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On July 18, 2008 the New York Times published an article by Israeli-Jewish historian, Professor Benny Morris, advocating an Israeli nuclear-genocidal attack on Iran with the likelihood of killing 70 million Iranians — 12 times the number of Jewish victims in the Nazi holocaust:
Morris is a frequent lecturer and consultant to the Israeli political and military establishment and has unique access to Israeli strategic military planners. Morris’ advocacy and public support of the massive, brutal expulsion of all Palestinians is on public record. Yet his genocidal views have not precluded his receiving numerous academic awards. His writings and views are published in Israel’s leading newspapers and journals. Morris’ views are not the idle ranting of a marginal psychopath, as witnessed by the recent publication of his latest op-ed article in the New York Times. What does the publication by the New York Times of an article, which calls for the nuclear incineration of 70 million Iranians and the contamination of the better part of a billion people in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, tell us about US politics and culture? For it is the NYT, which informs the ‘educated classes’ in the US, its Sunday supplements, literary and editorial pages and which serves as the ‘moral conscience’ of important sectors of the cultural, economic and political elite. The New York Times provides a certain respectability to mass murder, which Morris’ views otherwise would not possess if say, they were published in the neo-conservative weeklies or monthlies. The fact that the NYT considers the prospect of an Israeli mass extermination of millions of Iranians part of the policy debate in the Middle East reveals the degree to which Zionofascism has infected the ‘higher’ cultural and journalist circles of the United States. Truth to say, this is the logical outgrowth of the Times‘ public endorsement of Israel’s economic blockade to starve 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza; the Times’ cover-up of Israeli-Zionist-AIPAC influence in launching the US invasion of Iraq leading to over one million murdered Iraqi citizens. The Times sets the tone for the entire New York cultural scene, which privileges Israeli interests, to the point of assimilating into the US political discourse not only its routine violations of international law, but its threats, indeed promises, to scorch vast areas of the earth in pursuit of its regional supremacy. The willingness of the NYT to publish an Israeli genocide-ethnocide advocate tells us about the strength of the ties between a purportedly ‘liberal establishment’ pro-Israel publication and the totalitarian Israeli right: It is as if to say that for the liberal pro-Israel establishment, the non-Jewish Nazis are off limits, but the views and policies of Judeo-fascists need careful consideration and possible implementation. Morris’ New York Times ‘nuclear-extermination’ article did not provoke any opposition from the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO) because, in its daily information bulletin, Daily Alert, it has frequently published articles by Israeli and US Zionists advocating an Israeli and/or US nuclear attack on Iran. In other words, Morris’ totalitarian views are part of the cultural matrix deeply embedded in the Zionist organizational networks and its extensive ‘reach’ in US cultural and political circles. What the Times did in publishing Morris’ lunacy has taken genocidal discourse out of the limited circulation of Zionist influentials and into the mainstream of millions of American readers. Apart from a handful of writers (Gentile and Jewish) publishing in marginal web sites, there was no political or moral condemnation from the entire literary, political and journalistic world of this affront to our humanity. No attempt was made to link Morris’ totalitarian genocidal policies to Israel’s public official threats and preparations for nuclear war. There is no anti-nuclear campaign led by our most influential public intellectuals to repudiate the state (Israel) and its public intellectuals who prepare a nuclear war with the potential to exterminate more than ten times the number of Jews slaughtered by the Nazis. A nuclear incineration of the nation of Iran is the Israeli counterpart of Hitler’s gas chambers and ovens writ large. Extermination is the last stage of Zionism: Informed by the doctrine of rule the Middle East or ruin the air and land of the world. That is the explicit message of Benny Morris (and his official Israeli sponsors), who like Hitler, issues ultimatums to the Iranians, ‘surrender or be destroyed’ and who threatens the US, join us in bombing Iran or face a world ecological and economic catastrophe. That Morris is utterly, starkly and clinically insane is beyond question. That the New York Times in publishing his genocidal ravings provides new signs of how power and wealth has contributed to the degeneration of Jewish intellectual and cultural life in the US. To comprehend the dimensions of this decay we need only compare the brilliant tragic-romantic German-Jewish writer, Walter Benjamin, desperately fleeing the advance of totalitarian Nazi terror