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Israel’s front-line thugs

August 9, 2008

Consistent stands against the depravity of the West Bank’s lawless settlers are the only way to put an end to their crimes

News that leftwing activists are facing increased pressure to stay out of the West Bank is a worrying development in local politics, especially at a time when settler attacks on Palestinians are on the increase. Rather than clamp down on the settlers perpetrating the violence, the authorities are pursuing a path of locking the doors to the outside world and pretending that nothing at all is amiss.

Not all settlers are inherently violent; to portray their entire subgroup as such is as disingenuous as claiming that all Palestinians are fanatics just because there are radical elements in their midst. However, just because all settlers shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush doesn’t excuse the inaction and indifference on the part of the Israeli authorities when faced with the crimes of the extremists among the settler population.

Of late, there has been a steady stream of brutal assaults carried out by settlers against their Palestinian neighbours in the West Bank, right under the noses of the lackadaisical army. The phenomenon is, sadly, nothing new; what has brought the story back into the spotlight are the efforts of human rights groups, such as B’Tselem to film the violence and document the shocking reality on the ground – which is why, it seems, the authorities are so keen to clamp down on their activity in the region.

However, the settlers don’t confine their vindictive and vicious attacks to Palestinians; they are not averse to attacking their Jewish peers either. Two recent incidents amply demonstrated the extent to which the Wild West Bank has become bandit country, with no sheriff’s posse daring to stand up to the rogue elements holding the region at ransom.

First up was a Breaking the Silence tour to Hebron, whose bus was surrounded by jeering settlers who blocked their path and showered those aboard with abuse. Instead of intervening on behalf of the victims of the threatening mob, the police “did not manage to disperse the mob”, “no arrests were made”, and in the end they simply ordered the tour group to return from whence they came.

Then another Breaking the Silence group came under attack from settler vigilantes, who doused the participants with boiling water after confronting them in the streets of Hebron and heckling them with cries of “traitor”, and other such hostile invective.

For anyone who’s been to Hebron, Kiryat Arba, or any of the settlements which play home to the extremist hardcore of the settler movement, incidents such as those in Hebron, or the assaults in Susiya, are by no means surprising. Being subjected to settler abuse and attack is part and parcel of the experience for Israeli left-wingers and Palestinian locals alike. Sordid as it may be, the depths to which many settlers have sunk is merely a symptom of the malaise infecting Israeli society, rather than the cause.

Radical elements exist in every religion, in every ethnic group, and in every country. Human nature dictates that there will always be those for whom conforming to societal norms is antithetic to their bigoted, boorish ways – but that is when those charged with keeping order in society are meant to be put into play. In Israel, the state apparatus should, in theory, be mobilised to full effect to quell any illegal activity, whether carried out by right- or left-winger, Jew or gentile.

The security forces are, of course, by no means scared to act when it suits them. Palestinian demonstrations are routinely put down with excessive force: rocks flung by pre-teens are countered with rubber bullets, tear gas, and – often – live and indiscriminate fire. But when it comes to clamping down on violence emanating from the settler community, a different set of rules apply, and the authorities’ reeking hypocrisy is exposed as endemic to the way in which they view the different strands of Israeli society.

I’ve witnessed the double standards for myself countless times, from the kid-glove treatment my platoon used when evicting the settlers of Homesh to the heavy-handed brutality meted out by the border police in the Palestinian villages of Bil’in and Nilin. What is explained away as “necessary in the interests of security” in one situation is turned on its head in another; softly-softly replacing an all-out show of force, simply because the assailants in question are religious Jews rather than Muslims.

The longer the duplicity is allowed to thrive in the military and political spheres in Israel, the worse the violence will get on the part of the settlers’ lunatic fringe. Giving them carte blanche to engage in low-level crime only encourages them to see how much more they can get away with, in their attempts to intimidate and bully anyone they see as against them in their holy war.

