on January 18, three more Palestinians have been killed, and 15 more injured, 10 of those injured on January 22^nd.

These ceasefire violations are not a new precedent, as during the 6 month ceasefire which began on June 19^th, Israeli forces routinely targeted and fired upon fishermen and farmers along Gaza’s eastern and northern borders, injuring 62, according to Palestinian sources. During this period, 22 Palestinians were also killed, many of them members of resistance groups, and 38 fishermen and farmers were abducted. The truce period saw border crossings mainly closed, completely sealed them from November 4, 2008 with only the briefest of openings.

As the dust settles and noxious chemical fires continue to smolder, Gazans focus on their immediate needs: housing, food, and in many cases locating lost family members still under the rubble.

The root of the problem continues: the nearly 2 year old siege on Gaza, not relaxed under the 6 month ceasefire as agreed, and which had already decimated Gaza’s health and sanitation infrastructures, and had shattered the economy. From the ruins of Gaza, any signs of an end to the siege are far beyond the broken horizon.

*bullet lodged in Ahmed Hassanin’s brain.

*Ahmed Hassanin.

Nisreen al Quqa, hit with shrapnel from Israeli shelling on January 22nd.

Yasser Abed, 15, shrapnel to the head from Israeli gunboat firing, January 22nd.

*Mohammed Jarboua, 21, clinically brain-dead after shrapnel from Israeli gunboat firing on January 17th.

Wanted War Criminals

2009-01-27T16:09:00.000+02:00

Wanted War Criminals

Criminal Ehud Olmert

Criminal Tzipi Livni

Criminal Shaul Mofaz

Criminal Ehud Barak

Criminal Dan Halutz

Criminal Moshe Bogie Yaalon

Criminal Gabi Ashkenazi

Criminal Binyamin Fouad Ben Eliezer

Criminal Amir Peretz

Criminal Carmi Gillon

Criminal Matan Vilnai

Criminal Avi Dichter

Criminal Eliezer Shkedy

Criminal Giora Eiland

Criminal Doron Almog

WANTED WAR CRIMINALS: USED ILLEGAL WEAPONS IN A WAR AGAINST CHILDREN, WOMEN AND CIVILIANS IN GAZA

Arrest warrant: FOR WAR CRIMES

AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Anyone who has information about the suspects when they are outside of the Israeli borders, report immediately to:

The Prosecutor

POBox 19519

2500 Hague

Netherlands

Fax +31 70 515 8 555

otp.informationdesk@icc-cpi.int

For more information please visit :

http://www.wanted.org.il/ehud_barak_en.htm

Israel admits using white phosphorous in attacks on Gaza

2009-01-26T22:01:00.001+02:00

(Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)

The incident being investigated is believed to be the firing of white phosphorous shells at a UN school in Beit Lahiya on January 17

From The Times

January 24, 2009

------------------------------------

James Hider in Jerusalem and Sheera Frenkel in Gaza City

After weeks of denying that it used white phosphorus in the heavily populated Gaza Strip, Israel finally admitted yesterday that the weapon was deployed in its offensive.

The army’s use of white phosphorus – which makes a distinctive shellburst of dozens of smoke trails – was reported first by The Times on January 5, when it was strenuously denied by the army. Now, in the face of mounting evidence and international outcry, Israel has been forced to backtrack on that initial denial. “Yes, phosphorus was used but not in any illegal manner,” Yigal Palmor, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, told The Times. “Some practices could be illegal but we are going into that. The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) is holding an investigation concerning one specific incident.”

The incident in question is thought to be the firing of phosphorus shells at a UN school in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip on January 17. The weapon is legal if used as a smokescreen in battle but it is banned from deployment in civilian areas. Pictures of the attack show Palestinian medics fleeing as blobs of burning phosphorus rain down on the compound.

