Uri Avnery | avnery@actcom.co.il

Is there no limit to the wiles of those dastardly anti-Semites?

Now they have decided to slander the Jews with another blood libel. Not the old accusation of slaughtering Christian children to use their blood for baking Passover matzoth, as in the past, but of the mass slaughter of women and children in Gaza.

And who did they put at the head of the commission which was charged with this task? Neither a British Holocaust-denier nor a German neo-Nazi, nor even an Iranian fanatic, but of all people a Jewish judge who bears the very Jewish name of Goldstone (originally Goldstein, of course). And not just a Jew with a Jewish name, but a Zionist, whose daughter, Nicole, is an enthusiastic Zionist who once “made Aliyah” and speaks fluent Hebrew. All this in order to defame the most moral army in the world, fresh from waging the most just war in history!

The official Israeli reaction to the Goldstone report would have been amusing, if the matter had not been so grave.

Except for the “usual suspects” (Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and their ilk), the condemnation of the report was unanimous, total and extreme, from Shimon Peres, that advocate of every abomination, down to the last scribbler in the newspapers. Nobody, but nobody, dealt with the subject itself. Nobody examined the detailed conclusions.

The instinctive reaction in such a situation is denial. When a human being is faced with a situation which he cannot handle, denial is the first refuge. But with us it has been developed into an art form.

But a profound debate on the Goldstone report is going on. Not about its content, But about the one point that is really important: Was our government right in deciding to boycott the commission?

Why did the Israeli government boycott the commission? The real answer is quite simple: They knew full well that the commission, any commission, would have to reach the conclusions it did reach.

In fact, the commission did not say anything new. Almost all the facts were already known: The bombing of civilian neighborhoods, the use of flechette rounds and white phosphorus against civilian targets, the bombing of mosques and schools, the blocking of rescue parties from reaching the wounded, the killing of fleeing civilians carrying white flags, the use of human shields, and more. The Israeli Army did not allow journalists near the action, but the war was amply documented by the international media in all its details, the entire world saw it in real time on the TV screens. The testimonies are so many and so consistent, that any reasonable person can draw their own conclusions.

If the officers and soldiers of the Israeli Army had given testimony before the commission, it would perhaps have been impressed by their angle too, and the conclusions could have been somewhat less severe. But the main thrust would not have changed. After all, the whole operation was based on the assumption that it was possible to overthrow the Hamas government in Gaza by causing intolerable suffering to the civilian population. The damage to civilians was not “collateral”, whether avoidable or unavoidable, but a central feature of the operation itself.

Moreover, the rules of engagement were designed to achieve “zero losses” to our forces — avoiding losses at any price. That was the conclusion our army — led by Gabi Ashkenazi — drew from the Second Lebanon War. The results speak for themselves: 200 dead Palestinians for every Israeli soldier killed by the other side — 1400:6. Every real investigation must inevitably lead to the same conclusions as those of the Goldstone commission. Therefore, there was no Israeli wish for a real inquiry. The “investigations” that did take place in Israel were a farce.

So the worldwide Israeli propaganda machine will continue to defame the Jewish judge and the people who appointed him.

Not all the Israeli accusations against the UN are groundless. For example: why does the organization investigate the war crimes in Gaza (and in former Yugoslavia and Darfur, investigations in which Goldstone took part as chief prosecutor) and not the actions of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Russians in Chechnya?

Israel’s relations with the UN are very complex. The state was founded on the basis of a UN resolution. A year later, Israel was accepted as a UN member in spite of the fact that it had not allowed the (then) 750 thousand Palestinian refugees to return.

But this honeymoon soured quickly. David Ben-Gurion spoke with contempt about UM-Shmum (“Um” is the Hebrew for “UN”, the prefix “shm” signifies contempt). From then on to this very day, Israel has systematically violated almost every single UN resolution that concerned it, complaining that there was an “automatic majority” of Arab and communist countries stacked against it. This attitude was reinforced when, on the eve of the 1967 war, the UN troops in Sinai where precipitously withdrawn on the demand of Gamal Abdel Nasser. And, of course, by the UN resolution (later annulled) equating Zionism with racism.

Now this argument is raising its head again. The UN, it is being said, is anti-Israeli, which means (of course) anti-Semitic. Everyone who acts in the name of the UN is an Israel-hater. To hell with the UN. To hell with the Goldstone report.

That is, however, a woefully short-sighted policy. The general public throughout the world is hearing about the report and remembering the pictures they saw on their TV screens during the Gaza war. The UN enjoys much respect. In the wake of the “Molten Lead” operation, Israel’s standing in the world has been steadily going down, and this report will send it down even further.

This will have practical consequences — political, military, economic and cultural. Only a fool — or an Avigdor Lieberman — can ignore that. If there is no credible Israeli investigation, there will be demands for the UN Security Council to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Barack Obama would have to decide whether to veto such a resolution — a move that would cause grave harm to the US, and for which he would demand a high price from Israel.

Alison Weir | Arab News

Last week Sweden’s largest daily newspaper published an article containing shocking material: Testimony and circumstantial evidence indicating that Israelis may have been harvesting internal organs from Palestinian prisoners without consent for many years.

Worse yet, some of the information reported in the article suggests that in some instances Palestinians may have been captured with this macabre purpose in mind.

In the article, “Our sons plundered for their organs,” veteran journalist Donald Bostrom writes that Palestinians “harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the country’s organ reserve – a very serious accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.”

An army of Israeli officials and apologists immediately went into high gear, calling both Bostrom and the newspaper’s editors “anti-Semitic.” The Israeli foreign minister was reportedly “aghast” and termed it “a demonizing piece of blood libel.” An Israeli official called it “hate porn.”

Commentary magazine wrote that the story was “merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of European- funded and promoted anti-Israel hate.” Numerous people likened the article to the medieval “blood libel,” (widely refuted stories that Jews killed people to use their blood in religious rituals). Even some pro-Palestinian writers joined in the criticism, expressing skepticism.

The fact is, however, that substantiated evidence of public and private organ trafficking and theft, and allegations of worse, have been widely reported for many years. Given such context, the Swedish charges become far more plausible than might otherwise be the case and suggest that an investigation could well turn up significant information.

Below are a few examples of previous reports on this topic.

Israel’s very first, historic heart transplant used a heart removed from a living patient without consent or consulting his family.

In December 1968 a man named Avraham Sadegat (the New York Times seems to give his name as A Savgat) died two days after a stroke, even though his family had been told he was “doing well.”

After initially refusing to release his body, the Israeli hospital where he was being treated finally turned the man’s body over to his family. They discovered that his upper body was wrapped in bandages; an odd situation, they felt, for someone who had suffered a stroke. When they removed the bandages, they discovered that the chest cavity was stuffed with bandages, and the heart was missing. During this time, the headline-making Israeli heart transplant had occurred. After their initial shock, the man’s wife and brother began to put the two events together and demanded answers.

The hospital at first denied that Sadegat’s heart had been used in the headline-making transplant, but the family raised a media storm and eventually applied to three Cabinet ministers. Finally, weeks later and after the family had signed a document promising not to sue, the hospital admitted that Sadagat’s heart had been used. The hospital explained that it had abided by Israeli law, which allowed organs to be harvested without the family’s consent. (The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime includes the extraction of organs in its definition of human exploitation.)

Indications that the removal of Sadagat’s heart was the actual cause of death went unaddressed.

A 1990 article in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs entitled “Autopsies and Executions” by Mary Barrett reports on the grotesque killings of young Palestinians. It includes an interview with Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazalch, the former chief health official for the West Bank under Jordanian administration and director of forensic medicine and autopsies.

Barrett asks him about “the widespread anxiety over organ thefts which has gripped Gaza and the West Bank since the intifada began in December of 1987.”

He responded: “There are indications that for one reason or another, organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half. There were just too many reports by credible people for there to be nothing happening. If someone is shot in the head and comes home in a plastic bag without internal organs, what will people assume?”

In 1998 a Scot named Alisdair Sinclair died under questionable circumstances while in Israeli custody at Ben Gurion airport. His family was informed of the death and, according to a report in J Weekly, “…told they had three weeks to come up with about $4,900 to fly Sinclair’s corpse home. (Alisdair’s brother) says the Israelis seemed to be pushing a different option: Burying Sinclair in a Christian cemetery in Israel, at a cost of about $1,300.”

The family scraped up the money, brought the body home, and had an autopsy performed at the University of Glasgow. It turned out that Alisdair’s heart and a tiny throat bone were missing. At this point the British Embassy filed a complaint with Israel.

The J report states: “A heart said to be Sinclair’s was subsequently repatriated to Britain, free of charge. James wanted the (Israeli) Forensic Institute to pay for a DNA test to confirm that this heart was indeed their brother’s, but the institute’s director, Prof. Jehuda Hiss refused, citing the prohibitive cost, estimated by some sources at $1,500.”

Despite repeated requests from the British Embassy for the Israeli pathologist’s and police reports, Israeli officials refused to release either.

Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh reports in an article in CCUN: “In January, 2002, an Israeli Cabinet minister tacitly admitted that organs taken from the bodies of Palestinian victims might have been used for transplants in Jewish patients without the knowledge of the Palestinian victims’ families.

“The minister, Nessim Dahan, said in response to a question by an Arab Knesset member that he couldn’t deny or confirm that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli Army were taken out for transplants or scientific research.

“‘I couldn’t say for sure that something like that didn’t happen.’”

Amayreh writes that the Knesset member who posed the question said that he “had received ‘credible evidence proving that Israeli doctors at the forensic institute of Abu Kabir extracted such vital organs as the heart, kidneys, and liver from the bodies of Palestinian youth and children killed by the Israeli Army in Gaza and the West Bank.”

For a number of years there were allegations that Israel’s leading pathologist was stealing body parts. In 2001 the Israeli national news service reported: “… the parents of soldier Ze’ev Buzgallo who was killed in a Golan Heights military training accident, are filing a petition with the High Court of Justice calling for the immediate suspension of Dr. Yehuda Hiss and that criminal charges be filed against him. Hiss serves as the director of the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute…. According to the parents, the body of their son was used for medical experimentation without their consent, experiments authorized by Hiss.

In 2002 the service reported: “The revelation of illegally stored body parts in the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute has prompted MK Anat Maor, chairman of the Knesset Science Committee, to demand the immediate suspension of the director, Prof. Yehuda Hiss.”

Alisdair Sinclair’s death had first alerted authorities to Hiss’ malfeasance in 1998, though nothing was done for years. The Forward reported: “In 2001, an Israeli Health Ministry investigation found that Hiss had been involved for years in taking body parts, such as legs, ovaries and testicles, without family permission during autopsies, and selling them to medical schools for use in research and training. He was appointed chief pathologist in 1988. Hiss was never charged with any crime, but in 2004 he was forced to step down from running the state morgue, following years of complaints.”

According to the Economist, a kidney racket flourished in South Africa between 2001 and 2003. “Donors were recruited in Brazil, Israel and Romania with offers of $5,000-20,000 to visit Durban and forfeit a kidney. The 109 recipients, mainly Israelis, each paid up to $120,000 for a “transplant holiday” they pretended they were relatives of the donors and that no cash changed hands.”

In 2004 a legislative commission in Brazil reported, “At least 30 Brazilians have sold their kidneys to an international human organ trafficking ring for transplants performed in South Africa, with Israel providing most of the funding.” According to an IPS report: “The recipients were mostly Israelis, who receive health insurance reimbursements of $70,000 to 80,000 for life-saving medical procedures performed abroad.”

IPS reports: The Brazilians were recruited in Brazil’s most impoverished neighborhoods and were paid $10,000 per kidney, “but as ’supply’ increased, the payments fell as low as 3,000 dollars.” The trafficking had been organized by a retired Israeli police officer, who said “he did not think he was committing a crime, given that the transaction is considered legal by his country’s government.”

The Israeli Embassy issued a statement denying any participation by the Israeli government in the illegal trade of human organs but said it did recognize that its citizens, in emergency cases, could undergo organ transplants in other countries, “in a legal manner, complying with international norms,” and with the financial support of their medical insurance. However, IPS reports that the commission chair termed the Israeli stance “at the very least ‘anti-ethical’, adding that trafficking can only take place on a major scale if there is a major source of financing, such as the Israeli health system.” He went on to state that the resources provided by the Israeli health system “were a determining factor” that allowed the network to function.

IPS goes on to report: “Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who heads the Organs Watch project at the US University of California, Berkeley, testified to the Pernambuco legislative commission that international trafficking of human organs began some 12 years ago, promoted by Zacki Shapira, former director of a hospital in Tel Aviv.

