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Posts Tagged ‘Hamas’
Former US President Carter: Gazans “are literally starving”Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
June 15, 2009
Defending Israeli War Crimes
May 30, 2009In response to a series of reports by human rights organizations and international legal scholars documenting serious large-scale violations of international humanitarian law by Israeli armed forces in its recent war on the Gaza Strip, 10 U.S. state attorneys general sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defending the Israeli action. It is virtually unprecedented for state attorneys general – whose mandates focus on enforcement of state law – to weigh in on questions regarding the laws of war, particularly in a conflict on the far side of the world. More significantly, their statement runs directly counter to a broad consensus of international legal opinion that recognizes that Israel, as well as Hamas, engaged in war crimes.
The wording of the letter closely parallels arguments by Bush administration officials in support for Israel’s devastating offensive during their final days in office. Having been signed nearly 11 weeks after the end of the fighting and made public only late last month, it may have been part of an effort to undermine tentative efforts by the Obama administration to take a more balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A statement by state attorneys general putting forth a legal rationale for the large-scale killings of civilians is particularly distressing as concerns about civilian casualties from U.S. air and missile strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan has grown.
The attorneys general signing on to the letter included Republicans Rob McKenna of Washington, Mike Cox of Michigan, John Suthers of Colorado, Bill McCollum of Florida, Jon Bruning of Nebraska, and Mark Shurtleff of Utah. Signatories also included such prominent Democrats as Richard Cordray of Ohio, Patrick Lynch of Rhode Island, Jack Conway of Kentucky, and Buddy Caldwell of Louisiana.
Palestinians differ on US promises
May 30, 2009| Al Jazeera, May 30, 2009 |
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Palestinian Fatah has said it was “encouraged” by the meeting between Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and his US counterpart in the White House, while Hamas said the encounter would lead to nothing. “Palestinians are encouraged by the commitment President Obama and his administration have shown to Middle East peace,” Saeb Erakat, a Fatah member and the Palestinians’ top official said on Friday. Erekat said the establishment of a viable Palestinian state and a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem would make the region more secure and stable. But, he warned “the peace process lives on borrowed time,” saying it would not survive another round of failed negotiations. “Israel’s failure to implement its obligations under existing agreements has eroded its credibility, while its continued settlement activities are undermining the very viability of the two state solution,” Erakat said. Hamas reaction
Hamas, however, called the meeting a continuation of Abbas’ “way of begging” to the US and the “Zionist entity.” Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, said the meeting would “accomplish nothing but more pressure on Abbas.” He said the US administration would fail to take “any action on the ground” to halt Israeli “aggressions” and realise Palestinian rights. In the meeting on Thursday Obama called for a stop to Israeli settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and emphasised the two-state solution. However, Benyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, refused to openly endorse the two-state solution during a meeting with Obama on May 18. He also rejected the US and Palestinian demand for an absolute freeze in settlement activity. Netanyahu promised not to build new settlements, but vowed to continue construction in existing ones to accommodate for “natural growth.” |
MIDEAST: ‘Hamas Against Zionist Ideology, Not Judaism’
May 14, 2009By David Cronin | Inter Press Service
GAZA CITY, May 14 (IPS) – A founding member of Hamas says he hates all weapons and insists that his organisation is not anti-Jewish.
In an interview with IPS, Sayed Abu Musameh described frequent claims in the European and U.S. press that Hamas’s charter is based on enmity towards Jews as a “big lie”.
Speaking in the remains of the Palestinian Legislative Council headquarters in Gaza City – bombed by Israel on the third day of the offensive against Gaza it launched in late 2008 – Husameh drew a distinction between followers of Judaism and the Zionist ideology to which most politicians in Israel’s main political parties subscribe. Such an ideology, he said, has led Israel to tighten its control of the Palestinian territories and their most important natural resources, including water.
“In our culture, we respect every foreigner, especially Jews and Christians,” he said. “But we are against Zionists, not as nationalists but as fascists and racists.”
Musameh also contended that Hamas has long been ready to agree a truce – known in Arabic as a hudna – with Israel but that Israel had refused all offers and imposed a crippling economic blockade on Gaza. The firing of Qassam rockets on the Israeli cities of Ashkelon and Sderot was designed “not to destroy Israel or to destroy Israeli people” but to “make them notice our siege.”
