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Shadow Wars

May 27, 2009

by Conn Hallinan | Foreign Policy In Focus, May 26, 2009

Sudan: The two F-16s caught the trucks deep in the northern desert. Within minutes, the column of vehicles was a string of shattered wrecks burning fiercely in the January sun. Surveillance drones spotted a few vehicles that had survived the storm of bombs and cannon shells, and the fighter-bombers returned to finish the job.

Syria: Four Blackhawk helicopters skimmed across the Iraqi border, landing at a small farmhouse near the town of al-Sukkariyeh. Black-clad soldiers poured from the choppers, laying down a withering hail of automatic weapons fire. When the shooting stopped, eight Syrians lay dead on the ground. Four others, cuffed and blindfolded, were dragged to the helicopters, which vanished back into Iraq.

Pakistan: a group of villagers were sipping tea in a courtyard when the world exploded. The Hellfire missiles seemed to come out of nowhere, scattering pieces of their victims across the village and demolishing several houses. Between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, 60 such attacks took place. They killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda members along with 687 civilians.

In each of the above incidents, no country took responsibility or claimed credit. There were no sharp exchanges of diplomatic notes before the attacks, just sudden death and mayhem.
War without Declaration

The F-16s were Israeli, their target an alleged shipment of arms headed for the Gaza Strip. The Blackhawk soldiers were likely from Task Force 88, an ultra-secret U.S. Special Forces group. The Pakistanis were victims of a Predator drone directed from an airbase in southern Nevada.

Each attack was an act of war and drew angry responses from the country whose sovereignty was violated. But since no one admitted carrying them out, the diplomatic protests had no place to go.

Continued >>

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Medical supplies finally let into Gaza

May 27, 2009
Morning Star Online, Tuesday 26 May 2009

Egyptian officials have finally allowed about 20 solidarity activists into Gaza to deliver medical equipment, having left them stranded at the Rafah border for two days.

But Palestinian Rafah border chief Ghani Hamad said Egyptian authorities had prevented 19 others from getting through during Monday’s crossing.

Derry Sinn Fein councillor Gerry Mac-Lochlainn, who accompanied the Hope for Gaza Convoy, said the weary activists had handed over 25 ambulances, a kidney dialysis machine, wheelchairs and more than $47,000 (£29,535) worth of medicine paid for with money raised by charities and donations.

Egypt and Israel have enforced a strict blockade on Gaza since the democratically elected Hamas administration quashed a Western-backed coup bid by Fatah forces two years ago, allowing only limited amounts of humanitarian supplies in.

Medical equipment has been in especially short supply since Israel’s bloody offensive against Gaza ended in January.

Solidarity activist Arafat Madi condemned Egypt’s decision to block the 19 activists.

“It took us almost two months to prepare the convoy and the lorries and gather the desperately needed medical equipment,” Mr Madi stormed.

MPs from Italy, Greece, Ireland, Switzerland and Britain took part in the Hope for Gaza convoy, led by Italian senator Fernando Rossi.

Speaking in Gaza, Mr Rossi condemned the international community’s tolerance of Israel’s punishing blockade.

“Those who do not say ‘No’ to this siege and ‘No’ to this oppression in Gaza are against freedom for the Palestinian people,” he said.

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ANALYSIS / Netanyahu bringing Israel closer to war with Iran

May 26, 2009

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking during a faction meeting in the Knesset on Monday.
 (AP)

By Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent | Haaretz/Israel, May 26, 2009
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu considers the lifting of the Iranian nuclear threat his life’s mission. Before coming to power, he had mentioned that such an operation might cost thousands of lives, but the price was justified in view of the threat’s severity. His comments yesterday at the meeting of Likud’s Knesset faction put to rest Ariel Sharon’s doctrine that Iran is not just Israel’s problem but the entire world’s problem, and Israel must not be at the forefront of the struggle. Israel is now at the forefront.

The leaders of Iran and Israel escalated the verbal confrontation yesterday. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said discussions on the nuclear issue are over, which means Iran does not intend to give up enriching uranium. Netanyahu said that if Israel does not lead the defense against the Iranian threat and bring in the United States and other countries, no one else will.

In both cases, in Tehran and Jerusalem, it’s possible to justify the leaders’ comments by citing domestic political needs. But even if the immediate motive is domestic politics, the strategic implications cannot be ignored.