“Shapira performed more than 300 kidney transplants, sometimes accompanying his patients to other countries, such as Turkey. The recipients are very wealthy or have very good health insurance, and the ‘donors’ are very poor people from Eastern Europe, Philippines and other developing countries, said Scheper-Hughes, who specializes in medical anthropology.”

In 2007 Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper reported that two men confessed to persuading “Arabs from the Galilee and central Israel who were developmentally challenged or mentally ill to agree to have a kidney removed for payment.” They then would refuse to pay them.

The paper reported that the two were part of a criminal ring that included an Israeli surgeon. According to the indictment, the surgeon sold the kidneys he harvested for between $125,000 and $135,000. Earlier that year another Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, reported that ten members of an Israeli organ smuggling ring targeting Ukrainians had been arrested. In still another 2007 story, the Jerusalem Post reported that “Prof. Zaki Shapira, one of Israel’s leading transplant surgeons, was arrested in Turkey on Thursday on suspicion of involvement in an organ trafficking ring. According to the report, the transplants were arranged in Turkey and took place at private hospitals in Istanbul.”

In July of this year even US media reported on the arrest of Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, recently arrested by federal officials in a massive corruption sweep in New Jersey that netted mayors, government officials and a number of prominent rabbis. Bostrom opens his article with this incident. According to the federal complaint, Rosenbaum, who has close ties to Israel, said that he had been involved in the illegal sale of kidneys for 10 years. A US Attorney explained: “His business was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000.”

This is reportedly the first case of international organ trafficking in the US. University of California anthropologist and organ trade expert Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who informed the FBI about Rosenbaum seven years ago, says she heard reports that he had held donors at gunpoint to ensure they followed through on agreements to “donate” their organs.

Israel has an extraordinarily small number of willing organ donors. According to the Israeli news service Ynet, “the percentage of organs donated among Jews is the lowest of all the ethnic groups… In Western countries, some 30 percent of the population have organ donor cards. In Israel, in contrast, four percent of the population holds such cards.

“According to statistics from the Health Ministry’s website, in 2001, 88 Israelis died waiting for a transplant because of a lack of donor organs. In the same year, 180 Israelis were brain dead, and their organs could have been used for transplant, but only 80 of their relatives agreed to donate their organs.”

According to Ynet, the low incidence of donors is related to “religious reasons.” In 2006 there was an uproar when an Israeli hospital known for its compliance with Jewish law performed a transplant operation using an Israeli donor. The week before, “a similar incident occurred, but since the patient was not Jewish it passed silently.”

The Swedish article reports that ‘Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with organs and transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ collaboration with Israel in the 1990s. Jerusalem Post wrote that “the rest of the European countries are expected to follow France’s example shortly.”

“Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only Western country with a medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal business – on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (Dec. 5, 2003).”

To fill this need former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, then health minister of Israel, organized a big donor campaign in the summer of 1992, but while the number of donors skyrocketed, need still greatly surpassed supply.

Bostrom, who earlier wrote of all this in his 2001 book Inshallah, reports in his recent article: “While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.

“Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.”

“I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then traveled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed.”

He describes the case of 19-year-old Bilal Achmed Ghanan, shot by Israeli forces invading his village. “The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair… Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family.”

Five days later he was returned, “dead and wrapped up in green hospital fabric.” Bostrom reports that as the body was lowered into the grave, his chest was exposed and onlookers could see that he was stitched up from his stomach to his head. Bostrom writes that this was not the first time people had seen such a thing. “The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,” relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied.”

Bostrom describes the questions that families asked: “Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they performing autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted?”

Israel’s answer was that all Palestinians who were killed were routinely autopsied. However, Bostrom points out that of the133 Palestinians who were killed that year, only 69 were autopsied.

He goes on to write: “We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut from abdomen to chin.

It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.”

In scanning through the reaction to Bostrom’s report, one is struck by the multitude of charges that his article is a new version of the old anti-Semitic “blood libel.” Given that fact, it is interesting to examine a 2007 book by Israel’s pre-eminent expert on medieval Jewish history, and what happened to him. The author is Bar-Ilan prof. (and rabbi) Ariel Toaff, son of the former chief rabbi of Rome, a religious leader so famous that an Israeli journalist writes that Toaff’s father “is to Italian Jewry as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.” Ariel Toaff, himself, is considered “one of the greatest scholars in his field.”

In February 2007 the Israeli and Italian media were abuzz (though most of the US media somehow missed it) with news that Prof. Toaff had written a book entitled “Pasque di Sangue” (“Blood Passovers”) containing evidence that there “was a factual basis for some of the medieval blood libels against the Jews.”

Based on 35 years of research, Toaff had concluded that there were at least a few, possibly many, real incidents. In an interview with an Italian newspaper (the book was published in Italy), Toaff says: “My research shows that in the Middle Ages, a group of fundamentalist Jews did not respect the biblical prohibition and used blood for healing. It is just one group of Jews, who belonged to the communities that suffered the severest persecution during the Crusades. From this trauma came a passion for revenge that in some cases led to responses, among them ritual murder of Christian children.”

(Incidentally, an earlier book containing similar findings was published some years ago, also by an Israeli professor, Israel Shahak, of whom Noam Chomsky once wrote, “Shahak is an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight and depth of knowledge. His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value.”)

Prof. Toaff was immediately attacked from all sides, including pressure orchestrated by Anti-Defamation League Chairman Abe Foxman, but Toaff stood by his 35 years of research, announcing: “I will not give up my devotion to the truth and academic freedom even if the world crucifies me… One shouldn’t be afraid to tell the truth.”

Before long, however, under relentless public and private pressure, Toaff had recanted, withdrawn his book, and promised to give all profits that had already accrued (the book had been flying off Italian bookshelves) to Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League. A year later he published a “revised version.” Donald Bostrom’s experience seems to be a repeat of what Prof. Toaff endured: Calumny, vituperation, and defamation. Bostrom has received death threats as well, perhaps an experience that Prof. Toaff also shared.

If Israel is innocent of organ plundering accusations, or if its culpability is considerably less than Bostrom and others suggest, it should welcome honest investigations that would clear it of wrongdoing. Instead, the government and its advocates are working to suppress all debate and crush those whose questions and conclusions they find threatening.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, rather than responding to calls for an investigation, is demanding that the Swedish government abandon its commitment to a free press and condemn the article. The Israeli press office, apparently in retaliation and to prevent additional investigation, is refusing to give press credentials to reporters from the offending newspaper.

Just as in the case of the rampage against Jenin, the attack on the USS liberty, the massacre of Gaza, the crushing of Rachel Corrie, the torture of American citizens, and a multitude of other examples, Israel is using its considerable, worldwide resources to interfere with the investigative process.

It is difficult to conclude that it has nothing to hide.

I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794.

By Cynthia McKinney

This is Cynthia McKinney and I’m speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies – and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.

At the outbreak of Israel’s Operation ‘Cast Lead’ [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day’s notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver 3 tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.

During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16’s rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs – new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel’s onslaught that Gaza had become Israel’s veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.

The world saw Israel’s despicable violence thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water … It’s a miracle that I’m even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.

The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime … I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons to kids?

Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else’s children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza’s children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.

I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza’s children could color and paint, that Gaza’s wounded could be healed, and that Gaza’s bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.

But I’ve learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it’s incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream … like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better … The once proud, never colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.

My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn’t cheap. Many of them represent their family’s best collective efforts for self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel only after they arrived Israel told them “there is no UN in Israel.”

The police here have license to pick them up & suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world’s first Jews and Christian. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.

The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle’s detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for 6 months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and ‘yes we can’ were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in.

It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel’s marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.

We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they’ve done to others around the world.

What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people’s children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I’m experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I’m lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?

Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] what are you willing to do?

Let’s change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State’s Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.

I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I’ve met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.

- Cynthia McKinney is a former U.S. Congresswoman, Green Party presidential candidate, and an outspoken advocate for human rights and social justice. The first African-American woman to represent the state of Georgia, McKinney served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1993-2003, and from 2005-2007. She was arrested and forcibly abducted to Israel while attempting to take humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to Gaza on June 30th. For more information, please see http://www.FreeGaza.org.

British people are waking up to the truth about Israel’s lawlessness.

By Stuart Littlewood – London

On Tuesday the Israeli navy, in a blatant act of piracy on the high seas, assaulted the vessel ‘Spirit of Humanity’ and abducted six British nationals who were taking part in a voyage of mercy. The tiny unarmed ship was bringing a humanitarian cargo of medicines, children’s toys and reconstruction materials to the devastated people of Gaza.

Israel’s murderous 22-day offensive last December/January left more than 50,000 homes, 800 industrial properties, 200 schools, 39 mosques and two churches damaged or destroyed. The International Committee of the Red Cross says the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza are “trapped in despair”, unable to rebuild their lives because Israel, having wantonly wrecked their civil society and infrastructure, is blocking efforts to bring in the necessary repair materials. Those on board the ‘Spirit of Humanity’ were acting in accord with donors’ pledges of $4.5 billion for reconstruction and rehabilitation and US President Obama’s request to Israel to let those supplies pass.

The mercy ship sailed from Larnaca, Cyprus, with a crew of 21 human rights activists, humanitarian workers and journalists from 11 different countries, including Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire and former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. In the early hours of Tuesday morning Israeli warships surrounded it and threatened to open fire if the crew didn’t turn back. When they refused to be intimidated, the Israelis jammed their instrumentation and blocked their GPS, radar, and navigation systems, putting all lives at risk.

The ship had been searched and given security clearance by the Port Authorities in Cyprus before sailing, and posed no threat.

Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights, says the seizing of the ‘Spirit of Humanity’ is unlawful and the continuing blockade of Gaza a crime against humanity. Yes, yes, Mr. Falk. But the question as always is, what is your paralytic, useless organization doing about it? Or is hand-wringing all it’s good for?

Many here, including myself, immediately wrote to David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, about the outrage. Two days later I called the Palestine desk at the Foreign Office in London. The person I spoke to sounded uncomfortable having to trot out the same old gobbledigook about “working hard to resolve the problem” and “doing all we can”. He said the six Brits were in Israeli custody and nobody was sure where exactly the incident took place. However, the vessel was fitted with a SPOT GPS tracker, so the system should have a record of their position when attacked.

The real problem, as I suggested, is that Israel dares to kidnap Brits on the high seas and doesn’t fear the consequences – no doubt confident there won’t be any. I was reminded that Israel had issued warnings (and so had the Foreign Office) not to travel in that area. What area? Mustn’t one travel in international waters?

The spokesman assured me that progress was being made. There was “movement” on getting humanitarian supplies into Gaza, but I pointed out that nobody had seen any evidence of Israel conforming with international law and Geneva Conventions. He claimed there was also “movement” on halting settlements on occupied territory, although I observed that the Israelis had just OK’d more illegal building.

I also reminded him about the ramming of the MV ‘Dignity’ on a similar mission by an Israeli gunboat on 30 December, 53 miles from shore, and how people here were still hopping mad that nothing had been done about it. The vessel, with 16 on board, was badly damaged and had to limp to a safe Lebanese port. As far as I know, there was never an offer of compensation and no demand from London. As usual, somebody else had to pick up the tab for Israel’s unbridled destruction.

The ‘Dignity’ had a cargo of 3.5 tonnes of medical supplies, the majority donated by the Cyprus government, and a British skipper and a Greek mate. It carried fourteen passengers, one of whom was Cynthia McKinney. There were also two surgeons and a Palestinian physician. A friend of mine was among them and wrote this chilling account of the attack:

“At 04.55 hrs EMT on 30 December, searchlights appeared astern. There were two Israeli gunboats. They came abreast, circled and stayed with us. These boats can do over 45 knots, carry ten tonnes of fuel and have sophisticated weapon systems including Hellfire missiles. Tracer bullets were fired skywards, forming ellipses, and flares put up. At 05.30 hrs approximately, one gunboat was playing its searchlight on the port side of ‘Dignity’. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash at the bow, and then another almost simultaneously, and another on the port beam… The bow dipped and it seemed the boat was breaking up. It was dark, the wind force was 4 to 5 and there was a 10ft sea. The master shouted ‘we have been rammed’. It was feared the boat would sink. He broadcast a Mayday distress signal; there was no response.

“Cynthia McKinney and Caoimhe Butterly could not swim; the life jackets were rapidly deployed to all. The hull was taking water but bilge pumps were working. The first words from a commander of one of the gun boats came over the radio. First there was the accusation that the ship’s company was involved with terrorists and that it was subversive. Then there came the threat to shoot. The master was forbidden from making for Gaza or further south to El Arish in Egypt. He was ordered to return to Larnaca – about 160 miles, even though the boat was badly damaged and the Israeli did not know whether there was sufficient fuel, which there was not. He set a northerly course and the boat stayed buoyant in a moderating sea. A crew member arranged with the Lebanese authorities for a safe harbour in Sour (Tyre) where jubilant crowds thronged the quays. A UNIFIL ship came out to escort us and the Israeli gunboats, which were following, fell back.