to the Israeli-Jewish writer Benny Morris’ criminal advocacy of Zionist nuclear terror published in the New York Times. The question of Zionist power in America is not merely a question of a ‘lobby’ influencing Congressional and White House decisions concerning foreign aid to Israel. What is at stake today are the related questions of the advocacy of a nuclear war in which 70 million Iranians face extermination and the complicity of the US mass media in providing a platform, nay a certain political respectability for mass murder and global contamination. Unlike the Nazi past, we cannot claim, as the good Germans did, that ‘we did not know’ or ‘we weren’t notified’, because it was written by an eminent Israeli academic and was published in the New York Times. -James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). Petras’ forthcoming book, Zionism and US Militarism, is due from Clarity Press, Atlanta, in August 2008. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: jpetras@binghamton.edu. |
Archive for the ‘Palestine’ Category
Making Nuclear Extermination Respectable
August 1, 2008
End of the two-state solution
July 29, 2008A multicultural state can offer Jewish Israelis and Muslim and Christian Palestinians a future free of discrimination, occupation, fear and violence
By Saree Makdisi | guardian.co.uk, Monday July 28 2008
In order to try to create an exclusively Jewish state in what had been the culturally diverse land of Palestine, Israel’s founders expelled or drove into flight half of Palestine’s Muslim and Christian population and seized their land, their houses, and their property (furniture, clothing, books, personal effects, family heirlooms), in what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948.
Even while demanding – rightly – that no one should forget the Jewish people’s history of suffering, and above all the Holocaust, Israel has insisted ever since 1948 not merely that the Palestinians must forget their own history, but that what it calls peace must be premised on that forgetting, and hence on the Palestinians’ renunciation of their rights. As Israel’s foreign minister has said, if the Palestinians want peace, they must learn to strike the word “nakba” from their lexicon.
Some must never forget, while others, clearly, must not be allowed to remember. Far from mere hypocrisy, this attitude perfectly expresses the Israeli people’s mistaken belief that they can find the security they need at the expense of the Palestinians, or that one people’s right can be secured at the cost of another’s.
Little wonder such an approach has not delivered peace. The only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to end the denial of rights that fuels it, and to ensure that both peoples’ rights are equally protected.
For some years it was thought that peace could be obtained by sidestepping the central fact of the nakba, and creating a Palestinian statelet in what remained of Palestine after 1948, namely, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967.
But such a two-state solution is no longer possible. The inescapable fact is that one state controls all of the land, and it has done so for over 40 years, affirming one people’s right to live, marry, work and settle by negating another people’s right to do the same, on land that two peoples – not just one – call home.
The only question now is how much longer this negation can go on, and how long it will be before a state premised on it is superseded by its opposite, an affirmative, genuinely democratic, secular and multi-cultural state, the only kind that can offer Jewish Israelis and Muslim and Christian Palestinians alike a future free of discrimination, occupation, fear and violence.
The question, in other words, is not whether there will be a one-state solution, but when; and how much needless suffering there will be in the meantime, until those who are committed to the project of creating and maintaining a religiously exclusivist state in what was historically a culturally and religiously heterogeneous land finally relent and accept the inevitable: that they have failed.
This last point is especially important, because the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians is – and has always been –– driven by the notion that hundreds of years of cultural heterogeneity and plurality could be negated overnight by the creation of a state with a single cultural and religious identity.
It hardly matters that that identity was never as homogeneous as Zionists like to claim: witness Israel’s methodical de-Arabisation of its Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) population in the 1950s and 1960s, or the perennial debate over “who is a Jew” – an unseemly question that in Israel is not merely a matter of arcane theological exegesis but tied directly to matters of citizenship, nationality, and law.
Israel’s claim to an exclusive Jewish identity – as symbolised by its flag – has been sustained ever since 1948 by denying the moral and legal right of return of those Palestinians expelled during the nakba, by forms of legalised discrimination inside the state, and by the maintenance of a much more violent system of apartheid in the territories Israel has militarily occupied since 1967.