To read the complete article click here

CHANGING TUNE

January 5 The Times reports that telltale smoke has appeared from areas of shelling. Israel denies using phosphorus

January 8 The Times reports photographic evidence showing stockpiles of white phosphorus (WP) shells. Israel Defence Forces spokesman says: “This is what we call a quiet shell – it has no explosives and no white phosphorus”

January 12 The Times reports that more than 50 phosphorus burns victims are taken into Nasser Hospital. An Israeli military spokesman “categorically” denies the use of white phosphorus

January 15 Remnants of white phosphorus shells are found in western Gaza. The IDF refuses to comment on specific weaponry but insists ammunition is “within the scope of international law”

January 16 The United Nations Relief and Works Agency headquarters are hit with phosphorus munitions. The Israeli military continues to deny its use

January 21 Avital Leibovich, Israel’s military spokeswoman, admits white phosphorus munitions were employed in a manner “according to international law”

January 23 Israel says it is launching an investigation into white phosphorus munitions, which hit a UN school on January 17. “Some practices could be illegal but we are going into that. The IDF is holding an investigation concerning one specific unit and one incident” Source: Times database

To read the complete article click here

THE DAY ISRAEL USED A BOY AGED 13 AS A HUMAN SHIELD

2009-01-26T15:18:00.001+02:00

http://futurefastforward.com/component/content/article/906-misc/823-the-day-israel-used-a-boy-aged-13-as-a-human-shield?

This is what happened to a Palestinian child who joined teenagers throwing stones at Israeli border police.
Muhammad Badwan was grabbed by officers and tied by an arm to the grille covering the windscreen of their security vehicle (circled).
Last night the 13-year-old’s father said the police had illegally used his son as a human shield to try to stop demonstrators throwing stones at them.
‘When I saw him on the hood of the jeep, my whole mind went crazy, ‘ said Saeed Baswan, a 34-year-old labourer. ‘It’s a picture you can’t even imagine. He was shivering from fear.’
Muhammad said: ‘I was scared when they got me at first. I thought they would put me in prison. I was scared a stone would hit me.’
The incident happened in Muhammad’s home village of Biddo, north-west of Jurusalem, which has become a flashpoint for violence between Israeli forces and demonstrators protesting against the building of an Israeli security fence.
The picture was published by an Israeli human rights group trying to expose the behavior of some Israeli security personnel. Rabbi Arik Ascherman, director of Rabbis For Human Rights, heard about the boy and tried to intervene with the police, demanding he be released.
The rabbi claimed he was head-butted by one of the officers and arrested. He said he intended to press charges against the police.
‘The boy was sitting on the hood of a vehicle, unsuccessfully trying to hold back his tears, shivering with fright, and with one arm tied to the screen protecting the windshield,’ he said.
‘We tried to calm him down and reassure him. I asked if he was hurt. He said he had been beaten and was in pain.
‘It is very depressing that we have come to this position where this is what we do.’The Israeli police said they were investigating the incident.

Falk likens Gaza to Warsaw Ghetto

2009-01-25T12:53:00.001+02:00

Falk likens Gaza to Warsaw Ghetto
Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:32:11 GMT

UN investigator Richard Falk says Israeli crimes in Gaza will leave Palestinians mentally scarred for life.

There is more than enough evidence that Israel committed war crimes in its three week-long offensive into Gaza, says a UN investigator.

UN special rapporteur Richard Falk called for an independent inquiry into Israel's violation of international humanitarian law.

Falk said Israel's actions against the besieged Gazans are reminiscent of "the worst kind of international memories of the Warsaw Ghetto" which included the starvation and murder of Polish Jews by Nazi Germany in World War Two.

"There could have been temporary provision at least made for children, disabled, sick civilians to leave, even if where they left to was southern Israel," said the Jewish American academic on Thursday.

Falk, who was denied entry to Israel in December, said Gazans may have been mentally scarred for life because Israel made no effort to allow civilians to escape.

Israeli officials moved closer to being prosecuted for war crimes after Norwegian medics in Gaza found traces of depleted uranium on Gaza victims, suggesting that Israel used the illegal weapons in its war on the impoverished territory, which houses some 1.5 million Palestinians.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), there is a "high risk of developing cancer from exposure to radiation emitted by ... depleted uranium weapons. This risk is assumed to be proportional to the dose received."

The Geneva Convention has classified depleted uranium ammunitions as 'illegal weapons of mass destruction' due to their high radioactivity and toxicity.

Israel faces potential war crimes charges over its excessive use of other controversial weapons on the densely-populated coastal strip.