“Was there lethal intent? A gunboat came out of the black of night with no lights showing whilst a searchlight from the other gun boat displayed our port hull as its target. It would have approached at about 30 degrees to the Dignity’s port and at speed. The intention to sink the Dignity and thus to drown its company was clear. If the hull had been GRP (Glass Reinforced Plastic) it would have shattered and the boat would have sunk like a stone 53 nautical miles off Haifa. Fortunately, the hull was constructed of marine ply with timber ribs and survived…. The ship’s company were repatriated except for a resolute Scot, Theresa McDermott. She was imprisoned in Ramleh gaol. When the British Consulate in Israel was contacted for assistance in finding Teresa, staff refused to help locate her saying they couldn’t provide assistance to a UK citizen unless she personally requested it. Teresa was released after six days, her ‘crime’ probably being a member of the International Solidarity Campaign like Rachel Corrie before her.”

My written question to Mr Miliband was simply this: “Why isn’t Her Majesty’s Government providing the mercy ship ‘Spirit of Humanity’ with an escort to protect against the unlawful, piratical interference and threat to life by the Israeli navy? There have been repeated incidents of harassment, damage, theft and armed aggression on the high seas or in Palestinian waters by the Israeli regime against unarmed vessels”.

The British government has loudly pledged Royal Navy help to stop the “smuggling” of arms to the Gaza resistance but won’t protect Gaza’s fishermen from being fired on by Israeli marauders while trying to earn their living. And evidently the government can’t be bothered to protect our own people going about their lawful business.

But, sure enough, they kicked up an almighty fuss when Iran nabbed 15 British sailors two years ago for allegedly straying into Iranian waters.

For our sins we are saddled with a foreign secretary who calls for Israeli tank crewman Gilad Shalit’s release but not the release of 11,000 Palestinian civilians – some of them women and children – rotting in Israeli jails. On 25 June Miliband said: ‘Today is the third anniversary of the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. Both British Ministers and the British Ambassador in Israel have had repeated contact with Gilad’s family and emphasized our support for Gilad’s immediate release. Last September, the Ambassador helped to deliver over 2,000 Jewish New Year cards for Gilad to the ICRC as part of a campaign organized by the UK Jewish community. I repeat the UK’s call to Hamas for his immediate, unconditional, and safe release. We share the Shalit family’s dismay at Hamas’s refusal to allow the ICRC access to Gilad.

It’s shameful that his dismay doesn’t extend to the 11,000 Palestinian families.

British people are waking up to the truth about Israel’s lawlessness. In the absence of firm action from the British government they are taking reprisals of their own, in the form of boycotts, which has driven Mr. Miliband to complain that “the Government is dismayed that motions calling for boycotts of Israel are being discussed at trade union congresses and conferences this summer”. He insists that boycotts “obstruct opportunities for co-operation and dialogue and serve only to polarize debate further. Boycotts would only make it harder to achieve the peace that both Palestinians and Israelis deserve and desire”.

Mr. Miliband hasn’t learned the lesson of the last 61 years. And our prime minister-in-waiting, David Cameron (a Zionist and, like Brown and Blair, a patron of the Jewish National Fund), is no different. He says: “I think there’s something else we need to do, which is to say to our academics in this country that boycotts of Israel are completely unacceptable, and I think we also need to say that to the trade unions.”

Nowadays you have to carefully to pick your way through a veritable obstacle-course of pro-Zionists, Chosen Ones and Israeli stooges that inhabit every nook and cranny in the corridors of power and dominate Britain’s key defense bodies. These Israeli flag-wavers seem only too happy for the Israelis to insult us – and the rest of the world – while rewarding them with more and more trade and scientific co-operation.

- Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk.

Engagement and political validation must not happen at expense of the Palestinian people.

By Ramzy Baroud

Much can be said to explain, or even justify Hamas’ recent political concessions, where its top leaders in Gaza and Damascus agreed in principle with a political settlement on the basis of the two-state solution.

On June 25, Damascus-based leader of the Islamic group’s political bureau, Khaled Meshaal reiterated Hamas’ rejection of recognizing Israel as a Jewish State, rightfully dubbing such a designation as “racist, no different from Nazis and other calls denounced by the international community.” However, he did endorse the idea of a two-state solution, which envisages the creation of an independent Palestinian state on roughly 22 percent of the land of historic Palestine.

The announcement was hardly earth shattering, for other Hamas leaders have alluded, or straightforwardly agreed to the same notion in the past. But what was in fact altered is the language used by Hamas’ leaders to endorse the illusive and increasingly unfeasible possibility of two states. Meshaal’s language was largely secular, while past Hamas references to the same principle were engulfed in religious idiom. For example, in past years Hamas agreed to a Palestinian state in all of the occupied territories, conditioned on the removal of Jewish settlements, under the provision of a long-term ‘hunda’, or truce. The term ‘hudna’ is loaded with implicit religious inferences, and was used to present Hamas’ political views as both pragmatic, but also based on time-honored Islamic political tradition.

Ahmed Yousef, chief advisor to the deposed Hamas government in Gaza alluded to the concept of ‘hudna’ in various writings and media interviews. But his calls sounded more like an attempt to find common space between the Islamic movement’s firm religious beliefs and US-led international pressure aimed at forcing Hamas into the same political camp which discredited rival Fatah. But Ahmed Yousef’s variation in rhetoric cannot be understood as synonymous with Meshaal’s recent political revelations.

The boycott of the elected Hamas government in 2006, and the orchestrated violence that led to a Hamas takeover, and subsequent isolation and siege of the Gaza Strip, were all meant to force Hamas to ‘moderate’ its position. Immense collective suffering was endured throughout the Gaza Strip in order for Israel and its backers, including the Palestinian leadership based in the West Bank to force Hamas out of its ideological trenches to join the ‘pragmatic’ camp, which saw little harm in fruitless political compromises.

Hamas’ steadfastness was enough to further demonstrate its revolutionary credence and patriotic credentials to most Palestinians and their supporters around the Middle East and the world. Hamas impressed many, not because of its theological references, but political resilience and refusal to be intimidated. In some way, Hamas achieved the same revolutionary status and recognition as that of Fatah in the 1960’s.

It was not until the Israeli war against largely defenseless Gaza starting December 2008, that Hamas seemed politically self-assured, and for good reason. After all, it was a democratically elected movement representing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Their rivals’ failure to accommodate the new political reality, and incessant Israeli attempts at destroying the movement and imprisoning scores of its elected parliamentarians were not enough to de-legitimize it. Then Israel unleashed one of its grizzliest campaigns against Palestinians, aimed largely at civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza. The Israeli war was meant to achieve more than the killing of 1,350 (including 437 children) and the wounding of 5,450 others. It was aimed at disturbing the Palestinian psyche that began seeing a world of possibilities beyond the confining and shallow promises of peace infused by the Oslo peace process, which only served to ingrain occupation and entrench illegal settlements.

International solidarity was building up slowly prior to the Israeli attack. As Israeli bombs began raining atop Gaza’s mostly civilian infrastructure, international solidarity exploded throughout the world. Israel’s brutal folly served to legitimize the very group it was meant to crush. The voices that tirelessly demanded Hamas to live up to fixed conditions, handed down by the so-called Middle East peace quartet, were overshadowed by voices demanding the US and various Western powers to recognize and engage Hamas. A lead voice amongst them is former US President Jimmy Carter, one of the first influential Western personalities to engage Hamas, and to break the news that Hamas “would accept a two-state peace agreement with Israel as long as it was approved by a Palestinian referendum or a newly elected government.” (Guardian, April 22, 2008)

Carter’s insistence on involving Hamas in any future peace arrangement took him from Damascus, to Cairo to the West Bank, then, to Gaza. His recent visit to the Strip on June 16 was more than that of solidarity, but it was aimed at convincing Hamas to agree to the vision of two states and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. The alternative conditions are meant to present a more dignified exit than the belligerent and one-sided demands of the quartet. It’s unclear whether Hamas would fully embrace his call. But what is clear is that Hamas is sending various signals, such as its willingness to engage in dialogue with the Obama administration, and, again, acceptance of the two-state solution, which according to any reasonable estimation of the Israeli ‘facts on the ground’ created in occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank, is now a far-fetched possibility.

Needless to say, Hamas as a political movement, with an elected government with some jurisdiction over nearly one-third of the Palestinian people has the right, and even more, the obligation to politically maneuver, reposition and even re-brand itself. Breaking the siege on Gaza requires steadfastness, true, but political ingenuity as well. That said, Hamas must be wary of the political, and historic price that will be paid if it fails to learn from the experience of the discredited and corrupted Fatah. Palestinian rights are enshrined in international law, and corroborated by the endless sacrifices of the Palestinian people, in Gaza and elsewhere. Therefore, the price of engagement, dialogue and political validation must not happen at the expense of the Palestinian people wherever they are, as stipulated in numerous UN resolutions including 194, pertaining to the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, “The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle” (Pluto Press, London), and his forthcoming book is, “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London)

Has anything changed since the massacre in My Lai?

By Stuart Littlewood – London

Reports of prisoner abuse at the US prison at Bagram air force base in Afghanistan come as no surprise. They are just the latest example of the world’s biggest bully behaving badly as usual.

As if that weren’t enough, I’m reading how some 83 people, mostly civilians, were killed and over 50 injured in three drone attacks within 12 hours in Lataka, South Waziristan.

The first strike killed several suspected Taliban. Later, a second drone fired three missiles into a crowd of funeral mourners.

One of the wounded commented: “If the Taliban are bombing the mosques and America is bombing the funerals, what is the difference between them? We are stuck between Taliban and US attacks and when we are killed, not only no one cries for us, but also we are dubbed militants.”

Since August 2008, over 40 US drone strikes have killed at least 410 people. US troops in neighboring Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy unmanned drones in the region.

The use of armed drones is a particularly cowardly form of warfare. These lethal “assets” are computer-controlled from the comfort and safety of an armchair a hundred miles away and guided by dodgy “intelligence”. Or, if the truth be known, no intelligence at all. The Israelis use them extensively in Gaza to unleash death and destruction on civilian targets by remote control. Engines for Israeli drones are believed to be supplied by a British manufacturer, although the government here pretends not to know the truth of the matter.

This trend in ’sofa slaughter’ has many variations. For example, during the 40-day siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002 the Israeli Occupation Force set up huge cranes on which were mounted robotic machine guns under video control. Eight defenders, including the bell-ringer, were murdered, some by the robotic guns and some by snipers.

The US and its allies are just as callous in their treatment of civilian prisoners. The British authorities deal with their casual killings by offering £4,500 in compensation, showing how cheaply we value the life of ‘Johnny Foreigner’. And when it comes to prisoner abuse the Israelis, whose every cruel excess the West defends, don’t even spare children, according to various reports.

Something very chilling can take hold of uniformed thugs – I won’t call them soldiers because what many of them do is not proper soldiering – in a war zone; and in the days before high-tech weaponry like drones and robotic machine guns they happily indulged their blood-lust by murdering civilians at close quarters. If you haven’t heard of the My Lai massacre, brace yourself.

In 1968, 150 men of Charlie Company, a US infantry unit, were sent on a ‘search and destroy’ mission into the South Vietnamese village of My Lai. Four hours later more than 500 civilians – unarmed women, children and old men – were dead. Charlie Company hadn’t encountered a single Viet Cong. Nevertheless the unit, led by Lt William Calley, rounded up villagers and machine-gunned them until the dead lay five-deep.

When Calley spotted a baby crawling away, he grabbed her, threw her back into the ditch, and opened fire again.

Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, flying over the area, was so sickened by what he saw that he landed his machine to shield villagers from the troops and began rescuing survivors. He ordered his gunner to open up on any American soldiers who continued to shoot civilians.

Some of the dead were mutilated by having “C Company” carved into their chests; some were disembowelled.

Official reports said the My Lai operation was a stunning combat victory, and General Westmoreland congratulated the men on their bravery.

The American people didn’t learn the truth until 18 months later … and then only because a Vietnam veteran, after hearing about the incident from friends who had served in Charlie Company, wrote a letter to his congressman and other prominent officials, including President Nixon.

An army photographer produced pictures of the carnage. Then freelance reporter Seymour Hersh managed to interview Calley and splashed the story over the front pages of American newspapers.

26 members of C Company were charged with criminal behavior but not convicted. Calley himself was eventually court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving just three days he was moved to a comfortable apartment under house arrest, on Nixon’s orders. He was paroled 3 years later.

