| Al Jazeera, March 19, 2009 |
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Israel has detained at least 10 senior Hamas members in the occupied West Bank, according to officials from the Palestinian group. Nasser al-Shaer, a former Palestinian deputy prime minister, was among the men held on Thursday. The arrests took place in the West Bank cities of Hebron, Bethlehem and Nablus. The Israeli army confirmed the arrests, saying the men were wanted by Israeli security and intelligence services and that they “were taken in for questioning”. Hamas says the detainees include four Hamas politicians, three of whom have already served time in Israeli custody. The wife of al-Shaer told Al Jazeera that Israeli occupation forces stormed their home at dawn, placed her husband under arrest and took him to an undisclosed location. ‘Failed’ Shalit deal The Israeli military said in a statement: “These men have been the leaders of the ongoing effort to restore the administrative branch of the Hamas terror organisation in the region, while attempting to strengthen the power and influence of Hamas.”
Thousands of Palestinians are held in Israeli jails. The latest detentions are being seen as an effort to pressure Hamas to release an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas-linked fighters near the Gaza border in June 2006.Egyptian efforts to mediate the release of of the soldier, currently being held in the Gaza Strip, in return for the release of hundreds of Palestinians, collapsed this week. Mahmoud Musleh, a Hamas politician, told the Reuters news agency: “These arrests are an angry reaction by Israel because of the failure of the [Gilad] Shalit deal. “This won’t do Israel any good.”
An Israeli military spokesman denied the detentions were connected.Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister, had hoped to secure the release of the soldier before leaving office. Israeli arrests are part of daily incursions and raids in the villages and towns of the West Bank. Hamas has been demanding the release of more than 400 Palestinian prisoners. |
Archive for the ‘Zionist Israel’ Category
Israel arrests Hamas members
March 19, 2009
Jerusalem Patriarch: “Gaza destruction greater than portrayed in the media”
March 18, 2009
Tuesday March 17, 2009 08:59
by IMEMC & Agencies 
Patriarch Theofilos III, Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Holy Land and Jordan, stated on Monday that the destruction in the Gaza Strip from the latest Israeli offensive is far greater than the media has portrayed.
File, Image by Ghassan Bannoura
Theofilos added that the human suffering in the Gaza Strip exceeds by thousands of times the structural damage which is also unimaginable.
The statements of the Patriarch came after he concluded a visit to the Gaza Strip. He was accompanied by a number of priests and bishops.
The visiting religious delegates were briefed on the conditions of Greek Orthodox Palestinians in Gaza, and the situation all Gazan’s face due to the offensive and the ongoing blockade led by Israel and the United States.
During his visit, he held prayers at the Greek Orthodox Church, in Gaza City, and called on all residents to remain united and to help each other without any discrimination.
Spokesperson of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, Father Issa Musleh from Beit Sahour, stated that the Patriarchate denounces the offensive in Gaza, and observes it as a catastrophe and a great destruction innocent civilians had to face.
Father Issa added that the Patriarchate will continue delivering aid, collected by Greek Orthodox Churches to relieve the residents of Gaza.
“They are all our people”, Father Issa said, “we will not abandon them, we will continue to deliver aid.”
Dozens of British MPs attend solidarity meeting on Gaza in House of Commons
March 16, 2009| [ 14/03/2009 – 02:21 PM ] |
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LONDON, (PIC)– Dozens of British MPs including former lawmaker and minister Tony Benn attended a massive assembly in solidarity with Gaza held Thursday evening in the House of Commons at the invitation of friends of Palestine affiliated with the British labor party and the Palestine solidarity campaign. This special meeting was also attended by representatives of British parties, political, social and religious organizations and student and labor unions. The most prominent speech that touched the hearts of the attendees was delivered by Sameh Habib, the editor-in-chief of the English-language Palestine Telegraph newspaper. Habib moved some of the audience to tears when he described a number of real tragic scenes that occurred during the last Israeli war on the Gaza Strip and explained the size of suffering experienced by the distressed Gaza people after war. For her part, British MP Sarah Thatcher said in her speech that the humanitarian conditions in Gaza are extremely difficult and the citizens there live in a heartbreaking situation after Israel destroyed entire civilian areas. Thatcher urged the British government to urgently move to end the Gaza tragedy and also called on the UN and the Security Council to play more active role for the protection of human rights in the occupied Palestinian areas and for the enforcement of the international law. Rabbi Jacob Zappa condemned the British government, the EU and the Security Council for their silence towards Israel’s actions and aggression on the Palestinian people and its genocidal war in Gaza. |
Desmond Tutu demands Gaza war crimes inquiry
March 16, 2009Leading human rights figures including Archbishop Desmund Tutu have called for the United Nations to launch a war crimes inquiry into the conduct of both Israel and Hamas in the recent fighting in Gaza.
By Dina Kraft in Tel Aviv | Telegraph.co.uk
Last Updated: 2:12AM GMT 16 Mar 2009
The letter, supported by Amnesty International, called for “a prompt, independent and impartial investigation”.