Described by some observers of Middle Eastern affairs as one of the key “moderates” in the Islamic resistance movement, Musameh has expressed a strong interest in visiting Belfast to study whether lessons learned from the Irish peace process could be used to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas leaders recently held discussions with Gerry Adams, who as leader of the political party Sinn Féin has convinced the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to cease using violence.
“I hate all kinds of weapons,” said Musameh. “I dream of seeing every weapon from the atomic bomb to small guns banned everywhere.”
Since Hamas won a surprise victory in Palestinian elections in January 2006, 40 of Musameh’s fellow members of the legislative council, including chairman Aziz Duwaik, have been jailed. Contact with his imprisoned colleagues – or with the 11,000 other Palestinians held by Israel – is impossible, Musameh said.
The destruction of the council’s building has meant that video conferences between Hamas and its rival Fatah can no longer take place. Yet even before the attack, the council (described as a parliament by many Palestinians) was unable to operate properly as Israel had prevented Fatah politicians in the West Bank from travelling to Gaza for meetings.
After a joint Fatah-Hamas government – that was shunned by the U.S. and European Union – collapsed, Hamas took charge of running the Gaza Strip in 2007. Local human rights activists have protested strongly at some of the measures it has undertaken, particularly how it closed down more than 200 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that it accused of being affiliated to Fatah. Most have subsequently been allowed to resume their activities.
Despite speaking out against Hamas’s tactics, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza says it is vital that Europe and the U.S. encourage reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. “If the coalition government had been accepted by the international community or at least by Europe, we wouldn’t have an internal conflict (in the Palestinian territories),” said the PCHR’s Hamdi Shaqqura.
Governments that have refused to deal with Hamas because they consider it extremist are displaying double standards now that they agree to have contacts with an Israeli government that includes Avigdor Lieberman, who is seeking that Arabs within Israel’s internationally recognised boundaries should be stripped of their rights as Israeli citizens unless they pass a ‘loyalty test’ to the state, Shaqqura said.
“Europe can do a lot in terms of Palestinian dialogue,” he added. “It must encourage Palestinians to reach a compromise, and if parties can reach a compromise, it must be respected by the international community. The international community must end its hypocrisy. It has accepted Lieberman, it has accepted a racist.”
Khalil Abu Shammala, director of the Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights, said: “Hamas won the (2006) election. This was the Palestinians’ democratic choice, so the international community should accept it. Why not give Hamas the chance to govern and give people the choice of whether they trust it or not?”
Some analysts believe that hawkish politicians in Israel and their allies in the previous U.S. administration led by George W. Bush deliberately sought to foment strife between Fatah and Hamas as part of a colonialist ‘divide and rule’ strategy.
Amjad Shawa from the Palestinian NGOs Network said that bickering between the political parties “suits completely” the agenda being pursued by the Israeli government. Still, he argued that human rights activists should denounce any violations that occur regardless of who perpetrates them.
“I cannot say that Hamas has prevented the right to association but there is a violation,” he added. “We will face any violations by Hamas or Fatah or whoever. We will not keep silent.”
MIDEAST: Gaza Changed Everything, But Its People Still Suffer
April 18, 2009Analysis by Helena Cobban* | Inter Press Service News
WASHINGTON, Apr 17 (IPS) – Three months after the end of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, and nearly four months after former prime minister Ehud Olmert started it, the standoff between Israel and Hamas is as unresolved as ever.
Gaza’s 1.5 million residents, nearly all of them civilians, are still in a very tough situation, since Israel still prohibits the shipment into Gaza of many requirements for a decent life – including the building materials needed to repair or rebuild the thousands of homes and other structures the Israeli military destroyed during the war.
But it is already clear that the war has changed many aspects of the complex political dynamics both between and inside the Israeli and Palestinian communities.
Hamas, simply by surviving, has become stronger both within Palestinian politics and throughout the broader Middle East.
In the Israeli elections of early February Olmert’s party was defeated – by representatives of an even more militarist trend in Israel whose rise was fueled, in good part, by the war-fever unleashed among Jewish Israelis by Olmert’s own war.
Meanwhile, the ferocity with which Israel fought the war caused significant damage to the country’s image around the world. In the U.S., unprecedented numbers of civil society groups – including Jewish groups – expressed open criticism of Olmert’s decision to launch the war, even from the war’s very earliest days.