Hersh said that many in Charlie Company “had given in to an easy pattern of violence” and were totally blind to the humanity of the Vietnamese people. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

My Lai was one of many atrocities committed in Korea and Vietnam. Military training in those days set out to de-humanize not only the enemy but the local civilian population as well. Army culture encouraged its so-called soldiers to think they could treat them like garbage.

Has anything changed? The conduct of the Americans and their close buddies the Israelis is remarkably similar. They are the pace-setters (though not the only practitioners) in savagery and the casual art of killing Johnny Foreigner. It is now done at arm’s length – by remote video control or at the end of a sniper’s scope-sight or by DU tank shell, or from 35,000 feet. No need to personally check the situation on the ground, or look your unarmed victim in the eye, or get your hands dirty. No need to count the bodies afterwards or clear up the shredded and vaporized remains.

Apparently these high-tech killers, their commanders and their political masters have convinced themselves that everyone they don’t like is sub-human.

I’m reminded of a blistering attack by a church minister in Oklahoma after the shock-and-awe onslaught on Iraq, the point at which he discovered that his faith had been hi-jacked by fundamentalists who claimed to speak for Jesus but whose actions were anything but Christian.

“When you live in a country that has established international rules for waging a just war, build the United Nations on your own soil to enforce them, and then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral,” he said.

”When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching, or turn them on their head, you are doing something immoral.

”When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you are doing something immoral.

”When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killing is righteous, while theirs is evil, we have begun to resemble the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral.

“We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.”

- Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk.

Yitzhak Aharonovitch (right) with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

By Joharah Baker – Jerusalem

What unwritten law is out there that allows Israelis to sling racist insults at Palestinians with impunity? After all my years in this country and the absurdities that come along with it, this is one absurdity I still find hard to digest.

Obviously, my outrage has been most recently rekindled by Israeli Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch, who during a tour of the old central bus station in Tel Aviv called a Palestinian-Israeli policeman a “real dirty Arab.” Once the words were out, the minister was forced to apologize, saying his remarks did not reflect his worldview. A spokesman for the ministry also issued a statement saying that, “in a moment of jest, and using common slang, the minister said what he said, not intending to hurt anyone.”

If this were an isolated incident or if it were not an Israeli right-wing minister who said it, we might, just might, be inclined to believe this sorry excuse for an explanation. But in Israel’s history with the Palestinians, this can hardly be considered slip-of-the-tongue. Instead, such slurs are embedded in a historically-rooted relationship between Israeli Jews and their perceived Palestinian-Arab subordinates, a relationship that is so lopsided it allows room for those who wish to be verbally abusive against Palestinians to thrive.

This is certainly not the first time an Israeli political or religious figure insults Palestinians or calls them some degrading name. In 2001, the spiritual leader of Shas, Ovadia Yosef called Palestinians snakes and called on God to “annihilate Arabs.” In an interview with the Israeli daily Maariv, he said, “It is forbidden to be merciful to them, you must give them missiles, – annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.”

Expecting that such remarks might not be received well by the public and the media, a Shas spokesperson at the time clarified that Yosef had only been referring to “Arab murderers and terrorists.” Doesn’t that make us all feel better?

Still, some may say Yosef was an overzealous, ultra-religious fumbling fool who should not be taken seriously. Fine. What about Israel’s prime ministers? Those who the Israeli public voted into office? In 1982, in a speech to the Knesset, Prime Minister Menachem Begin said, “The Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs.”

A year later, Raphael Eitan, then-Israeli army chief of staff told the New York Times, “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”

At times, such blatantly racist statements embarrass Israel, not because many do not believe them but because Israel markets itself as a democratic country that treats all of its citizens with dignity and equality. We Palestinians here in the West Bank and Gaza are not Israeli citizens, but to mention that we have been under an Israeli military occupation for over 40 years just opens one more can of worms and adds to the explanations Israeli officials must provide as to why we are treated so badly.

The policeman who was insulted by Aharonovitch in Tel Aviv however, is an Israeli citizen, one of 1.2 million Palestinians living inside Israel. According to the law, this cop is to be treated like any other citizen of Israel, without discrimination. In reality, though, he and all the other Palestinians are treated as second class citizens, mostly because they live in a country tailored for Jews only. This is no secret. Israel was established as a homeland for Jews, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has set the recognition of the country as a Jewish state as a condition for talks with Palestinians and any Jew anywhere in the world has a right to make Israel their home under its Law of Return.

Add to this even more anti-Arab and Palestinian sentiment found in Israeli “common slang”. According to an article in Haaretz about the Salute for Israel Parade in New York City, young Israelis singing Am Yisrael Chai, (the Jewish Nation Lives), replaced the line “The People of Israel Lives” with “All the Arabs Must Die.” When asked by a fellow Jew whether the words of the song bothered him, one participant answered flatly, “This is Zionism.”

Apparently, that is all the answer needed to explain why Jews should reign over Arabs, why Palestinians should not be treated as human beings and degrading slurs such as the one made by the Public Security Minister are brushed off as a “joke”. This is also apparently why Israelis who call for death to the Arabs or call them beasts and snakes are not chided by the world or ostracized for their extremist views, even as those who call for the “destruction of Israel” are demonized and forever branded as militants, extremists and opponents of peace.

The problem is not primarily in the occasional slurs that are uttered by this or that minister or rabbi, regardless of how despicable. If it were not for a system that allows a breeding ground for such racist ideas, these officials would never have been given the chance to make their outrageous statements. But there is such a system and it is alive and well. A system that purports, according to the unnamed young man proudly singing “All Arabs must die” that all is justified in one sentence: “This is Zionism.”

- Joharah Baker is a writer for the Media and Information Program at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mip@miftah.org. (Published in MIFTAH – www.miftah.org).

By Uri Avnery – Israel

“You must be celebrating,” the interviewer from a popular radio station told me after Netanyahu’s speech. “After all, he is accepting the plan which you proposed 42 years ago!” (Actually it was 60 years ago, but who is counting?)

The front page of Haaretz carried an article by Gideon Levy, in which he wrote that “the courageous call of Uri Avnery and his friends four decades ago is now being echoed, though feebly, from end to end (of the Israeli political spectrum).”

I would be lying if I denied feeling a brief glow of satisfaction, but it faded quickly. This was no “historic” speech, not even a “great” speech. It was a clever speech.

It contained some sanctimonious verbiage to appease Barack Obama, followed right away by the opposite, to pacify the Israeli extreme right. Not much more.

Netanyahu declared that “our hand is extended for peace.”

In my ears, that rang a bell: in the 1956 Sinai war, a member of my editorial staff was attached to the brigade that conquered Sharm-al-Sheikh. Since he had grown up in Egypt, he interviewed the senior captured Egyptian officer, a colonel. “Every time David Ben-Gurion announced that his hand was stretched out for peace,” the Egyptian told him, “we were put on high alert.”

And indeed, that was Ben-Gurion’s method. Before every provocation he would declare that “our hands are extended for peace”, adding conditions that he knew were totally unacceptable to the other side. Thus an ideal situation (for him) was created: The world saw Israel as a peace-loving country, while the Arabs looked like serial peace-killers. Our secret weapon is the Arab refusal, it used to be joked in Jerusalem at the time.

This week, Netanyahu wheeled out the same old trick.

I do not underrate, of course, the significance of the chief of the Likud uttering the two words: “Palestinian state”.

Words carry political weight. Once released into the world, they have a life of their own. Unlike dogs, they cannot be called back.

In a popular Israeli love song, the boy asks the girl: “When you say no, what do you mean?” One could well ask: When Netanyahu says yes, what does he mean?

But even if the words “Palestinian state” passed his lips only under duress, and when Netanyahu has no intention at all of turning them into reality, it is still important that the head of the government and the chief of the Likud was compelled to utter them. The idea of the Palestinian state has now become a part of the national consensus, and only a handful of ultra-rightists reject it directly. But this is only the beginning. The main struggle will be about turning the idea into reality.

The entire speech was addressed to one single person: Barack Obama. It was not designed to appeal to the Palestinians. It was quite clear that the Palestinians are only the passive object of a discussion between the President of the USA and the Prime Minister of Israel. Except in some tired old clichés, Netanyahu spoke about them, not to them.

He is ready, so he says, to conduct negotiations with the “Palestinian community”, and that, of course, “without preconditions”. Meaning: without Palestinian preconditions. On Netanyahu’s part, there are plenty of preconditions, every one of which is designed to make certain that no Palestinian, no Arab and indeed no Muslim will agree to enter negotiations.

Condition 1: The Arabs have to recognize Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people” (and not just “a Jewish state”, as many in the media erroneously reported.) As Hosny Mubarak has already answered: No Arab will accept this, because it would mean that 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel are cut off from the state, and because it would deny in advance the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees – the main bargaining chip of the Arab side.

It should be remembered that when the United Nations resolved in 1947 to partition Palestine between a “Jewish state” and an “Arab state”, they did not mean to define the character of the states. They were just stating facts: there are two mutually hostile populations in the country, and therefore the country has to be divided between them. (Anyhow, 40% of the population of the “Jewish” state was to consist of Arabs.)

Condition 2: The Palestinian Authority must first of all establish its rule over the Gaza Strip. How? After all, the Israeli government prevents travel between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and no Palestinian force can pass from one to the other. And the solution of the problem by establishing a Palestinian unity government is also ruled out: Netanyahu flatly declared that there would be no negotiations with a Palestinian leadership that includes “terrorists who want to annihilate us” – his way of referring to Hamas.

Condition 3: The Palestinian state will be demilitarized. This is not a new idea. All peace plans that have been put forward up to now speak about security arrangements that would protect Israel from Palestinian attacks and Palestine from Israeli attacks. But that is not what Netanyahu has in mind: he did not speak about mutuality, but about domination. Israel would control the air space and the border crossings of the Palestinian state, turning it into a kind of giant Gaza Strip. Also, Netanyahu’s style was deliberately overbearing and humiliating: he obviously hopes that the word ‘demilitarized” would be enough to get the Palestinians to say “no”.

Condition 4: Undivided Jerusalem will remain under Israeli rule. This was not proposed as an opening gambit for negotiations but presented as a final decision. That by itself ensures that no Palestinian, nor any Arab or even any Muslim, could accept the proposal.

In the Oslo Agreement, Israel undertook to negotiate about the future of Jerusalem. It is an accepted legal rule that if one undertakes to negotiate, one accepts to do so bona fide, on the basis of give and take. Therefore, all peace plans provide that East Jerusalem – wholly or partly – will be returned to Arab rule.

Condition 5: Between Israel and the Palestinian state there will be “defensible borders”. These are code-words for extensive annexations by Israel. Their meaning: no return to the 1967 borders, not even with a swap of territory that would allow for some of the large settlements to be joined to Israel. In order to create “defensible borders”, a major part of the occupied Palestinian territories (which altogether make up just 22% of pre-1948 Palestine) will be absorbed into Israel.

Condition 6: The refugee problem will be solved “outside the territory of Israel”. Meaning: not a single refugee will be allowed to return. True, all realistic people agree that there can be no return of millions of refugees. According to the Arab peace initiative, the solution must be “mutually agreed” – which means that Israel has to agree to any solution. The assumption is that the two parties will agree on the return of a symbolic number. This is a highly charged and sensitive matter, which must be treated with prudence and the utmost sensitivity. Netanyahu does the opposite: his provocative statement, devoid of all empathy, is clearly designed to bring about an automatic refusal.

Condition 7: No settlement freeze. The “normal life” of the settlers will continue. Meaning: the building activity for the “natural increase” will go on. This illustrates the saying of Michael Tarazy, a legal advisor to the PLO: “We are negotiating about sharing a pizza, and in the meantime Israel is eating it.”

All this was in the speech. No less interesting is what was not in it. For example, the words: Road Map. Annapolis. Palestine. The Arab peace plan. Occupation. Palestinian Sovereignty. Opening of the Gaza Strip border crossings. Golan Heights. And, even more important: there was not a hint of respect for the enemy who must be turned into a friend, in the words of the ancient Jewish saying.

So what is more important? The verbal recognition of “a Palestinian state” or the conditions which empty these words of all content?

The public response is interesting. In an opinion poll taken immediately after the speech, 71% supported it, but 55% believed that Netanyahu just “gave in to American pressure”, and 70% did not believe that a Palestinian state would really come about during the next few years.

What exactly do the 71% support? The “Palestinian state” solution or the conditions which obstruct its implementation – or both?

