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Author hopes to pull Israel to the left with new party

November 17, 2008

The renowned Israeli author Amos Oz has joined 30 intellectuals and public figures to forge a leftwing party in an attempt to defeat the resurgent rightwing Likud party, which is leading the polls.

But Labour, not the hardline nationalists in Likud, may be the biggest losers if the party succeeds in Israel’s elections which are due in February next year.

“I hope the expanded leftist movement will become a replacement for the Labour party. The Labour party has finished its historic role, it isn’t putting forward a national agenda and it joins any coalition,” Oz told the Haaretz newspaper.

In 2006 Labour’s leading light and Nobel peace prize winner, Shimon Peres, defected to join the hawkish Ariel Sharon, who led a breakaway group from the hardline Likud party to form the more centrist Kadima, which heads the coalition government.

More recently Labour’s chairman, Ehud Barak, refused to rule out joining a coalition led by a resurgent Binyamin Netanyahu, whose Likud party is ahead in the polls.

Revelations last week that Barak, who is defence minister in the current coalition government led by Kadima’s Ehud Olmert, had authorised the construction of 400 housing units and lots for Israeli settlers in the West Bank have further tarnished its left-of-centre credentials.

“The Labour party is a body that does not seek political life, and does not fight for its life,” said Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, who resigned yesterday and is expected to join the more centrist party, Kadima.

The new left of centre party hopes to attract disgruntled Labour supporters, environmentalists, Reform Jews and Israeli-Arabs.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, arrived in Israel yesterday to begin a Middle East trip that will take in the Palestinian territories, Syria and Lebanon in the hope of promoting a regional peace plan.

But the trip has been overshadowed by Britain’s decision to crack down on products sold in the UK that come from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law.

Britain recently circulated a note within the EU expressing concern that goods may be entering the country improperly labelled as being produced in Israel when in fact they have been produced in the West Bank.

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Israel punishes Gaza with UN food aid ban

November 15, 2008

RINF.COM, Nov 13, 2008

CRUEL: A UN aid agency said on Tuesday that it will have to halt food aid distribution to 750,000 Gazans by Friday if Israel keeps the territory sealed.

ISRAEL barred UN humanitarian aid shipments from entering the Gaza Strip on Thursday, in its latest act of collective punishment for Hamas rocket attacks.

Israel had planned to let in 30 trucks of food aid to replenish empty warehouses. It had also agreed to let in fuel to power Gaza’s only electrical plant, which was facing shutdown and a power blackout.

But Israeli army officials closed all border crossings into the besieged Palestinian territory after militants had fired five rockets and two mortars into southern Israel.

John Ging, who heads Gaza operations for the United Nations relief and works agency said that, without the shipments, the UN will be forced to suspend food aid to 750,000 impoverished Gazans from Saturday.

A UN flour warehouse in Gaza, that was full early last week, stood empty, while another warehouse held just a few crates of luncheon meat.

“We’ve been working here from hand to mouth for quite a long time, so these interruptions on the crossing points affect us immediately,” Mr Ging said.

“International law requires that civilian populations have access to the goods and services that they need to survive.”

Electrical plant officials said that they expected to run out of fuel yesterday evening, causing widespread blackouts throughout the territory of 1.4 million people.

Israeli jet fighters flew at supersonic speed low over Gaza on Thursday, setting off sonic booms – a well-practised form of harassment against the population.

Israel also continued to block diplomats and journalists from entering the territory, including a group of some 20 European officials. The Israeli military said that crossings were closed to all but humanitarian operations.

Israel agreed to allow some shipments into Gaza in June, following an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire by Palestine’s elected-Hamas government.

The agreement will expire in December, although both sides claim that they want it to continue.

The truce began eroding last week when Israeli forces invaded Gaza to try to destroy a smuggling tunnel. Eleven Palestinians have been killed in more than a week of fighting, with more than 130 rockets and mortars fired from Gaza at Israel.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said: “The rockets are a natural response to Israel’s aggression.”

Continued . . .


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Robert Fisk: Obama has to pay for eight years of Bush’s delusions

November 15, 2008

He will have to get out of Iraq, and he will have to tell Israel a few home truths

The Independent, Saturday, 8 November 2008

Barack Obama

REUTERS

How is Barack Obama going to repair the titanic damage which his vicious, lying predecessor has perpetrated around the globe and within the US itself?