Netanyahu reiterated that he has come to an understanding with U.S. President Barack Obama on preventing Iran from acquiring a military nuclear capability. Unlike the dispute between Netanyahu and the United States on the Palestinian question, the Americans have not denied his statements on understandings reached on Iran.

A senior source close to the Obama administration has said that the dialogue Obama has offered Iran will come to nothing and that the U.S. will not strike Iran unless something unusual and unexpected happens. If this turns out to be the case, the Netanyahu government may have to decide whether to attack Iran’s nuclear installations.

Three arguments are normally made to reject the likelihood of an Israeli military option: the complexity of the mission, the U.S. veto and opposition in the government. It is usually assumed that Israel will seek to repeat the 1981 bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq. This is only one scenario and not a likely one.

There are other possibilities to consider: a war in the north that drags Iran in, or a strike against a valuable target for the Iranian regime, which leads Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to take action against “the Zionist regime.” If Iran attacks Israel first, the element of surprise will be lost, but then Israel’s strike against the nuclear installations will be considered self-defense.

The second argument, regarding American opposition to a strike, depends on the circumstances. It’s hard to imagine that Obama will order the interception of Israeli aircraft on the way to Natanz if all other ways of stopping the centrifuges have failed. Clearly the administration will have to chastise Israel, and let’s not forget the statements by CIA chief Leon Panetta, who warned against any operation not coordinated with the United States. But no one knows how Obama will behave in the moment of truth. He told Newsweek that he will not tell Israelis what their defense requirements are. Netanyahu liked this very much.

The third claim, about political opposition at home, is entirely mistaken. In talks on going to war, the ministers and officers compete over who is more patriotic, not who is wiser or more rational. At decision time, no one will dare go down in history as having reservations and risk being portrayed as a coward. If the Second Lebanon War is anything to go by, all the “heroes” who criticized the war in retrospect had voted to go to war. This will be the case if Netanyahu brings to the cabinet a plan to attack Iran, and the Israel Defense Forces will say that it can.

A war with Iran is not inevitable. But the prime minister took another step yesterday toward preparing the general public for the possibility that it might break out.

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Rethinking the Costs of Peace

May 25, 2009
The US has provided to Israel more than $100 billion in military and economic assistance.

By Josh Ruebner | The Palestine Chronicle, May 24, 2009

In pledging to trim ineffective spending, President Obama declared that “there will be no sacred cows and no pet projects. All across America, families are making hard choices, and it’s time their government did the same.”

By asking earlier this month for $2.775 billion in military aid to Israel in his FY2010 budget request, it would seem that on this important policy issue President Obama’s commitment is more rhetorical than substantive. Since 1949, according to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has provided to Israel more than $100 billion in military and economic assistance. In 2007, the United States and Israel signed an agreement for $30 billion in additional military aid through FY2018.

Yet the provision of U.S. weapons to Israel at taxpayer expense has done nothing to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer to achieving a just and lasting peace. Rather, these weapons have had the exact opposite effect, as documented recently by Amnesty International, which pointed to U.S. weapons as a prime factor “fueling” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, during the Bush Administration, Israel killed more than 3,000 innocent Palestinian civilians, including more than 1,000 children. During its December 2008-January 2009 war on the occupied Gaza Strip alone, Israel killed nearly 1,200 non-combatants.

On average, for each day that President Bush sat in the Oval Office, Israel killed one Palestinian civilian, often with U.S. weapons. Before Congress appropriates any additional military aid to Israel, it should insist upon President Obama providing a comprehensive and transparent review of the effects U.S. weapons transfers to Israel have on Palestinian civilians. The Arms Export Control Act limits the use of U.S. weapons given to a foreign country to “internal security” and “legitimate self-defense.”

If, after reviewing the impact of Israel’s misuse of U.S. weapons, the President and Congress cannot find the political will to sanction Israel for its violations of the Arms Export Control Act and prohibit future arms transfers as is required by law, then there are still steps that the U.S. government should take to ensure that any future transfers are not used to commit human rights abuses but instead to promote U.S. policy goals. For example, previous U.S. loan guarantees to Israel have stipulated that funds cannot be used to support Israeli activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel in the same way would prevent these weapons from being used to kill innocent Palestinian civilians.