There is, of course, an extreme right-wing minority which prefers a head-on collision with the United States to giving up any territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Along the road to Jerusalem one can see large posters showing a manipulated photo of Obama wearing an Arab headdress. (It sends a shiver down the spine, because it reminds us of seeing exactly the same poster with Yitzhak Rabin under the keffiyeh.) But the great majority of the people understand that a break with the US must be avoided at all costs.

Netanyahu and the right-wing hoped that the Palestinians would reject his words outright, thus painting themselves as serial peace refusers, while the Israeli government would be seen as taking the first small but significant step towards peace. They are sure that this could be achieved for nothing: the Palestinian state will not be set up, the Israeli government will not give up anything, the occupation will remain, settlement activity will go on and Obama will accept all this.

So the main question is: how will Obama react?

The first reaction was minor. A politely positive response.

Obama is not seeking a frontal collision with the Israeli government. It seems that he wants to exert “soft” pressure, vigorously but quietly. To my mind, that is a wise approach.

A few hours before the speech, I met with ex-President Jimmy Carter. The meeting took place at the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem. It was organized by Gush Shalom, with several other Israeli peace organizations taking part. In my opening remarks, I pointed out that we were in exactly the same room where 16 years ago, while the Oslo agreement was being signed in Washington, Israeli peace activists and the leaders of the Palestinian population in Jerusalem met and opened bottles of champagne. The euphoria of those moments has disappeared without leaving a trace.

Israelis and Palestinians have lost hope. On both sides, the overwhelming majority wants an end to the conflict but do not believe that peace is possible – and each side blames the other. Our task is to rekindle the belief that it is indeed possible.

For this there is a need for a dramatic event, a kind of invigorating electric shock – like the historic visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977. I suggested that Obama should come to Jerusalem and speak directly to the Israeli public, perhaps even from the Knesset rostrum, like Sadat.

After listening intently to the participants, the former President encouraged us in our activities and put forward some proposals of his own.

The decisive point at this moment is, of course, the matter of the settlements. Will Obama insist on a total freeze of all building activity or not?

Netanyahu hopes to wriggle out of it. He has now found a new gimmick: projects that have already started must be allowed to be finished. One cannot stop them in the middle. The plans have already been approved. The tenants are waiting for their apartments, and they must not be made to suffer. The Supreme Court will not allow a freeze. (A particularly ridiculous argument, like the court allowing a thief to spend some more of the money he has stolen before passing sentence.)

If Obama falls for this, he should not be surprised to find out belatedly that these projects include 100,000 new housing units.

This brings us to the most important fact of this week: the settlers did not raise hell after Netanyahu’s speech. On the contrary. Here and there some feeble criticism could be heard, but the large and armed settler population kept remarkably quiet.

Which brings us back to the unforgettable Sherlock Holmes, who explained how he solved one of his mysteries by drawing attention to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“But the dog did nothing in the night-time!” someone objected.

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Holmes.

- Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Israeli soldiers have been routinely using violence against Palestinian children.

By Jonathan Cook – Nazareth

The rights of Palestinian children are routinely violated by Israel’s security forces, according to a new report that says beatings and torture are common. In addition, hundreds of Palestinian minors are prosecuted by Israel each year without a proper trial and are denied family visits.

The findings by Defence for Children International (DCI) come in the wake of revelations from Israeli soldiers and senior commanders that it is “normal procedure” in the West Bank to terrorise Palestinian civilians, including children.

Col Itai Virob, commander of the Kfir Brigade, disclosed last month that to accomplish a mission, “aggressiveness towards every one of the residents in the village is common”. Questioning included slaps, beatings and kickings, he said.

As a result, Gabi Ashkenazi, the head of the armed services, was forced to appear before the Israeli parliament to disavow the behaviour of his soldiers. Beatings were “absolutely prohibited”, he told legislators.

Col Virob made his remarks during court testimony in defence of two soldiers, including his deputy commander, who are accused of beating Palestinians in the village of Qaddum, close to Nablus. One told the court that “soldiers are educated towards aggression in the IDF [army]”.

Col Virob appeared to confirm his observation, saying it was policy to “disturb the balance” of village life during missions and that the vast majority of assaults were “against uninvolved people”.

Last week, further disclosures of ill-treatment of Palestinians, some as young as 14, were aired on Israeli TV, using material collected by dissident soldiers as part of the Breaking the Silence project, which highlights army brutality.

Two soldiers serving in the Harub battalion said they had witnessed beatings at a school in the West Bank village of Hares, south-west of Nablus, in an operation in March to stop stone-throwing. Many of those held were not involved, the soldiers said.

During a 12-hour operation that began at 3am, 150 detainees were blindfolded and handcuffed from behind, with the nylon restraints so tight their hands turned blue. The worst beatings, the soldiers said, occurred in the school toilets.

According to one soldier’s testimony, a boy of about 15 was given “a slap that brought him to the ground”. He added that many of his comrades “just knee [Palestinians] because it’s boring, because you stand there 10 hours, you’re not doing anything, so they beat people up”.

The picture from serving soldiers confirms the findings of DCI, which noted that many children were picked up in general sweeps after disturbances or during late-night raids of their homes.

Its report includes a selection of testimonies from children it represented in 2008 in which they describe Israeli soldiers beating them or being tortured by interrogators.

One 10-year-old boy, identified as Ezzat H, described an army search of his family home for a gun. He said a soldier slapped and punched him repeatedly during two hours of questioning, before another soldier pointed a rifle at him: “The rifle barrel was a few centimetres away from my face. I was so terrified that I started to shiver. He made fun of me.”

Another boy, Shadi H, aged 15, said he and his friend were forced to undress by soldiers in an orange grove near Tulkarm while the soldiers threw stones at them. They were then beaten with rifle butts.

Jameel K, aged 14, described being taken to a military camp where he was assaulted and then had a rope tightened around his neck in a mock execution.

Yehuda Shaul, of Breaking the Silence, said soldiers treated any Palestinian older than 12 or 13 as an adult.

“For the first time a high-ranking soldier [Col Virob] has joined us in raising the issue — even if not intentionally — that the use of physical violence against Palestinians is not exceptional but policy. A few years ago no senior officer would have had the guts to say this,” he said.

The DCI report also highlights the systematic use of torture by interrogators from the army and the secret police, the Shin Bet, in an attempt to extract confessions from children, often in cases involving stone-throwing.

Islam M, aged 12, said he was threatened with having boiling water poured on his face if he did not admit throwing stones and was then pushed into a thorn bush. Another boy, Abed S, aged 16, said his hands and feet were tied to the wall of an interrogation room in the shape of a cross for a day and then put in solitary confinement for 15 days.

Last month, the United Nations Committee Against Torture, a panel of independent experts, expressed “deep concern” at Israel’s treatment of Palestinian minors.

According to the DCI report, some 700 children are convicted in Israel’s military courts each year, with children older than 12 denied access to lawyers in interrogation.

It adds that interrogators routinely blindfold and handcuff child detainees during questioning and use techniques including slaps and kicks, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, threats to the child and his family, and tying the child up for long periods.

Such practices were banned by Israel’s Supreme Court in 1999 but are still widely documented by Israeli human rights groups.

DCI says it has been disturbed by reports from several children of a special tiny cell, referred to as No 36, at a detention centre near Haifa. The cell has no windows or ventilation, its walls are dark and a dim light is kept on 24 hours a day.

In 95 per cent of cases, children are convicted on the basis of signed confessions written in Hebrew, a language few of them understand.

Once sentenced, the children are held in violation of international law in prisons in Israel where most are denied visits from family and receive little or no education.

DCI also criticises “a culture of impunity” among the Shin Bet, noting that not one of 600 complaints of torture filed against its interrogators during the second intifada has led to a criminal investigation.

Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, reported in November that soldiers too rarely face disciplinary action over illegal behaviour.

Army data from 2000 to the end of 2007 revealed that the military police had indicted soldiers in only 78 of 1,268 investigations. Most soldiers received minor sentences.

Academic studies suggest that Israeli soldiers have been routinely using violence against Palestinian civilians, including children, for many years.

In late 2007 Israelis were shocked by the testimonies collected by clinical psychologist Nufar Yishai-Karin from 21 soldiers with whom she shared her military service during the early 1990s.

The soldiers told her of incidents in which bystanders were shot or assaulted. In one of the most disturbing testimonies, a soldier said he had witnessed his commander attacking a four-year-old boy playing in the sand in Gaza.

“He broke his hand here at the wrist. Broke his hand at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left … The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.”

Such revelations have grown in number since the Breaking the Silence began drawing attention to the army’s mistreatment of Palestinians in 2004.

- Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.jkcook.net. A version of this article originally appeared in The National – www.thenational.ae – published in Abu Dhabi.

Ben White I The Guardian

FOLLOWING on from Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo, this weekend it was the turn of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stake out his vision for a way forward in the peace process with the Palestinians.

Ever since Netanyahu announced that he would be making an important speech, there had been plenty of speculation about its content. Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition allies desperately lobbied the PM to stick to his “principles” and some of them expressed confidence that the address would end up being satisfactory to their constituencies. The typical build-up spin was that Netanyahu was feeling “the heat” from both Washington and his right-wing government.

In the end, there was nothing surprising about the speech. EU policy chief Javier Solana was told on Friday by Netanyahu that Israel’s “security demands” with regards to Palestinian statehood included “demilitarization, control of air space and control of border crossings”. Interior Minister Eli Yishai had also already said how he expected Netanyahu to be “very general” and focus on “Israel’s security needs”.

The strategy of demanding Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state had already been voiced, and of course, a truncated, less-than-sovereign Palestinian “state” has been a standard Israeli position for some time. One commentator had surmised beforehand that Netanyahu would “use the term ‘Palestinian state’ as the wrapper for his own, far more restricted conception of Palestinian sovereignty”, embracing “a limited, conditional version of the two-state solution”.

Netanyahu’s main focus was to stake out these two “principles” for the peace process with the Palestinians: The recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and a guarantee that a Palestinian state would be demilitarized.

This first “condition”, that the Palestinians “recognize Israel as a Jewish state” was posited by Netanyahu as both the root of the conflict, and also as the key for unlocking a “true final settlement”. He bemoaned the fact that “even the Palestinian moderates won’t say the most simple statement — Israel is the Jewish national state, and will remain such”.

This principle is intended to act as an insurmountable obstacle for Palestinians, as well as create a lot of irrelevant, propagandist fluff about the inability of Arabs to recognize the “Jewish presence” in the Middle East. As Netanyahu noted, “even” Mahmoud Abbas and the senior Fatah leadership do not consider recognizing Israel as a Jewish state as on the “agenda”.

So it is worth thinking about why this is such an unacceptable demand — a thought process Netanyahu may regret encouraging. When Netanyahu and those who think similarly state that the “Land of Israel” is “the homeland of the Jewish people”, it is clear that the Palestinian presence is at best to be tolerated (depending on “good behavior”). But demanding that the Palestinians themselves recognize Israel’s “right” to exist as a Jewish state is asking them:

… to acknowledge that it was and is morally right to do all the things that were and are necessary for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, even though these necessary things include their own displacement, dispossession and disenfranchisement.

Hardly a surprise, then, that Palestinians consider this condition absurd. But Netanyahu’s talk of a Palestinian state — apparently “groundbreaking’” — also served to provide the second condition for advancing with a negotiated settlement. Superficially, at least, the principle of a demilitarized Palestinian state is intended to sound “reasonable”, couched as it is in “security needs”; but again, Israel’s colonial mentality is demonstrated.

Netanyahu’s idea of a Palestinian state sounds like “a flag and currency” and not much else. Certainly no control over its own borders and no right to its own airspace, and all of this without even considering Israel’s intention to annex the settlement blocs. Netanyahu made the important point that the content was more important than “terminology”.

There were other points of note — Netanyahu reiterated the completely untenable and illegal Israeli claim to a so-called “united Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital. He affirmed that settlements would continue to grow “naturally”, and he rejected out of hand the Palestinian right of return.

Netanyahu’s speech was designed to save him domestically without completely insulting the Obama administration. Israeli media reports had already indicated that even within Likud, “Netanyahu would not have political trouble if he indirectly endorsed a two-state solution” since, as the prime minister noted, it is the nature of the “state” that matters more than the word.

It is clear that Netanyahu’s vision will block any advancement of a peace process that was already on its deathbed. As reactions to the speech came in, Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rdainah said that the Israeli leader had “sabotaged all initiatives” and “paralyzed all efforts”. All of the Palestinian factions had already expressed their belief that the speech would offer nothing new, and negotiator Saeb Erekat described the address as a “slap in the face” for Obama’s plan.

The Haaretz website’s “live blogging” of the speech concluded with this wry summary of Netanyahu’s policy toward the Palestinians: “It seemed to be no to dividing Jerusalem, no to the return of refugees or an independent state and no to a real settlement freeze. But you’ll be well-off and taken care of.” This is a recipe for a new intifada, not peace.