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American lawyers defending six Algerians before a habeas corpus hearing in Washington this week learned some very odd things about US intelligence after 9/11. From among the millions of “raw” reports from American spies and their “assets” around the world came a CIA Middle East warning about a possible kamikaze-style air attack on a US navy base at a south Pacific island location. The only problem was that no such navy base existed on the island and no US Seventh Fleet warship had ever been there. In all seriousness, a US military investigation earlier reported that Osama bin Laden had been spotted shopping at a post office on a US military base in east Asia.

That this nonsense was disseminated around the world by those tasked to defend the United States in the “war on terror” shows the fantasy environment in which the Bush regime has existed these past eight years. If you can believe that bin Laden drops by a shopping mall on an American military base, then you can believe that everyone you arrest is a “terrorist”, that Arabs are “terrorists”, that they can be executed, that living “terrorists” must be tortured, that everything a tortured man says can be believed, that it is legitimate to invade sovereign states, to grab the telephone records of everyone in America. As Bob Herbert put it in The New York Times a couple of years ago, the Bush administration wanted these records “which contain crucial documentation of calls for a Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Indiana, and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Alabama, to help in the search for Osama bin Laden”. There was no stopping Bush when it came to trampling on the US Constitution. All that was new was that he was now applying the same disrespect for liberty in America that he had shown in the rest of the world.

But how is Barack Obama going to repair the titanic damage which his vicious, lying predecessor has perpetrated around the globe and within the US itself? John F Kennedy once said that “the United States, as the world knows, will never start a war”. After Bush’s fear-mongering and Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” and Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo and secret renditions, how does Obama pedal his country all the way back to Camelot? Our own dear Gordon Brown’s enthusiasm to Hoover up the emails of the British people is another example of how Lord Blair’s sick relationship with Bush still infects our own body politic. Only days before the wretched president finally departs from us, new US legislation will ensure that citizens of his lickspittle British ally will no longer be able to visit America without special security clearance. Does Bush have any more surprises for us before 20 January? Indeed, could anything surprise us any more?

Obama has got to close Guantanamo. He’s got to find a way of apologising to the world for the crimes of his predecessor, not an easy task for a man who must show pride in his country; but saying sorry is what – internationally – he will have to do if the “change” he has been promoting at home is to have any meaning outside America’s borders. He will have to re-think – and deconstruct – the whole “war on terror”. He will have to get out of Iraq. He will have to call a halt to America’s massive airbases in Iraq, its $600m embassy. He will have to end the blood-caked air strikes we are perpetrating in southern Afghanistan – why, oh, why do we keep slaughtering wedding parties? – and he will have to tell Israel a few home truths: that America can no longer remain uncritical in the face of Israeli army brutality and the colonisation for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. Obama will have to stand up at last to the Israeli lobby (it is, in fact, an Israeli Likud party lobby) and withdraw Bush’s 2004 acceptance of Israel’s claim to a significant portion of the West Bank. US officials will have to talk to Iranian officials – and Hamas officials, for that matter. Obama will have to end US strikes into Pakistan – and Syria.

Indeed, there’s a growing concern among America’s allies in the Middle East that the US military has to be brought back under control – indeed, that the real reason for General David Petraeus’ original appointment in Iraq was less to organise the “surge” than it was to bring discipline back to the 150,000 soldiers and marines whose mission – and morals – had become so warped by Bush’s policies. There is some evidence, for example, that the four-helicopter strike into Syria last month, which killed eight people, was – if not a rogue operation – certainly not sanctioned byWashington or indeed by US commanders in Baghdad.

But Obama’s not going to be able to make the break. He wants to draw down in Iraq in order to concentrate more firepower in Afghanistan. He’s not going to take on the lobby in Washington and he’s not going to stop further Jewish colonisation of the occupied territories or talk to Israel’s enemies. With AIPAC supporter Rahm Emanuel as his new chief of staff – “our man in the White House”, as the Israeli daily Maariv called him this week – Obama will toe the line. And of course, there’s the terrible thought that bin Laden – when he’s not shopping at US military post offices – may be planning another atrocity to welcome the Obama presidency.