Palestinian citizens of Israel – officially referred to by the state as deracinated “Arabs” because it cannot bring itself to acknowledge the fact that they are Palestinian – face institutionalised forms of discrimination far worse than those once encountered by African Americans. For example, while Jewish Israelis who marry non-citizens (or residents of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories) are entitled to have their spouses come live with them, Israeli law explicitly denies that right to Palestinian citizens who marry Palestinians from the occupied territories. Palestinian citizens are also denied various other privileges, including access to state lands, reserved exclusively for Jews.
Meanwhile, Israel maintains two separate infrastructures in the occupied territories, and it subjects the two populations there to two distinct legal and administrative systems. Indigenous Palestinians are subject to a harsh form of military rule, whereas Jewish settlers enjoy the protections of Israeli civil law, even though they have been transplanted -– in violation of international law – beyond the borders of their state.
Indeed, Israel’s intensive settlement of the occupied territories is the primary reason for the demise of the two-state solution. Not only is the settler population increasing at a rate three times greater than that of Israel itself, but, according to a UN report published last summer, almost 40% of the West Bank is now taken up with Israeli infrastructure to which Palestinians are denied access. The remainder of the territory has been broken up into an archipelago, each little “island” of territory in effect a small-scale Gaza, cut off from the outside and completely vulnerable to Israel’s whims. Under such circumstances, an independent Palestinian state is inconceivable.
Even if it were conceivable, the creation of a Palestinian statelet in the occupied territories would do nothing to safeguard the rights of the 20% of Israel’s citizens who are Palestinian; on the contrary, its existence would further empower the likes of former deputy prime minister Avigdor Lieberman, who wants all Palestinians removed to make room for Jewish immigrants (like himself). Nor would it address the right of return of the Palestinians who were deliberately expelled to make room for a Jewish state in 1948, who have been kept out and living in limbo – or in the prison that is Gaza – solely in order to preserve Israel’s tenuous claim to Jewishness.
Negation, denial and imprisonment have run their course. The future should be built on affirmation, cooperation, and the constitution of a democratic and secular state that guarantees the rights of Israelis and Palestinians, of Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike.
• Saree Makdisi is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, and the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, published by WW Norton.
Report: Torture widespread in Palestinian jails
July 29, 2008By KARIN LAUB and DALIA NAMMARI
Associated Press Writers
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — One detainee told of being beaten with pipes and having a screwdriver rammed into his back. Another said interrogators tied his hands behind his back then lifted him into the air by his bound wrists.
Two human rights groups on Monday decried widespread torture of political opponents by bitter Palestinian rivals Hamas and Fatah, and Associated Press interviews with three victims and a doctor backed the reports of abuse.
The findings emerged as the two sides carried out fresh arrest sweeps in the West Bank and Gaza – highlighting deep tensions in the Palestinian territories after a flare-up in violence over the weekend.
In the West Bank on Monday, the security forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rounded up more than 50 suspected Hamas supporters, including mosque preachers and intellectuals, in retaliation for a similar sweep of Fatah loyalists in Gaza, set off by a bombing that killed five Hamas members Friday.
Hamas violently seized power in Gaza in June 2007, leaving the Islamic militant group in charge of the coastal territory and Abbas’ forces controlling the West Bank.
The Palestinian human rights group Al Haq said Monday that arbitrary arrests of political opponents have been common since Hamas’ takeover of Gaza, with each side trying to defend its turf.
Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?
July 27, 2008
By Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, July 25, 2008
| “On October 21,1948 the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs.” – Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History |
I had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.
Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia, congregation: “I am a Zionist.” Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among his congregation.
Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian Canon of St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.
Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace/Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.
Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer’s recent book, which exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the explanation Americans receive about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel’s opening attack on the Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee: “The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality.”
Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history’s great killers, disputed the facts: “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”
Golda Meir’s apology for Israel’s great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na’im Ateek’s description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.
In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees.
In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25 million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their homeland.
The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades. On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been reclassified as “visitors in their own city.”
Continued . . .