Ironically, Netanyahu concluded by citing from the Biblical Prophet Isaiah, looking forward to a future when “nation will not take up sword against nation”. Unfortunately for both Israelis and Palestinians, he missed a more appropriate verse; it is only “justice” that “will produce lasting peace and security”.

Obama lectured the victims in Palestine on the morality of non-violence.

By Ramzy Baroud

If great oratory is a prerequisite to peace, justice, and human rights, then President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo, on June 4, shall be enough to cure every ill afflicting every Muslim nation. But since rhetoric never solved any real problem, one is left to question the wisdom behind Obama’s touted speech, clear or vague language, and all other indicators.

It was clear that Obama’s speech was not aimed at delineating a clear US foreign policy towards Muslim nations. In fact, it was merely an image booster, not only to help the United States regain some of its tattered standing among Muslim nations, but also worldwide, for the US image is certainly tainted beyond the parameters of the “Muslim world”.

Misreading the Conflict

Obama’s words in Cairo were meant to reveal a clear divergence from the past. They did so, ever hesitantly.

“We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world, tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate,” he said.

Untrue. The roots of the tension are crystal clear: imperial arrogance, occupation of Arab and Muslim land, violent policies against those who fail to comply with US interests, the unconditional support of Israel, and the backing of corrupt, undemocratic Arab regimes; the demonization of Islam and Muslim culture are but a few of the reasons behind the hatred of US foreign policy.

Although Obama tried to address the relationship between “Islam and the West” in somewhat positive terms — those of “centuries of co-existence and co-operation, but also conflict and religious wars” — he deliberately failed to take responsibility for his country’s detrimental colonial designs in Arab and Muslim regions. He recycled the “clash of civilizations” discredited discourse, which gained credence under his predecessor. When millions of people are killed, wounded, and displaced by an unambiguous US agenda to achieve political and economic gains using violence, the issue then is much bigger than a simple perceptional problem that may have led “many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.”

In fact, as unpopular as this may sound, violent extremists did not exploit “these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims.” The roots of extremism in the Arab world are largely related to the utter despair and anger caused by mass oppression, lack of democracy and economic and political equality, courtesy of the United States and its “friends and allies” in the region.

To confront extremism, even if symbolically, Obama should perhaps start with a few goodwill gestures: clearly apologize to and compensate the unfortunate prisoners of Guantanamo, cease bombing of civilian areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and call on Gaza’s border guards to allow some food and medicine in to the devastated population.

Afghanistan

“The situation in Afghanistan demonstrates America’s goals, and our need to work together. Over seven years ago, the United States pursued Al-Qaeda and the Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity,” Obama stated, adding, “Al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day [9/11]. The victims were innocent men, women, and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody.”

Only a pitiless person would question the innocence of those who were killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But should that in any way justify the killing of many thousands of equally “innocent men, women, and children” from Afghanistan and Pakistan, who also had done nothing to harm anybody? Unfortunately, one cannot provide a specific figure regarding the victims of US violence in these countries, as that of 9/11 victims. The many thousands who perished there remain nameless and their victimization is effortlessly justified as “necessity”. Is this not the same logic used by extremists who argue that it was the US violent policies in the Middle East that forced them to respond in kind?

Iraq

“Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible…”

No apology for the murder and displacement of millions of Iraqis, for a whole generation of orphans and widows, for the destruction of what was once one of world’s greatest civilizations. The Iraq war was a mere lesson in diplomacy, not modern history’s embodiment of brutality and torture. Clever oratory obviously has its uses: it conveniently minimizes grave war crimes and crimes against humanity of oneself, and augments the crimes of others.

Palestine

“The second major source of tension that we need to discuss is the situation between Israelis, Palestinians, and the Arab world.” Even if speaking from a Muslim capital in a message whose target audience was the “Muslim world”, Obama hardly failed to deviate from infusing his disclaimer, that of “America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.”

Obama went on to elucidate the entire Zionist historical context that helped create a Jewish state on the ruins of Palestinian towns and villages. He provided a fair account of the persecution of the Jewish people — by the West, not Arabs or Muslims, of course. His exposition was all true, of course, but the context in which such history was placed, was most unfair; for it is irrational to justify the establishing of a “Jewish homeland” on the land of another nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with plight of those who were “enslaved, tortured, shot, and gassed to death by the Third Reich.”

Then, Obama gets to his point, and vagueness, once more, revisited. “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people, Muslims and Christians, have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations large and small that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.”

Correction: initially, Palestinian suffering was not an outcome of their pursuit of a homeland, but their ethnic cleansing — from their own land — at the hands of the West-backed, politically supported, financed and armed Jewish militants, who used — and still use — the Holocaust as a justification for their action.

Violence

Obama however, reached the heights of arrogance when he began lecturing the victims in Palestine on the morality of non-violence. “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the centre of America’s founding.”

What a selective reading of reality and history. In fact, for generations Palestinians have used all sorts of non-violent means of resistance. Their violent responses are often desperate attempts at quelling the brutally violent policies of the state of Israel, again, violence that is largely financed by Obama’s government and passed administrations.

It would have been more appropriate for the United States to examine its policy of military funding to Israel, of weapons that are often used against unarmed civilians, illegal weapons of all sorts that are readily experimented against a vulnerable and besieged population, with Gaza being the stark example.

Last, Mr. Obama should consult with his speech writers over the palpable omission of relevant history, for afterall, US history books teach that the Civil War was largely fought to free the slaves, and that the Revolutionary War was fought by patriotic Americans to gain their freedom from the British crown; both were extreme acts of violence that cannot possibly be compared by Hamas’ Gaza rockets. Why the historical revisionism when it comes to oppressed people? Why the enthusiastic justification for violence in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and the condemnation of violence when used by the oppressed?

Obama also touched on Hamas’s political rise to power. The terminology was most selective. “Hamas does have support among some Palestinians,” he said. Note the use of the word “some”.

Correction: Hamas was elected by a majority of Palestinians in a popular democratic election, whose outcome displeased the United States and Israel, resulting in the collective punishment of 1.5 million people for daring make a choice inconsistent with US foreign policy and Israeli interests.

Imposing Peace?

“America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs. We cannot impose peace,” Obama said. True, but neither Palestinian, nor Arab or Muslim grievances and expectations from the United States ever including a call on Obama or any of his predecessors to “impose peace”, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, and certainly not in Palestine.

What Muslim peoples and nations want from the United States — as articulated in their chants, since they are denied democratic platforms to express such demands — is to bring its colonial drive to an end; to cease its imperial hubris; to quit standing on the wrong side of history by funding and justifying the Zionist colonial program in Palestine; by no longer identifying and backing corrupt rulers and self-serving elites — “our friends and allies” — by abandoning the persisting relationship that sees Muslim lands as strategic and economic assets ready to be plucked, exploited; by not suppressing genuine democracy projects, and foolishly imposing its own; in short, by leaving Muslims alone, so that they may heal their own wounds, resolve their own problems, and shape their own future.

It’s that simple.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals, and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, “The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle” (Pluto Press, London), and his forthcoming book is, “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London).
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Ramzy Baroud I Arab News

HIS room is ready; the walls have fresh paint and my kids prepared a basket of chocolates and other treats to place beside his bed. They hung a poster on his door that has been decorated with colored pens and glitter and it says “Welcome Sobhi!” I have taught them that “Sobhi” actually means the “morning light”, and that during his visit, he will not be treated as a visitor but as a brother. They have compiled a list of fun places to visit, parks, the beach and maybe a ferry ride.

Two weeks ago, my family, after months of anticipation, was scheduled to be the host family for a very special and unusual exchange program for kids from Gaza to visit the US. The child we were hosting, Sobhi, was scheduled to arrive on May 30.

My family was excited and a little nervous; I noticed my wife taking every opportunity to share the news of the arrival of our special visitor. We called Sobhi’s family from time to time, realizing that sending a child off to a foreign land to live with a strange family could be unsettling for the parents. But I think our occasional conversations were putting everyone at ease.

As time progressed, we learned more of Sobhi’s life and family in Gaza, and through the weeks, news has changed and altered. We first thought he was 11 years old, and then learned that he is actually 15. We originally thought his family lived in the town of Khan Yunis, but then learned that he is from the northern town of Beit Lahiya. We thought that he was maimed when his house was demolished in the Israeli attack of January 2009, but then learned that his leg was actually blown off his body by an Israeli tank shell when the army opened fire on his family while they were farming their land. So, day by day, we are learning more about this fine young boy’s tragedy.

Like Sobhi, increasing numbers of children forever maimed, dismembered and killed by Israel are not only somehow disregarded by the world media and therefore the world’s conscience — but to add insult to injury — they are even denied access to health care.

Sobhi is one of many Gazan children who have been taken under the wing of the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), a nonprofit, US-based organization that organizes medical exchange programs, sending injured children abroad for treatment when it is unavailable in Palestine, as well as sending medical teams to Palestine for short-term medical missions.

While I cannot express my admiration and gratefulness for the tireless work done by the staff of PCRF, in anticipation of Sobhi’s arrival, the irony fails to escape me that this innocent and unassuming son of a Gazan farmer, whose life is forever altered by a tank shell propelled by Israel and subsidized by the US, is to venture alone across the world to be the recipient of another US manufactured implement — a plastic leg. And now, as if things could get worse, even the possibility of getting Sobhi in the US seems grim.

Coming from Gaza, Sobhi must cross the Rafah border to begin his journey from Cairo. But Egypt refuses to grant Sobhi entry. It is the predicament that so many Gazans face following the January massacres: hospitals lay in ruins, medicine scarce, embargos on everything from medical equipment to medical teams that have flocked to Rafah’s border in droves from all over the world.

When Obama spoke in Cairo on June 4, the closest major city was Gaza, where children flooded the border, imploring the US leader to exert some pressure on Israel to open the border and end the blockade that has imprisoned the entire population for nearly two years. Children held banners with slogans such as, “A light of hope for Gaza children”, and “Gaza children appeal for help.” Sahar Abu Foul, a nine-year-old girl who attended the rally, said that the children in Gaza want Obama’s help “to secure a life like all other children.” But considering his rigorous schedule, Obama couldn’t pencil in a visit to the border to address this young crowd. However, just before his arrival, Congress invested further money into fortifying the border area, allocating an addition $50 million to secure the Rafah border, making Sobhi’s crossing all the more unlikely.

So the days pass. I telephone Sobhi, who speaks with such maturity and courtesy on the phone, inquiring about my health, the health of my family, and asking that God grant us lives of good health and other mercies.

His medical charts say that he is overcoming his depression and simply wants to join his father in the fields again. He has uncomplicated aspirations and a seemingly simple request; an artificial leg. His father, soft-spoken and a bit shy seems to be resigned to the unfortunate possibility of his son not coming to the US after all.

I continue to encourage him, but I myself also feel that this special and unusual exchange may have been too good to be true. Sobhi says that he hopes that he will be able to help with the olive harvest this year. But sometimes having hope in a place like Gaza becomes more of a liability than a lifeline.

— Ramzy Baroud is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com

Surely he had to have some hopeful surprise up his sleeve. Wrong. Nothing. (NYT)

By John V. Whitbeck

President Barack Obama’s much anticipated speech in Cairo was truly astounding. After all the months of lead-up and hype, few could have imagined that this speech would contain nothing of substance. Surely Obama would feel the need to announce some new initiative on at least one of the major matters of concern to the Muslim world. Perhaps a decision to develop a fully fleshed-out plan for a two-state solution, unilaterally or with the Quartet and/or the Organization of the Islamic Conference (King Abdallah of Jordan’s “57 Muslim countries” willing to make peace with Israel), dealing with all the difficult issues, and to present it to Israelis and Palestinians as the last best chance for peace based on partition and the acceptance of Israel by the Muslim world. Or perhaps an international conference involving all concerned regional parties to seek solutions to the interlinked problems involving Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and/or Iran.

Surely he had to have some hopeful surprise up his sleeve. Wrong. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

There were, of course, many eloquent mood-music paragraphs and a smattering of quotes from the Holy Quran (as well as the Bible and the Talmud). Obama obviously believes that America’s unchanged objectives with respect to the Muslim world are more likely to be pursued successfully by being polite and complimentary than by being rude and intentionally insulting. But the mood-music paragraphs dealt with atmospherics or the past. When it came to the present and the future and to concrete matters of American objectives and policies, there was nothing new. Nothing hopeful. Nothing.

He certainly offered nothing new or hopeful to the Afghans and Pakistanis, to whom he implicitly promised perpetual war, saying (in a verbal and intellectual formulation uncharacteristically childish for him) that American troops will keep fighting in their countries so long as there are “violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can” — which there are guaranteed to be so long as the Americans keep fighting in their countries.