Human rights group Amnesty International has also touched on the issue, saying that Tel Aviv used white phosphorus munitions "indiscriminately and illegally" in overcrowded areas of Gaza.

"The repeated use [of White Phosphorus] in this manner, despite evidence of its indiscriminate effects and its toll on civilians, is a war crime," said Donatella Rovera of the Amnesty International.

White phosphorus is a high-incendiary substance that bursts into all-consuming flames that cannot be extinguished with water, burning flesh to the bone and often leading to death.

Israel launched its Operation Cast Lead on December 27 to allegedly defend its territories from Hamas rockets, which were fired in retaliation for Israel's violation of a ceasefire that had then been in place.

Falk dismissed Israel's argument that the assault was for self-defense, saying that "the UN charter, and international law, does not give Israel the legal foundation for claiming self-defense."

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=83359&sectionid=351020202

Gaza: The Killing Zone - Israel/Palestine

2009-01-24T14:43:00.001+02:00

An old but continous Israeli terrorism againist Palestenian in Gaza

US journalists call Livni a 'terrorist'

2009-01-19T22:08:00.001+02:00

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3657477,00.html
Shortly after signing anti-smuggling agreement with Secretary of State Rice, foreign minister attends event at Washington Press Club. Several journalists take advantage of opportunity to shoot accusations at her over Gaza operation
Yitzhak Benhorin

WASHINGTON – Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was surprised Friday night by three journalists who shot accusations at her over the fighting in the Gaza Strip.

The incident took place at the Washington Press Club, after Livni signed a cooperation agreement with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice aimed at preventing the smuggling of weapons from Iran to Hamas.

One of the journalists called Livni a "terrorist" and complained that Israel was preventing reporters from covering the war in Gaza.

"What, are you like Zimbabwe?" another woman told the foreign minister.

The journalists took advantage of the opportunity and the stage to read out sections from human rights organizations' reports on Israel's conduct during Operation Cast Lead.

Livni's bodyguards were on high alert when at a certain stage one person, who did not introduce himself, began accusing Israel of murdering innocent civilians.

The event's host asked the man to settle for one question, but the latter cried out, "You let her speak here and don't let as ask questions. Since when are terrorists accommodated here?"

In spite of the unpleasant incident, the foreign minister kept cool and reiterated Israel's traditional stances. She stressed that Israel had left the Gaza Strip three years ago and was forced to return as part of a military operation.

Livni only lost her peace of mind once, when she was asked by an al-Jazeera reporter if her visit to Washington was part of her election campaign.

"Nonsense," Livni replied, adding "we work together. Defense Minister Barak and I are doing the job. I work according to my commitments as the foreign minister. We work together with the prime minister to defend Israel's citizens."

The improbable civilian and the impossible victim

2009-01-19T22:02:00.000+02:00

Take a piece of land,

40 kilometres long (24 Miles),

and about 5 kilometres wide...only.

Call it Gazza.

Then ,fill it with 1,4 Million inhabitants

Then put the sea on the West side

Mubarak's Egypt in the South

Israel from the North and East.

Call it the Terrorist-Land.

Then declare war on it and invade it

with 232 Tanks

687 Armoured Vehicles

43 Jet Fighter Places

105 Gun-Ship-Helicopters

221 field-artillery batteries

346 Mortar guns

3 Spy satellites

64 informers

12 inside-spies

and 8.000

Now , stop a while

and declare that "you shall avoid

harming the civilians."

Call it the only Democracy ,at work.

It will be a miracle , by any standards ,

to avoid harming those civilians or simply a lie

if anyone could avoid harming them.......

unless he is a liar !!

Call it defending Israel ,again

Now comes my question:

what if this invader is a liar and a war criminal ??

what will happen to those crowded civilians ??

How could , even Mother Teresa ,or even Mickey Mouse,

with such a fire-power ,avoid harming the civilians

in such an equation/situation/scenario .

Call it what ever you want .

Israel knew ,

very well,about the Gazza-civilians

because it has put them there !!

Call it Genocide !.........it is more credible.

Raja Chemayel

a civilian with a PC

17.01.2009