As President Obama has stated, “We can’t sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars, on programs that have outlived their usefulness or exist solely because of the power of politicians, lobbyists or interest groups. We simply can’t afford it.” In regard to U.S. aid to Israel, this is true as much from a budgetary standpoint as it is from a moral one.

– Josh Ruebner is the National Advocacy Director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. This article was contributed to PalestineChronicle.com. (Originally published in the Detroit Free Press, May 21, 2009)

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Netanyahu: Israel will still build on Jewish settlements

May 25, 2009

Israeli prime minister ignores Obama’s calls and says ‘natural growth’ on West Bank and in Jerusalem will continue

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said today that his country would continue to build in Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank, despite calls from the US administration for a halt.

Netanyahu’s comments came less than a week after he met President Barack Obama in Washington, where he was told that the US wanted to see a stop to settlement expansion.

“We do not intend to build any new settlements, but it wouldn’t be fair to ban construction to meet the needs of natural growth or for there to be an outright construction ban,” Netanyahu said.

“Natural growth” is the term Israel uses for expansion to accommodate population growth inside the boundaries of existing settlements. However, the 2003 US road map for peace explicitly calls for a freeze to all settlement activity, including natural growth.

Nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Settlements on occupied land are widely regarded as illegal under international law.

The issue of settlement outposts – the most remote settlements that are not even authorised by Israel – was debated in the Israeli cabinet today. Ehud Barak, the defence minister, said 22 settlement outposts, out of a total of about 100, would be taken down either by dialogue or by force. However, after police tried to demolish one outpost near Ramallah last week, settlers simply returned within hours and began rebuilding.

“The 22 … have to be dealt with now in a responsible, appropriate manner, first of all exhausting all efforts at dialogue, and if that proves impossible, then unilaterally, using force if necessary,” Barak said before the cabinet meeting. He and other Israeli officials have made similar promises in recent years but the outposts remain.

Many in Netanyahu’s government are deeply opposed to any steps against the settlers. “Outposts do not have to be dismantled now,” said the interior minister, Eli Yishai. “There is rampant illegal construction on the part of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. If we go for enforcement, then enforcement has to be unified, just and equitable.”

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‘Israel won’t yield to U.S. demands, won’t halt settlement construction’

May 24, 2009

Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon, left, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attending a Likud faction meeting.
 Emile Salman / Jini

Last update – 05:49 24/05/2009
By Haaertz Service
Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon spoke to Channel 2 on Saturday about the meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama, held earlier this week, saying that Israel’s government will not allow the U.S. to dictate its policy, and that “settlement construction will not be halted.””Settlements are not the reason that the peace process is failing, they were never an obstacle, not at any stage,” Ya’alon told Channel 2 News. “Even when Israel pulled out of [Palestinian] territory, the terror continued. Even when we uprooted [Jewish] communities, we got ‘Hamastan.’ That is why I propose that we think about it – not in slogans and not with decrees.”

According to Ayalon, “we will not halt the construction in the settlements within the framework of natural growth. There are people here who are living their lives, raising children. Housing is required ? it wasn’t housing that has prevented peace.”

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In reference to the illegal West Bank outposts, which Israel has vowed to evacuate and has begun to do so, Ya’alon stressed that “the government will not permit illegal settlement, as we’ve proven with our actions this week.”

Some believe that the evacuation of the outpost of Maoz Esther on Thursday morning, which came a day after Defense Ministry sources told Haaretz that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak had agreed on a plan to evacuate illegal outposts in the West Bank, was carried out in accordance with U.S. pressure. However, Barak denied any correlation between the Netanyahu-Obama meeting on Monday, and the evacuation.

Ya’alon also addressed reports that the U.S. had upped its demands and was trying to dictate Israel’s next moves in the negotiations with the Palestinians. “What the U.S. is asking is not a demand, we’ll see whether their declaration become actual demands,” he said.

“[U.S. envoy to the Middle East George] Mitchell will come, and we’ll talk to him. I suggest that Israel and the U.S. don’t set a timetable. We won’t let them threaten us,” Ya’alon added.

“From the banks of the Potomac in Washington it is not always clear what the real situation here is,” Ya’alon concluded. “This is where Israel must step in and help her ally understand the situation.”

Ya’alon also criticized Israel, saying that “the Israeli discourse paints us as hostile, the problem is within us.”

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US President Gives Green Light for Israel to Continue Its Nuclear Arms Program

May 24, 2009

The Alternative Information Center, May 20, 2009

The Dimona nuclear reactor in the south of Israel.The Dimona nuclear reactor in the south of Israel.