Arabs under siege as Israel tightens grip on Holy City
July 27, 2008The battle for Jerusalem is entering a new phase as Israel continues to build new settlements in the east of the city and a series of violent attacks by lone Arab attackers ratchets up the tension
- The Observer, Sunday July 27 2008
Palestinian Fawzia al-Kurd walks past a house displaying Israeli flags in the neighbourhood of occupied east Jerusalem where she lives with her family Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty
Fawzia al-Kurd’s home is nothing special. She has lived within its walls for the past quarter of a century, in the heart of East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah district. The house is tidy. But at first glance, it would not appear to be worth $10m.
That is the sum that the al-Kurd family claim they were offered by Israeli buyers as an incentive to move on, a figure confirmed by their lawyer. Fawzia refused to make a deal, whatever the price. It would have hurt her ‘integrity’ to take it and leave, she said. So last week she received an eviction notice, based on an arcane legal claim to the site that her husband first called home in 1956.
If she and her family are forced to leave as a result, ultra-Orthodox Israeli settlers from a company called Nahlat Shemoun – linked to a nearby Jewish shrine – will take over half of the house. Settlers have already occupied her illegally built extension. The Kurd house may soon be draped with Israeli flags – as is another a handful of metres distant – and Arab East Jerusalem will have shrunk perceptibly once more.
‘Their objective [in trying to evict me] is political’, said Fawzia. ‘They are claiming as theirs something that is not.’
The story of Fawzia’s house reflects the larger battle for the future of Jerusalem, a city contested with an intensity and urgency unmatched anywhere else in the world. In the interminable saga of the Middle East peace process, agreement on the ‘final status’ of the Holy City remains as elusive as ever.
As Fawzia pondered her eviction notice, Gordon Brown arrived in town to tell the Knesset that he favoured Jerusalem as a shared capital of two separate states: Israeli and Palestinian. US presidential hopeful Barack Obama followed, and adroitly back-tracked on a recent assertion that the city, as the capital of Israel, ‘must remain undivided’. ‘Final status,’ he said, would be for the ‘two sides to negotiate’.
What is at issue now is what has been at stake since Israel’s foundation and before: how can two peoples’ claim on a city as the centre of their national ambitions ever be reconciled? Since the ‘uniting’ of Jerusalem in the Six Day War of 1967, when Israeli troops overran Jordanian positions on the east side of the city, Palestinians have largely watched, furious but impotent, as Israeli construction in Arab East Jerusalem has proceeded apace. Israeli flags dotted around Palestinian quarters bear defiant testimony to Jewish insistence on a unified city and capital.
What Obama missed in the Middle East
July 26, 2008WHEN I and other Palestinian- Americans first knew Barack Obama in Chicago in the 1990s, he grasped the oppression faced by Palestinians under Israeli occupation. He understood that an honest broker cannot simultaneously be the main cheerleader, financier and arms supplier for one side in a conflict.
He often attended Palestinian-American community events and heard about the Palestinian experience from perspectives stifled in mainstream discussion.
In recent months, Obama has sought to allay persistent concerns from pro-Israel groups by recasting himself as a stalwart backer of Israel and tacking ever closer to positions espoused by the powerful, hard-line pro-Israel lobby Aipac. He distanced himself from mainstream advisers because pro-Israel groups objected to their calls for even-handedness.
Like his Republican rival, senator John McCain, Obama gave staunch backing to Israel’s 2006 bombing of Lebanon, which killed over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and the blockade and bombardment of the Gaza Strip, calling them “self defence”.
Every aspect of Obama’s visit to Palestine-Israel this week has seemed designed to further appease pro-Israel groups. Typically for an American aspirant to high office, he visited the Israeli Holocaust memorial and the Western Wall. He met the full spectrum of Israeli Jewish (though not Israeli Arab) political leaders. He travelled to the Israeli Jewish town of Sderot, which until last month’s ceasefire, frequently experienced rockets from the Gaza Strip. At every step, Obama warmly professed his support for Israel and condemned Palestinian violence. Other than a cursory 45-minute visit to occupied Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinians got little. According to an Abbas aide, Obama provided assurances that he would be “a constructive partner in the peace process.” Some observers took comfort in his promise that he would get engaged “starting from the minute I’m sworn into office”. Obama remained silent on the issue of Jerusalem, after boldly promising the “undivided” city to Israel as its capital in a speech to Aipac last month, and then appearing to backtrack amid a wave of outrage across the Arab world.