There’s unlikely to be a sea-change any time soon in the upper echelons of Israeli politics, given their tacit support of the settlement enterprise in turning a blind eye to illegal construction, and the army’s providing of military support to settlers the length and breadth of the West Bank. However, there has to be a concerted effort on the parts of all with an interest in human rights to follow B’Tselem’s lead and apply sufficient pressure on Israeli judges to see court cases through to a satisfactory conclusion.

Only by taking consistent and courageous stands against the depravity of the lawless settlers will there be an end to their crimes. The police force and army seem uninterested in calling them to heel, or allowing activists to bear witness to their crimes; it can only be hoped that the legal system is made of sterner, and more moral, stuff than them.

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One state with equal rights

August 8, 2008

Socialist Worker, August 8, 2008 | Issue 677

Analysis: Snehal Shingavi

The Oslo Accords of August 1993 were supposed to lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, in exchange for Palestinian recognition of Israel. Fifteen years later, after a vast increase in Israeli settlements on the West Bank, the ongoing erection of an apartheid wall and the barbaric siege of Gaza, increasing numbers of Palestinians and their supporters regard a two-state solution as unworkable. Snehal Shingavi looks at the debate.

Demonstration for Palestinian rights in ChicagoDemonstration for Palestinian rights in Chicago

IN THE 1970s, the dominant Fatah group within the Palestine Liberation Organization dropped its demand for a unified state governing all of Palestine with equal rights for all citizens and began the process of promoting a “two-state solution.”

In the aftermath, a consensus grew among the Palestinian left that a Palestinian mini-state was the only viable solution for Palestinians. According to this argument, the best Palestinians could achieve was a state established on the territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 Six Day War–land that amounted to less than 30 percent of historic Palestine.

The conclusion that a two-state solution was the only viable alternative reflected several political realities. The first was the belief that Israel had become a dominant power in the region, with the backing of the United States and Europe. Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War–and the unwillingness and inability of any other states to deliver a decisive military blow against it–confirmed this conclusion.

The second factor was a shift in the thinking of the mainstream Palestinian liberation movement, toward trilateral negotiations (between the PLO, Israel and the U.S.) and away from armed struggle and a broader engagement of regional issues related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While armed struggle, in itself, held no hope of winning Palestinian statehood, the trilateral negotiations among unequal powers meant that the PLO had little with which to bargain and much to lose. Once the PLO accepted peace talks and the nebulous “two-state” framework that came with them, a series of political debacles took place under the auspices of the Oslo Accords. Yet the “peace process” reinforced the idea that Palestinian statehood would happen only at Israel’s behest.

The other factor in the debate was a decline in the Palestinian secular left, the long-time proponent of the idea of a single, democratic, secular state in Palestine.

The political weaknesses of the Palestinian left–its traditions of Stalinism and its unwillingness to oppose the Arab ruling classes of other countries in the region–left it unable to meet the challenges it faced. Thus, when the armed struggle posed the possibility of regional revolutions in the 1970s and Arab governments, particularly in Jordan and Lebanon, cracked down savagely on the Palestinian resistance, the left was paralyzed.

With the demise of the secular left, the possibility of a one-state solution seemed to die as well. As a further consequence, Palestinians lost a single banner for a unified movement that represented their concerns as an oppressed nation. Since the 1948 creation of Israel on much of the land of historic Palestine, Palestinians have always been divided between those who live within Israel’s borders, those in the Occupied Territories and those in the diaspora. Abandoning a one-state solution meant accepting those divisions as permanent.

The result was that the Palestinian nationalist struggle gave rise to rival movements and rival local leaders. Israel has been able to play on those divisions and the relative weakness of the Palestinian resistance to tighten the screws on the Palestinian population to unbearable levels.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

BUT ISRAELI policies over the past 15 years, under the auspices of the Oslo Accords, have convinced increasing numbers of Palestinians that the idea of a mini-state, or a two-state solution, isn’t viable.