There is just one little problem, though, and that’s the “missing” prisoners. Not the victimswho have been (still are being?) tortured in Guantanamo, but the thousands who have simply disappeared into US custody abroad or – with American help – into the prisons of US allies. Some reports speak of 20,000 missing men, most of them Arabs, all of them Muslims. Where are they? Can they be freed now? Or are they dead? If Obama finds that he is inheriting mass graves from George W Bush, there will be a lot of apologising to do.

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Peace process? What peace process?

November 3, 2008
Posted by: Wafa Amr | Global News Blog, Nov 3, 2008

This is a common phrase used by both Israelis and Palestinians when asked about the negotiations process that was launched by U.S. President George W. Bush at Annapolis last year and which, according to Bush’s timeline, should have produced a Palestinian state by the end of his presidency in January.

Since the signing of the Oslo provisional peace deal 15 years ago, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals, professionals, and politicians have held hundreds of meetings in Israel and in most European cities to promote dialogue and coexistence, in the hope that eventually Palestinians will have the state the accords outlined for them, living in peace alongside Israel.

This week, the Peres Center for Peace, established after the Oslo peace accords, drew hundreds of Israelis, Arabs, and international leaders and professionals to discuss peace during its 10th anniversary event in Tel Aviv, under the aegis of former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, now Israel’s largely ceremonial president.

I attended sessions of the 3-day event and also took part, as a journalist covering the conflict for the past 14 years, in a meeting a week earlier between Israeli and Palestinian representatives of the media and academics in Seville, Spain, hosted by the Three Cultures Foundation , a non-profit organization founded under the aegis of the Andalusian Regional Government and Morocco, and organized by the Israeli and Palestinian branches of the Geneva Initiative Peace Coalition.

The mood at both meetings among activists committed to a peaceful solution to the 60-year-old conflict was sombre.

In between the two meetings, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians who won her party’s elections to replace Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, announced she had failed in forming a government and called for early elections scheduled for February.

A key sticking point was the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious Shas party to join her in a coalition because of its opposition to her negotiating with Palestinians on dividing Jerusalem between Israel and a new Palestinian state.

Divisions in Israeli society over the Oslo accords, divisions that led to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 – coincidentally on Nov. 4, the date of this week’s U.S. presidential election — continue to pose obstacles to peacemaking.

In Seville, a historic place of meeting, and conflict, among Jews, Muslims and Christians, Israelis and Palestinians sat in cafes and in formal sessions to discuss coexistence, and chances for an elusive peace that has weakened the peace camps in both neighbouring societies.

During the two-day seminar, professor Tamar Hermann, Dean of Academic Studies at the Open University in Israel, who conducts monthly opinion polls on Israeli positions regarding the peace process, presented figures that show that in 10 or 20 years, there won’t be a population in Israel receptive of peace ideas. She said some 70 percent of Orthdox Jews in Israel identified themselves as right-wing, and noted that the Orthodox community is growing fast as a proportion of the population.

The poll also showed that only 12 percent perceived an escalation of the Palestinian resistence as a threat. Hermann, a political scientist, said that “making peace with their Palestinian neighbours was not the prime goal of the Jews in Israel.”

Palestinian writer Hassan Khader, another participant in the Seville conference said the Israeli state of denial was harming the Jews. “Does it really serve the Israeli interests to defeat the Palestinians? In the 1967 war, they won the war, but forty years later it showed it was one of their worst traps.”

Palestinians have been increasingly disillusioned with peace as Palestinian negotiators conduct frequent sessions of negotiations with their Israeli counterparts without progress. The Palestinians have seen their lands confiscated for more settlements and walls and fences constructed around the Gaza Strip and West Bank that have isolated them from the rest of the world.

The only Israelis many Palestinians know are the soldiers at checkpoints or armed settlers attacking farmers harvesting their land in the West Bank. One secular Israeli politician said: “The extreme settlers are forming militias. They’re armed and claim they represent God, yet we don’t confront them. We say they’re a small group.But they will turn into a Hezbollah and eventually they will turn against us. We still can’t see this.”