But Obama missed the opportunity to visit Palestinian refugee camps, schools and even shopping malls to witness first-hand the devastation caused by the Israeli army and settlers, or to see how Palestinians cope under what many call “apartheid”. This year alone, almost 500 Palestinians, including over 70 children, have been killed by the Israeli army – exceeding the total for 2007 and dwarfing the two-dozen Israelis killed in conflict-related violence.
Obama said nothing about Israel’s relentless expansion of colonies on occupied land. Nor did he follow the courageous lead of former President Jimmy Carter and meet with the democratically elected Hamas leaders, even though Israel negotiated a ceasefire with them. That such steps are inconceivable shows how off-balance is the US debate on Palestine.
Many people I talk to are resigned to the conventional wisdom that aspiring national politicians cannot afford to be seen as sympathetic to the concerns of Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims. They still hope that, if elected, Obama would display an even-handedness absent in the campaign.
Without entirely foreclosing the possibility of change in US policy, the reality is that the political pressures evident in a campaign do not magically disappear once the campaign is over. Nor is all change necessarily for the better.
One risk is that a President Obama or President McCain would just bring back the Clinton-era approach where the United States effectively acted as “Israel’s lawyer”, as Aaron David Miller, a 25-year veteran of the US state department’s Middle East peace efforts, memorably put it. This led to a doubling of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, an upsurge in violence and the failed 2000 Camp David summit where Clinton tried to pressure Arafat into accepting a bantustan. A depressing feature of Obama’s visit was the prominent advisory role for Dennis Ross, the official in charge of the peace process under Clinton, and the founder of an Aipac-sponsored pro-Israel think-tank.
Whoever is elected will face a rapidly changing situation in Palestine-Israel. A number of shifts are taking place simultaneously. First, the consensus supporting the two-state solution is disintegrating as Israeli colonies have rendered it unachievable. Second, the traditional Palestinian national leadership is being eclipsed by new movements including Hamas. And, as western and Arab governments become more craven in the face of Israeli human rights violations, a Palestinian-led campaign modelled on the anti-apartheid strategy of boycott, divestment and sanctions is building global civil society support. Finally, the demographic shift in Palestine-Israel toward an absolute Palestinian majority in all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip will be complete in the next three to five years.
Making peace in this new reality will take leaders ready to listen and talk to all sides in the conflict and to consider alternatives to the moribund two-state solution, such as power-sharing, confederation or a single democratic state. It will require, above all, the courage, imagination and political will to challenge the status quo of Israeli domination and Palestinian dispossession that has led to ever more violence with each passing year.
Ali Abunimah is a Palestinian activist
The Ordeal of Mohammed Omer
July 25, 2008| By Dr Kenneth Ring | Axis of Logic, July 24, 2008, 19:41 | |
We are used to hearing about the hazards, often fatal, of being a journalist these days. Everyone is familiar with accounts of courageous Russian journalists who have been assassinated and, of course, with stories of war correspondents who have been killed or gravely wounded in the course of reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan. But what about the dangers of just being a Palestinian journalist who is simply trying to return to his own hometown in Gaza after being abroad?
Consider the case of a twenty-four-year-old reporter named Mohammed Omer.
Some background first: For the past six years Mohammed has been covering and reporting on the situation in Gaza and has published his articles in various periodicals in Europe, for the InterPress Service News Agency and The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. His articles have received much recognition and several awards, including, most recently, the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, which was presented to Mohammed in a special ceremony in London in June, 2008 – about which more in a moment.