All these developments have been evident during Sen. George Mitchell’s latest visit to the region, which started Wednesday. This was Mitchell’s third visit since he was named U.S. special envoy on Jan. 21. Some of the post-Gaza developments seem to make Mitchell’s peacemaking effort harder. But others, especially the new estrangement between the government of Israel and some of its former strong supporters around the world, open up new possibilities for his mission.
Indeed, in some of Mitchell’s early appearances on his latest trip, he has shown himself more ready than any U.S. official has been for many years to publicly adopt a position – in this case, support of an independent Palestinian state – that is very different from that espoused by the government in power in Israel.
When Olmert launched the war on Gaza on Dec. 27, he was aiming either to destroy Hamas or to inflict so much harm on it that its leaders would bow to Israel’s political demands. Despite the large amount of damage the Israeli military inflicted on the people of Gaza, it did not achieve either of those objectives. Hamas’s long battle-hardened command structure in Gaza remained intact and in place.
(Hamas’s broader, ‘nationwide’ leadership has anyway been located for many years now outside the occupied territories. Thus, the idea of breaking or ‘taming’ the whole organisation by delivering a knockout blow to its units in Gaza was always poorly thought through.)
Instead of being broken, Hamas found that during the war its popularity rose throughout the occupied West Bank and among the five million Palestinians living in exile outside their homeland. It dipped somewhat in Gaza, doubtless because of the punishment the IDF was inflicting on the Strip’s people. But Gaza is roughly half the size of the West Bank. The overall effect was that Hamas became stronger.
Fatah, a movement that in recent years has aligned itself ever more closely to U.S. policies, meanwhile saw its popularity decline.
Indeed, the collapse of Fatah’s internal decision-making structures is now so severe there is a real possibility it might disintegrate altogether. Though the collapse has been underway for some time now, the Gaza war certainly hastened it along.
Fateh has also, ever since 1969, been overwhelmingly the strongest component of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), the secularist body that has authorised all Palestinian peace efforts with Israel to date. Fatah’s decline thus also threatens the survival of the PLO – unless the on-again-off-again ‘unity talks’ that Fatah and Hamas have been pursuing in Cairo can find a formula to bring Hamas into the PLO for the first time ever.
Amid all these political developments, Gaza’s 1.5 million people are still trying to deal with life-situations and livelihoods that were shattered by the recent war. During the war more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. Ten Israeli soldiers and three Israeli civilians lost their lives.
For three years prior to the war, there had been intermittent exchanges of fire between Israel and Palestinian militants – mainly Hamas people – operating from Gaza. In addition, Israel maintained a tight siege around Gaza, in clear contravention of its responsibility as “occupying power” to safeguard the welfare of the Strip’s indigenous residents.
At the end of the war both Israel and Hamas announced parallel (and un-negotiated) ceasefires. That was on Jan. 18. In the absence of any more formal, negotiated ceasefire agreement, the existing ceasefires have remained fragile, and several exchanges of fire have occurred.
But in addition, Israel has considerably tightened the physical siege of Gaza – and this, at a time when the Strip’s residents have extraordinary needs to gain access to the materials they urgently need to rebuild the 5,000 homes and other structures that were destroyed during the war. Those structures included vital water and sanitation facilities, factories, warehouses – and even the parliament.
John Prideaux-Brune, Oxfam’s country director for the West Bank and Gaza, has described Israel’s policy toward Gaza as being one of “intentionally inflicted de-development.”
He told IPS recently, “Israel went on a rampage in Gaza during the war. You can see whole villages flattened, the cows and other livestock killed. They seem to have gone in and removed anything that could have been used for economic development – farms, factories, you name it.” (Israeli sources have said that during the war, the military trucked in 100 heavy-duty bulldozers, especially to undertake this destruction.)
“It seems a mind-numbingly stupid thing for Israel to do,” Prideaux-Brune said. “Where states have succeeded in suppressing terrorism, they have done so through negotiations and fostering economic development.”
He said he hoped western governments would act quickly to persuade Israel to lift the siege. That, he said, would allow Gaza’s people to move back onto a path of economic development rather than continuing to live on handouts.
Many of the humanitarian aid organisations that have been providing ‘emergency’ aid to Gaza (and the West Bank) for many years are now, like Oxfam, becoming more vocal in arguing that the only thing that can really stabilise the very vulnerable situation of the Palestinians of these occupied areas is to find a speedy end to the Israel’s military occupation of their home territories.
Prideaux-Brune said that the Gaza Palestinians are currently suffering from a deliberately inflicted “dignity crisis.”