The younger generation in Israel, which has come to adulthood since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995, is less supportive of peace since the images they have seen were of exploding buses and have never visited the Palestinian areas, Hermann said.
Gadi Baltiansky, director of the Israeli branch of the Geneva Initiative said time was running out and people must feel a sense of urgency to make dramatic decisions about peace.But as time is running out, there is a state of limbo. The Palestinians are divided as never before and may go to elections next year when President Mahmoud Abbas’ term ends. Israel too is heading for elections in February.

The mood among the activists is one of alarm.

“If two governments will be elected in both sides which are anti-peace … then unfortunately we are heading towards a tragedy. I can hope rationalism will win,” said Ron Pundak, one of the Israelis closely involved in the Oslo peace process.

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Palestinian group says Israelis killed 68 children in Gaza in year

October 21, 2008

A prominent Palestinian human rights group says it has found evidence that 68 children were killed in the Gaza Strip in the 12 months to June this year as a result of “disproportionate and excessive lethal force” by the Israeli military.

The deaths are documented, with witness testimony, in a report published today by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. Many of the deaths resulted from an Israeli military incursion into Jabaliya, in eastern Gaza, in late February and early March, in which more than 100 Palestinians, at least half of them civilians, died in what Israel said was an operation to stop rockets being fired into southern Israeli towns.

Others were killed in smaller strikes before a ceasefire was reached in June between Gaza’s Hamas administration and Israel. Despite occasional breaches, the truce still holds. In the year to June, another 12 children were killed by Israeli troops in the West Bank.

The rights group said many of the deaths passed without investigation, and those internal Israeli military inquiries that were held did not meet international standards of independence and transparency.

Since the start of the second intifada in late 2000, around 4,800 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, including nearly 900 children. More than 1,000 Israelis have been killed, including around 120 children.

The centre cited as one example an incident in April near the village of Juhor al-Dik, when a Reuters cameraman was killed by Israeli tank fire. The same tank shells killed two children: Ahmed Aaref Farajallah, 14, and Ghassan Abu Otaiwi, 17. The Israeli military said it investigated the incident and concluded that the tank crew reached a “reasonable conclusion” that the Palestinians gathered on the road were “hostile”, and said the decision to fire was “sound”.

The Israeli military did not respond to the criticisms last night, because of a Jewish religious holiday. However, it has in the past repeatedly defended its military actions in Gaza, saying it does not intentionally target civilians, and noting that Palestinian militants frequently fire from civilian areas.

The centre said the killing of unarmed civilians represented grave human rights violations, and called on Israel to establish an independent commission to investigate the deaths. It condemned Palestinian militant groups that recruited children to fight and said militants should not fire missiles from in or around residential areas.

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Israel ‘weighing Saudi peace deal’

October 20, 2008
Al Jazeera, Oct 20, 2008

Livni is scrambling to get the necessary numbers to form a coalition government [AFP]

Israel’s defence minister has said the country’s leaders are considering a dormant Saudi plan offering comprehensive peace with the Arab world.

Ehud Barak said it was time to pursue an overall peace deal because there was very little progress in individual negotiations with Syria and the Palestinians.

The peace plan – first mooted by Saudi Arabia in 2002 – offers Israel recognition by its Arab neighbours in return for its withdrawal from lands in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights captured during the 1967 Middle East war.

Barak said he had discussed the plan with Tzipi Livni, the leader of Israel’s Kadima party trying to form a coalition government, and that they were considering a response.

“There is definitely room to introduce a comprehensive Israeli plan to counter the Saudi plan that would be the basis for a discussion on overall regional peace,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.

Barak’s announcement came as Livni sought a two-week extension to form political alliances in a new government, having failed to attract the ultra-orthodox Shas party to join Kadima and Barak’s Labour party in the administration.

Coalition deadline

Livni was elected leader of Kadima last month, taking over from Ehud Olmert who resigned as prime minister in the wake of a corruption scandal but remains in office in a caretaker capacity until a new government is formed.

Livni has already won an initial agreement from Barak, the leader of the Labour party, to join a coalition under her leadership.

But her efforts to attract Shas, which is making a number of demands, have so far proved fruitless.

Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros, reporting from Jerusalem, said the Shas party had a strong bargaining position.

The Shas party knows that Livni really needs it in order to become prime minister and form a strong government acceptable to the Israeli public, our correspondent said.

The religious Shas party, which has long billed itself as a party that represents Israel’s poor, has been demanding increased government spending of about $270m on social welfare as a price for joining a Livni-led coalition.