It said: “We have seen at first hand the importance of investigating the truth and delivering justice for the victims of conflict and believe it is a precondition to move forward and achieve peace in the Middle East.”
It is signed by 16 judges and investigators into human rights crimes committed in conflicts around the world including the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Darfur and Rwanda.
Since a three-week massive Israeli assault against Hamas militants in Gaza ended in mid-January there have been questions about the nature of the fighting that occurred on the ground.
Israel launched the operation, officials said, in response to ongoing cross-border rocket fire into southern Israel by Hamas and other militant groups but the assault in small, densely populated Gaza where there was nowhere to escape the warplanes and tanks, took a heavily civilian toll.
Some 1,300 Palestinians were killed, and officials say at least half of them were civilians. Thirteen Israelis were killed, among them three civilians from rocket-fire.
“We urge world leaders to send an unfaltering signal that the targeting of civilians during conflict is unacceptable by any party on any count,” said the letter.
The Israeli foreign ministry said the call for an enquiry sounded one-sided.
“Only an NGO like Amnesty International that has no political responsibility has allowed itself to make such allegations based on very partial enquiries and to launch a call to the UN on the basis of partial testimonies and newspaper clippings is totally irresponsible,” said Yigal Palmor, a foreign ministry spokesman.
Israeli officials said repeatedly that troops did their upmost to limit civilian casualties and complained that Hamas fighters hid among civilians on purpose.
Palestinian FM: Israel on brink of ‘anti-peace’ government
March 16, 2009By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service (Israel), March 16, 2009
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said Sunday that Israel is on the verge of forming an “anti-peace” government that will make future Middle East talks impossible.
“It is very clear from what we have heard, and from what we expect, that we are going to see a far-right Israeli government, an anti-peace government,” Malki said at the start of talks with European Union officials in Brussels.
“And if that is the case, all efforts and all expectations for the renewal of negotiations between Israel and Palestine will be totally wasted,” Malki said.
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The foreign minister called on the international community to pile diplomatic pressure on the next Israeli government, saying, “We have to declare that, sadly, there is no partner on the Israeli side to negotiate with.”
His comments came a day after Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima reopened talks on forming a coalition
government in the aftermath of the close result in the country’s
February 10 parliamentary elections.
Meanwhile, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday lambasted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert over his assertion that Israel had been prepared to sign a peace agreement, but was held up the Palestinians’ “weakness and lack of courage.”
“The fact that we haven’t reached [a peace agreement] so far is due to the weakness and lack of courage on the part of the Palestinian leaders,” Olmert told ministers during his last weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “Everything else is just excuses and efforts to derail the talks.”
“We were ready to sign a peace deal but the Palestinians unfortunately did not have the courage to do so,” he said.
Abbas’ aide Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP that Olmert’s assertion was “completely false.”
“The proposals did not include conditions for the creation of an independent Palestinian state on all Palestinian territory occupied in 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital,” he said. “Israel did not present a single map and not a single serious position that could lead to a real peace on the base of two states.”
Mere days before the end of his term, Olmert used the platform of the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday morning to present an overview of his administration’s achievements.
Addressing the peace process with the Palestinians, Olmert said that his government had “gone further in the peace negotiations than any previous government.”
He voiced hope that the decades long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would be resolved in the near future, saying “I have no doubt that the negotiations I’ve held with the Palestinian Authority will result in a peace accord.”
“But we’ll have to make dramatic concessions in order to reach a point of signing an agreement,” he remarked.
Olmert also broke down the achievements of his administration to the cabinet ministers, mentioning “two well known military efforts” referring to the 2006 Second Lebanon War and the recent Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
“The event in the north [Lebanon border] brought about an unprecedented achievement of quiet in that region of Israel,” the prime minister declared. “In regard to Gaza, we made an important effort that hasn’t been completed yet and we have yet to achieve the full list of goals that we set out to achieve, but we have brought back to the global awareness the might of the Israel Defense Forces and its power of deterrence.”
Mullen: US Attack on Iran Would Focus on Navy, Air Force
March 16, 2009In PBS Interview, Admiral Warns Against Unilateral Israeli Attack
Posted March 15, 2009
In an interview today on the Charlie Rose show, Admiral Michael Mullen cautioned that a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran could endanger the stability entire region, leading to an escalation that could imperil American forces in the Gulf region.
Then Mullen spoke about a hypothetical US attack on Iran, declaring that it was in “a maritime part of the world, where the emphasis would certainly be on those two forces (the Air Force and Navy).” Mullen also insisted that there was no disconnect between the United States and Israel on the question of Iran. Israel has repeatedly been reported as being on the cusp of launching an attack on Iran.
At the same time, there is evidence of a disconnect within the Pentagon itself about Iran. Mullen has repeatedly been on the same page as Israel, accusing Iran of moving quickly toward the creation of nuclear weapons (in spite of all the evidence to the contrary). Yet Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Mullen contradicted one another rather publicly just two weeks ago, when Gates declared that Iran was “not close to a weapon at this point.”