He certainly offered nothing new or hopeful to the Iranians, again adopting the views of the Israeli, rather than the American, intelligence agencies on the issue of whether Iran has a current nuclear weapons program and menacing that “when it comes to nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point”.

He certainly offered nothing new or hopeful to the Iraqis, opining that they were “better off” as a result of America’s invasion of their country.

Most certainly and emphatically, he offered nothing new or hopeful to the Palestinians, promising to pursue a two-state solution “with all the patience that the task requires” — i.e., with no sense of urgency (unlike his pursuit of Iran) and without any firm deadline, as would be essential for there to be even a miniscule hope of success. This commitment to infinite patience constitutes an effective promise to pass the problem on, in an even more intractable and hopeless condition, to his successor.

Gaza? It rated one mention: “The continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel’s security.” Israel’s security? Nothing about the holiday-season massacre of over 1300 Gazans? Nothing about the crippling Israeli blockade and siege? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Jerusalem? Obama expressed the hope that the city could become “a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together”. Mingle? In the context of Obama’s repeated references to two states, one might have expected a vision of the city as the shared capital of those two states living together in peace and reconciliation. No. No sharing. That would have contradicted his pledge in his speech to AIPAC’s National Conference last summer. Just a right to mingle, so long as Christians and Muslims did so “peacefully”, without raising awkward questions about any rights in or to Israel’s eternal and undivided capital.

And then, of course, Obama had to say this: “To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements and recognize Israel’s right to exist” — unbalanced, even in a speech ostensibly intended to reach out to the Muslim world, by any hint that, to be worthy of interaction with civilized people, Israel must renounce violence, recognize past agreements and recognize Palestine’s right to exist.

This tired, morally bankrupt American mantra essentially argues that only the rich, the strong, the oppressors and the enforcers of injustice (notably the Americans and the Israelis) have the right to use violence, while the poor, the weak, the oppressed and the victims of injustice must renounce violence, submit to their fate and accept whatever crumbs their betters may magnanimously deign suitable to let fall from their table — a principle dear to the hearts and minds of those who are happy with the status quo but not one likely to win hearts and minds among those who are not or, indeed, anyone who believes that justice should be pursued and injustice resisted.

As if that were not enough, Obama also felt the need to declare that America’s bonds with Israel are “unbreakable” — a statement one would expect in a speech to AIPAC or on the American campaign trail but one which one would not normally have thought essential to include in this particular speech before this particular audience. At least it is a statement consistent with one of Obama’s Quranic citations — “Speak always the truth”. It constitutes a proclamation (or admission) that America is not and will never be a truly independent nation and that this is just fine with Barack Obama.

If Israelis were looking for assurance that any public “pressure” from Obama to improve their behavior would be purely rhetorical and could be ignored with impunity, here was that assurance.

Nevertheless, one intriguing paragraph in the speech is worth considering: “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. The same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia.”

Comparing the position of today’s Palestinians to that of black slaves in America or native South Africans under that country’s apartheid regime can only be constructive. However, Obama has not thought through the context or his conclusion. As he rightly notes, those oppressed peoples and victims of injustice whom he cites were seeking “full and equal rights”, not the partition of their countries.

If the goal of an oppressed people is to convince a determined and powerful settler-colonial movement which wishes to seize their land, settle it and keep it (eventually emptying it of them and their fellow natives) that it should cease, desist and leave, nonviolent forms of resistance are suicidal. If, however, the goal were to be to obtain the full rights of citizenship in a democratic, nonracist state (as was the case in the American civil rights movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement), then nonviolence would be the only viable approach. Violence would be totally inappropriate and counterproductive. The morally impeccable approach would also be the tactically effective approach. The high road would be the only road.

Nonviolence is clearly morally preferable to violence. Democracy and equal rights are clearly morally preferable to apartheid and partition. The better goal and the better tactic are a perfect match, the only match that truly offers hope. If and when the current Palestinian leaderships, or the Palestinian people under a new and better leadership, draw the only rational conclusion from Barack Obama’s Cairo speech — that he offers them neither change nor hope and that they must rely exclusively on themselves in the pursuit of justice — they should courageously press their own “reset” button and unite to pursue democracy and equal rights by nonviolent means.

- John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel, is author of “The World According to Whitbeck”. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Israel makes every effort to present Abbas’ PA as a Palestinian Vichy regime.

By Uri Avnery – Israel

One of the happiest moments in my life occurred in a restaurant. It happened before the second Intifada. I had invited Rachel to celebrate her birthday with dinner at a famous restaurant in Ramallah.

We were sitting in the garden under strings of colorful lights, the air was fragrant with the perfume of flowers and the waiters were hurrying back and forth with laden trays. We ate Mussakhan, the Palestinian national dish (chicken with tahini baked on pita bread), and I drank arak. Our waiter, who had overheard us talking, took our order in Hebrew. We were the only Israelis there. At the nearby tables, Arab families with the children in their best clothes, as well as a bride and groom with their wedding guests. Bursts of laughter punctuated the murmur of Arabic conversations, and spirits were high.

I was happy, and a sigh escaped me: “How wonderful this country could be, if only we had peace!”

I think of that moment every time I hear sad news from Ramallah. The news is depressing, but the memory helps me to keep alive my hope that things could be different.

The most depressing news concerns the split between the Palestinians themselves. This split is a disaster for them, and, I believe, also for Israel and the world at large. That’s why I dare to comment on a matter that seemingly does not concern us Israelis. It does.

It is easy to blame Israel. Easy and also justified. In their struggle against the national aspirations of the Palestinians, successive Israeli governments have applied the old Roman maxim divide et impera, divide and rule.

Since the Oslo agreement, the central component of this policy has been the physical separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Article IV of the Oslo Agreement of September 1993 says: “The two sides view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit, whose integrity will be preserved”.

Article X of Annex 1 of the Interim Agreement of September 1995 says: “There shall be a safe passage connecting the West Bank with the Gaza Strip for movement of persons, vehicles and goods…Israel will ensure safe passage for persons and transportation during daylight hours…in any event not less than 10 hours a day.”

In practice, the safe passage was never opened. Among all the blatant violations of the Oslo agreements, this was the most severe. Its consequences have been disastrous for both sides.

True, there was a lot of talking about the passage. Ehud Barak once fantasized about constructing a giant bridge between the West Bank and the Strip, after seeing such a 40 km long bridge somewhere abroad. Others spoke about a tunnel underneath Israeli territory. Yet others proposed an extraterritorial highway or railway. None of these ideas was ever implemented. On the contrary, while before Oslo there had been free movement for all, including the inhabitants of the occupied territories, after Oslo this freedom was abolished.

The pretext was – as always – security: convoys of murderers and terrorists would pack the safe passage, trucks loaded with Palestinian rockets would drive to and fro. But the consequences disclose the true aim: what remained of Palestine was cut into two disconnected parts.

One cannot rule a territory without physical contact with it. That was proven in Pakistan, which was founded as a state with two disconnected parts separated by Indian territory. Soon enough, war between the two broke out and the Eastern part became the independent state of Bangladesh.

According to the latest Palestinian statistics, which seem reliable, there are now 2.42 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and 1.46 million in the Gaza Strip; in addition to 379 thousand in East Jerusalem. From Yasser Arafat I once heard that more than half of the Palestinian Authority’s resources were being devoted to the Gaza Strip, in spite of the fact that the Strip amounted to only 6% (one sixteenth) of the Palestinian territories.

Now there exist in practice two Palestinian entities: the West Bank, whose actual capital is now Ramallah, and the Gaza Strip, with its capital Gaza city. From the political, economic and ideological points of view, the distance between them is growing.

And from the point of view of the Israeli occupation policy, that is a great victory.

The Israeli government conducts different strategies against the two Palestinian entities.

Against Gaza, the policy is simple and brutal: to overthrow the Hamas government by turning the life of those 1,460,000 men and woman, old people and children, into hell. They are allowed to bring in only the most basic foodstuffs. There was an international outcry when Senator John Kerry discovered the import of noodles is prohibited, because pasta is apparently a luxury. “We shall not give them chocolate when Gilad Shalit is not getting chocolate,” an army officer declared this week. It would be interesting to know how much chocolate the 11 thousand Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are getting.

The war against Gaza (“Molten Lead”) was intended to wreak death and destruction upon the civilians, so that they would rise up and overthrow their elected government. The dead are already buried, but the piles of rubble remain. The Israeli government does not allow building materials to be brought in, and the inhabitants have started to build homes of mud, as their ancestors did centuries ago. (To make the whole thing even more depressing, it is forbidden to bring in toys, books and musical instruments.)

The Egyptian government cooperates with the Israeli army in enforcing the blockade on the inhabitants of Gaza. Lately it has intensified its efforts to choke the essential supply line through the Rafah tunnels (“smuggling” in Israeli and Egyptian parlance). The campaign recently started by the Egyptian authorities against Hizbullah agents in Sinai has the aim, among others, of cutting this pipeline.

The Gaza people have not toppled the Hamas government. On the contrary, their opposition to the Ramallah government seems to be growing, and some say that it is turning into pure hatred.

Against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the occupation authorities employ a different, but no less destructive, strategy. They make every effort to present it as a kind of Palestinian Vichy regime, in order to prevent the healing of the Palestinian rift.

The Israeli government declares this openly and loudly. This week, the Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, wondered publicly how the Palestinian Minister of Justice could sue Israel before the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed in Gaza.

How come, Ashkenazi complained, when throughout the Gaza War there was such close cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority?

In other words, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli army declares publicly before the Palestinian people and the entire world that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah cooperated with the Israeli government in the war against their Palestinian brothers in Gaza, in which – according to the Ramallah Minister of Justice – systematic war crimes were committed. A more damaging blow to the standing of Mahmoud Abbas can hardly be imagined.

Other Israeli officers do not spare their praise for the Palestinian security forces, which – they allege – cooperate with the Israeli army in eliminating Hamas sympathizers in the West Bank. It is hard to imagine that such statements by the occupation officers will do anything to elevate the standing of Abbas in the eyes of the Palestinians, who see with their own eyes how the settlements on their land grow daily.

This week, a friend told me about a conversation he had with a Palestinian official from Ramallah. If Israel attacks Iran, he said with great enthusiasm, the Hamas regime in Gaza will collapse.

For an outsider looking in, this is incomprehensible. When the entire Palestinian people is facing a danger to their very existence, when the Israeli government is working tirelessly to make it impossible for a Palestinian state to come into being and there is a real threat that the Palestinian people will be eventually driven out of Palestine altogether, the split resembles a quarrel on the bridge of the Titanic.

There is an old Jewish saying that “the destruction of the temple (in the year 70 A.D.) was caused by mutual hatred.” When the Romans were already besieging Jerusalem, the various Zealot factions in the beleaguered city burned each other’s stocks of food. Among the Palestinians, such things are happening right now.

Disunity has always been a curse. In 1948, when they were fighting for their survival, they were unable to form a unified leadership and a unified military force. In practice, every village fought alone, without coming to the aid of its neighbors. Otherwise, perhaps, the Naqba would not have happened, and the untold suffering that continues to this very day would have been prevented.

The main result of the disunity 61 years ago was that the Palestinians were unable to establish the State of Palestine next to the State of Israel, and the territory allotted for it by the UN was divided between Israel, Jordan and Egypt.

Yasser Arafat understood this well. He made a huge effort to maintain the unity of his people at almost any cost. As long as he was alive, this unity was maintained. The secret services that planned his murder obviously wanted to sabotage this unity, much as Yitzhak Rabin’s murderers wanted to destroy the peace process. The two murders complemented each other, and not by accident.

Anyone who believes that peace is essential for the two peoples and for the entire world must fervently hope for the establishment of a Palestinian unity government.

I believe that this is still possible.

It seems that in this matter, too, Barack Obama must play a leading role. He must put an end to the stupid and disastrous policy of boycotting Hamas and employ his full power to bring about the creation of a Palestinian unity government. Perhaps it will have to be, in the beginning, a kind of super-government under which both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip keep some kind of autonomy.

Peace among the Palestinians themselves is a necessary precondition for peace between Israel and Palestine. Only Israeli-Palestinian peace can also bring about reconciliation between the two peoples and perhaps restore the atmosphere of that magic evening in the Ramallah restaurant – so that it will not remain just a sweet memory.

- Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom.

Ramzy Baroud | Arab News

It’s remarkable how some in the media can cleverly manipulate a story by avoiding its essence and focusing on marginal details. The chucking of a pair of shoes at former US President George W. Bush by an Iraqi journalist, Muntadar Al-Zeidi, during a Baghdad press conference on Dec. 14, 2008 is a case in point.