Scramble for numbers

With Labour in her corner, Livni would control 48 of the 120 seats in parliament.

“She could go to the Knesset [to ratify a government] with the seats she already has, but she believes she can do it in the end,” Gil Messing, a Livni spokesman, said.

Without Shas, she could form a minority government relying on precarious support from outside the coalition of left-wing and Arab parties wary of a national election that opinion polls show Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud would win.

Shas’s membership would boost that number to 60, a wafer-thin coalition but enough to stop the opposition from toppling her government in no-confidence votes.

Winning the support of smaller factions, such as the Pensioners party, with seven Knesset members, and the left-wing Meretz, with five, would give Livni a stronger mandate to pursue policies that include peacemaking with the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, some 80 truckloads of food and medical supplies were delayed from reaching the Gaza Strip after dozens of Israelis blocked a crossing on Sunday, demanding their government seal an agreement with Hamas to release Gilad Shalit.

Hamas is demanding the release of 1,400 prisoners in exchange for Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Palestinian fighters more than two years ago.

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The settlers’ war with Israel

October 16, 2008

In any peace deal with the Palestinians, Israel will also have to tackle the problem of militant Jewish settlers

Paul Raymond | guardian.co.uk, Thursday October 16 2008 08.00 BST

While it is not unusual for events on the Temple Mount to trigger renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict – the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) was triggered in 2001 by then Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon’s controversial visit to the site – the latest events also have much to say about the current political situation in Israel itself. A growing current of hardline neo-Zionist militancy is terrorising Palestinians, leftwing Israelis and state authorities alike. As the Israeli government desperately tries to come to an agreement with the Palestinian Authority and undermine Hamas, the problem of evacuating settlements inhabited by violent ultra-nationalists will be near the top of a list of thorny challenges for the next Israeli administration.

There is plenty of evidence that the right wing radical fringe is growing. In mid-September, over 200 vigilantes from the illegal West Bank settlement of Yitzhar invaded the nearby Palestinian village of Asira al-Qibliyyah with guns and slingshots, in response to the stabbing of a Jewish boy from the settlement.

But settler violence is not limited to attacks against Palestinians. Two weeks after the assault on Asira, leftwing Israeli professor Ze’ev Sternhell, a staunch critic of the settlement movement, was injured by a pipe bomb on his doorstep. It was widely assumed that rightwing activists placed it there, although the settlers’ supporters were quick to accuse Israeli intelligence forces of launching a sinister leftwing conspiracy to discredit them. Later, prominent settler leader Daniela Weiss was arrested for attacking Israeli police officers during the evacuation of the illegal settlement of Shvut Ami, giving a further indication of the gulf between Israeli state authorities and the radical right.

It is clear that the rift has implications for the current round of talks with the Palestinians. Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister, has argued that Israelis should abandon the Zionist utopia of the Greater Land of Israel, resorting instead to a territorial compromise in order to achieve peace with the Palestinians. After the events of September 13, Yitzhar’s rabbi, David Dudkevich, who claims that the Arabs should emigrate from the “Land of Israel”, launched a public tirade against the idea. Among other things, he endorsed the proposal of a separate state, Judea, which would be established alongside Israel should the latter decide to abandon the Zionist dream.

“It’s obvious that a great many people who are secure in their Judaism feel emotionally distant from the state, which is in another place altogether,” he told Haaretz newspaper. “The state of Israel is not the be-all and end-all. If it decides it does not want to be in the hereditary lands of our forefathers, then other Jews have the right to organise themselves in order to live there, even without a link to the state. When there’s talk about another expulsion, then on the ideological level, the ‘State of Judea’ is no worse than expulsion.”

The irony is that settler radicalism was nurtured by the Israeli state in the first place. Over the years, Likud governments in particular encouraged non-ideological Israelis to settle in the West Bank in the hope that they would adopt views that fitted the rightwing agenda of that party. It was also an effective strategy for gaining control of the Occupied Territories and guaranteeing that the maximum possible territory would be ceded to Israel should the US force her into a deal with the Palestinians.