According to the Israeli press, US President Barak Obama promised Prime Minister Netanyahu that he would maintain the current understandings between the two countries regarding Israel’s nuclear program.

Before the Obama-Netanyahu summit, at an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, Rose Gottemoeller, declared that Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea should sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. These are the only four recognized sovereign states that are not parties to the treaty.

In Israel, those declarations increased the public sense of insecurity regarding US-Israel relations. The press feared that the Obama administration would review its 40 year old nuclear ambiguity policy and demand international inspection of Israel’s nuclear facilities.

As part of its nuclear ambiguity policies, Israel does not need to confirm or deny the possession of nuclear weapons. However, Israel is believed to have begun full scale production of nuclear weapons following the war in 1967, although it may have had nuclear bomb parts earlier. According to Avner Cohen’s book Israel and the Bomb, a CIA report from early stated that Israel had the materials to construct a bomb in six to eight weeks.

The CIA believed that Israel’s first bombs may have been made with highly enriched uranium stolen in the mid-1960s from the US Navy nuclear fuel plant operated by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, where sloppy material accounting would have masked the theft.

The understandings between the US and Israel regarding Israel’s nuclear capabilities date back to 1969, when President Nixon pressed Israel to “make no visible introduction of nuclear weapons or undertake a nuclear test program,” in exchange, the US will not request Israel to joint the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli former nuclear technician revealed details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program in Britain to the press. He was subsequently lured to Italy and kidnapped by Israeli agents. He was transported to Israel and convicted of treason.

Although no official statistics exist, a report published on 14 March by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington based foreign policy think-tank, it is estimated that Israel possesses between 60 to 400 thermonuclear weapons.

Israeli military forces also possess land, air, and sea-based methods for deploying their nuclear weapons, thus forming a rudimentary nuclear triad.

The Israeli nuclear program is part of a deterrence military doctrine that assumes that Israel has to maintain its absolute regional military superiority. Israel’s long-range missiles, nuclear capable aircraft, and its submarines present effective second strike deterrence against unconventional and conventional attacks.

In order to maintain its absolute military superiority, Israel must prevent other Middle Eastern countries from acquiring nuclear capabilities. It also requires Israel to remain outside of the international nuclear non-proliferation system.

According to Haaretz, an Israeli daily newspaper, in the past, Netanyahu asked President Clinton and received a written promise that the US will help to maintain Israel’s strategic deterrent capabilities and make sure that weapons control initiatives will not damage it. President Obama has now ratified this commitment.

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Obama Orders Update to Iran Attack Plan

May 23, 2009
Gates Says “All Options Are On the Table”

by Jason Ditz | Antiwar.com,  May 22, 2009

On NBC’s Today Show this morning, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that President Obama has ordered him to update the plans for a US attack on Iran, plans which were last updating during the Bush Administration. Gates says the plans are “refreshed” and insists that “all options are on the table” with respect to the potential attack.

It was only a month ago that Secretary Gates was warning vigorously against the potential attack, saying that it would create a “disastrous backlash” against the United States to hit Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities. The Obama Administration has insisted it is intending to pursue the matter diplomatically with Iran, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said the administration doesn’t expect diplomacy to work, and the effort seems to be primarily to rally international support for more measures against Iran.

The US has also been sending secret missions to Israel in recent days, reportedly to caution them against launching any surprise military attacks against Iran of their own. It was unclear how successful the warnings were: Prime Minister Netanyahu said he remained confident that the US would respect Israel’s right to attack Iran.

It is unclear whether Gates’ revelation portends a serious potential for an imminent US attack on Iran, or whether the move is more international posturing. Still, it seems unlikely the news will be greeted warmly in Iran, which is in the middle of an election campaign in which potential US talks are a major issue.

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Israel accused of ‘colonialism and apartheid’

May 23, 2009

Middle East Online, First Published 2009-05-22


When will these walls be brought down?

Study finds Israeli practices in occupied Palestinian territories resemble those of apartheid South Africa.

LONDON – The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released findings that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

The 307-page report, co-authored by Arab Media Watch adviser Victor Kattan, will be found online on the HSRC website (www.hsrc.ac.za).

Titled “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law,” the study represents 15 months of research by a team of experts in international law from South Africa, the UK, Israel and the West Bank.