Most Arab and Muslim media — and other media around the world, save mainstream Western media — framed Al-Zeidi’s deed within its proper context, that of a horrific, genocidal war, bloody and humiliating occupation and the colonial hubris of a superpower that gave itself the right and “moral” justification to devastate a sovereign nation for the sake of oil, Israel and the desire for sheer hegemony.

Nonetheless, in most — although, not all — mainstream Western media outlets, Al-Zeidi’s story somehow became the focus of attention for it was, to a certain degree, amusing, and also allowed for the further dissection of Arab culture — throwing shoes, supposedly being the “ultimate” Arab insult. For some, the dramatic act of a journalist’s shoes lobbed at a “liberating” president in a farewell visit to a “liberated” country was an indication of Arab ingratitude. Others sought less controversial topics, using the do’s and don’ts in journalism as a unit of analysis, as if shoes thrown at smirking presidents are a recurring topic in the field of journalism.

CBC correspondent, Richard Roth commented, a day after the incident, “Mr. Bush’s message of progress was eclipsed in Baghdad by a sign of his unpopularity.” Roth reminded listeners of the symbolism of shoe throwing or “footwear beating” in Iraqi Arab culture, in reference to throngs of Iraqis slapping the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003.

The juxtaposing of the two occurrences was highlighted by other media as well, conveniently omitting the fact that despite Saddam’s unpopularity among many Iraqis, the April 2003 events were completely staged by the US Army’s “psychological operations team.”

“As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, the site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel, not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images, who decided to topple the statue,” the army report said. “And it was a quick-thinking army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking,” wrote David Zucchino in the Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2004.

But even if one willingly ignores the fact that the army was behind the statue toppling theater, the underpinnings of the comparison are still faulty. The subtle indication is always the same: The former Iraqi president was hated by many Iraqis for his oppressive rule, while Bush is disliked because of the lack of “progress” in Iraq, which could mean anything between lack of basic services, economic development or the security situation. What is not directly discussed is the lethal war and the brutal occupation, which followed a decade-long suffocating siege as key factors in Iraq’s ongoing tragedy.

Those who wish to deviate from the debate altogether, conveniently reference the shoe throwing as a discussion pertaining to cultural mannerisms. The issue, however, is not about Arab shoes, but imperialism, the cruelty of war and, equally important, the Iraqi government’s subservience.

Although the tabloid-like media’s presentation of Al-Zeidi’s famous shoes have petered out, the true story of Iraqi anger and abhorrence of the occupation doesn’t end there, nor does that of Al-Zeidi himself.

On Feb. 20, 2009, Al-Zeidi received a short trial of 90-minutes by the Baghdad Central Criminal Court. On March 12, he was sentenced to three years in prison for assaulting a head of state during an official visit.

Of course, the Iraqi court — directed by political checks and balances of a government, whose own existence is an American diktat — wished to overlook the very motive behind the journalist’s action, as reflected in his cry: “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”

Also of little bearing to the court’s decision were the many millions around the world who regarded Al-Zeidi’s action “heroic” for reasons too obvious to restate.

But aside from both narratives — one that glorifies Al-Zeidi as a hero, and another that creates every possible distraction from the true underpinnings of the man’s action through extraneous and inane commentary — Al-Zeidi is a typical Iraqi, who was merely responding to the subjugation of his own people.

Al-Zeidi told the court during the trial that his act was a spontaneous response to Bush’s praise of the “achievements” made in Iraq after nearly 6 years of US occupation: “While he was talking, I was looking at all his achievements in my mind. More than a million killed, the destruction and humiliation of mosques, violations of Iraqi women, attacking Iraqis every day and every hour. A whole people are saddened because of his policy, and he was talking with a smile on his face — and he was joking with the prime minister and saying he was going to have dinner with him after the press conference.”

Al-Zeidi’s action was reduced in the mainstream media, perhaps because he was an Iraqi fighter of a different type, the kind that fails to fit the media’s stereotype, that of the sectarian militant, blowing people up, gunning them down, or detonating their homes and houses of worship. Indeed, Al-Zeidi didn’t only challenge Bush, the occupation and the quisling government of Iraq, but the media perception itself.

The true story, conveniently missed or reinterpreted by many in the media, was not about a pair of shoes, but a pair of narratives, that of the Iraqi court and the government it represents — compromising, self-serving and sectarian — and that of Muntadar Al-Zeidi and the people he represents, occupied and oppressed, true, but daring, and exceptionally proud.

Ramzy Baroud | Arab News

One cannot emphasize enough the stranglehold Israel’s lobbying infrastructure has on US foreign policy. The events of recent weeks undoubtedly attest to this. “The special relationship” that has been historically fostered between the US and Israel is, in fact, often a relationship of leverage, manipulation and intimidation that leads the US to support actions or resolutions that stand at complete odds with the interests of the American people.

The promise of change echoed the world over as people from all corners anticipated the magic moment Obama would change the devastating reality in which we live today. But just weeks before his inauguration, Israel unleashed its most barbaric attack on defenseless Palestinian civilians since 1948. Civil societies expressed outrage and called for Israeli leaders to be tried for war crimes and genocide. Other nations completely severed diplomatic ties with the Jewish state. But the man of change did absolutely nothing. For weeks he was completely silent. Even in his first days in office, Obama made no mention of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. So, what of the change that he promised? What kind of hold does Israel have to silence the president of the United States?

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two authors and professors from the University of Chicago and Harvard University respectively, defined the Israel lobby in their volume, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy”, as a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.” What has been revealed in their work is that “The Lobby” is not a unitary organization of a few or many paid lobbyists pushing for a specific foreign policy agenda. Sure, you have that too, manifested in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)— an organization that boasts 60,000 active members, and which showers US congressmen with many millions of dollars in campaign contributions, all with one aim in mind, a pro-Israel, right or wrong agenda. But it’s much more complex than that.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which is less known than AIPAC, is a powerful lobby conduit, supposedly representing 52 major Jewish organizations. Based in New York, the organization simply represents an uncompromisingly pro-Israel stance, which tends to advocate Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians (as Israel’s right to defend itself), and advocates a pro-war agenda (as was the case before the Iraq war, and later against Syria and Iran.) These are but mere examples. What Mearsheimer and Walt describe as a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations” is a vast infrastructure that has penetrated every major organization and institution, governmental and otherwise to influence, push for or advocate Israel’s interests.

When AIPAC holds its annual conferences, countless members of the House and the Senate, the executive branch, top representatives of both parties, as well as hundreds of US ambassadors flock from all over the world to vow their allegiance to Israel.

With the passing of time, the strength of the lobby, and the level of influence of Israel’s “friends” in the Congress have grown immensely to the point that US allegiances jeopardize the interests of their own citizens. Even from an imperialistic viewpoint, the US has no particular interest in supporting Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza, considering the fact that the US is struggling to find any semblance of “stability” in the region that is saturated with anti-American sentiment.

Consider what outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a speech in the Israeli southern town of Ashkelon on Jan. 12, regarding how he influenced the US vote in the UN on a resolution pertaining to the Gaza war: “In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a cease-fire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favor,” Olmert said.

“I said ‘get me President Bush on the phone.’ They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now.’ He got off the podium and spoke to me.

“I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor.

“She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favor.”

Imagine, Olmert is boasting how he, with one telephone call, managed to completely turn around the entire US foreign policy agenda with no questions asked. This tells us that it’s not a give-and-take relationship.

One can learn a valuable lesson in all of this. Within the United States there is a great apparatus that has been in motion for generations. It is beyond civil society, individual citizens and citizen groups; it is perhaps even more powerful than “the man of change” himself. And if we are truly to see some transformation in the way the US now rules the world, then this war-mongering machine must be dismantled.

Ramzy Baroud | Arab News

As I sorted through another batch of fresh photos from Gaza, my three-year-old son, Sammy, walked into my room uninvited. I was seeking a specific image, one that would humanize Palestinians as living, breathing human beings, neither masked nor mutilated. To no avail. All the photos I received spoke of the reality that is Gaza today: Homes, schools and civilian infrastructure bombed beyond description. All the faces in the photos were either of dead or dying people, mostly women and children. Then, I paused as I reached a horrifying photo in the slideshow, that of a young boy and his sister huddled on a hospital stretcher in the queue to be identified and buried; their faces darkened as if they were charcoal and their eyes still widened with the horror that they must have experienced as they were slowly burned by white phosphorus.

It was just then that Sammy walked into my room snooping around for a missing toy.

“What is this, Daddy?” he inquired.

I rushed to click away the horrific image only to find myself introducing a no less shocking one. Fretfully, I turned the monitor off then turned to my son; he stood puzzled. His eyes sparkled inquisitively as he tried to make sense of what he had just seen.

He needed to know about these children whose little bodies had been burned beyond recognition.

“Where are their mommies and daddies?” “Why are they all so smoky all the time?”

I explained to him that they are Palestinians, and that they are hurting “just a little,” and that their “mommies and daddies will be right back.”

The fact is that these children and thousands like them in Gaza have experienced the most profound pain, a pain that we may never comprehend in our lives.

“I think that Gaza is now being used as a laboratory for new weapons,” Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor who recently returned from Gaza, told reporters in Oslo. “This is a new generation of very powerful small explosives that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 meters. We have not seen the casualties affected directly by the bomb because they are normally torn to pieces and do not survive, but we have seen a number of very brutal amputations.”

The dreadful weapon is known as Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), one of several new weapons that Israel is using in Gaza, the world’s most densely population urban zone.

Israel could not have possibly found a better place to experiment with DIME or the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas than in Gaza, for many have disowned the hapless inhabitants of the Strip. Indeed, the power of the media, political coercion, intimidation and manipulation can demonize even an imprisoned nation fighting for its life in the tiny spaces left of their land. No wonder, Israel refuses to allow foreign journalists into the tiny enclave, and has brazenly bombed the remaining international symbols in Gaza, primarily, the UN headquarters there. As long as there are no witnesses to the war crimes committed in Gaza, Israel is confident it can sell a fabricated story to the world that it is, as always, the victim, one that has been terrorized and, strangely enough, demonized as well.

The Jerusalem Post reported remarks made by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Jan. 15: “Livni said that these were hard times for Israel, but that the government was forced to act in Gaza in order to protect Israeli citizens. She stated that Gaza was ruled by a terrorist regime and that Israel must carry on a dialogue with moderate sources while simultaneously fighting terror.” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert conveyed the same peculiar message as he declared his one-sided cease-fire on Jan. 17.

Never mind that the “terrorist regime” was democratically elected, and had honored a cease-fire agreement with Israel for five months, receiving nothing in return but a lethal siege, interrupted by an occasional round of death and destruction. Livni is neither perceptive nor shrewd; nor are blunt-speaking Ehud Barak or stiff-faced Mark Regev convincing men of wisdom. Their logic is bizarre and wouldn’t stand the test of reason. True. But they have unfettered access to media platforms where they are hardly challenged by journalists who know well that protecting one’s citizens doesn’t require violating international and humanitarian laws, targeting medical workers, sniping children and demolishing homes with entire families holed inside. Securing one’s borders doesn’t require imprisoning and starving one’s neighbors and turning their homes to smoking heaps of rubble.

Olmert wants to “break the will” of Hamas, i.e. the Palestinians, since the Hamas government was elected and backed by the majority of the Palestinian people. Is not 60 years of suffering and survival enough to convince Olmert that the will of the Palestinians cannot be broken? How many heaps of wreckage and mutilated bodies will be enough to convince the Israeli prime minister that those who fight for their freedom will either be free or will die trying?

Avigdor Lieberman, the rising star in Israeli politics, is not yet convinced, however. He thinks more can be done to “secure” his country that was established in 1948 on the ruins of destroyed Palestinian towns and villages. At least he has a plan. “We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II,” the head of an ultranationalist opposition party was quoted as saying by The Jerusalem Post.

Lieberman, a selective reader of history, could only think of the 1945 atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Something else happened during those years that Lieberman wished to omit: It is called the Holocaust, a term that many are increasingly using to describe the Israeli massacres in the Gaza Strip.

It is strange that conventional Israeli wisdom still dictates: “The Arabs understand only the language of force.”

If that were true, then they would have conceded their rights after the first massacre in 1948. But after more than 60 years of massacres, new and old, they continue to resist.

“Freedom or death,” is the popular Palestinian mantra. It is not words they simply utter, but a rule by which they live and die. Gaza is the proof and Israeli leaders are yet to understand.

My son persisted, “Why are Palestinians so smoky all the time, Daddy?”

“Silly boy. When you grow up, you’ll understand.”

— Ramzy Baroud is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com.