However, the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza placed the state authorities charged with implementing government policy – namely the police – at loggerheads with those settlers. The image of Israeli police forcibly evicting Jews from their homes created a wound in Israeli society that has been festering ever since. Several thousand young people who lived their entire childhoods in Gaza settlements now feel abandoned by the state and are willing to take out their frustration, often violently, against both Palestinians and the Israeli authorities.

Thus the Israeli government now faces huge dilemmas in the context of the current round of Israeli-Palestinian talks and also in how it deals with its own citizens. If the implication of Olmert’s comments is that more settlement evacuations are on the cards, and forcing that past a group of armed, radical settlers who have sworn their enmity to the state will be every bit as hard as negotiating an agreement with the Palestinians.

No religious festival in Jerusalem would be complete without a controversial political incident, and this year’s Yom Kippur was no exception. A group of nearly a hundred rightwing radicals forced their way on to the plaza of the Dome of the Rock, one of the most sacred sites in Islam. Entering the precinct on Yom Kippur was a symbolic way of claiming Jewish sovereignty over the site many consider to be the location of the second temple, destroyed by the Romans in AD 70.

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Licence to kill

October 15, 2008
Jewish settler fanatics continue to kill and steal from Palestinians without censure from Israel, writes Khaled Amayreh in the West Bank
Al- Ahram Weekly, 9-15 October 2008

Israeli security circles have warned recently that “organised Jewish terror” against Palestinians (and also against peace-oriented Jews) is on the rise and that steps must be taken to “nip that terror in the bud”.

However, Israeli officials, including Defence Minister Ehud Barak, have admitted that “confronting the settlers” is an uphill struggle, given the wide support they receive in Israeli-Jewish society and the strong political backing they enjoy from powerful government circles.

Barak also alluded to the shocking laxity shown by the Israeli justice system towards the settlers, which effectively allows them to commit acts of murder and vandalism, especially against unprotected and near helpless Palestinian villagers, with virtual impunity.

The ultimate goal of the settler terrorists is to intimidate and terrorise indigenous Palestinians into leaving their land so that more settlers can take it over. However, despite years of permanent terror and harassment, very few Palestinians if any have left their villages and land, prompting the mostly religious terrorists to intensify their attacks against Palestinians and their property.

In recent days, armed settler terrorists have stepped up acts of arson and vandalism targeting Palestinian olive groves throughout the West Bank. In the Nablus and Salfit region, settlers set fire to olive groves, destroying large swathes of the crop upon which the livelihood of numerous impoverished Palestinian families depends.

In one incident, the head of a settlement council took part in an arson attack that Palestinians contend happened in full view of Israeli army troops.

“I think there is a sort of collusion between the army and the settlers. Do you believe that the mighty Israeli army can’t control a few thugs who are terrorising Palestinian communities here?” asked Ibrahim Ahmed of Salem near Nablus.

“The world is often under the false impression that the settlers are a few unruly fanatics in an otherwise civilised society,” Ahmed continued. “The truth of the matter, however, is that the settlers are a key tool of the Israeli state and army to terrorise and torment the Palestinians. It is the state and the army that give them money, housing, weapons and protection. So it is naïve to buy the claim that the settlers are acting against the will of the Israeli state and army.”

Last week, a young Palestinian shepherd was found murdered next to a Jewish colony, also in the Nablus region. Eyewitnesses reported that they saw a white van chasing the 19-year-old man. The Israeli army denied that the boy was murdered by settlers, saying it was more likely that he was killed by unexploded ordnance left by the Israeli army.

Last month, dozens of armed Jewish settler terrorists committed a virtual pogrom at the Palestinian village of Asira Al-Qibliya south of Nablus, shooting into Palestinian homes and vandalising property. Ten Palestinians were injured, including one sustaining serious gunshot wounds. A videotape of the wild rampage showed Israeli soldiers looking on and doing virtually nothing to stop the settlers. When the “story” died down, the settlers resumed their violence and vandalism.

In recent years, settlers have resorted to stealing Palestinian olive crops in broad daylight. Settlers have also begun to bring in foreign workers to harvest Palestinian groves in the vicinity of their settlements. In doing so, settlers act on religious edits issued by local and national rabbis allowing them to steal crops in the West Bank, which the settlers call Judea and Samaria, believing that the land belongs to the Jews by a divine decree.

Until recently, rabbis issued their edicts publicly, drawing bad publicity from the press. Now, however, the edicts are issued and circulated quietly through local synagogues in the settlements.