“So long as Israel controls everything in these people’s lives, they will remain vulnerable,” he said. “Emergency relief aid is no substitute for successful peacemaking, and that is the only way to get to real economic development.”
*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at http://www.JustWorldNews.org.
Will Israel be brought to book?
March 25, 2009The evidence of war crimes in Gaza is a challenge to universal justice: will western-backed perpetrators ever stand trial?
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- guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 March 2009 17.15 GMT
Evidence of the scale of Israel‘s war crimes in its January onslaught on Gaza is becoming unanswerable. Clancy Chassay’s three films investigating allegations against Israeli forces in the Gaza strip, released by the Guardian today, include important new accounts of the flagrant breaches of the laws of war that marked the three-week campaign – now estimated to have left at least 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 13 Israelis dead.
The films provide compelling testimony of Israel’s use of Palestinian teenagers as human shields; the targeting of hospitals, clinics and medical workers, including with phosphorus bombs; and attacks on civilians, including women and children – sometimes waving white flags – from hunter-killer drones whose targeting systems are so powerful they can identify the colour of a person’s clothes.
Naturally, the Israeli occupation forces’ spokesperson insists to Chassay that they make every effort to avoid killing civilians and denies using human shields or targeting medical workers – while at the same time explaining that medics in war zones “take the risk upon themselves”. By banning journalists from entering Gaza during its punitive devastation of the strip, the Israeli government avoided independent investigations of the stream of war crimes accusations while the attack was going on.
But now journalists and human rights organisations are back inside, doing the painstaking work, the question is whether Israel’s government and military commanders will be held to account for what they unleashed on the Palestinians of Gaza – or whether, like their US and British sponsors in Iraq and Afghanistan, they can carry out war crimes with impunity.
It’s not as if Clancy’s reports are unique or uncorroborated by other evidence. Last week, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that a group of Israelis soldiers had admitted intentionally shooting dead an unarmed Palestinian mother and her two children, as well as an elderly Palestinian woman, in Gaza in January. As one explained: “The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way”.
They also tally with testimony of other Israeli soldiers from the Givati Shaked battalion, which operated in the Gaza city suburb of Zeitoun, that they were told to “fire on anything that moves”. The result was that one family, the Samunis, reported losing 29 members after soldiers forced them into a building that subsequently came under fire – seven bleeding to death while denied medical care for nearly three days. The Helw and Abu Zohar families said they saw members shot while emerging from their homes carrying white flags. “There was definitely a message being sent”, one soldier who took part in the destruction of Zeitoun told the Times.
Or take the case of Majdi Abed Rabbo – a Palestinian linked to Fatah and no friend of Hamas – who described to the Independent how he was repeatedly used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers confronting armed Hamas fighters in a burned-out building in Jabalya in the Gaza strip. The fact of Israeli forces’ use of human shields is hard to gainsay, not least since there are unambiguous photographs of several cases from the West Bank in 2007, as shown in Chassay’s film.
Last week Human Rights Watch wrote to European Union foreign ministers calling for an international inquiry into war crimes in Gaza. In the case of Israel, the organisation cited the siege of Gaza as a form of collective punishment; the use of artillery and white phosphorus in densely populated civilian areas, including schools; the shooting of civilians holding white flags; attacks on civilian targets; and “wanton destruction of civilian property”.
Israel and others also accuse Hamas of war crimes. But while both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have echoed that charge, particularly in relation to the indiscriminate rocketing of towns such as Sderot, an exhaustive investigation by Human Rights Watch has found no evidence, for example, of Hamas using human shields in the clearly defined legal sense of coercion to protect fighters in combat. And as Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights, argued recently, any attempt to view the two sides as “equally responsible” is an absurdity: one is a lightly-armed militia, effectively operating underground in occupied territory – the other the most powerful army in the region, able to pinpoint and pulverise targets with some of the most sophisticated weaponry in the world.
There is of course no chance that the UN security council will authorise the kind of International Criminal Court war crimes indictment now faced by Sudan’s leaders over Darfur. Any such move would certainly be vetoed by the US and its allies. And Israel’s own courts have had no trouble in the past batting away serious legal challenges to its army’s atrocities in the occupied territories. But the use of universal jurisdiction in countries such as Spain or even Britain is making Israeli commanders increasingly jumpy about travelling abroad.