Rather, it leaves unresolved all the decisive issues that resulted from the creation of the state of Israel in the first place–not the least of which are the rights of the large refugee population.

Continued . . .

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President Obama Up Against the Middle East “Berlin Wall”

August 7, 2008

Robert Weitzel, August 6, 2008

“People of the world — look at Berlin, where a wall came down . . . and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one” -Barak Obama–

On July 24, Barak Obama stood where a 96-mile-long wall of barbed wire and concrete once separated the ideologies and lives of East and West Berlin. He told a crowd of 200,000 that “history reminds us that walls can be torn down” and that the “greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us one from another.”

He reminded the crowd that sixty years ago this summer, the Soviet Union “cut off food and supplies to more than two million Germans in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin. That [was] when . . . the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city.”

American pilots nicknamed the rescue “Operation Vittles.” History knows it as the Berlin Airlift.

For the fifteen months of Operation Vittles, American C-47 and British Avro York cargo planes flew over the wall separating East and West Berlin 278,228 times, flying 92 million miles and delivering over 2,325,000 tons of food and vital supplies.

The Allies literally “flew to the sun” to save two million people.

The day before his Berlin speech, Obama stood at the 187-foot-long Western Wall that flanks the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. This wall is the closest anyone can get to the “Even ha-shetiya” (Foundation Stone), the holiest spot in Judaism and the biblical justification for the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

His presence at the wall so soon after his genuflection at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington D.C. in June assured the Israelis that their “security” would remain the number one priority of U.S. Middle East Policy.

As a C-47 flies, Obama was standing less than two miles from the 400-mile-long wall of concrete and fear and hate that divides a land and imprisons hope and makes a mockery of the democratic pretensions of Israel. On the Israeli side it is a landscaped separation barrier. On the Palestinian side it is a bleak apartheid wall. Neither barrier nor wall was mentioned by Obama . . .either day.

The walls surrounding the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have turned these areas into open-air prisons. At the whim of the Israeli government or commanding officer or private soldier, entry/exit points are closed for hours, days, weeks or months.

Palestinians seeking life-saving medical attention are denied passage to hospitals on the landscaped side. Children are born just to die in the scorched dust while their mothers wait for permission to pass—mothers die as well. Workers are denied access to jobs, farmers to fields and students to school. A season’s worth of harvest rots in trucks broiling in the hot sun. Food, medical supplies, replacement parts for a deteriorating infrastructure and the stuff of daily commerce are permitted through in a trickle much too small to sustain the nearly four million people held beyond the reach of humanity’s conscience.

Fully eighty percent of people in Gaza live on less than two dollars a day and depend on food aid for their day-to-day survival. Many parents can provide only one meal a day for themselves and their children.

Dov Weisglas, a senior Israeli government advisor, was candid, if not boastful, regarding Israel’s unconscionable policy of cutting off food and supplies to the walled areas, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Anyone with an unblinkered view of the Zionist vision will understand Weisglas to mean, “The idea is to make their lives so intolerable that they lose hope and “choose” to go somewhere . . . anywhere . . . else.”

If ever there was a need for an airlift to breech a wall and succor a desperate people it is now. It is Palestine. Should Barak Obama become the next president of the world’s only superpower he will have an opportunity and the wherewithal to put his well-articulated Berlin vision into action. He will have an opportunity to walk his talk.

Forming a humanitarian “coalition of the willing,” President Obama can order American C-130 Hercules cargo planes, with a payload of 18 tons, to transport supplies the 360 miles from Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey to Israel. Sustaining the West Bank and Gaza Strip for fifteen months will require ferrying five million tons of food and supplies 93 million miles in 258,333 flights.

‘Amaliet Ta’am (Operation Vittles), like the Berlin Airlift, will required a “trip to the sun.” But the “trip” will send a message to Israel that the world is standing as one to demand that they tear down the walls and create a legitimate secular democracy that guarantees the civil and human rights of all its inhabitants regardless of religion or ideology.