Mohammed and his family, like many Palestinians, have suffered greatly because of the circumstances under which they live in Gaza. He himself was nearly killed by a bulldozer in the course of photographing the demolition of a neighbor’s house and one of his brothers did lose his life as a teenager as a result of being shot by Israel Defense Forces on his way home from school. Another brother was shot in the leg, which had to be amputated. Mohammed’s father has spent eleven years in Israeli prisons where torture, as is well known, is common. And in March, 2003, Mohammed returned to his home after school to find that it had been demolished by an Israeli bulldozer. All his family’s possessions – books, photographs, his own notebooks, everything – were obliterated, and he and his family suddenly found themselves homeless.
This is not an unusual family story for people living in Gaza; on the contrary, one hears accounts like this all the time from the lips of Palestinians.
Fast-forward to June 2008. Mohammed has recently received word that he is to be a co-recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Prize. For this, he must get to London. But it is not easy for any Gazan to leave the prison that Gaza has become under the unrelenting Israeli siege. Only after strenuous diplomatic efforts by Dutch officials and a prize-winning Australian journalist living in England over several weeks was it possible for Mohammed to leave Gaza to receive his award. While in Europe, Mohammed spoke in Sweden, the Netherlands and Greece about his work, in addition to giving a very moving acceptance speech in London during the ceremonies for the Gellhorn Prize.
The return to Gaza was, however, fraught with difficulties. According to various reports in the press, as soon as Mohammed arrived in Amman, the Dutch diplomats who had facilitated his trip informed him that the Israelis did not want him to return. But he was finally allowed to enter Israel via the Allenby Bridge on the morning of June 26th, after further negotiations by his Dutch sponsors.
That’s when the trouble began.
According to all the accounts I have read in the press, including several interviews with Mohammed himself, he was interrogated there, strip-searched, and brutalized by agents of the Shin Bet for several hours. Mohammed says that his interrogators made fun of him saying, “Oh, so it’s you who won the journalism award,” and repeatedly asked him where he had hidden his prize money. After that, he was continually threatened at gunpoint, forced to remove all his clothes, and then beaten and kicked for more than ten minutes until he lost consciousness. He awoke to find himself being dragged around the room by his feet, his head banging on the floor. Then a Shin Bet officer pressed his boot upon Mohammed’s neck while another painfully jabbed fingers into his face. At this point, Mr. Omer says, “I thought I was dying. I remained in a state of unconsciousness for up to 90 minutes until a medical doctor who was carrying an M-16 performed an electrocardiogram on me.”
This bare summary of Mohammed’s ordeal hardly gives more than an overall impression of his treatment, and the rank and wanton humiliation inflicted on him, seemingly motivated only by malice. Reading Mohammed’s own testimony, one can’t help being reminded of the unchecked and unmonitored torture that was visited upon Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. To illustrate this, I will present some excerpts from a recent interview between Mohammed and Amy Goodman on her Democracy Now! program.
Continued . . .
The Israeli army released the soldier who shot a bound Palestinian in Ni’lin two weeks ago
July 24, 2008uruknet.info, July 22, 2008
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A video showing an Israeli soldier shooting a bound Palestinian in the village of Ni’lin near Ramallah raised uproar among human rights organizations. The tape, which was released on Sunday by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, shows an Israeli soldier shooting Ashraf Abu Rahme with a rubber coated-steel bullet at short range while his arms were bound almost two weeks ago. B’Tselem said that other soldiers witnessed the shooting but moved no limb to stop it, and demanded an investigation to be opened into the incident. The shooting took place July 7, during an anti-wall demonstration in the village. The video shows Abu Rahme being taken to the military jeep by one soldier, while the other points his gun form a very short range at Abu Rahme and shoots him in his left foot. The video was filmed by a Palestinian girl, 14, from a window in her home in the village. B’Tselem has distributed about 100 cameras to Palestinians throughout the West Bank over the last year, as part of their “Shooting Back” project. B’Tselem released a video last month showing the beginning of an apparent assault by stick-wielding Israeli settlers on Palestinian farmers. The footage shows four people holding sticks approaching the farmers near the settlement of Susya outside Hebron. Dozens of similar violations go undocumented especially in nonviolent protests in remote villages that most media outlets do not reach. The Israeli soldier told the investigators that he opened fire at the Palestinian civilian after he had received orders by his commander. The Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, said that this incident is against the morals of the Israeli army and an investigation will be conducted. The Israeli Army District Attorney announced that the charges against the soldier will be dropped but the officer who gave the order will be questioned and may face charges. |
UK MPs urge the Quartet to bring Hamas into peace talks
July 24, 2008A cross party group of MPs has called on the Quartet mediating in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to open a dialogue with Hamas, saying “until now there has been no engagement between the Quartet and Hamas, but now we think it is time”.