In addition, the Israeli army seems to always find new ways to make life more difficult for Palestinian farmers. Many olive groves surrounding illegal Jewish settlements are declared closed military zones (only for non-Jews), which in effect is a green light for settlers to come and to steal Palestinian olives.

Last week, the Israeli army said it would provide “protection” to Palestinian olive-pickers from settler violence. However, the army said the duration of protection would only last three days.

The Israeli army claims it is unable to rein in terrorist settlers. This claim, however, is starkly mendacious and hypocritical. The truth is that the army lacks the will and inclination to confront the settlers.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz this week commented: “Military jails are packed with young Palestinians convicted of far less serious crimes than the violent acts of which the settlers are accused.” Yet generally speaking, the Israeli public is indifferent to the terror, murder and harassment wreaked by army-backed Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Now, however, settler terror is boomeranging back on Israeli-Jewish society. Last month, suspected Jewish terrorists placed a bomb at the doorstep of 73-year-old Zeev Sternhell, a political science professor at Hebrew University in West Jerusalem. Sternhell, an expert on the evolution of European fascism, was slightly injured in the incident that sent shockwaves across the Israeli political establishment and public.

Sternhell, a prominent supporter of the centre-left group “Peace Now”, warned that the attempt on his life might mark the “collapse of democracy” in Israel. However, it is unlikely that the attempted assassination of Sternhell will introduce a qualitative change into the way the Israeli army and public relate to settler terrorists. Something much more would be required to break down the institutionalised, studied racism and violence at the core of the state of Israel.

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Former British foreign secretary warns Israel may attack Iran

October 13, 2008

The News International, Monday, October 13, 2008
 News Desk

LONDON: Former British foreign secretary David Owen warned on Sunday that Israel could attack Iran in the near future. In an article in The Sunday Times, he wrote that some key decision makers in Israel were convinced that it was the most suitable time to attack Iran when Bush was in office.

“Some key Israel decision makers fear unless they attack Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities in the next few months, while George W Bush is still president, there will not be another period when they can rely on the United States as being anywhere near as supportive in the aftermath of a unilateral attack,” he said.

Owen, who served as the British foreign secretary from 1977 to 1979, observed the Israel-Iran conflict would involve the whole world, economically. “In the past 40 years there have been few occasions when I have been more concerned about a specific conflict escalating to involve, economically, the whole world,” he said.

Owen further warned that if Iran was attacked, it would be supplied with arms by China and Russia, adding Iran’s one immediate reaction would be blocking the Strait of Hormuz. “In the narrow strait just one oil tanker sunk would halt shipping for months,” he added.

The former diplomat is convinced that the Revolutionary Guards of Iran are committed to a war against Israel and prepared to take on the rest of the world. “They have good equipment and operate from the land, sea and air. They will be suicide soldiers, seamen and airmen,” he said. Owen said that after Israel attacked Iran, the American military would be bound to follow Bush’s orders. “The experience of Georgia has given an amber, if not a green light to Israel and only Bush can switch that to red,” he said.

Owen advised Bush to publicly warn Israel that the United States will use its air power to prevent it bombing Iran, while announcing that he was sending Rice to Tehran to start negotiating a grand bargain whereby all sanctions would be lifted if Iran forgoes the nuclear weapons option.

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America Must Plumb Olmert’s “Depths of Reality”

October 11, 2008

Robert Weitzel, Oct 10, 2008

“I was the first who wanted to impose Israeli sovereignty . . . I admit it . . . I was not ready to look into all the depths of reality.”
– Incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert –

In a September 30 article in the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronot, Israel’s incumbent Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a former member of the right-wing Likud party, said that Israel must withdraw “from almost all of the territories, if not from all the territories. We shall keep in our hands a percentage of these territories, but we shall be compelled to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace.”

He went on to say, “We can perhaps take an historic step in our relations with the Palestinians . . . the decision we must make is the decision we have refused to face with open eyes for 40 years . . . What I am telling you was never said by any previous Israeli leader, it’s time to lay everything on the table.”

The reality that Olmert was willing to lay before the Israeli people, “which exposed him to criticism from all quarters,” according to Yedioth Ahronot interviewers Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer, is one that no Democratic or Republican politician who aspires to national office has the chutzpa to tell the American electorate.