Barak Obama is not a disinterested or ill informed or uncaring man. He knows the reality of the Palestinians’ brutally suffocating existence. But he, like all national politicians in America, has had his knees weakened by the realpolitik of Israel’s shadow government on K Street.

Hopefully, if Obama is the man he claims to be, he will change the realpolitik in America and will one day walk with strengthened knees across the sands of a true democracy in Palestine-Israel or Israel-Palestine . . . or whatever they elect to call it.

_______

Robert Weitzel is a contributing editor to Media With a Conscience. His essays regularly appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He can be contacted at: robertweitzel@mac.com

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Zionism versus democracy

August 7, 2008

By Frank Scott
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Online Journal, Aug 7, 2008

“The Zionist power configuration’s primary loyalty is to the state of Israel and its policy is designed to colonize the US congress on behalf and to the benefit of the ‘mother country,’ Israel” –James Petras

James Petras speaks to a reality rarely discussed in circles accustomed to whispered criticism, at best, of the U.S. performance in support of Israel. He mentions Congress, but the executive branch has been equally “colonized.” The scripted performances by major party presidential candidates, whether bowing before the Israel — American lobby in Washington or praying before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, are evidence enough. The dominance exercised by what he calls the Zionist Power Configuration is a very critical problem for a public that remains generally oblivious to its existence, let alone the control it has over our political system.

With a crippled economy and over extended armed forces, America’s global position has old establishment groups trying to retake control before mindless dedication to the Jewish state brings about total ruin. A revival of the old WASP (white Anglo Saxon Protestant) power cabal finds it in a struggle with the newer Jewish power bloc. This clash of establishment gangs will hardly bring social justice and peace to America, but it could give the public a chance to come to its senses. Support for a racist state that brutalizes its native population in a way that shocks veterans of apartheid South Africa can only continue with a public kept in the dark.

Under the dominance of propaganda that tells us innocent Israeli Jews are being persecuted by evil Palestinian Arabs, the U.S. continues to prop up the Jewish state with money, and wage nation destroying wars on its behalf. Constantly retelling the story of past dreadful persecution makes it seem that because German Nazis brutalized European Jews, Israeli Ashkenazis are morally justified to brutalize Palestinian Arabs. Settlers in a land which they believe, with no evidence save religious faith, is where they originated, are seen as natives, while the people who’ve lived there for centuries are expelled, treated as terrorists, and despite their Semitic origins, called anti-Semites by those whose only connection to Semitism is their belief system.

This situation would be the ultimate black comedy, if it were not so dangerous to all humanity. Israel is run by some seriously disturbed people who are not waving an ax, but are armed with nuclear weapons. These, of course are respectfully never mentioned by what is called the international community, which means America, Israel and a handful of their lackey states.

How can the U.S.A. continue its multi-trillion dollar funding of Israel, the waging of endless war, and the maintenance of military bases in hundreds of foreign countries, while its people suffer a seriously declining economic status? Only with the help of a media that tells us our problems originate in faraway places rather than at home, and that our most important ally in the world is Israel. Both are in complete denial of material reality. An individual acting on such presumptions would be judged clinically insane and institutionalized. Our society behaves as though delusions were reality, lies were the truth, and a psychotic condition was a sign of excellent mental health.

The U.S.A. is in hock for trillions of dollars and hated not only in the Middle East, but increasingly in other parts of the world. This has led to calls for change which have seen the WASPs reasserting, to regain control from the power bloc that has played a major role in creating the present crisis, though not the unacknowledged longer standing one which is capitalism itself. That major threat to the future of humanity hardly depends on whether the ruling group is gentile or Jewish, but on whether we allow that system to destroy the entire planet, and not just the Middle East.

The relation of policy and its reportage is clear in the preparing of Americans for a war with Iran, and then priming them into a maybe we will maybe we won’t indecision. Each time heated talk about Iran cools slightly, the price of gasoline declines. Until the next surge of fanatic babble that claims Iran will nuke Israel and exterminate all Jews, at which point the price goes up again.