With such powerful evidence of violations of the rules of war now emerging from the rubble of Gaza, the test must be this: is the developing system of international accountability for war crimes only going to apply to the west’s enemies – or can the western powers and their closest allies also be brought to book?
Istanbul statement backs Hamas and sets out ‘obligations’ to the people of Gaza
March 25, 2009- The Guardian, UK, Wednesday 25 March 2009
The Istanbul statement claims God has granted victory to Gazans over their “Zionist Jewish occupiers”. But it also complains of an “international and local conspiracy” against Gaza, implicating Palestine leaders in the West Bank and accusing the Egyptian government of treason (though without mentioning it by name). The statement then sets out eight “obligations” for the Muslim community – “its religious scholars, its rulers and its peoples”:
• To aid the people of Gaza in rebuilding “what the Zionist aggression destroyed”; to compensate the injured and support widows and orphans.
• In the delivery of aid and reconstruction, to deal only with Hamas.
• Not to recognise the Palestinian Authority as representative of the Palestinian people.
• To withhold aid from the undeserving or untrustworthy and to punish those who cause “mayhem, negligence and waste” of funds.
• To find a fair formula for reconciliation “between the sons of the Palestinian people” (ie Fatah and Hamas), so as to establish a legitimate authority that will “carry on with jihad and resistance against the occupier until the liberation of all Palestine”.
• To open all crossings in and out of Palestine, giving the Palestinians access to “money, clothing, food, medicine, weapons and other essentials”.
• To regard all those who contribute substantially to the “crimes and brutality” of Israel in the same way as Israel itself.
• To reject and “fight by all means” the sending of foreign warships into Muslim waters on the basis of “claiming to control the borders and prevent the smuggling of arms to Gaza”.
Obama emerged in Cairo as a true friend of Israel
June 5, 2009By Gideon Levy | Haaretz/Israel, June 5, 2009
Neither Tel Aviv nor Ramallah held their breaths Thursday as the American president gave a speech in Cairo; the traffic in both crowded cities continued normally. Tel Aviv was indifferent, Ramallah sunk in desperation: Both cities have already had their fill of nice, historic speeches.
Nonetheless, no one can ignore the speech given by Barack Obama: The mountain birthed a mountain. Obama remained Obama. Only the Israeli analysts tried to diminish the speech’s importance (“not terrible”), to spread fear (“he mentioned the Holocaust and the Nakba in a single breath”), or were insulted on our behalf (“he did not mention our right to the land as promised in the Bible”). All these were redundant and unnecessary. Obama emerged Thursday as a true friend of Israel.
The prime minister ordered the ministers to say nothing, but of course they could not help but invade the studios. Uzi Landau said that a Palestinian state is tantamount to an “Iranian state.” Isaac Herzog appeared even more ridiculous when he said that the problem with the settlements is one of “public relations.” In essence, both were busy with the same problem: How can we manage to pull the new America’s leg as well? Israeli politicians have never before appeared as pathetic, as small as they did Thursday, compared to the bearer of promise in Cairo.
Indeed, there was promise in Cairo, of the dawn of a new age. A U.S. president talking about negotiations with Iran without preconditions or tacit threats, even willing to accept Iran having civilian nuclear capability; a president who talked about Hamas as a legitimate organization that represents part of Palestinian society, but that needs to relinquish violence; who spoke with empathy about Palestinian suffering; who spoke, believe it or not, about security not only for Israelis but also for Palestinians; who said that all the settlements are illegal; who called for nuclear disarmament of the entire region. All are sensational messages, headlines whose significance cannot be exaggerated, even if there are those who desperately tried to argue yesterday that “there was nothing new in his speech.”
Not enough? Obama also spoke in Cairo (!) against denying the Holocaust, about the rights of women and Copts, and on the need for democracy tailored to each society’s culture.
This is the thinking of a great leader, who walked with wisdom and sensitivity between the Holocaust and the Nakba, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Americans and Arabs, between Christians, Jews and Muslims. How easy it is to imagine his predecessor, George Bush the Terrible, in the same position: a complete opposite.
Our right-wingers were disappointed that he did not approve at least of Gush Etzion, and the peace lovers were disappointed that he did not offer a timetable. But a speech is just that, and the time for carrying things out is still to come.
But why waste words? Israeli news shows still opened Thursday with the Dudu Topaz story; that is what really interests Israelis. Never mind Obama; Israel has its own concerns.
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Tags:a Palestinian state, Gideon Levy, Hamas, Israel, President Obama
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