Publishing a report on the humanitarian and development situation in the occupied territories, the international development select committee said the international community should “seize the opportunity” of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas to bring the Palestinian group into the peace process.
The chair of the committee, Liberal Democrat Malcolm Bruce told the Guardian that the MPs believed it was time for the Quartet – made up of the US, the EU, Russia and the United Nations – to “sound out Hamas”.
The committee heard evidence from former prime minister Tony Blair – the representative of the Quartet – whose session in front of the committee was a rare return to the House of Commons. The MPs found that Blair had made a “welcome first step” to reduce strategic checkpoints.
Although the MPs reported that the Hamas armed takeover of Gaza was “neither justified nor acceptable”, they also said that it was important to include Hamas in peace talks. They also urged the Quartet to use the opportunity provided by the truce to begin a reconciliation between rival Palestinian parties Hamas and Fatah.
The Quartet’s insistence that Hamas must first agree to three principles – to recognise Israel, renounce violence, and abide by previous agreements – before being involved in peace talks had “achieved very little” in the last two years, the committee said.
Bruce said that food, fuel and water were in short supply in Gaza, and the public health system was under severe pressure following the closure of borders. Though a six-month ceasefire was agreed between Hamas and Israel last month allowing food and aid through Gaza’s borders, the committee found that the effect of Israel’s blockades were still felt and the situation on the ground was far worse.
Bruce said: “Israel has obligations to ensure the health and welfare of the Palestinian population, which it has not met.
“We believe the situation was allowed to continue for too long, and that the Quartet did not exert sufficient pressure on Israel to open the crossings.”
The Speech Brown Should Have Made to the Knesset
July 23, 2008
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| By Stuart Littlewood – London
I and my dog Mortimer apologise most sincerely to the world, and especially to Arab friends, for our prime minister’s crass speech to the Knesset. Britain, like the US, has an uncanny knack of producing one silly leader after another from a limitless supply that thrust themselves on an unsuspecting public in order to perpetuate the Great Betrayal and the Nakba. Brown is the latest high-flier from our political swamp. Judging by his performance so far, we Brits are destined to live our lives in a state of perpetual and excruciating embarrassment. Let it be known that this prime minister doesn’t speak for me or anyone I know when he says: “Britain will always stand firmly by Israel’s side.” And nobody of my acquaintance, or their dog, would ever sign up to “an unbreakable partnership based on shared values of liberty, democracy and justice” with Israel. It is quite obvious that none of our values of liberty, democracy and justice is practised by that regime. However, it was faintly amusing to hear Brown say that “we will do more than oppose what is wrong. We will show those who would give licence to terror the way home to what is right too – showing them that the path to a better future runs not through violence, not by murder, and never with the killing of civilians but by liberty’s torch, through justice’s mighty stream, and across tolerance’s foundation of equality.” That should have had Knesset members squirming in their seats, but the irony was obviously lost on them, and on Brown himself. “I think of David Ben Gurion,” he blurted, “who from humble beginnings in Poland built up the Jewish National Institutions and in 1948 said it was not enough for the Jewish state simply to be Jewish, it had to be fully democratic offering equal citizenship to all residents: a democracy not just of one people but of all your peoples…” Mentioning Ben Gurion in the same breath as democracy and equality is not a good idea. This is the same guy who said: “I support compulsory transfer [i.e. ethnic cleansing]. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” On another occasion he admitted: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel… We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.” Brown even praised Menachem Begin but was careful not to mention the Irgun. It was Begin’s terror gang, the Irgun, that declared war on the British mandate government while Britain was still fighting Nazi Germany. And our prime minister must have forgotten that in 1946 the Irgun under Begin’s leadership blew up British headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, killing 91. |
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