These fluctuations in maniacal rhetoric and petroleum prices are part of the struggle to exercise control over U.S. policy in the Middle East. The fact that Americans are not using as much gasoline has not escaped the awareness of petro-capital and it surely plays a role in the recent price decrease, which is still much higher than it was a year ago. The notion that oil powers provoked us into the war in Iraq is still widely believed, despite the fact that this would mean Big Oil decided to endanger its foreign relations and watch Americans consume less of its product. That ridiculous story is a measure of the extent of Jewish-Israeli power over not only the government, but the media which controls the consciousness of the American public.

Continued fables of an alleged Iranian threat, based on the same fictional evidence, supernatural fears and psychotic tendencies that transform Israel from a national nightmare for Palestinian Arabs into a Paradise Disneyland for Israeli Jews, make it more vital than ever to put a stop to this madness. Electing a new member of the colonized population to the presidency, whether in the USA or Palestine, will not make a substantial difference. Rather than a simple change at the top, which is part of the problem, we need a profound awakening to action by the mass population at the bottom, which could bring about the real solution: A 50-state democracy in the U.S.A., and a one state democracy in Palestine.

Copyright © 2008 Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

Frank Scott writes political commentary which appears in the Coastal Post, a monthly publication from Marin County, California, and on numerous web sites, and on his shared blog at legalienate.blogspot.com. Contact him at frankscott@comcast.net.

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Israel mulls military option for Iran nukes

August 7, 2008

Israel beefs up strike capability, confident it could deal setback to Iran nuclear program

STEVEN GUTKIN
AP News

Aug 06, 2008 17:21 EST

Israel is building up its strike capabilities amid growing anxiety over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and appears confident that a military attack would cripple Tehran’s atomic program, even if it can’t destroy it.

Such talk could be more threat than reality. However, Iran’s refusal to accept Western conditions is worrying Israel as is the perception that Washington now prefers diplomacy over confrontation with Tehran.

The Jewish state has purchased 90 F-16I fighter planes that can carry enough fuel to reach Iran, and will receive 11 more by the end of next year. It has bought two new Dolphin submarines from Germany reportedly capable of firing nuclear-armed warheads — in addition to the three it already has.

And this summer it carried out air maneuvers in the Mediterranean that touched off an international debate over whether they were a “dress rehearsal” for an imminent attack, a stern warning to Iran or a just a way to get allies to step up the pressure on Tehran to stop building nukes.

According to foreign media reports, Israeli intelligence is active inside Iranian territory. Israel’s military censor, who can impose a range of legal sanctions against journalists operating in the country, does not permit publication of details of such information in news reports written from Israel.

The issue of Iran’s nuclear program took on new urgency this week after U.S. officials rejected Tehran’s response to an incentives package aimed at getting it to stop sensitive nuclear activity — setting the stage for a fourth round of international sanctions against the country.

Israel, itself an undeclared nuclear power, sees an atomic bomb in Iranian hands as a direct threat to its existence.

Israel believes Tehran will have enriched enough uranium for a nuclear bomb by next year or 2010 at the latest. The United States has trimmed its estimate that Iran is several years or as much as a decade away from being able to field a bomb, but has not been precise about a timetable. In general U.S. officials think Iran isn’t as close to a bomb as Israel claims, but are concerned that Iran is working faster than anticipated to add centrifuges, the workhorses of uranium enrichment.

“If Israeli, U.S., or European intelligence gets proof that Iran has succeeded in developing nuclear weapons technology, then Israel will respond in a manner reflecting the existential threat posed by such a weapon,” said Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz, speaking at a policy forum in Washington last week.

Continued . . .