The team was commissioned by the HSRC to review Israel’s practices in the OPT according to definitions of colonialism and apartheid provided by international law.

The executive summary was first presented by members of the research team at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) on Monday.

Regarding colonialism

The team found that Israel’s policy is to fragment the West Bank and annex part of it permanently to Israel, which is the hallmark of colonialism.

Israel has appropriated land and natural resources in the OPT, merged the Palestinian economy with Israel’s, and dominated the Palestinian people to ensure their subjugation to these measures.

Israel has also denied the Palestinians their right to govern their own natural resources and economic affairs.

These practices violate the prohibition on colonialism which the international community developed in the 1960s during the great decolonisation struggles in Africa and Asia.

Regarding apartheid

The team found that Israel’s laws and policies in the OPT fit the definition of apartheid in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

In brief, Israeli law defines the Jewish people as a distinct group with special rights and privileges.

These laws are then channelled into the OPT to convey privileges to Jewish settlers and disadvantage Palestinians on the basis of their identities, which function as racial identities in the sense provided by international law.

A policy of apartheid is especially indicated by the demarcation of geographic ‘reserves’ in the West Bank to which Palestinian residence is confined and which they cannot leave without a permit.

The system is very similar to the policy of ‘Grand Apartheid’ in South Africa, in which blacks were confined to black Homelands (Bantustans).

From the executive summary

“A troika of key laws underpinned the South African apartheid regime…The first pillar was formally to demarcate the population of South Africa into racial groups…and to accord superior rights, privileges and services to the white racial group…The second pillar was to segregate the population into different geographic areas, which were allocated by law to different racial groups, and restrict passage by members of any group into the area allocated to other groups,” the report read.

“The third pillar was ‘a matrix of draconian ‘security’ laws and policies that were employed to suppress any opposition to the regime and to reinforce the system of racial domination, by providing for administrative detention, torture, censorship, banning, and assassination,” it added.

“Israel’s practices in the OPT can be defined by the same three ‘pillars’ of apartheid. The first pillar derives from Israeli laws and policies that establish Jewish identity for purposes of law and afford a preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews…The second pillar is reflected in Israel’s grand policy to fragment the OPT [and] ensure that Palestinians remain confined to the reserves designated for them while Israeli Jews are prohibited from entering those reserves but enjoy freedom of movement throughout the rest of the Palestinian territory,” it continued.

“[The third pillar] is Israel’s invocation of ‘security’ to validate sweeping restrictions on Palestinian freedom of opinion, expression, assembly, association and movement [to] mask a true underlying intent to suppress dissent to its system of domination and thereby maintain control over Palestinians as a group,” it said.

Research

This study was researched and written by scholars and international lawyers based at the SOAS in London, the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in Durban, the Adalah/Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and the West Bank Affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists.

Consultation on the study’s theory and method was provided by eminent jurists from South Africa, Israel and Europe.

The Middle East Project of the HSRC is an independent two-year project to conduct analysis of Middle East politics relevant to South African foreign policy.

Its funding was provided by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government of South Africa.

The analysis in this report is entirely independent of the views or foreign policy of the Government of South Africa, and does not represent an official position of the HSRC.

It is intended purely as a scholarly resource for the Department of Foreign Affairs and the concerned international community.

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‘Israeli assassination of Nasrallah would set region ablaze’

May 22, 2009

By Jack Khoury, Haaretz Correspondent | Haaretz/Israel, May 22, 2009

Israel is planning to assassinate the head of the southern Lebanon-based Shi’ite militia Hezbollah, a development which would “set the region ablaze,” one of the group’s deputies told an Arab language newspaper on Friday.

Nawaf al-Moussawi, who was Hezbollah’s top foreign policy official and who is now running in Lebanon’s upcoming parliamentary elections, accused Israel of plotting to assassinate the Shi’ite group’s leader, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.

Al-Moussawi, who is running for a seat representing the south Lebanese town of Tyre, said that Israel’s plan was hatched in concert with Arab governments.

In an interview with the pan-Arab London-based daily newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, al-Moussawi spoke in detail about the elections. He also told the newspaper that Israel’s planned large-scale military drill is really a simulation of the army’s plan to liquidate Nasrallah.

Al-Moussawi said an Israeli assassination of Nasrallah would “set the region ablaze” and that Hezbollah was preparing for such a scenario.

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