Related Stories
- March 8, 2009 — Israeli General: Iran Capable of Creating Nuclear Bomb
- March 4, 2009 — Report: Israel ‘Seriously Considering’ Attacking Iran
- January 30, 2009 — Israeli Envoy: Attack on Gaza a ‘Preintroduction’ to Attack on Iran
compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]
Israeli settlers attack homes and stores in East Jerusalem
March 14, 2009
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IMEMC, Thursday March 12, 2009 Palestinian sources reported on Wednesday that a group of extremist Jewish settlers attacked dozens of Palestinian homes and stores in East Jerusalem. The settlers were marching in the city and chanting slogans against Arabs and Palestinians, calling for their expulsion from the Holy City. The Israeli police did not attempt to intervene, and allowed the settlers to continue their march, which encouraged them to attack Palestinian property, local sources reported. The settlers chanted “death to Arabs” and other racists slogans while marching in Arab markets and the alleys of the Old City. The Palestinian News Agency, WAFA, reported that different settler groups marched in different parts of the Old City under heavy protection and presence of the Israeli military and police. The police closed main roads in the Old City barring Palestinians from using them in order to allow the settlers to march. WAFA stated that dozens of extremist Jews arrived in the Old City by special buses, beginning in the early morning hours of Wednesday, and held prayers at the Western Wall before marching in the alleys of Jerusalem. They were accompanied by settlers living in East Jerusalem, especially from Sheikh Jarrah area and other outposts in East Jerusalem. |
Richard Falk: Israel’s War Crimes
March 13, 2009Calls for investigation into Gaza attacks
For the first time since the establishment of Israel in 1948 the government is facing serious allegations of war crimes from respected public figures throughout the world. Even the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, normally so cautious about offending sovereign states – especially those aligned with its most influential member, the United States – has joined the call for an investigation and potential accountability. To grasp the significance of these developments it is necessary to explain what made the 22 days of attacks in Gaza stand shockingly apart from the many prior recourses to force by Israel to uphold its security and strategic interests.
In my view, what made the Gaza attacks launched on 27 December different from the main wars fought by Israel over the years was that the weapons and tactics used devastated an essentially defenceless civilian population. The one-sidedness of the encounter was so stark, as signalled by the relative casualties on both sides (more than 100 to 1; 1300-plus Palestinians killed compared with 13 Israelis, and several of these by friendly fire), that most commentators refrained from attaching the label “war”.
The Israelis and their friends talk of “retaliation” and “the right of Israel to defend itself”. Critics described the attacks as a “massacre” or relied on the language of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the past Israeli uses of force were often widely condemned, especially by Arab governments, including charges that the UN Charter was being violated, but there was an implicit acknowledgement that Israel was using force in a war mode. War crimes charges (to the extent they were made) came only from radical governments and the extreme left.
The early Israeli wars were fought against Arab neighbours which were quite literally challenging Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign state. The outbreaks of force were of an inter-governmental nature; and even when Israel exhibited its military superiority in the June 1967 six day war, it was treated within the framework of normal world politics, and though it may have been unlawful, it was not criminal.
But from the 1982 Lebanon war this started to change. The main target then was the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in southern Lebanon. But the war is now mainly remembered for its ending, with the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Although this atrocity was the work of a Lebanese Christian militia, Israeli acquiescence, control and complicity were clearly part of the picture. Still, this was an incident which, though alarming, was not the whole of the military operation, which Israel justified as necessary due to the Lebanese government’s inability to prevent its territory from being used to threaten Israeli security.
The legacy of the 1982 war was Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and the formation of Hizbullah in reaction, mounting an armed resistance that finally led to a shamefaced Israeli withdrawal in 1998. This set the stage for the 2006 Lebanon war in which the announced adversary was Hizbullah, and the combat zone inevitably merged portions of the Lebanese civilian population with the military campaign undertaken to destroy Hizbullah. Such a use of hi-tech Israeli force against Hizbullah raised the issue of fighting against a hostile society with no equivalent means of defending itself rather than against an enemy state. It also raised questions about whether reliance on a military option was even relevant to Israel’s political goals, as Hizbullah emerged from the war stronger, and the only real result was to damage the reputation of the IDF as a fighting force and to leave southern Lebanon devastated.
The Gaza operation brought these concerns to the fore as it dramatised this shift away from fighting states to struggles against armed resistance movements, and with a related shift from the language of “war” to “criminality”. In one important respect, Israel managed to skew perceptions and discourse by getting the media and diplomats to focus the basic international criminal law question on whether or not Israeli use of force was “disproportionate”.
This way of describing Israeli recourse to force ignores the foundational issue: were the attacks in any legal sense “defensive” in character in the first place? An inquiry into the surrounding circumstances shows an absence of any kind of defensive necessity: a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that had been in effect since 19 July 2008 had succeeded in reducing cross-border violence virtually to zero; Hamas consistently offered to extend the ceasefire, even to a longer period of ten years; the breakdown of the ceasefire is not primarily the result of Hamas rocket fire, but came about mainly as a result of an Israeli air attack on 4 November that killed six Hamas fighters in Gaza.
Peace and Justice Post 
Zionism is the problem
March 16, 2009The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace.
By Ben Ehrenreich | Los Angeles Times, 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.”
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