This lack of chutzpah has been nowhere more evident than in the presidential and vice-presidential “debates.” These prime-time events, which are really nothing more than 90 minutes of vacuous one-upmanship, could serve as a reality check for the 70 million-plus viewers if the moderators were willing to challenge the candidates’ evasions, half truths, exaggerations and outright lies . . . or if Ralph Nader were allowed to participate.

During the vice-presidential debate, both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin professed their undying love and support for Israel, “our strongest and best ally in the Middle East (Palin).”

“No one in the United States Senate has been a better friend to Israel . . . (Biden).”

“I’m so encouraged to know that we both love Israel (Palin).”

One-upping Palin, Biden boldly claimed, “I would have never, ever joined this ticket were I not absolutely sure Barack Obama shared my passion [for Israel].” Obviously, Obama does.

Moderator Gwen Ifill might have taken this opportunity to inquire as to the source of Palin’s “love” and Biden’s “passion” for Israel. Ifill might have pointed out to the 70 million-plus viewers that a candidate does not make it to a national “debate” without first being pronounced kosher by Israel’s shadow government on K Street.

Both Ifill and Tom Brokaw, the moderator of the recent town hall presidential “debate,” might have challenged the candidates’ assertions that Israel is a hairs’ breath away from annihilation by its Arab neighbors.

“An armed, nuclear armed . . . Iran is so extremely dangerous to consider. They cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons period. Israel is in jeopardy . . . (Palin).”

“We cannot allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon . . . it [would] threaten Israel, our strongest ally in the region and one of our strongest allies in the world . . . (Obama).”

Keep in mind that U.S. intelligence estimates that Iran is years away from developing even one nuclear device, while Israel has over 200 nuclear warheads targeted and minutes away from any Arab or Persian country foolish enough to attack it.

Keep in mind also what Olmert told Yedioth Ahronot, “Israel is the strongest country in the Middle East, it can win any war against any regional country, it can even win a war against all of them together.”

All four candidates took the opportunity during the “debates” to once again assure Israelis in the Holy Land and Jews on K Street that their administrations would continue the annual $6 billion in direct and indirect economic and military aid . . . even as Americans are losing their homes and jobs and retirement savings.

Ifill and Brokaw might have challenged the candidates’ promise of continued economic and military aid to Israel considering:

Israel is one of the most economically and industrially advanced countries in Southwest Asia.

Israel ranks second among foreign countries in the number of companies on U.S. stock exchanges.

Israel has the second largest number of startup companies in the world and the largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies outside North America.

Israel’s GDP per capita is $31,767

Israel’s economic growth in 2006 was the fastest of any Western nation.

Israel has the best armed and trained military in the region and is the fourth largest weapons exporter in the world ($2 billion annually)

And the United States’ taxpayers are expected to finance Israel?

But the “depth of reality” check of utmost salience to the 70 million-plus “debate” viewers is why the candidates and most members of Congress consider Israel our “strongest ally in the world.”

In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon, igniting a civil war. America’s support for Israel cost the lives of 241 servicemen who were blown apart as they slept in their Beirut barracks.

Israel did not fight in the first Gulf War, neither did its soldiers die in Afghanistan or Iraq—a war its cooked intelligence helped to bring about. This year our “strongest ally” pushed the Bush administration to the brink of war with Iran—a war whose catastrophic reverberations would have been on a par with the current global economic meltdown.

Israel’s regional aggression and its repressive—often brutal— domestic policies regarding the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank inflames its Arab neighbors and cinches tight the explosive vest to the chests of Arab youths.

Predictably, the United States’ irrational and unconditional support of Israel makes it equally culpable and equally target-worthy in the eyes of Arabs and Persians in the Middle East and Muslims worldwide. An ally that causes more insecurity than succor can hardly be considered the strongest ally in the world—unless that ally is also the only way to the White House.

Gwen Ifill and Tom Brokaw might have challenged the candidates in a way that exposed him or her to criticism from the Israeli quarter. Unfortunately for the 70 million-plus viewers Israel is a “depth of reality” the American political system and mainstream media are unwilling to plumb.

But as a right-wing Israeli Prime Minister says, “it’s time to lay everything on the table.”

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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