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Spotlight on the lesser evil

August 4, 2008
By Gideon Levy | Haaretz.com, Aug 3, 2008

The Olmert affair has come and all but gone. A few more invoices here and some daggers there will be hurled at the hemorrhaging political corpse hanging in the town square, and Ehud Olmert will disappear into the sunset. A hedonistic, spendthrift prime minister, a relatively small-time, corrupt man who, like many others, did not know where to the draw the line between public and private money and who – like many of his colleagues in the upper crust of government – thought that a politician deserves everything, is going home. Olmert and his transgressions will be remembered as a footnote in history.

Contrary to the typically passionate claims of a few self-styled protectors of the law, Olmert`s conduct did not for one second endanger the rule of law in Israel; it did not threaten its form of government, nor did it undermine the state`s foundations. Far more serious acts of corruption have been committed. Much greater dangers stalk and ultimately threaten the rule of law, and our democracy is fissured and fragile due to other phenomena. It isn`t the Rishon Tours affair, nor the house on Cremieux Street, nor the Talanskys of this world, nor the cronyism and patronage in the Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry that shape the state`s character. On the contrary, the manner in which the relevant instruments of power sprang into action and launched an all-out offensive clearly proves that when it comes to minor corruptible violations, the rule of law is in relatively good shape. The danger we are faced with stems from other, incalculably graver circumstances. Nobody has taken it upon himself to wage a war against these circumstances, because this war demands much more courage.

Like the `investigative journalism` programs we see on television, the self-righteous preoccupy themselves with trifle matters. How great it must be to make a name for yourself as a pursuer of justice as you shine the spotlight of your `investigation` onto a rabbi who got a little too frisky or the mechanic who overcharges his customer. This is a war that is universally satisfying to all sides. After all, who wants to tolerate an adulterous rabbi, a swindling mechanic, or a thief for a prime minister?

It goes without saying that such characters are worthy of ostracism, yet these battles are confined to the tiny space illuminated by a flashlight instead of the larger front where the greatest danger awaits. Olmert failed the Kolbotek (a popular consumer affairs TV show) litmus test, and he deserves to be punished accordingly, but the saintly image of the hell-bent seekers of justice that has been affixed to those who have brought him down is exaggerated, if not ridiculous.

Continued . . .

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Israel’s secret police pressuring sick Gazans to spy for them, says report

August 4, 2008

· Treatment only offered to would-be informants
· Patients allowed to cross the border drops sharply

A porter pushes a 15-year-old Palestinian cancer patient through the Erez crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel

A porter pushes a 15-year-old Palestinian cancer patient through the Erez crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel Photograph: Goran Tomasevic

Israel’s secret police are pressuring Palestinians in Gaza to spy on their community in exchange for urgent medical treatment, according to a report released today by an Israeli human rights organisation.

Physicians for Human Rights says the Shin Bet began interrogating Palestinian patients seeking permission to travel from Gaza to Israel for crucial medical help after Israel blockaded and then declared the tiny territory an enemy entity more than a year ago.

Typically, patients are taken to a small, windowless room, underground, beneath the security terminal at Erez, the only passenger crossing that remains open between Gaza and Israel, where they are questioned by Shin Bet agents for hours, the report says.

Refusal to cooperate often results in the denial of medical treatment. Based on the testimonies of more than 30 Palestinians – 11 of which are published – the report says the Shin Bet is using coercion and extortion to force patients to collaborate.

“They took me through underground passages and made me sit in another waiting room for almost 45 minutes. A man approached me and called me to another room for interrogation. He asked me to sit down and presented himself as Moshe,” Bassam al-Wahidi, a Fatah-aligned journalist, said in his affidavit to Physicians for Human Rights.

“After all my responses he said to me: ‘I want to talk to you openly when you return from Israel so that you will have an acceptable reputation on the Israeli side. Either you make contact with me and agree to my demands, or you will not get any medical treatment which will cause you to be blind and you will become a burden to your family and friends,'” Wahidi said in his affidavit.

But he said he refused and was forced to return to Gaza without receiving any treatment. Now the 28-year-old, who married a year and a half ago, is completely blind in his right eye and losing the vision in his overstrained left eye.

“I might divorce because I can’t stand in front of my wife as a disabled person,” Wahidi said .

He is one of an unknown number of patients from Gaza who have been denied medical treatment after refusing to inform on their friends, neighbours and relatives. Many patients feel they are being forced to choose between preserving their life or protecting their community. Physicians for Human Rights says such pressure amounts to coercion and extortion.

International law forbids the use of civilians in conflict to damage an enemy state and collaboration in the Palestinian community is a crime punishable by death.

“The patient knows that refusal to respond to the interrogator’s questions and demands will ruin his chances to access medical treatment,” the report says. While some patients are turned back after they refuse to collaborate, others arrive at the security interview only to be detained and locked in jail, it says.

Applications for help in Israel jumped sharply with Israel’s blockade on Gaza.

Decrepit and deficient hospital services in the besieged territory coupled with the closure of Gaza’s crossing into Egypt forced Palestinians in the besieged territory to increasingly seek help in Israel.

As a result, the number of requests for medical assistance in Israel – which is funded by the Palestinian Authority – jumped from about 600 a month at the beginning of 2007 to about 1,000 a month by the end of the year. As a result, the proportion of sick Gazans permitted to cross into Israel has dropped sharply from 90% in early 2007 to 62% by the end of the year.

Israel’s security services insists that patients are denied entry only on security grounds. It also says that holding Israel responsible for the health of Palestinians in Gaza is “wholly inappropriate and misleading”, arguing that it no longer occupies the coastal territory, having withdrawn its troops and settlers from the area in 2005.

However, in a letter to Physicians for Human Rights in June, Colonel Shlomi Muchtar said: “The state’s obligations are derived, among other things, from the rules of war and from the scope of its control over border crossings between it and the Gaza Strip.”

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Strike On Iran Still Possible, US Tells Israel

August 1, 2008
Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense chief, is visiting as Washington is perceived to be softening its stance toward Tehran.
By Paul Richter and Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
July 30, 2008
WASHINGTON — Bush administration officials reassured Israel’s defense minister this week that the United States has not abandoned all possibility of a military attack on Iran, despite widespread Israeli concern that Washington has begun softening its position toward Tehran.

In meetings Monday and Tuesday, administration officials told Defense Minister Ehud Barak that the option of attacking Iran over its nuclear program remains on the table, though U.S. officials are primarily seeking a diplomatic solution.

At the same time, U.S. officials acknowledged that there is a rare divergence in the U.S. and Israeli approaches, with Israelis emphasizing the possibility of a military response out of concern that Tehran may soon have the know-how for building a nuclear bomb.

“Is there a difference of emphasis? It certainly looks as though there is,” said a senior American Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the sensitive talks.

U.S. and Israeli officials believe Iran is enriching uranium with the aim of building nuclear weapons.

Tehran says that it is engaged in a peaceful enrichment program for civilian energy purposes.

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said in an interview that U.S. officials have often made it clear to Israeli officials that Washington prefers to try to mitigate the threat from Tehran by applying economic pressure.

“The military option, although always available, is not our preferred route,” Morrell said.

“We have made that point clear to them and the world in our public statements and private meetings.”

Barak left Israel for Washington amid reports in the Israeli press that he would try to talk the Bush administration out of what many Israelis perceive as a more conciliatory policy toward Iran.

On Tuesday, the Israeli Defense Ministry released a statement saying that Barak had told Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that “a policy that consists of keeping all options on the table must be maintained.”

Speaking to reporters in Washington, Barak said that there remains time for “accelerated sanctions” to try to persuade Iran to abandon the nuclear program.

Israeli officials were concerned in December when a key U.S. intelligence report concluded that Iran had abandoned an effort to build a nuclear bomb. They also have noted with concern comments this month by Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that an Israeli airstrike on Iran would further destabilize the Middle East and compound the strain on overworked U.S. forces.

Also this month, in a rare move toward engagement with Tehran, a senior U.S. diplomat took part in international talks in Geneva about the nuclear program.

And U.S. officials have floated a proposal for opening a low-level diplomatic office in Tehran.

These gestures have taken place at a time of intensifying discussion in Israel about the wisdom of an Israeli military attack on Iran before the Bush administration leaves office.

A senior State Department official said Tuesday that Israel “is a sovereign state and we understand that they view this as an existential threat. And we take the threat that’s posed by Iran seriously as well.”

But the official, who asked to remain unidentified in keeping with diplomatic rules, said the administration is “pursuing the strategy we believe is the right one.”

Gates, in an hourlong meeting with Barak, told the minister that the United States intends to consider providing radar to Israel that can detect ballistic missiles launched from Iran and supplying weapons to counter rocket attacks from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, according to a senior Defense official.

paul.richter@latimes.com

julian.barnes@latimes.com

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MIDEAST: Arabs Despair of U.S. Even More

August 1, 2008

Analysis by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani

CAIRO, Jul 31 (IPS) – For decades, the U.S. has jealously guarded its role of sole arbiter of the Arab-Israeli dispute. In light of recent shows of support for Israel by U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama, however, many Arabs fear that Zionist influence on the U.S. body politic — across the political spectrum — has made the notion of ‘U.S. even-handedness’ a contradiction in terms.

“When it comes to the Middle East conflict, the Arabs no longer see any difference between Republicans and Democrats,” Ahmed Thabet, political science professor at Cairo University told IPS. “Both parties vie with one another in expressing total support for Israel.”

In a speech before Israeli parliament in May, U.S. President George W. Bush went further than any of his predecessors in voicing praise for the self-proclaimed Jewish state. Referring to Israelis as a “chosen people”, Bush pledged Washington’s unwavering support against Israel’s traditional nemeses, including Iran and resistance parties Hamas and Hezbollah.

In statements heavy on “Judeo-Christian” religious references, Bush went on to describe Washington’s alliance with Israel as “unbreakable”.

Similar sentiments have been echoed by Bush’s would be Republican successor, Senator John McCain, who has also pledged “eternal” U.S. support for Israel.

“Israel and the U.S. must always stand together,” McCain declared before the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in early June. “We are the most natural of allies. And, like Israel itself, that alliance is for ever.”

Calling Israel “an inspiration to free nations everywhere,” McCain barely addressed longstanding Palestinian aspirations for statehood. Like Bush, he denounced regional actors opposed to Israel’s occupation of Arab land, referring to Hamas as “the terrorist-led group in charge of Gaza.”

Neither Bush nor McCain so much as mention — let alone criticise — Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinian populations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This treatment includes frequent military assaults often targeting civilians, the use of ‘targeted assassinations’, the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip (which has brought that territory to the brink of starvation), continued construction of Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and the forced removal of non-Jewish, Arab inhabitants from the city of Jerusalem.

Arab analysts, meanwhile, express little surprise at such blatant pro-Israel bias, coming as it does from a political party thoroughly influenced by the so-called “neo-conservative” movement, of which Israeli ascendancy is a central tenet.

More disturbing to Arab critics of U.S. policy is the fact that Democratic presidential contenders have shown just as much zeal for Israeli supremacy as their Republican rivals.

In his own speech to AIPAC in early June, Obama stressed the need for a “more nuanced” approach to U.S. Middle East peacemaking. He stunned many, however, when he went on to state that Jerusalem would “remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

Although Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since 1967, its claim to the city has never been recognised by the international community. Officially, the status of Jerusalem — which Palestinians also want as capital of their future state — is supposed to be determined in long-awaited “final status” negotiations.

Continued . . .

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Making Nuclear Extermination Respectable

August 1, 2008
James Petras | The Palestine Chronicle, July 30, 2008
‘Morris is a frequent lecturer and consultant to the Israeli political and military establishment.’

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:

Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Barring this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland.

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.

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